The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m planting the third succession of beans and peas down in the garden today. This year I built a fence inside the outer fence, a double perimeter for the deer and rabbits that breached the outer barrier last year. I’m considering a moat, possibly a security system, and last resort, my granddad’s old 16 gauge shotgun. If I have to channel Elmer Fudd, so be it.

For those of you who don’t have vegetable gardens and even those who refuse to eat ‘rabbit food’, you can stop reading right now. I’m not going to pull a Come to Jesus and Jacama on you, but I will tell you a garden is one very easy connection to the earth. To the Land. To what was once, before the spinning jenny and the I-phone, as close to a cosmic umbilical as I can imagine. You know, not counting sex.

A garden is optimism shaded by luck. Bad weather, pests, varmints, blight — but you plant it and hope for the best. You learn to share with those pesky wabbits, with the crows and the deer, the slugs and the snails, hopefully with the neighbors too. You weed, you water, you pray to the gods of weather. And you curse, you howl, you plant a second time. Or a third. This is the world, the universe, the big roulette wheel, the game of chance and the luck of the draw. You succeed and you fail and mostly it’s out of your hands.

Yeah, you can buy potatoes at the Kroger, corn from the vegetable stands on the highway, frozen peas from Costco, fresh tomatoes … but don’t let me go postal on fresh tomatoes, a fruit the agri-assholes have completely ruined. Gardening is farming on the micro-scale. It’s maddening and it’s hard work. But … I wouldn’t stop for anything. Growing some of what we eat is a joy, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so simple.

I was chatting it up with a couple of fellow artists down at the South End Galleria this week, comparing notes on aesthetic strategies, bizness practices, encounters with philistines and other assorted moral hazards of the art trade. The sculptor among us avowed how he chose to eschew my public art avenue and regaled us with tales of clients and looky loos, folks who might suggest that rather than pay full price they could check Ebay or Etsy for fabulous deals, as if that original stone carving might be had from WalMart for hefty discounts.

We artists love displaying our wounds and scars from the Culture Wars. I mentioned how I lacked bizness acumen and so public art took me out of those sorts of encounters … to which our gallery owner mentioned being a finalist three times for public art commissions only to lose. ‘No prizes for runner-up,’ I said. ‘No Miss Congeniality either.’ Afterwards I started adding up my own losses over the years, something around a dozen. You get a small stipend for a design, maquettes, plane fare, motel, car rental, etc., usually less than what you spend and zero for your work. It’s a tough racket and after a couple of second place finishes, plenty of artists quit throwing their hats in the ring. Me, I got plenty of hats.

My first loss, a fire station entry against a famous Seattle glass artist with a buddy on the jury who gave him helpful hints at our site visit, left me feeling like the game was rigged. But instead of quitting I took my 4 foot by 3 foot glass model, cut a hole in my shop wall and installed it in front of my work table, a wound I could salt every damn day, a reminder that I needed to up my game.

What I’ve learned over a few decades of competition is that it isn’t always fair, it is sometimes rigged, the juries are occasionally a sham, an opponent may actually be better than you and lose … or vice versa. Art in the public arena is a bloodsport. I try to accept the losses and thank my lucky stars for the commissions I win. Mostly I’m glad I stuck it out. And best of all, nobody’s going on Ebay and finding a cheap substitute. Yet.

Back in the Paleolithic Era I used to put my allowance of 50 cents a week into 25 dollar U.S. Savings Bonds, something my folks, being Depression Era kids, wanted us to learn, the habit of thriftiness. And … a little economics too. Like how interest rates work and our little pile of money would grow bigger if we just skipped candy and comic books. Later we would buy IRA’s and CD’s, etc. and when interest rates were high, money accrued rapidly … assuming inflation didn’t eat it faster.

After the Great Recession the Federal Reserve Board, those watchdogs of the economy, drove interest rates into the ground. My little savings accounts weren’t going to grow much when the interest was point something. You wanted to make money, boy, you invested in the stock market where the Fed hoped you’d stimulate the economy back to health. Great if you like to gamble, not so great if you’re old and cautious like myself. That Dow Jones or the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq drop 40% like it did in recent memory, you maybe won’t live long enough to see that money come back. Needless to say, a decade and a half after the interest rates bottomed out near zero, I’m not a big fan of the Fed. My pals who threw the dice on the Dow, they love the Fed. The rich are getting richer, way of the world. The poor? Well, they might as well bury their paltry savings accounts in tin cans behind the garage.

