The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Content Advisory: Readers should be aware that the following might contain adult language, sexuality, some light violence and possibly was processed with products containing peanuts. Reader discretion is definitely advised.

You would be amazed, flabbergasted really, gobsmacked actually, what you turn up when you spend days looking for something you lost. In my quest to find my lost funny bone, I searched high and low, near and far, under and over, in and out. I found stuff I hadn’t even remembered losing. In a suitcase up in the shack’s attic stuffed in an alcove I found old manuscripts, early poems and some photos of my ex-wife. I remembered why I stuffed them in a suitcase and buried it behind a couple layers of detritus and memories.

Downstairs, in a desk drawer that hadn’t been opened in about two decades, I discovered mouse-eaten letters from friends and from the mizzus back when I first moved to the South End. Sure, I saved em. And someday I’ll sit down and read them again, same as I did 20 years ago when I found them that time out in a box in the woodshop and brought them where I hoped the mice wouldn’t go nearsighted reading them in the dark. Handwritten letters, imagine! Now there’s a lost concept.

I found a couple of tools I’d mislaid, some plumbing parts I could’ve used when I searched for them a few months ago, an old outboard boat motor in the weeds where the blackberries were strangling it, a backpack I haven’t used in I hate to tell you how long, a couple of cameras that take actual film which is another Kodak moment but one that’s relegated to history. Back in the walk-in closet which is barely walk-in-able anymore there were boxes of photographs and slides. I started to dig through those, but geez, I could’ve gotten sidetracked for weeks and I was on a mission to find that missing sense of humor. Old photos would spin me into a cobweb of inescapable reverie I might not free myself from for days, if not months.

In the back of an old Hoosier cabinet I found some tattered pieces of my innocence. I’m not even sure how long it had been lost, but it sure looked like a long time. A long hard time if the tears and rips were any indication. Funny how you never really noticed it was gone until you stumble onto it and then, what good is it? Probably better if I hadn’t. There were old Boy Scout merit badges and little medals from some school in Georgia for some forgotten things those Southern Daughters of the Confederacy had thought important. I found my old I Ching yarrow sticks that I quit using back probably when my innocence was lost. I remember throwing them when I bought the shack, asking if I should take a chance on moving from my ghetto hellhole to a dilapidated house at the end of the world. It said good fortune would surely follow. Why would I quit the sticks when it predicted my life so accurately?

And of course I came face to face with my long lost youth one night searching the back rooms of the studio. Sometimes I like to think I’m still that same kid who moved out here back in ’77, the same optimistic yahoo who called up his old girlfriend and asked if she’d come out and live with him in a love shack in the woods by the Puget Sound with a view of the Olympic Mountains, the very same boy who never wanted to work for anyone, who kept searching for an alternative to the American Dream which didn’t seem like much of a dream to him, who really had no direction home, no direction at all, just a misguided faith in himself and a longing to be a country boy, a half assed Huck Finn who preferred being a bum to selling himself to some job he would hate but probably learn to accept.

I barely recognized him. And I’m sure he didn’t recognize me even though he had that imbecile grin on his face like something was funny but maybe only to him. It was just a brief encounter, sort of like a shadow you catch behind you before the sun drops behind the clouds and it disappears. But I was sure it was a younger me. You know it when you see it and there’s no doubt. None at all. Course, doubt is what made me lose him in the first place. Ironic, isn’t it?

Longevity and Bondo

Down at the Kustom Kar Body Shop the latest news of declining life expectancy for us Americans was met with some degree of skepticism at closing time. Fairlane Fred had looked up from reading the article in the newspaper he’d brought to the shop and the assembled hangers-on were smirking and laughing even before he’d finished the last paragraph.

“Gee, Fred you think those statistics apply to us?” Jake asked, lighting up a Marlboro. His empty beer can served as make-do ashtray where it balanced nicely on his beer belly and barely jiggled as he popped his third Bud. Quitting time at the Kustom was early today, it being Friday and all. George, the owner, had sent his crew home already and the Flatheads had assembled for their usual Friday wrap up. A ’62 Malibu two door sat in the paint room, its butterscotch epoxy gleaming behind the makeshift plastic sheet doorway that separated the finish room from the body shop’s clutter and mayhem. Monday George would put the wax to it, seven coats at least. Today he was more interested in putting the finish on the week. He had the fridge loaded with two cases of beer.

“Says here we’re dying faster than we did four years ago. Only going to live to be 78. Hell, Jake, you’re 73 now. The Japs get six more years than us. Time’s running out, buddy.” Freddie tipped his can at Jake. “Here’s to an early grave.”

“You believe that crap they put in the paper, go ahead, Fred, but I plan to live a long happy life.” He took a drag on his cigarette, a good pull on the Bud and laughed. “Clean living will do it every time, boys. That and a clear conscience.”

