The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When Shirley’s Hypno-Therapy opened its clinic doors just down the road from the Pilot Lounge, it instantly became the topic du jour for the barflies who regularly frequented the drinking establishment.

“Might be just the thing, Bob,” Little Jimmy was saying the evening Two Toke and I were having a pint after a hard day of loafing. “You could beat that nicotine habit, throw away the patches, get yourself cleaned up once and for all.” Bob and Jimmy and a few others were lined up at the bar like crows on a telephone line waiting for incoming messages, not likely other than texts from the mizzus to get their sorry asses home.

“Are you insane?” Bob practically shouted. “Who in their right mind would put themselves under some spell? This Shirley person could have you giving her your passwords, your bank accounts, who knows what else?”

“What else?” Fairlane Fred threw in, “maybe a cure for your E.D.”

This, predictably enough, brought the crows to full cackle, all but Bob who surprisingly missed the humor, eliciting further speculation from the clothesline concerning potential remedies for Bob’s ‘problems’ before Bob removed himself from the group for a cigarette outside on the dock. Whereupon Two Toke excused himself and stood out with Bob against the rotting wood rail listening to the rattle of unused boats rocked against the pilings.

“What’s up?” I asked when he returned. “Nothing much. Bob said he planned to go see this Shirley, don’t mention it to the boys.”

“Kicking the habit?”

“Naw, kickstart the motor maybe. Freddie hit a nerve, I guess. Worth a shot, he figures.”

And so Shirley added another new client to her short list of us South Enders. Never did hear how it worked out for Bob but rumor at the Pilot Lounge was a lot of the boyz made appointments a few months later. Probably to the disappointment of a few wives….

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As a person fully dedicated to protecting others from making the same mistakes I keep making, let me share with any of you contemplating guitar luthiery, the sad sorry saga of my last acoustic guitar, the 5th in a series of steep learning curves, inadequate preparations, insufficient tools and, well, a dearth of about everything except moxie. Moxie I got plenty of. Too much maybe. Einstein’s definition of insanity, that repeating your same mistakes and expecting better results, totally applies to me. Sadly. But since I pretend to be a so-called artist, I can justify my guitars, not as failures, but as artistic ‘gestures’, works in progress, evolutionary aesthetics.

My last gesture was a nice little black limba guitar, what professionals in the trade would call a parlor guitar. What I call a small guitar. But big on interesting woods in the neck and body, details like tailpieces and side soundholes and pickguards that set it apart from other guitars. Trouble was, my original redwood top had sagged with the tension of the strings and an experimental bracing system underneath. Like mostly all the other four gestures, this one needed to be dismantled and repaired. The redwood top broke when I pried up after using a blowtorch to loosen the glue holding it to the body. Bummer, man. And then when I tried to remove a block holding the neck, the entire front end of the body shattered.

Now ordinarily, being prone to fits of anger management, I would have taken the rest of the ruined instrument and beaten it into shards and slivers while hollering obscenities and slapping myself in the face repeatedly. All that work, so much time, came to nothing. Not only hadn’t I learned from previous mistakes, this fifth iteration was now the ultimate testimony that perhaps I was not cut out to be a guitar luthier. Maybe not even a woodbutcher. Just a complete and irredeemable failure. Sure, I cried, I wailed, I went through depression, I swore on Clapton’s guitar I would never attempt another one.

But dammit, I’m an artist and if there’s one thing I’ve learned being an artist, it’s … well, I’m not really sure I’ve learned anything. Except maybe you have to keep going. Every painting can’t be a Picasso, every glasswork can’t go into the cathedral of Notre Dame, you just have to have faith in yourself even if no one else does, even if the last work was ruined. So I got this idea looking through my box of scrap woods and found a few pieces of matching black limba. Enough to cut away the entire front of that broken box and use it to span the breakage. Instead of a nicely rounded top where the neck attaches, mine was flat. A flat top. What most people think of as the flat soundboard versus an archtop, mine was flat both places, a true Flat Top, possibly the prototype for an evolutionary shift in guitar luthiery. Once again great leaps forward sometimes have their genesis in mistakes. Okay, not mistakes, ‘gestures.’ Feel free to try this at home. Whaddaya got to lose, right?

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After an hour in the South End Dental Clinic chair, I’m slowly starting to feel my face again. It’s been years since the last road construction in my mouth and I’d forgotten — or repressed — the uniqueness of the dental experience. Mouth dams, jackhammers, sump pumps, interrogation lighting and full disclosure on finances, assets and lienholders.

Like I said, it’s been awhile in between visits, something to do with the lack of dental insurance. You want to see the face of poverty, look at a person’s teeth, at least the ones that aren’t missing. I’m trying the best I can to keep mine. But … when the good doctor shows me the estimate for filling a cavity, $250 (not counting x-rays,etc.) versus what the bill will be if this is a root canal, $2200 —which is what he expects it to be — you can maybe understand why the frugal shopper might opt to have the damn tooth pulled right out of his head for good, skip the anaesthetic.

