The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Hits: 46

Hits: 43

Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium

Every blue moon or so a new entrepreneurial startup appears in the sleepy hollows of the South End. A computer repair shop stuck out a shingle ten years ago, some techie kid who figured the retirees would need his skills first time their desktop Dell froze up — and he was right. Trouble was, there aren’t enough of us old timers. There was that dog groomer place, the Pampered Pooch, who specialized in poodle pompadours but quit shortly after Jenny Winesack’s fox terrier took issue with the jetted bubble bath and bit her on the face, nearly taking out an eye. The neighbors claimed the terrier was vicious even without the water torture treatment and advised her to sue Jenny, but she said no, she guessed she just wasn’t the Dog Whisperer she’d thought she was.

So when I saw the wooden sign down past Tyee Store nearly to the Head where the road hairpins back north toward our place, I shook my head, figuring Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium would last a month or two. I also figured I ought to get myself a trim before the place closed its doors forever and so I rode my bike in one sunny day down the long overgrown driveway into the nettle festooned interior, surprised to discover Ralph had added a room off the old Stuart place where had installed an old time hydraulic barber chair, a double basin porcelain sink and even a vintage barber pole spinning red white and blue on its axis by the door.

Little Jimmy was in the chair and Fairlane Fred was sitting his turn. “Take a seat, won’t be long, I cut faster’n a logger on meth,” Ralph, I presumed, said in greeting. I took off my hat and joined the crowd. The conversation was lively, political and heated enough for my liking. The cut was fair and the price too. “Come back,” he said, sweeping my locks into a metal dustpan, shaking the apron for Big Walter who’d come in behind me. “I will,” I said, and I have. And damn if Ralph’s Old Time Tonsorial Emporium didn’t make a go of it, despite all odds.

Hits: 52

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Unknown attribution.

I have a friend down in Taos who was kind enough to send me a clipping about a musician who decided to become a guitar luthier. The guy embarks on this new career with the same gusto I did when I decided to try my hand at my own brand of wood butchery and immediately realizes, he is quoted, that this would be a 5 year project. Meaning, this would be a long, long learning curve to build little boxes that project sound. I knew exactly what he meant. The trouble was, I didn’t plan to make this a career and I don’t want to spend the waning years of my life in that learning curve to a cliff.

So okay, I built a couple of guitars last winter and spring. After the first one I told the mizzus and myself this was crazy, way beyond my meager abilities. So when I launched into the second, she shook her head but … it was nothing new to her, this quixotic tendency to obsession. After all, I’d built four banjos, not to sell, not to become a banjo luthier, just … well, just to … geez, I don’t actually know why. It’s not as if I expect to become a real luthier. The fiddler in our band makes violins and cellos, incredible things of beauty and sound. His shop is immaculate, his templates perfect, his tools razor sharp, his techniques honed from years of school and thousands of repairs and dozens of instruments he’s made. He is, in other words, a consummate craftsman.

I, on the other hand, am not. I am an errant fool when it comes to woodworking and a complete ignoramus when it comes to instrument construction. My shop is a mess, my tools are not luthier tools, my expertise is limited and my patience is non-existent. Needless to say, I don’t let this get in my way. I have no illusions that I will stumble into the Stradivarius of guitars by some quirk or accident. No, I just keep thinking one more try and maybe the next guitar will sound, I don’t know, more pleasing. Play easier. Be visually exciting.

Or, if nothing else, that guitar will be mine, built by me, warts and all. I recall a neighbor who was telling me he had built his house. I knew the guy who actually had built his house , the guy who had hammered the nails and sawed the boards and hung the doors and put on the roofing shingles. My neighbor had signed the checks and now he was telling me he’d built the damn house. I built my own house a long time ago. Sure, it’s a bit homemade, but I like that word, homemade. I’d rather have something I built myself than something I bought at the store or hired to have done for me. When I say I built this, I mean I built this.

So, I’m building another guitar. What can I tell you when I can’t really explain it myself. I told the mizzus this would be the last one. I think I said that twice before. She knows eventually I’ll lose interest and move on to something else I won’t get very proficient at. If nothing else, she assumes it keeps me out of trouble. Or at least out of her hair, anyway….

