The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was out on the road the other day trying to sell the last of my Skeeter Daddle Diaries, the second printing. I’m about as good at door to door sales as I am at hedge fund managing. Me and money don’t really mix, I’ve learned slowly over a long life without an MBA degree. Neither of us trusts the other….

I meet folks — even down here on the indolent South End — who knew shortly after teething that they wanted to make money, get rich, retire early. They didn’t go to college and spend four years on a Philosophy degree. They picked careers in law or dentistry or finance. You don’t drill for water in the Sahara, that’s what they understood.

Me, I always thought I’d rather do something I loved doing. Call me naïve and slap me with an IOU, but I figured there was always a job, even a miserably low paying one, that would pay the bills and allow me to pursue some quaint interest or other. So I took English, majored in literature and poverty, then stepped off the educational track years later with a nice solid background in arts and history and yeah, literature, then promptly discovered I had virtually NO marketable skills. Kind of a shock. You kind of figure if they sell you a degree, there be a placement.

I worked awhile in a dog pound, ran a cafeteria, drove metro buses, wrote poetry and short stories that got published for, oh, nothing, drove school buses, seriously considered graduate school (maybe get a PhD. in Unemployment or Swahili), moved around a bit, lived in shabby apartments, ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. To be honest, I didn’t mind. What I did mind was not finding the exact perfect job that fulfilled some as yet undiscovered passion in life. Four years at a university and I sure didn’t find it. Now I had to do it AND work crap jobs looking.

I can tell you youngsters — in hindsight — the only thing worse than some crummy job is looking for the next crummy job. But I can also tell you — and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Perfessor of Smartology — if you settle for the money, or the security, or the health insurance benefits, or the pension, you’ll maybe be satisfied, possibly even happy, but you will never find the thing that makes working really worthwhile. It took me plenty of dead end jobs, too much macaroni, far too many bad bosses, but in the end, you’ll persevere. Probably not rich, but trust me on this, a helluva lot happier.

I’ve known some folks on the South End who didn’t own a car, incredible as that seems. And this was back before the Island Transit free buses plied the highways. They’d hitchhike or walk, they’d ask for rides at Elger Bay Store. Some rode bicycles. They weren’t making some ecological, enviro ‘green’ statement — they were just poor. And without transportation, they kept getting poorer since there weren’t many local jobs.

A lot of us South Enders commute. Seriously commute. After my one night at the Twin City Food assembly lines and a mangled arm, I quit and found myself in a familiar predicament: unemployed with no prospects for work. Just about when I hit rock bottom and figured I’d need to move to Seattle just to keep my homestead, I got a graveyard job at Everett General Hospital as an orderly two nights every weekend. 40 miles one way. I thought it was a trip to Oregon every week, an adventure in my old ’60 Chevy Apache pickup that needed constant mechanical attention, often on the side of the road.

Maybe it’s an indication of just how paradisical the South End is that we’ll drive to Hell and back just to live here. The missuz drove 75 miles to the University of Washington Library in Seattle for her job. I knew folks who drove to Tacoma, over 100 miles away, to find work that paid enough to keep their piece of Shangri-La-La. Course, they probably never saw it in the light of day —- mostly just imaginary real estate, sort of exactly like Heaven. Maybe without the streets of gold.

My own commuting days are about over. Walk down the hill to the workshop, fire up the woodstove on cold days, go back up for the third cup of coffee and wait for the place to warm up. Sure I miss those drives through the farmlands, the tulip fields, over the rivers and past all those Puget Sound views and the volcanoes and the mountain ranges. But my truck’s gonna last a decade or two longer and if I get real nostalgic about the good old days of commuting, I just take a road trip, you know, without the 8 hour shifts at the end.

I decided, in the dreary months of the monsoons, to while away the sunless days by learning a new trade. If you read what passes as medical news, you’ll no doubt know that exercising the brain is supposed to thwart dementia, Alzheimers and probably premature hair loss, something to do with synaptic heat generation upstairs. Course, like with physical exertion, it’s best to go slow, work into it, don’t strain, know your limits — all that cautionary advice — before you tackle, oh, quantum mechanics or the future subjective clauses of Swahili.

