The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My last attempt at South End luthiery was a black limba parlor guitar. I had to tear it apart once, maybe even twice, I can’t remember now after a couple of years of Covid isolation, to fix a problem that made the neck pull down and the action go up. For all you non-luthiers out there, count yourselves lucky. For me, it was the last straw in a year of guitar building misadventures. Most of the five I made got disassembled, repaired, rebuilt and finally just hung on the wall, testament to my obstinacy and incompetence. Some of us are slow learners. And one of us never learns.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? How about plenty ventured, nothing gained? You can learn a lot about yourself attempting to accomplish what might actually be impossible. The fiddler in our band went to violin making school for three years. Our new mandolin player makes his own and I don’t think he went to school to learn how to do it, but his mandolins are beautiful and the workmanship is superb. I don’t know him well yet, but I suspect he’s meticulous as a clock maker. Me, not so much.

By the time I tried my hand at bending wood for an acoustic guitar I’d built a few banjos. Banjos, well, banjos are a little easier and at the end of the day, a banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. Oh, sure, you can hear some nuanced differences, but mostly they’re a drum with strings, a percussive instrument that defies respectability. A guitar, on the other hand, has a range of intonations that vary from sweet mellowness to brittle sharpness, mostly the result of the choice of woods, rosewood being the balanced mellow, maple contrasting with a hard tone. Course, being a neophyte, I tried everything from koa to bubinga, maple to walnut, and the last one, a black limba. About the only woods I didn’t use were balsa and plywood.

I won’t even get into the playability factor, the balanced tones from bass to treble, the bracing strategies for guitars like mine with untraditional soundholes, sometimes on the sides, usually two on top, each essentially a new experiment, each always a new challenge. After all, I wasn’t trying to make a duplicate the way my fiddler does his violins, each meticulously fashioned to be a copy of a Stradivarius. Experiments don’t sell well to symphonies. I wasn’t planning to sell to the Philharmonic players.

The truth is, there’s something to be said for repetition, especially if you fine tune the procedures, learn from the previous mistakes and try not to repeat them. But something in me resists that. I wanted each one to be entirely unique, more an artistic statement than a musical one, but in the end, maybe neither. Today I’ve got the spruce top off after an hour of red hot spatula prying without breaking it, but what I’m going to do to fix my problem, god only knows. I liked the guitar before it warped, liked how it looked, liked how it sounded. I waited a year to convince myself to repair it, swore I was done with this folly, promised myself to stick with the banjos. Stay tuned. The guitar probably won’t.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Daddle, after repeated attempts to put lipstick on his ‘pig of a guitar’, has enrolled in a 12 step luthier withdrawal program. Future blog posts, so he claims, will delete all future references to guitar building and consequent deconstructions. He has extended apologies to all, if there are any, readers.

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If Donald J. Trump was a six year old kid, you’d take his pants down and paddle his fanny until he finally told you the truth. About anything…. Lately he’s been explaining his actions on January 6th. He wanted to walk to the Capitol with his minions, the ones he’d just exhorted to go down there and overturn the election, but gee, the meany men at the Secret Service just wouldn’t let him do it. No way, Mr. President, we won’t let you go out there. I guess the Secret Service ranks a degree or two higher than President of the United States is all I can figure.

So he has to go back to the White House and watch his MAGA true believers assault the Congress without their Leader, just watch it on his TV in the safety of his bedroom, probably yearning to be at the front of the mob, battering ram in hand, the General leading his troops into battle, not lounging in his bathroom with a can of diet pop and a bag of chips. But hey, he’s got a phone, he’s got twitter, he’s got the bully pulpit. It is, after all, the 21st century, not some Civil War battleground with General Grant on his horse directing the artillery fire, c’mon.

Lately there’s been a lot of commotion about the missing logs for those hours. Nixon had some missing too, but nowhere near so long and nowhere close to being as important. Alarmed aides and his kids tried to convince him to go public and stop the insurrection. Stop the insurrection? What were they thinking? This was exactly what he called for a few hours earlier. And if it weren’t for those high ranking Secret Service, he’d be down there, tall in the saddle. Besides, watching it on TV was almost like being there, after all, he was a reality TV star before he became a reality twitter President. Not all that much difference.

A lot of logs, archives, what have you, ended up, oddly enough at Mar-a-Lago which caused a fuss with the folks investigating the events prior and during January 6th. Trump claims not to have known they were taken down there, just probably tossed in by a White House maid with the half eaten bags of chips, the cases of diet pop and the non- disclosure agreements with half a dozen of his girl pals, nothing nefarious about it. If some seemed tampered with, well … maybe his dog ate them.

Meanwhile, back in reality, his aides are refusing to testify under subpoena, his backers are calling the whole investigation a witch hunt, the fair and balanced media folks are claiming the insurrection was nothing more than exuberant tourists. They’re all stonewalling in hopes the legislature will flip in the midterms and the investigation will be stopped. There are a lot of britches that ought to be pulled down and plenty of asses that need paddling. It would make great TV.

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I was in college when the Population Bomb became a best seller, a happy tome about world-wide famines precipitated by over population. Mass starvation, immigration upheavals, wars and pestilence, get ready for a Malthusian Armageddon. Sound familiar? Course, that was 50 years ago, a half century, and sure, the world has been through some famines, its population has doubled from under 4 billion to about 8 billion since then, but somehow we’ve managed to hang on.