Hits: 111

Hits: 4266

Let me start out by setting the record straight. I don’t like Trump. Actually I guess I hate the lying little ignoramus. I don’t like most of the yes-people he has around him either. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, most of his cabinet, all toadies, all the kind of folks who would condone gas chambers if the boss wanted them built, good little Nazis, all of em. These are the lowest people who ever inhabited the White House. Or infested the White House. They would happily oversee the dismantling of a democracy and they may actually achieve that sad distinction. I want them gone. I want Fox News and Breitbart to go with them. And those GOP congressional cowards, afraid confronting the President and his yo-yo policies would cost them their jobs, they give government the bad name they’ve been calling it for years. Vote me out! So yeah, I got an ax to grind, just so you know.

But it bothered me to have some restaurant owner come out from the kitchen and ask Sarah Sanders to leave. Mid-meal. And now there seems to be a call to action from some legislators to confront and harass these people I don’t like at their cafes or homes or plane rides or anywhere they can be shouted at. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to predict where this animosity leads. It leads to public beatings or even assassinations. The rhetoric is scalding hot right now and you bet, I get it. Some of us see Trump as a wannabee dictator, a bully who would gladly sell out this country if it would make him a few million richer or it appealed to his enormous ego. He needs to be voted out or kicked out or impeached.

Oh, I do take pleasure in the victims’ cries for decency, for some civility, knowing they have dragged politics down to the lowest levels I’ve seen in my lifetime. And I’ve seen the Chicago riots of ’68, Viet Nam protests, Nixon, Watergate, Newt Gingrich, an epic cast of creepy idealogues. But nothing quite like Donald J. Trump and his minions. Bullying from the pulpit, disregard for anything factual, self-aggrandizement at others’ expense, the list is numbingly long and my sympathy is commensurately short.
I can imagine worse yet to come, trust me. I’m not Pollyanna about what is happening to this country. Gerrymandering, corporate welfare, a rise in racism, a rightwing Supreme Court, union-busting, income disparity, a very uncompassionate conservatism, trade wars, economic upheavals, border walls, another list too long. Sure, it scares me. It alarms me. It makes me lose sleep and it disturbs my peace of mind. The thing is, if we stoop to these people’s level, we’re lost. We’ve become them. The Obamas always said, when others go low, we should go high. Sounds glib, sounds corny, sounds like a Sunday School sermon. But … I don’t want to wake up one morning and look in the mirror to find myself staring at exactly what I despise.

Hits: 106

Hits: 42

Hits: 65

So I got a buddy who’s building himself a house. In a tree up 14 feet off the ground. He’s doing it the South End Way, skipping the permits and just grabbing a hammer. A treehouse, in case the last one you built was when you were a kid, is a little more complicated than nailing a couple of 2×4’s to a fir tree and its neighbors. You need to factor in 80 mph winds lashing those firs, racking the structure and breaking windows. Treehouses need to be engineered, in other words, not slapped up. They require forethought, not foreskin.

Treehouse Terry was a contractor so he went into this eyes open, did his homework and bought these specialized gizmos that get drilled into the firs and hold the joists out away from the tree which lets the house ride a few inches in the winds and still hold about 25 tons of structure. Terry left one fir to grow through the bathroom floor and ceiling — which should be interesting in two or three years when it starts widening the holes. Firs in these parts grow a few inches in diameter a year. I guess Terry figures it’ll just seal the hole nicely with bark instead of caulk.

The other day I stopped by. I used to like to put my county STOP WORK order up just to put the fear of government into my pals, but these days I worry they’ll do something rash when they think the building inspector has discovered them and shut them down. Sure wouldn’t want Terry calling the county to straighten matters out. If he were required to get a permit on a treehouse 14 feet off terra firma, he’d be looking at a bureaucratic fishline knot he’d never extricate himself from Plus thousands of dollars for structural engineering, probably for naught. The county isn’t good with thinking out of the box … much less up in the air.

Instead I brought him a favorite stained glass window, figuring, I guess, I’ve never installed an artwork in a treehouse and I might never get another chance. So I snuck it up to his aerie and propped it into a window opening for him to find. Climbing back down the ladder, I noticed his truck’s bumper sticker: TRUMP! RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

I know, I considered taking my window home. Instead, I just left a small note: ART! TRUMPING TRUMP! If nothing else, he’ll be installing a small protest.

Hits: 58

Hits: 70