The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

 

Folks ask me all the time – well meaning folks mostly – why in Blue Tarnation would a right brain sided yahoo who makes his so-called living on the fringes of the art world sit down and write himself a blog.  Blogs, they reason, are the direct polar opposite of the visual arts.  You could cut away the entire left hemisphere of my frontal lobes  –if you had a magnifying glass big enuff to find it — and I probably wouldn’t miss a banjo beat.  Van Gogh mighta been trying something similar with his ear surgeries, see if it might equalize the polarity.

 

People nowadays believe in specialization.  Find your niche and stay put.  Brain surgery, okay, don’t try chainsaw sculpture too.  Hard on the scalpel hand.  Maybe it’s cause I never was much good at anything in particular.  Couldn’t find a niche …. Or a crack or a crevice in the world that seemed like something I wanted to spend my whole life on, give my whole self to, dedicate all my energy for.  Probably just attention deficit before we gave it a name and diagnosis.

 

This blog writing – it was something to fiddle with.  Explore it a little, see where it led.  Life, it seems to me, now that half of it’s in the rear view mirror, objects appearing closer, life should be an exploration more than an explanation.  Writing, I suppose, to most folks, is different than painting an abstract, or sculpting a nude, or cutting glass to pieces and gluing the scraps back together.  It’s different than building a house.  Or making music.  Or becoming a physicist.

 

Or so they think.  And, they think this way because instead of seeing the universe as a whole, they see it as its pieces.  They see their life the same way.  Compartmentalized.  Fragmented.  Broken up like my glass art ….. only they don’t know how to take the pieces and make them cohesive again.

 

 

We live our lives, not so much in quiet desperation as quiet isolation.  We’ve lost the sum of our parts.

 

Folks tell me way too often, oh, they could never be an artist.  They think artists are BORN that way.  They think Mozart and Picasso.  They think if genius doesn’t come pouring out by age four,  the fountain’s probably dry.  No point trying.  Can’t do it.  Not an artistic bone in their body.

 

The world, I think, is a grand experiment.  Meaning, failures are okay.  What’s not okay is not even trying.  Not learning.  Not exploring.  Not imagining.  I got some real bad news for the artistically invertebrate …………….. we’re all artists.  We’re all born with an empty canvas and our life is what we’re all painting.  The only art that matters one iota …. is creating ourselves.

 

So, I’m doing some writing and I’m playing banjo in a fiddle band and I’m building my house and I’m struggling along in this vastly inexplicable world the best I can, trying not to bore myself more than necessary.  I’ll no doubt prove  I sure wasn’t born a Mark Twain, but I didn’t let it stop me.

 

The Skeeter Daddle Diaries are really about the arc of a life on Camano’s backwash South End.   I came out here to lick some wounds and hide from the world.  Turned out, I learned most everything I know down here.  But mostly I learned that the fun of life is the adventure of learning.  If you’re not afraid to look the fool sometimes, everything’s possible.  This fool, you better believe, got more than a few laughs from watching himself trying to figure things out……

 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2012 at 3:26 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.