The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Every blue moon or so I stop loitering in our gardens and tune in briefly to the world at large outside our gates. Actually I don’t so much go searching for it, it intrudes on me. Folks who say the world is shrinking, well, from my foxhole, it seems more like it’s expanding, same as some of the invasive weeds that come creeping in the night, magically appearing next morning.

Try as I might, hoeing isn’t all that effective. Technology, once unleashed, is pretty much an onslaught. Everyone I know walks around with it strapped to their belt, parked in their purse, stuffed in a pocket, carried in their car, enveloping them in a cyberbubble they now feel uncomfortable without. No cellphone, no laptop, no I-pad — they feel naked and vulnerable. Doesn’t matter I don’t attach the umbilical myself, the digital electromagnetic pulses lap at my brainpan anyway. The engineers, aliens to me, have won the battle for our consciousness. More and more we are ruled by technocrats, those busy little beavers intent on morphing their rules and parameters and metrics onto our flesh and bones. Or simply working 24/7 to create Artificial Intelligence… They imagine a future of exponentially increasing efficiencies. They argue this will be good for us humanoids, a gift from the scientists and technicians. Even quite a few of my fellow artists have begun to believe this.

Lately I’ve been hearing the drumbeat to scale back Humanities in universities, substituting more degrees that lead to high paying jobs, degrees in programming, coding, engineering, all those ‘practical’ careers. But I think we need more impractical degrees. We need musicians, sculptors, painters, writers, dreamers. We need to tether ourselves through them to what makes us human, not cyborg.

A sea change is coming, a digital tsunami, a revolution that will implant its seed in all of us. Technology is easy now — being human, soon that’s going to be very hard. Soon most of us won’t know the damn difference. The difference may just be Art. Humanities, well named. And I may be forced, reluctantly, despite a lifetime of self-deference, to admit we artists are somehow special after all.

When I was a hopeless romantic … well, when I first realized I was a hopeless romantic, a state of mind that for the most part has afflicted me my entire life, I was a fan of Richard Brautigan. Brautigan was a product of the ‘60’s, as was I and possibly as were a few of you, altho you may not have scrambled the eggs in your brain the way we did. Richard eventually shot himself in those eggs, depressed that his fame hadn’t followed him into his later, sadder years. I was saddened that he couldn’t just accept the trajectory of his career and maybe make the necessary adjustments, but then, fame isn’t following me much of anywhere so why try to walk a mile in Richard’s boots.

In 1966, hot on the heels of Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General in Big Sur, he wrote a book called The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, which was about a guy who kept a library for anyone who wished to drop off their unpublished or unpublishable manuscripts. Kids who wrote in crayon, people writing their boring memoirs, teenagers spilling their angst-ridden guts, you name it, the librarian in the novel accepted, quote, “the unwanted, the lyrical & haunted volumes of American writing” unquote, anytime day or night, no questions asked. For a would-be wannabee writer, this was a pretty notion. Nowadays, of course, we got the internet for all that. I even have a blog … so I guess I’m the librarian of at least those slim archives.

And of course there are Brautigan Libraries all over the country from Vermont to Washington where manuscripts can be dropped off and where they’ll presumably be cared for and probably remain unread. Literature, apparently, is a lot like news in these blog-riddled days where we’re awash in unedited, un-verified flotsam washing up on the debris-strewn beaches of our consciousness. For all I know, this, like plastic, will be the defining characteristic of our epoch. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts. Put that on the gravestone of the 21st century.

Walking recently with an old friend who’s a writer, we got to talking about our late life chapter as artists. In the course of our conversation strolling the moss and fern world of the Sauk River up north, meandering under huge fir trees and listening to the language of the river, we commiserated about the publishing world and gave voice to the usual lament of writers since time immemorial. Meaning, who reads us?

Which eventually gives rise to the question, why do we write? Would we do it if we knew pretty much nobody would read what we wrote? Neither of us have anything but a puny audience. We’re the perfect candidates for Brautigan’s Library. Haul those unpublished manuscripts in late at night and ring the silver bell at the entrance, let the attendant put them on a shelf while we walk away.

My friend may have a different answer than mine, but I would write if I were the last man on earth. For the same reason I play a song on my banjo even if no one is around to hear it. For the same reason I make stained glass windows without caring if I sell them or not. For the same reason I build furniture and guitars and too many banjos, none of which I’ve ever sold. For the same reason I built a glass studio and a sailboat and the house we live in now. Because … in the end what we’re creating isn’t just a poem … or an acoustic guitar … or a song … or a stained glass window. We’re creating our life and these are the bricks, these are the doors and the windows, these are steeples. Corny as it sounds, this is why we write, why we make music, why we dance, why we grow a garden, why we get out of the bed we’ve made every morning. Because somewhere along the line we realized life is our real canvas and the world is our creation.

