The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Some of the boys down here on the South End were deep into a night of nog over at the Tyee Store and Saloon when the subject of New Year’s Resolutions reared its ugly head.  We’d pretty much solved most of the burning issues of the day that Congress can’t or won’t address, and with world peace close at hand and a solution for global economic recovery looming in our fevered LED’s, we naturally turned to self-improvement, the final obstacle to Nirvana.

     Self-improvement, in case you’ve never met a dyed-in-the-alpaca-wool South Ender, isn’t high on his Honey-Do List.  If it’s on the list at all…..  I’m not saying we don’t think we could use some polishing, but all those so-called vices other folks resolve every January One to curb or cut back on or eradicate completely, are those very traits we hold in high esteem.  We sure aren’t in any hurry to canonize ourselves.  We aren’t aiming for perfection.  Okay, maybe we could stand a bit of sprucing up, but we all know what a slippery slope that is.  Mabana Mike quit the bottle for 13 weeks two New Years ago and by the 3rd week he was an insufferable convert not only to Sobriety but worse, Piety.  Every day was like an AA meeting with Mike and he might as well have started his own church, passed out nicotine patches and offered  up 3 more cups of decaf coffee to the gods of abstinence.

     No, we decided long ago it’s better to accept our little blemishes and move on the best we can.  You live in a Shangri-La-La like we do, you don’t want many more monks claiming blissful enlightenment.  Next thing you know hordes of tourists seeking Truth, Wisdom and the South End Way will be clogging our backwash blacktop.  Plus, Tyee Store isn’t legally zoned for monasteries or temples.  We’ll probably just save everyone the grief and skip the resolutions again this New Year.  Good luck, though, to the rest of you….

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No doubt some of you revelers are wondering if we’re going to have our annual New Year’s Party this Year of Our Covid 2020, maybe figuring after 3 decades of these if we didn’t we’d have to leave town and hang a sign on the door saying
PARTY CANCELED THIS YEAR
SEE YOU SURVIVORS IN 2021.

If you’re still wondering, the answer is you need to get more than a vaccination when they’re available. Trump lost the election, the world is round once again and sadly this coronavirus isn’t a hoax. Someone asked if we might have a Zoom Party instead. We assume they had been celebrating a couple weeks too early. The idea of a festive zoom party has all the fizz of a non-alcohol champagne. Better than that would be a return to the pre-party days of falling asleep on the couch by 10 pm waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square on your black and white TV. In other words, hell no. We’d rather have a power point presentation of past parties than sit through a night of Zoom waiting for midnight, bad video, sound that glitches and disembodied voices. Our fervent resolution for New Years is NO MORE VIRTUAL SOCIAL TIME.

So sadly we’ve bagged our New Year celebration this year. We’ve asked Santa for a couple of vaccinations and two senators from Georgia which would mean next year’s bash will be exactly that. Meanwhile, hunker down, avoid friends and family, wear a mask and for godsake, stay off social media, no point living through the coronavirus only to contract brain rot. This plague will end and like the saying says, what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. And if you believe that, by all means, come on over for our non-existent New Year’s Party.

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So the Pope is now an Art Critic as well as the Last Word on morality. I’m not clear on how baby Jesus and Joseph and Mary got approved as cosmonaut religious icons and I’m really not sure why anyone would think the Pontiff would endorse a nativity scene that looked like a scene on the cutting room floor of Aliens, but geez, couldn’t he lighten up a bit? He’s accepted homosexuals, why not avante-garde artists? Maybe even offer up an encyclical giving contemporary sculptors a pathway into Heaven? Modern art, it seems safe to say, isn’t the Holy See’s cup of tea.

I hate to say it, but the guy sounds like a Philistine. Don’t get me wrong, I got plenty of friends who are philistines, who think maybe I should tone my own stuff down and maybe do some nice sailboats and Victorian windows and even colorful flowers. Not because they worry that I’m going straight to Hell, just that this modern stuff leaves them cold. I mean, what IS that you got here, Skeeter? Is it my damn job to figure it out? It’s like those paintings by that guy Piccollo or whoever with two eyes on one side of a backwards face? C’mon, I never met anybody looked like that? D’jou??

Give me that old time religion, apparently. Renaissance art and forget the Campbell’s soup crap. Back here in Crazy Land, Trump just mandated that any new government buildings in Washington D.C. have to be ‘classic’ architecture. That new fangled stuff, forget about it, nobody likes it, nobody wants it, nobody is willing to pay for it. Right. Hitler hated modern art too. Degenerate art, I think was his term. Trump’s? Who knows what goes on in that gerbil caged brain of his? You ever seen his baroque apartment, the one with the gold toilet, probably all you need to know. The man thinks he’s in Versailles. Without the waiting guillotines….

Hitler sure had some nice buildings. Sturdy stuff. Brutal to some, but hey, brutal’s in the eye or the gunsight of the beholder. Trump maybe thinks his Reich will last a thousand years too. The Pope’s has. Why not lock in for another couple millenia? Personally, and I sure don’t want to offend any philistines, stagnation doesn’t seem like much of an aesthetic. Innovation, experimentation, evolution, change … well, it may not be the gold toilet standard, but last time I looked, the world was hurtling into the future whether we decided to rebuild Rome again or not. These folks don’t want to learn from the past, they want to live in it.

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bubba’s outhouse service

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