Now we got cryptocurrency. Bitcoins and a bunch of wannabee digital monies, the currencies of the future, they say, and a chance, if you buy low, to watch your money mushroom exponentially, legal gambling, oh boy, and a golden opportunity for untold riches. Without working! What’s not to like? Except, of course, bitcoin yesterday dropped 50% from its recent high. Nothing I like more than volatility in my money and I suspect most CEO’s probably feel the same way. Might as well use 2×4’s for currency. Lumber prices are spiking but futures are dropping. My kind of legal tender: legal timber. Which, now that I think about it, I have. My house. Times get tough, we tear off the back bedroom and sell the lumber. Bitcoins, good luck. The only thing backing that currency up is gullibility. Apparently there’s plenty of that.

Nothing I like much more than a good intra-denominational dogfight. The Southern Baptists are squabbling down at their convention in Nashville, mostly over abortion strategies. The Catholics are drawing up papers to ban politicians who vote for abortion rights from receiving the Eucharist. If that seems like religion is crossing over into Caeser’s territory, you’re probably on the money. Biden is Catholic and Biden is pro-abortion rights. In the eyes of a majority of the church’s bishops, he’s just right of a spawn of Satan. Or a pawn. Or … well, you know what they mean.

Churches and their doctrines, man oh man, they just dig their heels in and resist anything that might seem Enlightened to a secular yahoo like myself. Women priests? How long did that take em? And some religions, well, God made Man first and then took a rib to make Woman and if that doesn’t prove superiority over the fairer sex, what does? Gays are a thorny subject for most of them. Love thy neighbor, love your fellow man, but whoa, don’t take it literally, buddy, that’s Abomination and a one way ticket to Hell. The rest of society seems to have moved on, but the Bible Thumpers are still parsing Leviticus, maybe skipping the injunctions not to wear dissimilar fabrics or eat certain foods. And that part about stoning to death those who lay man with man, thou shalt not kill doesn’t apply apparently.

The ban on communion seems okay to me. Ex-communication is fine too. My question really is why would folks want to be in a religion that is exclusionary, especially based on the politics of the day. You folks gonna deny the Eucharist for the Senators who support the death penalty? Unless, of course, it’s for homosexual abominations. In which case, pick your rock and have at it. So when all these good and righteous folks demand to have church back in the schools or the courtroom or the government, we need to ask them, which church you want to let in. And if the answer is none of the others, just ours, well … maybe you see the problem. If you don’t, wait til the Supreme Court decides Roe v Wade one more time now that most of them are Catholics who would probably prefer to take communion, not be banned from it.

If you’re a savvy investor like myself, no doubt you’ve been sniffing around the cryptocurrency phenomenon, wondering if it’s time to plunk down some of those 20th Century dollars and trade em in on bitcoins. You might even be wondering what exactly cryptocurrency is, possibly googled it, and undoubtedly come away realizing you haven’t got a clue. But then, what is an Andrew Jackson, really? Just cloth with dyes and inks and watermarks. Worth what it says on the bill if everyone keeps believing it’s real even if no gold is sitting in Ft. Knox to back it up. Economics, a faith based religion?

Cryptocurrency, forget about the gold standard. What you got is blockchain. Okay, I know, you don’t actually understand blockchaining. That’s fine, neither do I and neither do most people who own bitcoins or any other cryptomoney. You just know some economists think this is the future of monetary transactions, safer than greenbacks in your bank account some lowlife hacker can empty faster than you can say Bad Password. Bitcoins, well, their password is unhackable, but … if you forget it, no way can you or the hackers get at it, sorry.

But what you do notice is that bitcoins and their brethren virtual cash move up and down in value the way Apple stocks do, a breathtaking hedge against minimum interest rates on your savings. Now, you could ask yourself, before, hopefully, you convert your life investments and 401-K and the pension to bitcoin, what kind of currency can change value 20% in a day, up, down, you just never know. Would you put your money in a bank that offered the potential to drop in value half overnight?

Well obviously some people would. If it looks like a pyramid scheme and smells like a pyramid scheme and acts like a pyramid scheme, I think you and I know it probably isn’t a real smart investment, it’s just a high tech form of gambling cloaked in crypto-babble. Me, I’d rather bury money out in the yard. Just so long as I don’t lose the map showing where I put it.