The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I first moved to the Left Coast, I had a yearning to get myself a motorcycle, learn to ride, then set myself free on the byways of the Cascades. Being poor, I bought a used Honda 350 that hadn’t run in years, wouldn’t start and looked like it was ready for the crusher. I paid $100 for the piece of junk, hauled it back to my house in the ghetto and pushed it down the basement stairs where I could spend some quality time diagnosing why it wouldn’t start over the winter months.

By summer I had the problem solved and so, with the help of my roommates, I hauled it back up and out to the backyard, kick started it into an oily smoke idle and admired the thing in the full light of a Seattle sunny day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to ride it. I called the police and asked what kind of temporary license I would need to take it for some learning spins on their city streets and was told it was illegal, no temporary licenses were to be had. I said how am I spozed to learn how to ride. The sergeant said it wasn’t his problem.

So right from the start I became an outlaw biker, stalling my crappy bike on half the shifts, careening down the mean streets of my neighborhood, searching for large empty parking lots to practice sharp turns and fast starts. Trouble was, my clutch didn’t shift right and every so often the engine would shut off in mid-travel for no apparent reason that I could diagnose. On one of my ventures I came across a fellow biker working on his Harley at Seward Park, tools spread on the parking lot and so I thought why not ask an expert about my clutch problem. He was hard at it in his Joker leathers with his tattoos bulging as he strained to his work, a fellow outlaw. I interrupted him to ask about my clutch dilemma. He looked at my battered scooter and said — I can remember it clearly to this day 40 years later — ‘Get the fuck away from me, man.’ I took it to mean us real bikers fix our own bikes without outside help.

On the way back to my ghetto house I was idling at the red light on Jackson and 23rd when a menacing group of black gangbangers roared up beside me on both sides, about 15 or so, all revving their Harleys as we waited for the green so that I thought I was inside a Boeing 747 engine. I didn’t think this was an initiation test. And I didn’t think it would end well either. The light, after what seemed like an hour, turned green and we all popped our clutches, ready for a tire burning, wheel skidding jackrabbit start … and my bike died right then.

I suppose a lesser man, a man not accustomed to the outlaw biker life, might have been embarrassed. A lesser man might have thought the laughter and catcalls from the black Banditos was too much endure. A lesser man might have junked his prized Honda 350 and succumbed to the temptation to buy a Vincent Black Shadow and show these hooligans who really ruled these mean urban streets. But me, I pushed my spray painted motorcycle ten blocks back to the basement and sold it a month later. For $100. My easy riding days had come to an end. There was nothing more to prove, I guess.

Researchers have recently discovered that cows have the capability to use tools. Until now, the bovine beasts were considered dumb cud-chewing know-nothings, content to graze a field or stand in their crowded stanchions munching on antibiotic-adulterated hay and feed, happy probably to serve their masters as Big Macs, Whoppers and various other hamburger patties. Apparently they’re not as stupid as we thought.

What tipped our astute researchers off was a farmer with a pet cow he never intended as fodder for the meat packing plant up the road. The Swiss bovine, Veronika, had more than the usual two years to develop her IQ skills and one day farmer Clyde noticed her using a deck brush to scratch a backside itch. Veronika, the farmer said, prefers the bristly side. Tool usage! Even with hooves instead of opposing thumbs, just gripped that handle in her teeth and scratched with the other end. Scientists were gobsmacked.

Me, not so much. I don’t judge animal intelligence on computer skills or essay writing, blogging or banjo playing. Might just be they have a different set of intellectual skills we verbal monkeys don’t appreciate. But pick up a stick — even with your teeth — hoo boy, there’s evidence of mammalian intelligence. Might even be enough, but I seriously doubt it, to give us primates pause next cheeseburger we gobble at the neighborhood barbecue.

Nevertheless, this is newsworthy stuff in the world of Yahoo News. Over at Fox News I’m betting the talking heads are dissecting the data and alerting their own cud-chewing audience to the dangers of cattle with sticks. Time to call our GOP Representatives to pass legislation keeping guns out of the hands of cows, the 2nd amendment be damned. Worst case scenario we got bovine militias unleashed on rural red state Americans with revenge on their minds. Smart minds, we know now. Might be we need a constitutional amendment.

Amid rumors that our commissioners have decided to divest the county of its parks, the South End Environmental Koalition (SEEK) has begun a campaign to Save Our Parks (SOP). Ginny Davis, the newly appointed president, spoke at the South End Chamber of Commerce, arguing that parks mean tourism and tourism means dollars. Ralph Hinshaw asked if she thought our little 5 acre park —Hutchison Park — really brought tourists into our ‘economic sphere’.

“Seriously, Ginny,” he asked, “who the hell comes to that park except teenagers doing drugs and having sex? You think they’re going to fuel the economy down here?” Ginny realized she’d maybe gone down the wrong cul-de-sac, citing economic growth where economics barely existed, but Harry Walton, owner of Tyee Megastore, stood up and declared he sold a lot of ice cream bars to the bicyclists who stopped at the store and he’d seen more than a few eating popsicles at the picnic tables down at the park an eighth of a mile north.