My last root canal and crown cost $1100. The dentist in Stanwoodopolis drilled twice and didn’t get the infected nerve cleaned out. The last visit he asked if I wanted to give it a 3rd go or have him refer me to a specialist. I said, gee Bob,I didn’t get a dental degree but since you need to ask, let’s go with someone who knows what they’re doing, which is obviously neither of us.

You want to spoil a doctor/client relationship, this is pretty direct. Course when I had to have the specialist’s temporary crown replaced with a permanent one, something beneath him apparently, I went to a new dentist. News travels fast in Podunk and I got a pretty cold shoulder from my new guy. Another last visit. Which is why, after 15 years, I’m at the newly opened South End Pain Clinic, no records transferred, no toxic gossip exchanged. Just money. The way I remember dentistry in the good old days….

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The ‘Make My Day Guns & Ammo” shop does a brisk business these days on the heavily defended South End. Earl and his brother Biker Billy watched their revenues double in the 2008 election, then double again in 2012, most buyers convinced the government was going to confiscate all the firearms in America. Earl and Billy could keep up with their gun inventory, but ammo was rationed and frightened homeowners were put on a waiting list. Ralph Hansen wanted to know if he’d need to ask his ‘intruders’ if they’d mind waiting before they broke into his house, raped his wife and daughters, then killed him. In the end, Earl sold him a Browning over and under and a box of 12 gauge slugs he said would stop a rabid rhinoceros. Billy shook his head when Ralph walked out with the shotgun in its tooled leather case proud as Hemingway. “How many shotguns does he have?” he asked his brother. And Earl smiled as he put Ralph’s check under the cash drawer in the register. “Probably one shy of enough.”

Down my well armed end of the Alamo I hear plenty of gunfire. The mizzus took years to get used to the sudden bark of semi-automatic practice sessions of the local militia excercising not only their right to bear arms, but their obligation to shoot them as often as possible. She’d ask, alarmed, what is THAT?? Gunfire, I’d say nonchalantly, and she’d grow more alarmed, her fears realized and then want to call the police. It’s America, I’d explain patiently, figuring that was explanation plenty, all Clint Eastwood would bother with, why waste words OR ammo?

A few years back we had a bad hombre stroll down Bernie Road when it was a one lane dirt cutoff to Tyee Store, occasionally letting loose with an automatic assault rifle beside the cow pastures up there, alarming more than just the mizzus. Turns out he was wanted on felony warrants and the local gendarme treated him like Machine Gun Kelly on meth, waited until he’d gone to bed at his moll’s place off Dallman, then dropped a stun blast through the window and shot him to pieces reaching for either his trousers or his gun. The sheriffs around these parts don’t much cotton to automatic weapons being practiced on the roadways. Especially by hardass criminals.

I won’t say the mizzus has gotten used to country livin’, but she doesn’t race to the phone to call 911 every artillery session or the opening of hunting season. I guess she just figures it’s slightly better than moving to Beirut or Baghdad or the wrong side of Everett. At least the casualties are somewhat less. Even if supposedly we’re not at war.

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Maybe you were like me when you saw the Trump Tennis Shoes, advertised for $399, probably thought some fake news blurb, make the Donald look like some cheeseball huckster selling merchandise like a snake oil salesman. And same as me you probably did some fact checking, expecting to find that this was some bogus AI blog bot cranking out embarrassing phony B.S., see who was gullible enough to click on the bait. I mean who can tell anymore what’s really true and what isn’t? Another year or two and we can forget about fact checking, we’ll be so completely inundated with Artificial Intelligence images and speech imitators, nothing will be certifiable.

Turns out the tennis shoe pitch was authentic. Shameless promotions, MAGA hats, Trump steaks and perfumes, coffee mugs, why not sneakers? I dunno, doesn’t it seem … well, unseemly? Crass even? You picture Abe Lincoln hawking stovepipe hats with his picture on them? Or George Washington selling axes with I CANNOT TELL A LIE on the handles?

And sure, I know we’re a capitalist country and I get that Trump was elected at least partly because folks thought he was a helluva biznessman. But c’mon, this smacks of nickel and dime commerce. You expect a Kool-Aid stand next at the entrance to Mar-a-Lago. The man needs more money, all I can figure. A few billion isn’t enough! He needs liquid assets. He needs a bond to meet his fines of half a billion bucks. He needs to sell those sneakers!!!

We are a strange country, all I can say. We might re-elect a guy who never conceded the last election, who, in fact, tried to overthrow the government. For a day or two after Jan. 6th the Republicans called for him to resign. But then … well, now they support his campaign to be the President again, a nearly total unified front. They pledge their allegiance to the rapist, the crook, the insurrectionist, the liar and the cheat. They pledge allegiance to the sneaker salesman. Sell em clown shoes, they’ll buy em!

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