The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Art is a funny sort of investment, let’s say that right off the get-go. It’s worth what anybody is willing to pay for it. If you’re an artist whose work is actually collected as a hedge against recessions, inflation, wars, disasters and the coming apocalypse, you really can’t lower your prices when the bank account dips too low, not if you want to keep your investors happy. Me, I don’t worry too much about this part of the art game. I charge by the square foot for original designs in glass, a price I haven’t changed since 1995, one that’s cheaper than the stained glass shops in the area. The obvious corollary to this is that, well gee, maybe I’m selling product, not art. But let’s not get sidetracked, okay?

This week Christie’s auction house sold a digital painting for 69 million dollars plus change. For what was advertised as an NFT, which for you poor readers living in the comfortable past, means a non fungible token. Huh? you ask and I say yah shure, u betcha, a non fungible token, where ya been? An NFT is basically artistic crypto-currency, see? And don’t say Huh? It’s the future and the future is here.

A guy you never heard of named Beeple is now the 3rd richest living artist after his first sale ever. Not bad. Or is it? Bad, I mean. This Beeple is a graphic designer who lives in Charleston, South Carolina. The idea behind the “Everydays” project is to create art daily, no matter how complex or simple, he said.

“These pictures are all done from start to finish every day,” he declared on his website. “The purpose of this project is to help me get better at different things.” Well now, he certainly got better at selling his work, and hopefully maybe even fine-tuned his graphic art. I mean, he has 5000 images tucked away in that digital painting, some maybe good, some maybe not, and if you owned the painting you could scroll through and find a few you loved and a few you wish you could photoshop out.

Of course I’m trying to figure out a way to digitize my own glassworks. Jam every doodle and design into a collage that would fill my own computer’s hard drive in a South End minute. I was worried at the beginning I wouldn’t know how to make a non fungible token since I wasn’t really sure what an NFT is, but then I realized most of even the non-digitized stuff I have collecting dust down at the glass shack is basically non fungible now since obviously it appears to be unsaleable. Keep a close watch on Christie’s. I’ll be there soon. 4th richest living artist? Why not?? Bid high!!

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Back in 1978 I bought my first motorcycle — from my then wife’s boyfriend. I know what you’re thinking, I wasn’t, and you can congratulate yourself for wisdom I did not have at the time. The bike was a beat-up 1960’s Honda 350 that wouldn’t start, which is why my wife’s boyfriend was selling it. Cheap. Maybe it was the despondency over a marriage gone south, but that bike seemed like just the tonic to reinvigorate my depressed life. Right … get a suicide machine.

It took me months to get that crummy motorcycle to start, but there came a day when it sparked to life down in the basement of my ghetto house and triumphant, I brought that Honda out into the sunshine, popped the clutch and hung on for dear life as I menaced the car strewn streets of my shabby neighborhood. No license, no tags, no helmet — that’s right, amigo, bad to the bone!

Only a few blocks from my house the bike quit, stalled in an intersection and so I ingloriously pushed the thing back home, disappointed but still determined. If you’ve never sat a bike, that raw power between your legs, a monster growl snarling with the smallest twist of the throttle, the sudden acceleration from zero to 60 in seconds, you’re the lucky one. Only insane people and Tesla money love that G-force barely under control. Me, I knew this was a death machine. I could all too willingly hurtle into my dark future.

Lucky for me I spent most of my time with the bike working on it, not riding it. Dreams of horrible motorcycle accidents littered my night, recalled next morning as black omens, harbingers of an early and messy demise. An encounter with a black motorcycle gang at an intersection where we all stopped for the red light, the boys surrounding me right left front and back, revving their Harleys to red line RPM’s, then sprinting on the green, all but me, stalled out yet again when my ugly Honda died when I hit the gas, leaving me in their wake of oil and gas fumes and imagined laughter. I knew right there my days of being the Wild One had crashed and burned. Like Peter Fonda said to Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, we blew it, man.

In the end I sold the bike. Back to my then wife’s boyfriend. Same price. Seemed only fair. And every once in awhile I wonder if maybe he took a turn too fast, laid that Honda down on some backroad blacktop in a shower of sparks and screaming metal, wishing he’d just kept my hundred bucks and my wife, called it a good deal all around, lived happily ever after. But then I think, we probably all got what we wanted, or at least deserved. Hopefully the only ones disappointed are the Hells Angels. Sorry, guys, I hung up my bike.

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Sarah Jensen runs the South End Animal Rescue here on the island. She’s got an old barn, some sheds, half a dozen outdoor pens, a small vet clinic off the house plus a few acres of fenced pasture where horses and alpacas and llamas patrol the grounds along with a menagerie of dogs, goats and the occasional Vietnamese pig. She doctors eagles and cats, raccoons and the usual squirrels. Most return to the wild but some stay with her the rest of their lives. Her longest guest by far is Quixote, a donkey she had to amputate its hind leg back she guesses around 1995.

