The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So the guy parked next to us at the Red Wing Marina with the ¾ million dollar boat sez: Buy Gold! He’s hopped up on our poop deck to introduce himself, offer up his bio and inform us of his plans to buy a trimaran sailboat and cruise it to Florida, then from Florida head around South Africa’s Cape Horn and end up in Madagascar, no doubt the result of extensive research on the Nature Channel since he doesn’t know much about the place except its approximate location.

Our investment advisor made HIS fortune by spraying herbicides under state power line right-of-ways, then retired at 45 ‘before the toxins killed me’. He and his wife are partying with a few other retirees on the dock where we’re all moored up and trapped like ghetto rats here at the marina, nothing better to do than compare boats, talk travel dreams and, of course, drink. Everyone, apparently, is invited.

Buy gold, he sez, not an ounce of doubt. When we ask what the reason is for that fiduciary surety, he answers: the Federal Reserve will be gone in 6 months. None of us offer up a scintilla of skepticism. Probably knowing this is a lead-in to a political skirmish. We’re obviously going back, apparently, to the Gold Standard. And given the current state of affairs, who knows? Trump might just give it a shot.

They say money talks and bullshit walks, but today they’re both in full voice and no one is going anywhere. Although we’ll be debarking early in the morning before our new rich friends wake with hangovers and possibly new schemes and dreams. I doubt if we’ll be phoning our brokers to liquidate and start piling up bullion. We might, however, consider buying stocks in herbicides.

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95 years old, my old man is. We called him the Old Man back when he was younger than we are now. The guy still drives, still lives in his house, still shops, still manages to fend for himself. Our mother died a year ago after a steady decline that finally landed her in the assisted living apartments nearby and kept Dad tethered to home when we used to haul him on long trips to everywhere from the Suwanee River and the Gulf to fishing trips up in Ontario. About 15 years ago we rented a houseboat and took three weeks to pilot the locks and dams of the Mississippi from mid Wisconsin and Minnesota down to where the bluffs level out in Illinois and Iowa. By the time we motored the boat back into port, it was snowing, the docks were being pulled in for winter and the boat looked like the ghost of the Flying Dutchman, curtains fluttering out a broken window, one outboard with a bent prop, the other breaking down. Great trip!

So we decided to go back, this time head north on the Mississippi, a Huck Finn adventure repeated, just my brother, myself and the Old Man, Dad and the River. If all goes well, I should be back in a couple of weeks. All of us. For the time being I plan to be Incommunicado. I know it isn’t the Amazon, but it is the Mississippi. Old Man River.

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As Hamlet asked after his bipolar musings on being and not being, Is it Art or is it Craft? That is the question. Poor Hamlet, always a little flummoxed. The Small Craft Advisory is coming too late to help the Danish prince, but we can help you answer that age old question on Sat. and Sun. August 18th and 19th at the Floyd, Stanwood’s Historical Society Cultural Center. And no, we’re not raising a 3rd question: whether or not Stanwood has culture.

Uff da! Of course it does! In fact, that same weekend Art by the Bay has its annual show on the East side of Stanwoodopolis, something like its 26th or 27th anniversary. So okay, it’s not on the bay, but it’s a great show nevertheless. And the Small Craft Advisory fine arts craft exhibition isn’t a weather report. Let’s not get hung up on details, all right?

A bunch of us yahoos decided it was high time to bring fine craft out into the light of day. Back when we started the Ma Day Studio Tour, folks weren’t aware the artists had slowly but surely infiltrated the area with their mutating species of brush-wielding, paint spattered, plein air denizens, all quietly biding their time hidden in the nettle gulches and brackish backwaters of the area. Now they practically dwarf the number of realtors, and worse, rumor has it they may be intermarrying. God help you all!

But never fear — we have the appropriate antidote. Legions of artisan/craftsmen who have also been laying low in their dilapidated shacks or hiding out in sea caves, plying their crafts out of view, but now coming out of the eelgrass, bringing with them the nearly lost aesthetic of making stuff yerself.

Boats, banjos, beadwork, cigar box guitars, sculpture, pottery, quilts and fabric art, mixed media, ceramics, furniture and morel. Did I mention banjos. If I didn’t, be assured, homemade banjos will be in the show. Banjos will save you from artistic egos and crazed realtors.

Come on down Aug. 18th and 19th, 10-5 pm. Guaranteed a more effective cure-all than a polio vaccine, easier than fleeing the area. Small Craft Advisory. Hell, we don’t know if it’s art or craft. And that’s Hamlet’s answer too. You’ll have to figure out yourself where the bay is at Art by the Bay. But by all means, go see their show too. Art and craft will fill the streets those days like butterfly pheromones. Y’all come.

Home – 2022

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I grew up watching Roy Rogers and John Wayne. We pretty much all did. Now we watch violent video games and Tarantino movies. If that isn’t plenty enough, turn on the news at 6. We Americans are a violent bunch of yahoos. Okay, we American men are a violent bunch of yahoos. We like it, apparently. Oh sure, when there’s a mass killing, we wring our hands and hold our heads and say, what can we do, what can we do? Then we repeat it in a day or two. It’s like shampooing — lather, then rinse. Blather, then wince. We mostly start to take it for granted.

Machismo, American style. I’ve had neighbors who carry a handgun down to the beach. For packs of dogs, they tell me. One, a little tough guy who apparently feared rabies or worse from roaming hordes of frothing seadogs, used it on himself later, the Hemingway ending, no rewrite, a Real guy’s way out. After all, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

You don’t see too many women lugging AR-15 assault rifles into the mall and letting loose a barrage of bullets at innocent shoppers. Maybe if Mom had given me a realistically bosomed Barbie doll to play with instead of that Hop-a-long Cassidy cap gun to play shoot-em-up, I’d be a tad more pacifist in my adult years. Okay, at least a teddy bear, if not swimwear Barbie. Who knows? I’m not a psychologist, but hey, a lifetime of male heroes who beat the crap out of their opponents or just dispatched them with a well-placed bullet, I’m betting our propensity to settle arguments with our fists or our .38’s might be diminished without estrogen if we weren’t constantly told that being a man in this society meant having the courage to smash an opponent ruthlessly.

Course, I’m not sure walking down the Mean Streets with a Barbie is the answer either … but it might open up the public discourse in a gentler way than the NRA’s.

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