The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A few years back while we were still living in our hundred year old shack, I was at a graduation dinner for a friend and her family. The seating arrangements worked out in a way that I was at the far end of the long table and even further down was my friend’s aunt who was obviously peeved at the prospect of an evening with no one else to talk with than my miserable self. This lady had actually stayed a night many moons prior at my shack, before even the mizzus arrived some months later, and so she knew first hand what my socio-economic status was, somewhere near the bottom.

In the intervening years she had married a man closer to the top of that status, a high mucky-muck for a major corporation who sat on no fewer than 7 board of directors for other major corporations. And in full honesty, was a nice guy when I met him, despite being filthy rich. In the course of our shared exile from the rest of the dinner party we chatted amiably about this and that, talked about the divergent paths our lives had taken and eventually grew pretty comfortable with one another.

At some point past dessert she mentioned that her two high school boys had taken a vacation to some southeast Asian country I had never heard of, which they loved and which she suggested I make plans myself to go touring. At the time a trip to Wisconsin was about as far as our budget would extend, something she might have surmised but obviously didn’t. Later she waxed nostalgically about the guided fishing trip to Alaska, a weeklong safari with their own chef and a fabulous lodge. Only cost about 10,000 for the week. She told me in all earnestness we needed to take that trip too. I said it sounded wonderful. She no doubt assumed I would be on the phone to my travel agent as soon as possible following a quick call to our broker.

My point in all this was how, in only a couple of decades, this woman who had stayed with me in a shack where the mice kept her awake all night gnawing on the walls, could lose sight of what it was like to be … well … poor. We can all drop what we’re doing and jet over exotic lands. We can certainly afford a guided fishing excursion with our own chef in tow. The gulf between her wealth and our poverty had disappeared. We still stay in touch. She and her husband are very nice people and very generous to their niece. They just seem to have lost touch with us unwashed masses. Even though they had been here themselves once.

On a recent encounter at their niece’s wedding, one catered by a restaurant hours away in Portland, I asked about the house they had bought in Pasadena and been restoring for the past few years. At some point I asked, gee, this is a long shot, but this isn’t the Greene and Greene arts and craft house you see in all the architecture books, is it? No, they laughed, we’re the house next door. Probably a modest neighborhood, I’m thinking. In a galaxy far far away….

1. START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

2. LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

3. LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

4. WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

5. WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

6. LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

7. MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

I got a wild hair this spring, no doubt from lack of legitimate work, and decided I’d build myself a banjo. I play one so I’m familiar with the basic form. Bunch of strings, thingamabobs to hold em to the end and more up at the top so you can tighten or loosen em. I mean, even a banjo, it helps to be in some kind of tune. It’s got a round pot made of wood and some have a round brass metal piece on top of that to give it a ‘ring’. Banjos have a skin head or a store bought plastic job pulled down over the pot and you need some kind of gizmos to hold it down tight and better yet, to be able to tighten it up like a drum. Then there’s a neck that has the fretboard and the peghead and this has to fit up against the pot and something has to hold it at the right angle so you aren’t playing strings about half a foot off the fretboard which makes playing a lot harder than it already is.

I don’t mean to make it sound complicated. I mean, early banjos were made out of gourds with some catgut for strings and a stick neck and you just wailed on that thing like beating a drum. Banjo! Not exactly as complex as a harpsichord or a saxophone. Seems doable. Seems like a person with the right attitude and a little nerve could just go at it and a few days later might come out the other end with all his digits intact and an instrument that would sound at least okay, if not totally tolerable to most listeners.

I think life is a little like that. Meaning, sometimes you have to wade out into the water. It isn’t as deep as you think and worse case, you can dogpaddle. Too many of us think we’re going to drown, just flounder out there when the bottom drops out and then flail until we’re worn out and finally just sink down into a watery grave. Why risk it? Why take a chance when there’s all this dry ground to stand on and just look at the beach and the water from a safe distance? Well, lots of us do just that. I mean, I don’t mountain climb and I don’t race Formula Ones. Some things do seem risky.

