The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The blowhards down at the Kustom Kar Body Shop loved to speculate lewdly and loudly what went on next door at Wanda’ Massage. Anybody ever complained about back pain, someone invariably suggested Wanda’s, wink wink, nod nod, the boys snickering lasciviously. Wanda, a closed door to them, slowly elevated to a virtual goddess of earthly delights. Laugh and snicker, they were intrigued, they were mystified, they were as entranced as Odysseus’ men before Circe turned them into pigs. Wanda, no great beauty, became something beyond beautiful, something unnameable, something ineffable.

Like any great mystery, the masseuse fired the furnace of their meager imaginations. Half her clients were women so naturally visions of Sappho danced in their fevered, porn-fueled brains. Since none of them had ever contemplated a health related massage, the fantasies churned in their paint-fumed heads. They might just as well have sniffed glue, the delirium was growing weekly. The boys laughed about drawing straws, see who would make an appointment to enter the Inner Sanctum. They imagined satin pillows, black sheets, soft music and dim lighting while the sorceress worked her magic. Nothing was too implausible and it sure beat talking politics half the long days.

Six months after she opened for business, the men of Kustom Kar or Lust Afar noticed the panel truck roll up to Wanda’s and two guys loaded up a few filing cabinets, a desk, some lamps and chairs, but nothing like a king size bed, then drive away. Little Jimmy reported a week later he’d seen a small sign in downtown Stanwoodopolis for Wanda’s Massage, down the hall in the refurbished old hardware store that was now a warren of professional services and lately, antique consignments. At Wanda’s old storefront a bait and tackle shop opened, run by a retired Navy bosun who lasted about two months when business fell from sparse to nothing. Little Jimmy said the shelves were mostly empty, crab pots, a few rods and reels some tackle, but not much. Just like with Wanda, none of them ever got a line in the water but they still tell stories, whoppers really, of the one that got away.

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“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Alternate Facts, Fake News, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. George Orwell is dizzy whirling in his grave. Truth isn’t True. There was no collusion, the Russians didn’t meddle in our election, the Mueller investigation is a Witch Hunt.

We’re living among madmen and half of us voted for them. Nothing you read in the paper, see on the news, hear on the radio, none of it is true. But who cares? Truth isn’t true, the news is fake. Up is down most of the time, alternate facts are as valid as facts. 2 plus 2, who knows what it adds up to? I don’t know what the definition of insanity is, but I know the President is the poster boy. Too much time on the gold plated toilet, I presume, his lies don’t stink.

These are weird times in Wonderland circa 1984. The anarchists must be having a ball, all these monkey wrenches in the machinery of government. The populace is aggrieved and nothing less than heads on pikes will do. Trump would be wise to remember the worm does turn. The same folks who voted for Obama voted for him. They were looking for change and when they didn’t get it, they went looking for blood. And trust me on this, they haven’t had their fill.

Don’t bother them with facts, don’t try to give them the news, forget arguing what is true and what isn’t, they’re the same thing: irrelevant. The fox is in their henhouse pretending to be a rooster, but the day is coming when the ruse is up. Go ask Alice. When she’s 10 feet tall.

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I’m parked in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport waiting my turn to fly the friendly skies, reading a little, writing some, watching my fellow passengers checking e-mails or their stock markets or whatever else they monitor on their ‘devices’. I’m going home after a week on the River with my old man and my brother, a bunch of geriatric Huck Finns searching for childhoods thought lost, our raft a small houseboat we navigated through 10 Lock and Dams over 250 miles between Minnesota and Wisconsin’s Mississippi River valley where the eons have carved through limestone bluffs hundreds of feet high to create canyons we wove our way past in channels surrounded by islands and swamps, estuaries and sandbars.

We passed old river towns, rusted railroad bridges, interstate overpasses, dredging barges, parks and wilderness, steam paddle wheelers, flocks of white pelicans and cormorants, eagles’ nests, fishermen and tugboats pushing 1000 foot barges. We slept on sand bars and the occasional marinas, docked at historic towns, biked on river roads, kayaked the backwashes, swam in the muddy Mississippi. The sun set red from the haze of western wildfires and the moon rose a red fingernail in starry nights. If I paint a romantic adventure, don’t let me underestimate the journey. The Old Man told stories of his time in the Maine woods one cold winter with his dad, running a logging camp in the Great Depression where he went in in the fall and came out when the river ice melted for the spring log drive downstream.

Lots of stories of life in the American Past, told and retold, probably soon to be lost, another history slipped unnoticed beneath the river’s current. We’re all old men now, refugees of another era clinging to our own sentimental past and knowing they’re the same dreams as the pioneers and loggers and bargemen, legends now only in our own minds. Tell the androids, why don’tcha, we were here. Tell the machines what came before them, who imagined them. Tell them they’re welcome, the ingrates. It’s their world now. And be sure to tell them they don’t have a freaking clue … and never will. Oh, and ask them – nicely – if they’d take care of the forests and streams, the oceans and the air. Be good karma for them if they did.

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When I was young and heading off to college, Humanities were still an honorable degree. History, Art, Philosophy, Music, Literature — you could get a diploma even if your chances of getting a job were slim to none. I guess I was more interested in getting an education than a career because I took a double major in the humanities at the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, a time when the Vietnam riots were in full swing, a different education altogether.

Jump 50 years into the future, a half century — the trend now is to downsize or eliminate the Humanities, the argument being that high tuition costs DEMAND degrees with maximum employment potential and a salary to pay off the huge student debt. Bizness degrees, I.T., engineering, high tech — that’s where universities and community colleges are funneling their students. Microsoft and Amazon, Google and Facebook, the billionaires of Silicon Valley, they’re all driving the pilot-less train into a brave new future of automation, artificial intelligence, drones and a wired world. The Digital Age is rapidly replacing the Industrial Era, leaving the Romantic Era beneath deep sediment. Who needs poetry when you can program the next generation of androids to write a ditty?

We call the Humanities humanities because we’re exploring just that, the qualities that make us human and not machine, an altogether necessary endeavor in this next evolution of mankind. It is more than alarming to watch the diminution of the Humanities at the same time humans are inexorably merging into their own technology. As an artist, I’ve never been one to argue that we’re the saviors of the culture, the Sensitive Ones, the Visionaries. I may have been wrong. More worrisome now — we may be canaries in the mine.

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