The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Nobody seems to like growing old.  Can’t blame em,  I guess when you factor in the aches and pains, the wrinkles and hair loss, the diminished mobility.  Well, almost nobody, cause I don’t mind.  Sure, I got the same ailments, but hellfire, you ought to pay  SOME price for all this accumulated wisdom, for some peace of mind, for a more stable financial grip on this hard world.

My brother’s father-in-law, a dairy farmer in Northern Wisconsin who knew a few things about Hard Living, told him at a ripe young age to quit worrying about money.  Money, he said, takes care of itself.  You’d be better off to tackle the rest.   Love, marriage, family, career, happiness.  My brother, being young, didn’t believe him until he too was older and wiser.

We used to value maturity.  We used to respect the accumulated wisdom of all those years of living.  We used to pay homage to our elders.  Now that I’m an elder, I sure wish we still did.  But we don’t.  We value youth, energy, good looks, clean skin, svelte bodies, shimmering hair.  We’re a bit superficial.  Okay, we’re TOTALLY skin deep.  We’d sell our souls to be beautiful, to be athletic, to be rich.  If I was the devil, boy oh boy, I’d be banking more souls than I’d have rooms to rent in Hell.  I’d be building infrared suburbs, you bet.  Plenty of beauty parlors, fitness centers, spas, sports injury treatment facilities, so many mirrors a 60 watt bulb would heat the place up to full sizzle.

You reach my advanced age, you ought to pat yourself on the back.  You probably figured most things out.  You must’ve learned plenty from all those mistakes.  You should’ve learned to live in your own skin.  When kids ask who your heroes are, tell them YOU are.  It’s not egotistical.  It should be the truth.

The truth is, we got this far.  Meaning, we had a hearty dose of living, our fair share….  We learned a thing or three.  We witnessed the world.  We even changed it a bit, don’t underestimate yourself.  Pass some of it on to the young’uns.  They might listen.  More than you think.  Just don’t wish you were them, young and starting out fresh.  Why go through that twice?

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I got an e-mail today with a link to the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ jobs in America.  Gotta tell you, I dreaded opening it up, fully expecting to find Artist probably the worst.  In all honesty, I almost hit the DELETE button, but this had come from a friend and he probably expected a response or a confession or a vow to do better in my next career choice, one from the ‘best’ list.

Turns out the ‘best’ jobs were pretty much judged on the basis of salary.  Actuarials, statisticians, mathematician(!), no kidding: high paying, technical, number crunching corporate gigs.  Boy oh boy, if I’d only know known back when I drummed out of school and began my desperate search for a ‘meaningful’ job.  Nobody told me the best careers were the highest paid ones.  I thought maybe they would be the ones that made me the happiest.The ‘worst’ jobs were the dangerous jobs.  Like Lumberjack.  Probably cut your leg off or be killed by a miscalculated cut in a leaning Doug Fir.  Poor pay, hearing loss, amputations.  And forget health care or vacations or sick leave or a pension.  Not gonna get to pension age anyway….

No mention of Artist in the group.  I guess poor wages, no bennies, no pension, not really the ‘worst’ job if it isn’t dangerous too.  Although I got to thinking how about those glass installations I did back when I was too eager and too stupid, climb up on a skinny ledge two stories above a concrete floor to hoist 30 square foot panels of stained glass into place with barely a few toes on secure footing at 3 a.m., every cell in my body screaming NO NO NO! and the sweat smelling like fear.  Fear, in case you don’t know, that kind of fear at least, smells like excrement.  Truly, unforgettably.

Anyway …. I didn’t find my ‘job’ listed on this link.  I’m just sort of glad I got something I can call a job.  Although, between you and me and the pegleg lumberjack, I never think of what I do as a job.  Someone asked me about retirement two nights ago at an art gallery opening. Would I — could I — just stop?  It’s not like punching a time clock, I guess.  It’s not about making the money.  And it’s not about being afraid of the danger.  My danger was really starvation, poverty, failure and humiliation.  Too late for that now.  The fear now is the creative well drying up, the days growing longer and emptier, the boredom settling in like a slow metastasizing dread.  I don’t know yet, but I bet it still smells the same.

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Businesses come and go down here on the South End.  Mostly go…. Folks figure they can just empty out the kids’ piggy bank or sell the old Chevy van that’s been up on blocks 10 years behind the shed and scrape up the cash to hang a shingle out on their new storefront.  Something about working for other people makes em yearn for the entrepreneurial dream.  They figure if they work for themselves, their new boss will treat them a whole lot better.