Quixote wants nothing to do with the horses or the alpacas and especially the cantankerous two llamas. He gimps around the pasture waiting for Sarah, apparently the love of his donkey life. A truck had hit him on the highway where he’d made his escape from the Drummond place north of the Diner where he’d mostly been staked to an iron rod and left day in and day out tied to a shackle on the metal stake. His life with Drummond was about 20 feet in diameter, water bowl, moldy hay, a circle of mud to stand in or lie down in or just try to ignore. Why old man Drummond wanted a donkey is anybody’s guess but when Quixote snapped the rotten rope and hit the road before being hit himself, the last thing he wanted was a 3 legged jackass, or so he declared when Sarah presented him with a bill for an amputation.

Life is hard enough on the South End for us 2 legged denizens, but if you visit Sarah, you’ll feel like we’re the Lucky Ones. If you take an apple like I do when I drop by, Quixote, who is not above being bribed, you’ll appreciate that the world, hard as it is, also has a few Sarah Jensens to offer balm and medicine and compassion. Quixote too is one of us, the Lucky Ones. You decide to visit the Rescue, bring an apple. Or three.

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The Mabana Sunset Villa was originally a sort of low end Dry Out facility, mostly aging alcoholics but later everything from meth to heroin. The fact that they were fairly inexpensive kept them at full occupancy for decades, but when ownership changed hands and the new folks thought they could double profits without changing services — in fact, maybe eliminate a few, everything from staff to cable TV to the quality of the food — well, maybe that works in Seattle and Gomorrah, but up here in the boondocks, setting up a rehab clinic that mimicked a penitentiary, not so much, not when half the inmates, I mean residents, know exactly what a prison looks like from the inside.

When the recidivism went through the roof and half the residents were selling drugs in the recreation room ( a few chairs and a card table plus a filthy aquarium) after hours, a de facto happy hour of their own, well, the Villa lost referrals and profits went more southerly than the South End and eventually the place was sold for less than the last entrepreneur had paid five years earlier. So much for South End dreams of fast riches!

The Villa, once a hotel serving Mabana’s not-very-thriving Port one hundred years ago, was practically historic. When the Mabana Villa LLC purchased it, the previous owners had upgraded plumbing and electric, added amenities such as saunas and hot tubs, recreation rooms with pool tables and jukeboxes, in-room TV’s, all the luxuries … but now the saunas sported black mold, the hot tubs weren’t hot and the TV’s were relegated to one 31 inch tube set in the Commons cafeteria that was itself historic.

Now, some years later, the Mabana Sunset Villa (LLC) offers retirees medium care for a medium price. The staff is mostly minimum wage, but they’re caring and they’re honest. If we geezers need a sterling silver drool bucket,well, we can go to the assisted living franchises up north, pay the dime and spend our Golden Years with cable TV in our well-appointed and spacious rooms. Since most of us down here don’t need three shopping channels or care about the politics of Fox or MSNBC, the gossip at the Villa’s dining room will do just fine as about all the entertainment we’ll need as we all slide slowly but inevitably into history.

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Holly Burgess has been singing every Sunday since 1991 at the Little Chapel in the Ravine, our South End church, which, despite its declaration by the road as non-denominational, collects every denomination in the collection plate passed for tithing right after the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and the ever popular 23rd Psalm. Yea, though she walks through the Valley of Death, Holly will sing a joyful noise.

Pastors come and go with alarming frequency down at the Chapel. It’s some kind of ecumenical banishment to the nether regions apparently. The last Reverend, Pastor George, was promoted to some outpost in heathen Kenya and within a week had packed up his Spartan belongings and his long suffering pinch-faced wife Elizabeth (NOT Liz), a woman who kept to her bed during the winter drizzle, then administered a stern sermon laced with promises of Cotton Mather style penalties for the sinners in the congregation and left the South End immediately after the final hymn in a mudcrusted Chevy SUV with a crumpled quarter panel never fixed after a run-in with a six point buck four months prior.

Holly and two other robed choir members were the only congregants gathered to wave adios at the pastor’s driveway and she was aghast at the dearth of well wishers. Perhaps, she wondered aloud to her fellow singing compatriots, that last sermon WAS overly pointed. She herself was no stranger to sin and venality, but …. my Lord, a Sea of Eternal Fire seemed a bit extreme for some harmless gossip. Pastor George was practically apoplectic from the pulpit, the vein on his tanless forehead positively throbbing to the beat of his thumped King James version, the spine finally splitting open at a particularly vehement whack.

“Well,” she sighed to Kate and Kate’s boyfriend Leo, all hands still aloft in farewell to the padre’s departure, “our loss is those poor Africans’ gain, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Leo agreed, starting to head down to his truck left in the church’s rutted parking lot. Kate hesitated a final moment longer, watching the exhaust cloud of Pastor George’s SUV dissipate after the car had disappeared up over the hill. “You suppose Sin is the same over there?” she asked. Holly, caught off guard, considered that, started to say ‘of course’, then thought maybe she had a point. Something to consider. Definitely something to consider. Maybe even something to ask the new Pastor. If he stayed long enough.

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