“I don’t know, Jake,” Big Ralph said, one foot on the mangled rear bumper of a Camry the towing company dropped off that morning. “You don’t look like the poster boy for ObamaCare to me. More like the Before picture of erectile dysfunction. And didn’t your doc tell you to quit smoking that last stent?”
“Doctors!” Jake snorted, “what the hell do they know?”

This sent the shop floor into waves of amusement. Half the assembled Flatheads were on doctor’s orders to quit drinking, quit smoking, get some exercise and maybe even eat right. Only Little Billy was thin enough to avoid qualifying as obese and that was barely. Little Billy didn’t really eat much of anything. He was like one of those bromeliads that attach to trees and live only off air and beer. 78 wasn’t likely to be in Billy’s cards. He said, “I haven’t been to a doctor in 40 years. And now they want to force me to buy insurance.”

“Here we go again” Phil growled, “another bitch session about health care. Let’s skip the crying for once.” He crumpled his can and tossed it in the industrial sized waste container George filled at least twice weekly. “Who’s ready for another beer?” he cried, rubbing his hands and heading toward the fridge.

And so another weekend got off to a great start at the Kustom Kar. Mercifully, no one would be keeping statistics down there. Or as Jake likes to say, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Words to live by on the South End.

I suspect quite a few of you readers out there in blogland wonder how I make a ‘living’. Meaning, how do I make money? Moonshining is pretty much dried up, so naturally I’ve turned to other forms of petty crime. Currently I’m an artist. Partly a con artist, you might say with the same degree of truth, inasmuch as I have to hoodwink my clients that what I’m selling has real value, no easy thing in this mass produced, low priced WalMart society we live in.

Back in the day folks like me glommed onto a religion. Us artists worked for the church, painted Bible stories or filled cathedrals with portraits of the saints and baby Jesus, maybe throw in some doves and lambs. If we found a rich patron, the patron wanted to curry favor with the priests so same thing, more religious art. The Greeks, the Romans, even the Pagans, the art was to reinforce the rituals, the belief system of the Gods.

Now of course we got Secularism. Meaning, we got Modern Art. If you’re an artist, it means a whole lot of artistic freedom. Artistic freedom, you want to know the truth, means starvation wages. Very few patrons, no church commissions, just a free-for-all helter skelter rush for what few jobs there are, at least in my chosen field, public art.

I’m a glass guy, stained and leaded. Design large murals for courthouses, train stations, libraries, places like that. Build em, haul em across the country, then install em. Usually a committee decides my glass design is more appropriate, say, than a sculpture or a mosaic or an atrium hanging. I have to sell them on that design, justify its expense, convince them I can hoist glass into the heavens without killing anyone below. I have to make them believe what I believe: that this art of glass will do what Renaissance glass did for cathedrals — lift their eyes and their hearts beyond the mundane, upward to an impossible light, what we secularists still call inspirational but seems harder to sell. Even us con artists believe in our art.

Jack Gunter’s History of the World Gallery is packing up after 30 years at the old garage next to the now defunct Tyee Mega Store. End of an era, end of culture as we know it on the now bleaker South End. For awhile we were the Paris of Camano Island, salons and studios, galleries and sculpture parks, art in the parks, a magnet for the annual Mother’s Day Studio Tour, a veritable mecca for the artistically famished. Now, probably, the beginning of an Exodus, leaving us once again the way it was when I first arrived, a cultural desert.

When the Gallery moved from its former location in East Stanwoodopolis, we all told Jack and Karla no one would drive hell and gone to attend fine art openings in an old garage 17 miles down a dead end island. They assured us naysayers we were wrong. Well, we were wrong. Pilchuck glass shows, Honey I Shrunk the Art shows, gala openings, Mother’s Day Tours, art auctions and 30 years of cultural extravaganzas kept the South End lively before social media supplanted that role. Karla moved a few miles north and opened the Matzke Gallery and Sculpture Gardens, a sophisticated appendage to the History of the World, the finest art gallery north of Seattle and south of Vancouver, B.C., bar none. The Jason Dorsey Fine Art Studio and Gallery opened in 2018, adding yet another piece to the South End’s cultural identity.

The way snowflakes and raindrops coalesce around a small nucleus, the History of the World expanded to create the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, the Camano Visitor Center and Sculpture Garden, the Camano Arts Association and gave inspiration to those of us who once were naysayers, that this backwash would never embrace fine art. We were wrong. I like to think that the Gallery is leaving the South End, but the South End isn’t leaving the Gallery. The legacy of those years hopefully will continue to expand outward, from art hangings in the Senior Centers to the new Art Center being imagined in West Stanwood. Cultural identity is an ever evolving work in progress and for those of us who may be disheartened at the loss of the History of the World Gallery, well, we’d be wrong. Once again….