But … nothing ventured, nothing gained, my old man used to tell me. Course, he never figured I’d apply that to a career in art and he probably felt bad for steering me down a rutted road. I remember when I told him I was building my own house. The silence on the other end of the phone was all I needed to comprehend his horror. Poor Karen, he was thinking, or so he told me later when he and Mom came to visit and view this construction debacle firsthand and he fully expected some plywood lean-to drafty as a chicken shed and leaking the first rain. Instead he drove up the drive to find a two story house, sturdy and durable and handbuilt with slate floors, mosaic tiles, curly maple staircases, stained glass transoms and sidelights, custom made doors, brick fireplace, handcrafted furniture, birdseye maple cabinetry, hardwood floors, cedar paneling on the interior walls, cedar on the exterior. A nice house, perfectly comfortable. Took two years to build. Best years of my life.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. Sometimes a purpose and a little faith in yourself will carry the day. Most things in life aren’t rocket science. Although that seems to be changing. Too often we’re just afraid of failure. I guess I’m not. It seems like it’s one way to learn what you need to learn to be successful. And anyway, sometimes they’re not totally different. That’s what art taught me. You have to be your own judge, finally, even if other people will be too.

So … I’m making banjos. Some play well, some not. Some sound sweet, some not. Some are beautiful, some are a little like your kids, beautiful maybe only to you. Could I sell them? my friends ask, wondering I guess, who needs this many banjos. Well, that wasn’t my original intention. But then again, when I started making stained glass, it wasn’t going to be my career either. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to build houses for a living. I’m probably not going to be a banjo luthier. What I’m doing is what any kid does, just following my nose, trying stuff out, seeing what’s fun and what isn’t. In the meantime I get to live in my house. I get to play my banjos. And hopefully my life will be my art. It’s about all I can ask.

We humans have walked upright on this planet for 6 million years. About 90,000 years ago we learned how to use tools. And then, only 12,000 years ago, we became farmers, grew our food instead of hunting it and developed towns and cities, nation states and countries. Civilization, on a planet that’s 4 and a half billion years old, is fairly short-lived, although most of us homo sapiens think of it as fairly permanent, all of us crowns of creation, made in God’s image. Took Her awhile to get around to us, but now that we’re here, probably forever, right?

But if something happened to our species, god forbid, and in some distant future another civilization rose from the ashes, would they even know we were here once? Or put another way, if a civilization preceded this one, maybe before the dinosaurs, how would we know? The fossil records? Planet Earth is a churning waring blender, continents in movement, mountains forming and disappearing, oceans rising and falling, the climate in constant flux with or without human intervention. Those dinosaur prints archeologists find represent a minute record of life on this planet. Even in our lifetime entire civilizations disappear beneath the jungles — imagine millions of lifetimes, billions even.

You think maybe the Empire State Building will be the clue to past cultures? You think steel and concrete are forever? Better think again. If aliens landed on this third planet from our sun and set up shop, managed to make this their home for a few million years then died or immigrated elsewhere, how would you know? Not like you could go down to the salvage yards and find rusting spaceships to prove there were folks here before us. Even nuclear waste has a limited half-life. Nothing is permanent, not even us. Suns burn out, God herself gets tired, and all us infinitely egotistical humans, well, maybe we should get over ourselves. The dinosaurs thought they were pretty hot shit too….

For most of my life I’ve had this quaint notion that school was, for the most part, meant to give you skills that you could use AFTER you LEFT school. Teach you, for instance, how to read so you could, on your own, pursue further education. Teach you, as an example, how to reason, how to analyze, how to navigate the world after graduation. Sure, I know, school was a means to acquiring the skills to get you employment, a job, even a career. But mostly I’d hoped it would encourage curiosity and offer the skills to explore that curiosity.

When I taught 8th grade back in the Dark Ages before computers or AI, my goal was to convince my little students that reading was the KEY to it all. You can’t read, well, life was going to be a rough ride. Now, of course, you can watch You-Tubes and even let ChatGPT substitute for your own thinking. Reading the 21st Century is like using a slide rule to do your math problems — are you kidding?? You got a computer to do that crap.

Now I know I sound like an old fogey, possibly even a Luddite, but I still believe in reading more than a few sentences of Google articles and calling it knowledge. More than half of us don’t read one single book in a year. 50% of us can’t read at 8th grade comprehension. I don’t think you have to go to college to be an intelligent person. I went to college with plenty of dumbasses. I’ve known plenty of people who never even cracked a book — and were proud of it. Some of these were actually intelligent, they just decided being an ignorant dumbass was perfectly fine.

I don’t know where the kids I taught reading to in 8th grade are now. Plenty didn’t want to read even though I let them pick Anything to read, just read, goddammit. I read them great books just to convince them reading could be enjoyable. We had entire classes, outside even, for reading days. Just read!!

My guess — just a wild shot in the dark — 50% never cracked a book after high school or college. Call me Old School. Call me Mr. Chips. But I’d hate to be a teacher now. Books? They don’t need no stinking books!