The folks who tell me, and there are plenty, oh, they don’t have a creative bone in their body, couldn’t paint if they took classes the rest of their lives, well, I’ve got bad news for the artistically invertebrates. We‘re all artists. We just don’t know it yet. I was pretty old when I discovered I had more than just a funny bone and if you want to know the truth, if someone had told me I’d end up becoming an artist, I’d have laughed in their face. I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag, couldn’t make a decent stick figure much less a portrait, never took an art class, didn’t come from a family that appreciated art. My point is that art isn’t necessarily something you’re born with. All those stories of Mozart writing symphonies at 5 or Michelangelo painting masterpieces as a kid, forget about that, those are what stop us from even trying. Those are the myths that need to be ignored. Art isn’t necessarily the Sistine Chapel mural. Sometimes it’s just the way you arrange a bouquet of flowers or the change you make in a recipe for dinner. Art is simply … and as complex … it’s simply self- expression. It’s a way of seeing the world that’s uniquely yours. And in the end, it changes the world.

Back in 1977 I bought a HUD repo house in the ghetto of Seattle. First house I ever owned and so, being a neophyte, I thought maybe I should go whole hog and get a dog too, a companion, a man’s best friend. I always had a fondness for boxers so I looked in the paper, found someone selling pedigree boxer pups and went over to take a peek at the litter. One of the little guys was far and away the most active so unfortunately I picked that one. I named her T’Ashi, which I was told by a Sioux Indian I shared a Greyhound bus and a bottle with a few months earlier, meant ‘friend’.

T’Ashi made the Energizer Bunny look like a rabbit on tranquilizers. She was a bundle of mindless energy with legs like pogo sticks and a brain the size of a pea. A dumber dog I never saw before or since. If I threw a ball out into the Sound, she would go under to find it and if she didn’t find it, would stay down until I rescued her. Not many animals lack even the minor brain activity required for self survival.

Couple all that energy with a love of chewing, you got a recipe for mayhem whenever I left her alone in the house. She chewed through drywall, she chewed through closet doors, she pretty much chewed through a post in the basement that held up the two stories above. I drove nails into that post when I discovered it eaten a quarter way through and T’Ashi chewed through those. In despair I took her to a dog training class where the woman with the German accent told me, when I mentioned I didn’t think T’Ashi was trainable, that all dogs were trainable by her.

Great, I thought. Maybe she can save my house from being nibbled to death. Four weeks later she told me not to come to classes anymore. My beloved brainless dog was incapable of learning. In defense, I had tried to tell her. But now I was tethered to the monster I had brought into my new home.

Some months later I threw in the towel. It was the dog or the house. I put an ad in the Seattle Times: Pedigree boxer free to good home. I got plenty of calls, but when I asked if they planned on leaving the dog alone in their house, I patiently explained that that would not be a good home for T’Ashi. Not for long, anyway. People tried to argue with me, but I was firm, I was stubborn even, I was trying to protect them from themselves. A week of declined offers to take my dog for free left me thinking suicidal thoughts. And then Linda Rae Starr called.

“Would you be leaving the pooch home when you go to work?” I asked and was surprised and ecstatic when she said she wanted a dog that would NEVER LEAVE HER SIDE. “Come on over,” I said. “T’Ashi is yours. You got the perfect home.” I told her why that was, told her she was eating my own home down stud by stud, nail by nail, every time I left the house. “I’d never leave her,” Linda Rae Starr told me sweetly. “I’ll take her everywhere with me.”

Linda Rae came right over to what was left of my ghetto house. I gave her dog food and dog toys and dog dishes and dog leashes, everything she needed. “Just one thing,” she said right at the end and I felt my heart crash into my guts, figuring she was backing out at the last minute. “What?” I whispered.

“I’d like to change her name, if that’s okay.” My heart soared, my mind spun dizzy little circles of joy. I told her she could name T’Ashi anything she wanted and she clapped her hands, put T’Ashi in her beat up car and the last I saw of the two of them was when they drove away. I did call Linda Rae up a week or two later, just to be sure, just to relieve my guilt at inflicting a hound of hell on her. “Oh no,” she said in response to my concern, all was well in the Starr House. “Cleopatra and I go everywhere together. I thought maybe you wanted to take her back.”

I assured her that was not my intent. “Cleopatra is yours, Linda, forever and ever.” Linda Rae thanked me again and again. And I thanked her. Again and again. And still do…..