Starting a business, they suppose, is a snap.  After all, this is a capitalist society and there’s all those consumers up on the North End clamoring for sales and services.  Wanda opened up the El Sol Tanning Solarium last year.  Now you know and I know the sun doesn’t shine much up on the cloud shrouded North End…. And so did Wanda, so she put out the CostCo neon OPEN  sign in a little 700 square foot storefront rental up by the Plaza Market where storefronts are opening up faster than real estate offices can move in, something Wanda mighta shoulda oughta factored in when she developed her business plan that night between dinner and Wheel of Fortune.

She lasted about the time it takes to say melanoma.  I don’t know what tanning beds go for used on CraigsList, but someday the antique value should be right up there with Ozone Generators from the 1920’s.  Wanda did get a nice full body tan herself, better than the burn down at the bank, and now we got another FOR LEASE sign where the neon no longer says OPEN.

When I last chatted with Wanda, she was heartbroken her dream died before it even had a chance to blossom.  ‘People must stay indoors and figure the TV will give them a tan,’ she lamented.  I said they go to Palm Springs or Albuquerque for the sun, not some coffin with full spectrum artificial lighting.  Wanda was in full denial.  More advertising maybe.  A location closer to town.  One free tanning session for every ten.  Now her savings were gone.  ‘I don’t want to go back to driving that school bus again,’ she practically sobbed.  In the land of capitalist dreams where Bill Gates whispers sweet somethings in every aspiring entrepreneur’s ear, failure is hard to accept.  Wanda will be fine.  She’ll dust herself off, take stock and probably launch into the next hot market.  DVD rentals or an umbrella shop.  Dreams don’t really die down here on the South End, they just recycle.  Worst case, she can do like most of the rest of us small businesspeople and become a working artist.  Low pay but huge self esteem.

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Our latest entrepreneurial entrée into the fragile economic market of the South End is Tatoo U.  Armed with dye injecting needles and a menacing array of bicep tats, ‘Biker Bob’ Kowalski opened up his ‘body art emporium’ in the cleaning supply room of Hair Today – Gone Tomorrow’s Rogaine Outlet beneath Windy Rear Realty.

The opening week alone Biker Bob adorned 30 arms, torsos and lower calves with artworks ranging from colorful butterflies and cute unicorns to snarling hounds of hell and a blood dripping dagger with the always popular logo: NO LOSERS!  Bob acknowledges that he’s fighting a long held stereotype of body art that’s a bit negative.  “Mostly it’s the old farts,” he said in an exclusive interview for the Crab Cracker.  “They equate it with a sailor’s drunk in some port town.  Next morning he wakes up with the worst hangover of his life and the wrong girlfriend’s name on his chest.”  Bob tells us he doesn’t get many sailors and he’s reluctant to inscribe current girlfriend’s names.

Scrutinizing the hundreds of graphic images posted on the salon walls, I ask what are some of the favorites of us South Enders.  He admits it’s a bit early to say, but he’d done a couple of dragons for the guys and the little butterfly is popular among the ladies. “They like it right about bikini-line or just visible below the top of the bra line,” he says, then laughs and admits, “me too.”  Not bad work, if you can get it.”

With all the artists down here, I make the mistake of asking if he plans to use any of them to create one-of-a-kind tattoos.  This rankles him.  “Why don’t you go ask THEM if they’re going to use any of the other artists’ art to make theirs, ya jerk!”

I took his point, without the dye, apologized and took a hasty departure.

Artists are hyper-sensitive people, in case you’ve somehow never stumbled down to Colony Central here at the nettlesome South End.  Biker Bob will make a fine addition.

On my way past a stack of detergent and window cleaning supplies I passed a client coming in:  about 18, pierced nose, tongue stud, 3 tiny diamonds glittering in a clean row on her earlobe.  “Go for the butterfly,” I meekly suggest.  Her accompanying boyfriend glared ominously at me and advised I mind my own business.

You know, if I had one….  Biker Bob apparently does.

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Before my Old Man died and he stopped watching or reading the new, if we asked him about some current event or other, he’d shrug and say ‘crazy world’. I think in his late 90’s he figured there wasn’t much he could do anymore to change things. If there ever was …. So he put politics, world and national and local events, catastrophes and wars, all of it in the rearview and tried to focus on eating and breathing. The rest — someone else could worry about it.

There are days — and this is one — I wish I could ignore the outside world, play my banjo, make some furniture, design a stained glass window, chop wood, hunt for crab, sit and write, enjoy the remaining years of my life without the constant bombardment from the insane jungle beat of a world going mad intruding constantly. The polls say Trump is at his highest approval rating ever. Higher than Biden, even though the guy is a crook, a traitor, an authoritarian creep without morals or values or the slightest human empathy for anyone but himself.

And I was worried about Artificial Intelligence taking over …. Global warming is no hoax and it and all our new wars are spurring immigration on a level we’ve never seen, only to get worse, but always a wedge issue for the ultranationalists here and abroad. What, me worry? But, like my old man says, crazy world. Unlike him, I have to live in it awhile longer.

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