Maybe it’s a couple of years of Pandemic, maybe soon it will be the Russian/Ukraine war, but lately there seems to be another groundswell of impending Doom menacing us. Pretty obviously the countries of the world aren’t going to meet the goal of reducing greenhouse gases enough to prevent catastrophic climate changes, the glaciers are melting, sea ice is opening up arctic shipping lanes, record temperatures are climbing, the weather is wilder, the earth is going through major temper tantrums. The End is Near! The End is Near!

What’s a homo sapien to do? Well … I guess we could drive less. Maybe turn down the thermostat. Recycle more. Hell, I don’t know. My guess is we’ll mostly throw up our hands, surrender to despair, call it quits, let the chips fall where they may. If we can’t stop carbon emissions before the Tipping Point, why bother, right? Party on, Bro! Chances are us survivors will be okay, good luck to the kids and grandkids. C’est la vie…. Or not.

It’s a little like falling behind on your mortgage payment right after you lost your job. Might as well skip the next ones, the bank’s going to repossess the trailer anyway. Haul down to the Bud Hut, make a stop at the liquor store, stock up with a few months’ worth of cheap pizzas, enjoy the freedom long as you can. Just no point in fighting fate, right? Right?

Well, maybe the doomsayers are right, the planet is going to get hotter and wilder, the hurricanes will get more frequent, the floods that were hundred year floods will be yearly, tornadoes will become as frequent as robo-calls, your backyard will be a desert and some folks out there will still say it’s all a hoax. Me, I’m not going down without more than a whimper. I just grafted my favorite plum to four rootstocks, I planted two new Asian pears and just for laughs I intend to put the garden in again this year. Although … I may still stock up with cheap pizzas.

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Like a lot of places, the South End is far more discerning of the oddities of others than themselves. The Avant-Gardeners’ hippie commune was the most prevalent gossip for years down here. Were they communists? Were they polygamists? Were they drug addicts? Were they pagans? There was no end to the rumors, no matter how fantastic — and, of course, the Gardeners themselves fed the flames with their fantastic behavior. Not just their colorful gypsy attire or their unorthodox social behavior, but Grand Experiments involving ship building and dome construction, all gone horribly awry, yet never diminishing their unbounded optimism or their total lack of fear of failure. They were pioneers, not just in breaking ground for their greenhouses and their livestock sheds, but in how they viewed the world. And the rest of us South Enders.

So we shunned them, most of us. Made them Outsiders in a place already Outside. Oh, a few of us bought their eggs and raw goat milk. I traded bread for those and vegetables, even got to know a few of the menfolk. The women mostly held back, kids peeking from behind their long granny dresses. Although I did teach Betsy, the most gregarious of the whole troupe, how to make stained glass. She would walk to my shack and glean scraps from the throwaway pile, then make the most beautiful suncatchers and small windows, far surpassing her teacher in no time flat.

After a few seasons I showed them where the wily Dungeness could be caught by hand and where to dig for free range clams. I took a few of the boys out in the S.S. Pterodactyl, my little sailboat, and we fished for true cod and bottomfish before they were gone, both the fish and the boys. Because one day the FOR SALE signs went up and the farm was abandoned as fast as it had arrived.

I bought a couple of their goats and some laying hens, took some greenhouse glass panels, accepted some macramé and pottery gifts, then waved adios as their gypsy caravan exited the South End one misty, fog filled autumn day. I guess they were as mysterious to me as they were to my neighbors, the only difference being I never minded. But I still remember that day when the Flower Children headed off island, north into the cruel ‘70’s, waving goodbye as I stood by my blue mailbox in a slow drizzle, wishing they would never leave. For me at least, that was the day, looking back, the 60’s really ended.

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A friend of mine just wrote to say she might have discovered she has a heretofore unknown brother, discovered, apparently through the wonders of DNA analysis. He is either her half brother or the son of her father’s brothers, the result, she says of a one night stand in some hick town in Arizona with his mother who until he was 11 thought was his sister. Yeah, I’m confused too. To make the story all the more interesting, his mother is African American. Of course I’m interested in selling the movie rights…

There are studies that show between 10 and 30% of us may not have the right dad when we send those father’s day cards. This is a testament to the infidelity of the American Mom whose libido may have been vastly underestimated. I had a buddy, a white guy, who had a black kid. Kind of a surprise at the birth, but like he said, the mizzus got drunk at a party one night and hey, these things happen, but he was going to raise the kid, someone else’s genetically, his by choice. Gotta say, I was impressed. If you met his wife, you’d never guess her wild side judging by her mousey disposition.

Another buddy of mine got a knock on his door one day a few years back and found his old paramour of even further back darkening his doorway with her son in tow. He’d had a fling with her when she was 15, picked her up in a park, took her home and carried on an affair for a week or two. Yeah, I know what statutory rape is. He did too, but it didn’t stop him. So now the chickens were flying home to roost. My pal, being the distrustful sort, decided to call her bluff, especially since the kid was pretty dark like his mom and didn’t show much Caucasian. And because she wanted money. Turned out the boy wasn’t his after all. I don’t know if he gave her some money anyway, but I hope he did.

I guess these DNA tests are great for exploring the family tree. Personally, I’m okay letting Dad be Dad. I don’t need to be sending multiple father’s day cards every damn year….

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