The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Now that we’re living lives totally encumbered by the restrictions of Covid-19, I have been forced to adjust, to adapt, to make the best of a crappy situation. What else can a stained glass artist do? I can’t have an audience of wheezy sneezy art fans standing around my table while I cut glass into exquisite shapes and form them into designs that dazzle the peanut gallery, now can I? No, in case you were hesitating there for an answer.

So I took a page from the sports folks. I’m cutting out cardboard life size figures to arrange around the studio. There’s a cute one of Kurt Vonnegut, waving with a thumbs up. Another of Stormy Daniels, which I can’t tell you about if I want to save my marriage. Barack Obama is smiling from the corner and Robert Duvall is sitting on a horse waving hello. Bruce Springsteen has his electric guitar and Bob Dylan has a harmonica. Both are looking pretty damn interested in this new panel I’m working on. Bonnie Raitt is winking at me. You bet I want to cut glass with her.

America’s pastime has to be enjoyed now at a safe distance. Meaning nowhere close to a stadium. Same will be true of basketball, hockey, football and lawn bowling. Why not art? Every time I cut a piece of glass I have the soundtrack of American Idol and WWF Smackdown blasting approval, just like the baseball stadiums. And if by chance I cut a piece poorly, a groan goes up from the sound system that can be heard across the highway. I need to set up a live feed and a podcast, but money is, after all, an issue, and don’t get me going on lost product sponsorships, I know I’m losing out bigtime.

What this pandemic should teach us is how to adjust to the changing times. Sure, I know no potential client will walk through my studio doors for months, years even, but if baseball can survive with non-paying cardboard cutouts filling its stands that don’t buy tickets, I should be able to withstand a drought. Hell, I don’t have employees making 20 million dollars a year. Not even 20 dollars an hour. My payroll is definitely survivable is what I’m saying. I just have to figure out how to monetize this art show.

Course, that’s always been the problem, hasn’t it? I have artist pals who paint a picture, print 50 to 500 copies, sign half of them as Artist Proof, then sell them online for a nice hefty profit. You think anyone is interested in a 2-D rendition of a stained glass window??? Think again, muchacho. I even thought about making a coffee table book of my public glassworks, full color, annotated, nice layouts, signed even by the artist himself … until I calculated the printing costs, delivery charges, the website hosting and realized each book would cost more than my unemployment checks.

I’ve always maintained no one goes into art to get rich. But none of us realized the phrase ‘starving artist’ might be accurate either. Today I’m making a cardboard cutout of Warren Buffet. He’ll be holding a large check in both hands. And you know, don’t you, whose name will be on it. It’s a start….

I suppose police are like health insurance, you don’t need it til you need it. But I have to say, I try my damnedest to avoid them at all costs. Not just because I figure they have better things to do than mess with the likes of me, but because the few encounters I’ve had have been fairly unpleasant. When I reported stolen items a couple of times, they made it very clear that 1. my items were gone forever. And 2. they wouldn’t waste their time filling out a report. Once they even told me they knew who it probably was that stole my stuff, but petty theft wasn’t high on their To-Do List.

I get it. We don’t have a lot of deputies on the island and we certainly don’t have many who bother with the South End. You know what? That’s okay with me. The little crime we have isn’t all that serious, unless driving 50 in the 35 speed zone is heinous to you. Drugs, domestic abuse, petty theft, that’s what we have down here and if it means living without heavy police intervention, fine. When we do have something serious, they call in the SWAT teams, folks who know how to handle felons on the loose. Or neighbors’ girlfriends who go after their low life boyfriend with a gun. The cops here work traffic. I sleep about as soundly now as I did when none were on duty after midnight the first years I came here.

So the protesters on the streets of America have been crying Defund the Police. At first I thought the terminology could have been better. Maybe Re-Imagine the Police. But defund is okay too. Take the money, redistribute it to social agencies, mental health professionals, specialized drug intervention units, shelter for the homeless, all those things cops shouldn’t be doing anyway. And when we’ve defunded half the police force, take the ones who are left, the ones who want to be part of their community as peace keepers and protectors, and train them in those skills. What we have now are heavily armed military minded personnel with way too much testosterone jamming their brainpans. Which they’re encouraged and which is undersupervised. They’re headbangers first, Officer Friendly maybe never.