So I detoured away from Kantian philosophy or a complete study of Middle Eastern history from the ancient Assyrians to Modern Israel. I’d keep it simple, South End, just baby steps toward a rich and complex intellectual pursuit of, well, who cares? Crossword puzzles, they say, work as well as anything. Why not learn words that no one ever uses? Me, I decided to build a banjo. I can guess what you’re thinking. I can guess because the missuz thought the same thing.

A banjo is a simple device, got a drum attached to a skinny neck with strings you whack and the thing makes a rhythmic caterwaul that you either tap a foot to or you want to stomp on with that foot. You could attach a cigar box or a cookie tin to a 2×4 and tie some wire and when you got done, it would sound pretty much like a banjo. Hell, it would BE a banjo. And sure, I could’ve done that, I could’ve taken the Easy Road, but … the point is to avoid Dementia, not embrace it. So I set out to build not just a banjo, but a work of art. And hopefully … one I could play.

I thought I’d apply my limited luthier skills to this, then probably move on to maybe cellos, make the missuz a grand piano, then when my intellectual stamina was up to it, move on to a new theory of music based on atonalities, discordant triads and a rap musician-on-meth’s rhyming Simon phraseology. Roll over Alzheimer, give Beethoven the news…

I write this after a month of whittling necks, carving pegheads, cutting saddles and nuts and armrests and dowel sticks, all those ephemera you’ll never use outside the NY Times Crossword Puzzle. But I had to design them, laminate and saw them, fit them, adjust them …. more than once, more sometimes than twice. For a novice, this is like flying to the space station — but you need to build the vehicle. And somewhere, oh, maybe when you ignite the propane canister boosters you think will propel you through the first layer of the atmosphere, you realize, far too belatedly, it’s not Alzheimers you should fear, not dementia, not even South End Senility.

No, it’s insanity. And if you could only forget … if the memory of this was forever lost … you might feel blessed. But you’ve closed that avenue now. You’ve got the synaptic strength of a hormonal teenager. And so, sadly, I plow on. I’m building acoustic guitars now. Certain, I want you to know, that I’ll learn from all my mistakes.

When I was a kid, I don’t remember the weather folks being quite as apocalyptic as they seem to be now. Snowmageddons, polar vortexes, macrobursts, haboobs, thundersnows, bomb cyclones, firenadoes — the weather is not your friend these days. Is it because every weather event other than mist or sunny days is now attributed to climate change? Every flash flood, blizzard, hurricane, tornado and earthquake is usually followed by the obligatory addendum that the weather is becoming more unpredictable because of global warming. What we used to call where I came from, ‘variable’, a term we used facetiously to make the obvious point that weather changes about every day. A rainstorm rolled in after an afternoon of sun, we said, ‘sure is variable, this weather!’ We just never knew what was around the corner.

Now we keep records. We have satellites in geosynchronous orbit to keep an eye in the sky for what’s coming next. And we got computer simulations to make pretty accurate predictions days ahead of time. We know that 100 year floods come every other year now, hurricanes crank up to Category 5 more often and twice as fast, the polar vortexes drop further south and the haboobs look like latter day Dust Bowl versions. Last night on our TV weather the meteorologist warned us about temperatures dipping below freezing and, hold on to yer hats, the wind gusts would exceed 10 mph. Be prepared! he cautioned us sternly, this is serious and dangerous.

Seriously dangerous? C’mon, maybe if I go out in my birthday suit and jump in the sprinkler…. But hey, if it were really hazardous to my health, wouldn’t it have a name befitting the monstrosity of the meteorological event, something that would put the fear of god and climate change right into my bones? Category 11 CryoWind maybe. Or Force 7 Chillnado! Do NOT try to reach your car in the driveway, you will be hyperthermed in the time it takes to get your key in the lock. Stay indoors and hope to heaven the power doesn’t go off and you have no furnace to save your lily soft ass. Stay tuned to your television. Public announcements will be made every ten minutes. The news is not good. Bundle up, pray to your god and await further developments. Bombogenesis! The End is Near. If that doesn’t do you in, the pollution haboob will. Have a nice day. And keep your windows rolled up!