The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The pilot for a potential PBS series on glass around the world.

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About 2008 I got a phone call from a woman who said she was doing a documentary on glass, had seen some large windows I’d done and would I meet with her and her cinematographer for an interview. And … did I know any other glass artists whose work was in the area they could interest? Sure, I was skeptical. Us artists get inquiries all the time from publishing outfits that want to include us in their compendium of modern art, mostly a scam to get us to buy expensive coffee table size copies for our friends and family, show em how important we are now.

But I thought why not talk to these people, no harm in that, no money has to be passed when they inevitably ask if I’ll fund their project, just a couple lost hours. I had plenty of hours to lose and no money for wild-eyed investments. The day they arrived I had some crud or cold or flu, the usual yearly malady. I felt rotten, I looked rotten, I probably sounded rotten as they interviewed me about my work, photographed me in a beat up hat and a torn coat, then packed up their gear and went back to Seattle. A few weeks later they had edited their ‘pilot’ film ‘Fire and Glass’ and planned to take it to PBS where they would pitch it to the execs there. Would I consider, assuming they got funding and the public TV buy-in, being the narrator? I guess Dale Chihuly or David Attenborough were busy, but since I wasn’t I said I would love to. They said I’d be the face of modern stained glass, start with America, next season hit other countries, see how it goes.

You can maybe imagine the fantasies that played through my mind. I’d be the Rick Steves of the glass world, hopscotching from cathedrals to courthouses, introducing the viewer to fantastic glass murals from the South End to Tokyo, expounding on design and blown glass, educating a TV audience to the wonders of contemporary stained glass. And whoa ho, a lot of those examples would be mine! I, of course, as your guide to the world of glass, would be properly modest.

Well, timing is everything and it so happened that the Great Recession hit right before the months they pitched the project to prospective funders. Money had dried up and whatever dreams my handlers had dried up too. C’est la vie. Another road not traveled, another life not lived. I’m not a man who looks back with regret, but … I do look back and wonder where those forks might have led.

It’s a pretty notion to imagine What Ifs, let the possibilities play out and try to guess at unforeseen consequences. Sure, I would have liked to highlight the modern glasswork that rarely gets publicity, the murals that transform our secular cathedrals, the ones basically ignored by the artworld. But I can also picture myself stepping out of the glass shack, never having time to build another window myself, maybe not caring but maybe looking back and realizing I’d stopped being an artist and become instead a pitchman. Since then I’ve built a few dozen murals of glass that might never have been built if I’d taken that gig, if the funding had come through, if if if… It was a close brush with celebrity. Assuming I didn’t fall flat on my face. Us moths are better off avoiding the flame and us artists, I suspect, might be better off avoiding fame.

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He’s baaaack! You thought maybe you’d heard the last of him after Facebook banned him for at least the next two years. You thought he’d be a little too busy huddled in the Mar-a-Lago office with his team of attorneys prepping for the New York indictments coming soon to a theater near you. You figured he would just fade away from the national consciousness same as the Covid plague, all of us just weary of the constant drumbeat, the endless articles, the tsunami of statistics and mortuary tables.

But then, you really didn’t know the man. He’s the opposite of Dracula. He dies in the dark. He thrives in the spotlight. No way was he going to stay buried very long, not our boy, not when he knows we all miss the thrills and chills of his every word, who cares if he just keeps repeating himself. Witch hunt. Stolen election. Return to the White House. I am not a crook.

No, wait, that was the other crook, what’s his name, the tricky one. This one thinks he’ll be back in the Ovoid Office before August. The lib press keeps referring to this Trumpless Void as the Big Lie, as if repeating that will convince the true believers the election was fair. And possibly balanced. Qanon believers, definitely unbalanced, would disagree, possibly violently if voter suppression laws don’t do the trick.