Are they racist? Sure, some of them. But mostly they’re stationed in the poor parts of town to keep the citizens there under control. Black folks, white folks, everybody who’s down and out. Is there more crime there? Sure, poverty breeds crime. So we garrison the centurions where trouble is most likely to break out. Is this the best way to go about pacifying the crime zones? You ask me, putting a cop on foot who knows the ‘hood, knows the shopkeepers, knows the troublemakers, knows what’s going on and … here’s the deal … knows how to deal with this as a fellow member of the community, his community, chances are he or she can smell trouble and nip it in the bud. Is this liberal snowflake bullshit? Sure, some of it, but we’re learning this month that Stormtroopers tossing gas grenades and shooting rubber bullets is a symptom of something much more troubling going on in law enforcement. Wouldn’t bother me one bit to try something else for a change, look at a larger picture, maybe see if crime isn’t more of a social disease that can be cured, not beaten with a baton.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine the congregation is gearing up for the End Times. Pastor Paul comes from the Cotton Mather School of Preaching, meaning, he intends to scare the holy bejabbers out of his flock, wake them up before it’s too late and lead them into the nettle-less valley of righteousness. He’s offering Salvation, take it or leave it. Woe unto those who don’t take it ….

Jimmy the Geek’s mizzus listens to these sermons Sunday after Sunday. She recently volunteered to minister to the Little Lambs of Jesus, the youth group that meets an hour before the late service, and Jimmy, an electronics engineer down at the Boeing plant, is at a complete loss what to do about her evangelical fervor. “She wasn’t like this when we got married,” he told our decidedly profane group of sinners gathered at the booths beside the pool table in the Pilot Lounge. “I’m not real religious, ya know, but I agreed to go to church with her. It’s almost a cult what they got down there in the ravine. I didn’t know we’d be drinking Kool-Aid instead of grapejuice.”

“Armageddon, man,” Two Toke pronounced over a tough 8 ball side pocket. Which he missed by a country mile …. Chalking his cue thoughtfully, he commiserated with Jimmy. “Scary stuff, Revelations. Mark of the Beast. Four ponies of the Apocalypse. I been listening to midnight radio lately. Biden’s the anti-Christ and the Middle East is heating up. The Russians are coming in. The Pandemic is the Sign of the Second Coming. Anytime now, they say.”

“Pastor Paul predicts Iran will get the bomb in a year and that’s the End. Jenny believes this stuff,” Jimmy blurted. He waved his empty pint glass at Vic, tonight’s fill-in bartender. Jimmy wasn’t going home soon, it was obvious to all of us and by god we were going to stick with our pal til the glasses were broken or the bar closed. South End Sinner’s Code. “What am I gonna do? I already said I won’t go anymore and now she’s teaching Sunday School too?”

Robbie stopped mid-shot, pointed with his cue and said solemnly, “Call her bluff, buddy.” Jimmy shook his head. Robbie continued. “Give her a year for the End Times to happen. When it doesn’t, time to reassess. Check and mate, dude!”

Jimmy took Vic’s refill the way a pilgrim clutches sacrament. Robbie slammed the 6 ball into the corner pocket with a bang, left himself an easy 2 ball on the side. “That’s what I would do,” he declared.

Two Toke could see his own End Times if Robbie hit the 2 ball. “Easy for a man with no wife, Rob,” he smiled, maybe put a little Doubt on the table. “Faith’s a funny thing. Hard as hell to argue it …”

“Damn, Tom, you want Jimbo to start stockin food and guns?” Robbie eased the 3 into the side with a soft sweet stroke. The 8 ball waited, hard cut, but Robbie was hot, all the confidence in the world. Two Toke groaned, leaned on his useless cue. “No,” he muttered, “I just want him to save a marriage.” Jimmy nodded mournfully. Robbie cut the 8 ball and we all watched it roll half a mile down a long green to the far corner pocket, hang for a breathless second, then drop with a dull clatter.

“End Time, Tom” the shooter laughed and Two Toke slapped a new set of quarters on the felt. If any of us thought we’d solve Jimmy’s problems tonight, it would take more beers than Vic would serve.