Ralph avowed how he’d never seen a soul down there much less a motorcycle gang with sweet tooths. Ginny, who didn’t catch the humor in that, asked, “What do you think, Ralph? Sell the park for a building lot? Not much revenue in a single house on a lot zoned for 5 acre rural residential.”

The South End only has this one park. Course it only has one store. One diner. One hair salon. And two art galleries. Which are extraordinary if you’ll allow me to play art critic. We got plenty of art studios, some good, some not, but they all add to the mythology of the fabled South End, if not, admittedly, to the tax base.

Personally, I think the park should stay. I don’t give a fig or a fart if folks throng to its short trails and its unused BBQ grills or notice the flowers or idiosyncratic sculpture. Some day when this is an art mecca for weary urbanites, they’ll have a place to pull in and check the GPS for how to get home. Meanwhile the teenagers got a place for backroad sex.

Maybe you’ve heard about the AI painting that took first prize in a national art contest. Or the AI song that went high up on the pop charts. If not, don’t worry, you will. For awhile — a short time, trust me — us artists, musicians and writers will use AI as an assistant only. That’s what we’ll tell ourselves. Just eliminating some of the drudgery to give us more time for serious creativity. You betcha.

Creativity, we tell ourselves, is the sole domain of us talented humans, nothing that a bundle of circuits and chips could manage, no doubt a gift from the gods. Oh sure, the droid helper might be able to emulate, monkey see monkey do, but no way, NO WAY, could these silicon toys manage to create new original great art. Like us humans, the crown of creation, the Rembrandts and da Vinci’s, the Mozarts and Chuck Berrys, the Picasso and Warhols, the Tolstoys and Stephen Kings.

Sure, maybe they borrowed a bit from their predecessors, might even have stolen whole cloth, but that’s how art, capital A, evolves. C’mon, it’s a synthesis, leaping forward and upward on the backs of those who came before, from cave drawings of mastodons to the masterpieces of Pollock’s splattered paint, from the humble notes of a pan pipe to the eloquent silences of Philip Glass, from the first scribbles of verse to the Burger King jingle, just a steady progression toward our own enlightened era.

How could a bunch of wires and circuit boards possibly do more than merely emulate what homo sapiens do so naturally? So what if the cyborgs can write a decent opera in a nano-second or design a painting that looks wildly futuristic or carve a sculpture with laser cutters in the time it takes to say Michelangelo. Still doesn’t make it human art. That’s why we call it Artificial Intelligence. Then again … art is sort of Artifice, isn’t it? Nothing we real artists should worry about. Worst case, we can let AI do a little more of the creating. Not too much. Just a tool, after all. Like using a paint brush or a keyboard. Just a tool. Keep saying that. We might learn to believe it. Course by then it’ll be too damn late.

When I first learned how to make stained glass at a night class up at the high school in Stanwoodopolis, my sole goal was to learn enough to make replacement windows for a couple of nailed on plastic sheets in my drafty shack on the South End. At the time I didn’t know how to reframe a window for maybe a salvage yard replacement … and judging by the plastic ones, neither did my predecessor who I’d bought the place from. Ignorance, of course, isn’t always bliss.

But a funny thing happened on my way to an Architectural Digest feature. I got hooked on stained glass. Those couple of windows fueled some sort of heretofore unknown passion and in the course of a few fevered months that curiosity into the backwaters of art design sunk its hooks completely. For a time I built panels on the floor of my bedroom in the attic but after stepping on half-built glass designs going to the bathroom for midnight pisses, it became apparent I needed a more formal studio. Or at least an addition to the shack. Which necessitated learning basic construction and carpentry. A small detour that led to a career in glass and a love of building, additions, outbuildings, furniture and eventually a two story house up on the hill above the shack. Life is full of surprises….

The glass addiction created a conundrum for me back then. It was expensive, this stained glass stuff. My panels got smaller and smaller trying to keep going without going broke. And so, ultimately I had to decide whether to try to sell some of these little windows or just quit outright, call it a day and be glad those plastic windows were closed in against the wind and the weather. Reluctantly, I became a salesman. Of sorts. And a capitalist. Of sorts.

The last few years I got entangled in a similar passion. It started when I remodeled a favorite banjo, upgrading parts, then decided to build one from scratch. Everybody, of course, needs more than one banjo. Maybe not five, which is what I ended up with after building a few more. And if that weren’t bad enough, I tried my hand at building acoustic guitars. I just finished the fifth one of those, a nice little maple body job with an unusual sycamore top, what I swear is my last one.

The thing is, I don’t really want to be a guitar/banjo salesman. For one thing, they’re not really that professionally made. Maybe half a dozen more and they might be. But I doubt it. Maybe if I was back in my starving artist mode I’d take the leap. But I doubt it. Poverty might just be the true mother of invention. And I’m no longer starving. Anyone out there needs a few banjos to make their neighbors miserable, you know where to find me.