Democracy itself is at stake, so say my libtard pals. Ignorance rules the right, the Dark Ages are coming back, the internet is the only truth (and you can pick from an incredible buffet of theories). Democracy. If the voters want Donald back, well, there’s your democracy. Sure, you can blame gerrymandering, voter suppression, the electoral college, Mitch McConnell, the Supreme Court, dark money, the Koch Brothers and the think tank apologists. And you’d be right. So what? Democracy in action, my friends. I know, it looks more like a bad late night horror show with the appliance salesman host dressed up as Count Dracula with a toupee and a cape. But the zombie president is out there, fingernails clawing at the hastily dug grave we left him in, digging his way back into the limelight. As usual, the sequel will be much worse than the original.

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I’m out here in the wilds of Spokane, the Inland Empire where folks happily hang FUCK BIDEN flags in their front yards for their churchgoing grandmas to read along with us cannibal Democrats. We’re visiting old friends from the radical ‘70’s who we’ve stayed close to for going on half a century. Politics were wild then and politics are wild now. America – love it or leave it. None of us, of course, went anywhere.

But time, so they say, stands still for no man. We’ve lost a few wars, supposedly won a couple, put satellites on Mars and flown helicopters there, sent probes beyond our own solar system and probably have Qanon believers waiting for the replies. China has become a capitalist country and Russia a quasi-criminal state. Refugees and immigrants are fleeing natural disasters, wars and gangs are shifting entire countries to the right toward nationalism and isolationism. Meanwhile science marches on … despite the fact that half of us think like superstitious 15th century peasants.

The folks we’re visiting drive an electric car. They have a lawnmower that’s battery powered too. Half their tools now are the rechargeable kind. The mizzus has a hybrid car and I have a new batteried chainsaw. What’s the world coming to, you ask? Is this part of the Deep State’s nefarious Plan? Is Bill Gates behind this? Or George Soros? When I was back in Wisconsin a month ago, I noticed a Tesla charging station. In the middle of nowhere, some small rural town where I would bet a bitcoin nobody owns a Tesla. Maybe it’s for a battery run tractor. Or maybe they just see the future coming up fast on that blacktop leading into town.

Yesterday’s paper had an article about the good folks east of the Cascades fighting to keep some wheat farmer from turning his fields into acres of solar arrays. Same thing with those wind turbines marching across the hills. And it was no doubt the same when Bonneville erected transmission towers from Grand Coulee to Seattle. Just a conspiracy to ruin the rural ambiance in order to power the left wing cities over the mountains. I suppose the native Americans thought the same thing when barb wire crisscrossed the buffalo grounds. And I might think that too. At least until I’m stranded in Dogfart Dakota looking for a charging station, muttering to myself that I should have bought a cellphone now that microwave towers are ubiquitous. As my old man sez about every conversation, always something….

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Not long ago a friend asked me if I thought the rest of the country was pretty much the same, economically, as the South End. Obviously my buddy needs to get out more once this Covid business recedes enough to allow traveling again. What he was really asking was if most folks were fairly well off in America. Now, to be fair, my pal isn’t exactly in the 1%, he’s more likely down in the bottom quarter, no Social Security, no retirement, still working manual labor under the table at 74 and will be until he dies.

Traveling through the Deep South one year with my father and brother on one of our Trips with Dad, the Old Man mused how in his lifetime most of us boats had risen with the economic tide. He and my mom grew up poor in Northern Maine where nearly everyone was in that same boat, not much water underneath. And of course there was the Great Depression, then World War Two, what some historian yahoos call the Good War. Please leave your college degrees at the door when you leave, guyz….

We got a few leaky dinghies on the South End moored next to the yachts, but most folks don’t have a boat to pee in and some not even a pot to bail with. We’re 99% white bread with the few immigrants working on our lawns then leaving by dark. The South End has a few homeless people, but not many. It has a few millionaires, maybe too many. Rents here are high, real estate is hot, retirees are many and working couples few. I’m no sociologist (although I have a degree in sociology) but no way is the South End representative of the America spread over 3000 miles east of us. We’re white, we’re fairly well off, we’re insular and we’re divided about equally by politics.

I told my friend that parts of America are poor and getting poorer, rural but the farms are played out or bought by agri-corporations, urban with ever marginalized ghettos, suburban with the malls dead and abandoned. The South End is a backwash of a lost American Dream on an island with a rising sea level. If my buddy is any indication, ignorance is bliss. For the rest of us, it may just be a tactic.

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