The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I’ve been out of the Loop lately, walking the Pacific beaches over on Washington’s pristine coast on the Olympic Peninsula. No wi-fi, no newspapers, no TV. I know, it’s hard to imagine in this day and age. Cold turkey from the Trump news cycle. Forget the 12 step program, just Total Immersion. Or Aversion. After a day or two the shakes settle down a bit, the fever abates, the absence even grows fonder. Just the slow rolling of waves endlessly soothing, endlessly churning, endlessly washing the sins of the world. Or something delusional like that….

But we’re back now in cell tower range, back to the endless crawlers of the news cycle, back to … yup, Trump stunts. Trying to catch up after a 72 hour hiatus, forget it, too much backlog and like they say out on the coast: Backlogs Kill! Or was it beach logs? Either way, they both probably do.

We’re evacuating personnel from Iraq and deploying a carrier fleet to the Gulf. Sounds ominous. We’re sending troops to the Mexican border, maybe to staunch the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from slipping through. And we escalated a war with China. A trade war anyway. Some other Cracker state has banned abortions. Trump pardoned a crook who wrote a book on what a great president he is. Jared has come up with a ‘new’ immigration plan. Immigrants on the border are being flown to Democratic counties in Florida. Half a dozen more Democrats have thrown their hat in the ring to run for President. The Attorney General is re-investigating FBI ‘spying’ on folks in Trump’s election campaign. Three days out of earshot and the world has destabilized in our absence. I doubt we’ll ever take another vacation again unless we’re hoping for an apocalypse. It’s too stressful coming back to a dystopian America every time.

We had a friend who trekked Nepal for a month and when she returned, she experienced what she called ‘culture shock’. Too much traffic, too many cereals in the grocery store, too much media, too many emails, too much stress, too much overload on every level. I know exactly what she meant. After only a few days…! Today I plan to go down to the beach. Walk in the woods. Work on a stained glass window. Maybe China will pay for it. Sure, China will pay for it.

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I listened to a report recently on public radio extolling the virtues of using Instagram to further an artist’s career. As an artist with a career in definite need of a jumpstart, I paid close attention, figuring maybe a tutorial in social media might be just my ticket to fame and fortune. They featured two artists, the first being some guy I’d never heard of (no surprise since I don’t subscribe to Instagram) who painted colorful murals but apparently didn’t make enough money to quit his day job. So, using the power of a photographic platform, he marketed his art on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Sometimes he tried out new mural designs, see what folks bought and what folks wished he’d never drawn. Democratic art, I guess, vote for the winning design.

The other artist was a painter and she was doing okay on Instagram but complained how it sucked up all her time trying to stay current, keep posting, respond to her fans and adoring public. She admitted she was thinking of dropping off the social media rat race, maybe spend some time making art instead. She mentioned how her fanbase would almost always respond negatively to about anything new or different she was trying out — they only wanted the tried and true.

There are folks I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet who think good art is defined by its sales potential. If it sells, it’s good. If it doesn’t, probably bad art. Nice, I guess, to have a quantifiable definition. Jeff Koons’ stainless steel rabbit just sold for 91 million dollars to the dad of our current Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, making Koons the greatest living artist of our time. Give me a break. The guy’s a PR guy who couldn’t, as one critic once said, carve his name on a tree, the kind of putz who photographed himself having anal sex with his Italian porn star wife and calling it art. Jeff would have loved Instagram.

I don’t pretend to be the final arbiter of what good art is. I just know it isn’t what sells the most. Otherwise I’d probably be printing T-shirts and coffee cups with stained glass designs, probably only the ones my clamoring fans bought multiples of. The danger, at least to me, of being an artist is falling into the trap of following the money. I’d rather have a crappy day job if money was the goal. Which, I guess, is why I was a graveyard shift orderly for 10 lousy years. Okay, a crappy night job. Beats boxing up those T-shirt orders, if nothing else.

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You know it’s a dangerous world when driftwood becomes a deadly predator, but I suppose it’s best to stay on guard at all times. You just never know what lurks around the corner! Beach logs lurk around my corner this morning. Seemingly benign but … waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting.

Kalaloch. No doubt a Hoh tribal word for Killer Dead Trees. Fortunately it’s pouring down rain this morning, no chance we’re venturing down to the beach where the logs are piled high. We watched a sea otter hump out of the tide and directly into the waiting maw of those logs, last we’ll see of it, I bet. Let his demise be a cautionary tale for us visiting humans. No wonder the sea otters nearly went extinct, they’re obviously slow learners.

Kalaloch beaches are strewn with dead razor clams, crabs, sand dollars — all no doubt victims of beach log attacks if my scientific acumen is accurate. And I think you know by now it is. Of course there are other warnings on the National Park kiosks. Sneaker waves. Rip tides. The dangers are plenty. Falls off the bluffs. Slugs the size of pythons. Antibiotic resistant mildew. Maybe we made a mistake coming here. It was supposed to be a mellow vacation, not a jungle safari.

If we’re smart, we’ll play it safe and stay put, forget venturing down onto the sandpits. Although coming in, I did notice the signs warning about tsunamis. Evacuation Route, they said. Maybe we should just start now….

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I’m about as anachronistic as any old geezer I know. I hate newfangled gizmos so much that can track my every move, my every purchase, my every tweet, my every everything, it almost makes me a certified Luddite. I don’t want a cellphone attached 24/7 to my person, I don’t want a refrigerator I can adjust the temperature with the cellphone I don’t own, I object to GPS devices in my truck, my car, the mizzus’ laptop or the baby carriage. Don’t want surveillance cameras monitoring the shack. I don’t want to be on Facebook or Instagram or any other social media platform to keep myself informed about conformity. I don’t watch Fox News or MSNBC for my ‘news’, I just buy a couple of newspapers. I don’t plan to be an integral cog of the Borg Hive. Just sayin.

But … I do think the folks who believe coal is coming back, that fracking is perfectly safe, that oil will power our future, well, these folks are the real anachronists. These folks who lobby for pipelines and more refineries, who pine for regulations that allow car companies to lower MPG’s, who think global warming is liberal bullshit, who love the Drill Baby Drill rant and think we should keep burning fossil fuel until the last oil drum is hauled up out of the earth, these folks make me look like a visitor from the future.

Somebody needs to give them the news: the planet is warming up, buddy, and that ain’t fake news. I get it, you don’t want to drive an electric car. You don’t want to use the sun to power your entertainment center. You don’t like the look of wind farms and you don’t care for tidal generators. You like gas, check. You like a car that pollutes, check. You think ‘clean coal’ is ready for a breakthrough, double check. You think natural gas power plants are the future, bingo. You believe what you hear from the GOP, that climate change is a hoax and all those scientists are wrong, happy days for you!

Wake up, pal, the future is calling you on your cellphone. Your kids are starting to sweat, just in case you didn’t notice. They think maybe something needs to be done and done pretty quick. Check your engine light, pardner, the one blinking red on the dashboard. It’s time for more than an oil change. It’s time for a complete overhaul. Wrap your pointy little head around it, the revolution is coming.

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