A couple days ago I was wandering the garden, something I do a lot more now with the pandemic lockdown, and caught sight of a weirdly shaped bird nest in last year’s bean trellis. Elongated with an offest hole at the top, what I took to be an oriole nest. Having never seen an actual oriole nest, I was pleased to find one and planned to keep it with a few other nests collected over the years. One, a hummingbird nest with two very tiny eggs, I took after realizing the parents weren’t coming back. This oriole nest I carefully cut away the twigs holding it to the bean fencing and mounted it in my shack near the hornet’s nest and a few other museum pieces.

The next day we were inside the studio and Karen kept asking, what is that noise? I didn’t hear anything but she kept asking anyway and finally I went back into the room she was standing in and holy orioley, the noise was chirping coming from that nest! I’d stolen the nest AND the babies! I not only robbed the cradle, I took the cradle too. Orioles are fairly rare in these parts so I felt terrible, guilt-ridden over probably bringing them to near extinction, something akin to killing the last pterodactyl. I felt bad. I felt like an idiot. The nest looked old and I’d just assumed it was last year’s nest. What a moron. What a fiend! Nature is cruel, it sure doesn’t need help from me.

Without much hope of success I took the nest back to where I’d stolen it, reattached it to the bean trellis and hoped, without much reason to have any hope, the parents would return to their offspring. I’d always heard if a bird nest was disturbed the adults wouldn’t come back to it, probably something I heard on Fox News or Breitbart, but what else could I do? Put a notice in the newspaper: Lost Oriole Chicks, Need Good Home? Probably get some coronavirus survivalist who would take them for food, one more layer in the new freezer filled with locker meat.

Well, I went out the day after I’d rehung the purloined nest, not expecting much, but … sure enough, out hopped the mom and I noticed the pop jumping limb to limb in the fir tree behind her, both watching the creep who’d stolen their prodigy, maybe see if he was monstrous enough to try it again. He wasn’t. I don’t suppose they appreciated a parents’ day off while I babysat the kids. No, I don’t suppose they did.

‘If you decide to leave civilization, expect to live without its comforts.’ I don’t know who said that but they were absolutely right. We live down at the bottom end of a skinny island 17 miles from the bridge that connects it to the mainland and all things modern. Shopping malls (before they started closing), restaurants and taverns (before Covid shut them down, schools (before they went virtual), theaters (before the plague hit), all those amenities folks took for granted until the Coronovirus Epidemic of 2020.

I feel sorry for folks, I really do. But … we got our own problems. Down by us we live across the great digital divide. Meaning we finally got DSL internet, not the old dial-up, but because our ‘provider’, and I use that phrase loosely, doesn’t deem it worthwhile to provide better fiber optics this far from Rome, we have very slow internet. Better than the old dial-up, okay, but nothing like you might have expected from the promises our provider made when Ma Bell was broken into Baby Bells. If we try to watch a movie streaming over Netflix, the buffering is nearly as long as most commercials on TV. A two hour movie becomes three hours. Plenty of time to make popcorn, grab another beer (or three), check our email (which is now even slower), use the restroom (even mop and clean it), do the laundry, wash the dishes and take out the garbage. We get a lot done watching a movie we probably won’t even like.

The mizzus ran into the ‘provider’ yesterday, some guy in a truck from the new outfit that bought the old outfit, now called Zipley. What a name! You just know the service will improve. Fast internet? Sure, zipley. The name says it all. She wanted to know, confronting this poor schmuck with the toolbelt laden with every electronic gizmo hanging from his waist, when we’d be getting better internet. He was busy, he told her, hooking up ‘cross cable’ and didn’t really know when, if, why, or how faster internet would be coming to the wild South End. And … he was a little too busy cross cabling to chat with her further. So much for anything remotely resembling zipley.

I don’t know doodley about most things technical. If I can’t fix it with a wrench or a screwdriver or just pounding it on a table or throwing it on the floor, I have no real comprehension. Black boxes are just that to me. Magic electrons, ethereal waves, wifi, routers, servers, providers, very large monthly bills. The mizzus knows this stuff and believe me when I tell you she didn’t like some macho yahoo with a toolbelt talking down to her like she was the little woman at the service desk of a car repair shop telling her her whatchamacallit was acting up and maybe she should sit quietly in the waiting room and read a woman’s magazine until the repairmen had finished. Somebody was cross cabled all right. The trouble was, it was probably us. If you think Zipley implies something speedy, forgetaboutit. It really means zip up yer lip, Lady.