The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe some of you are of an age where you get senior discounts at various retail stores and, a reward for surviving the travails of living. With the coronavirus plague shuttering those places and menacing us in even the most trivial of errands out there in zombieland, the local grocery stores here have embarked on offering us geezers an early jump on shopping, figuring we probably get up early since we don’t sleep well anymore, and more importantly, we need to keep our distance from shoppers carrying the seeds of our early death. I, for one, appreciate the thought.

Actually, no I don’t. But … in one instance I acted on this offer. Costco. For weeks I have been hearing about traffic backups, long lines to enter, enforced separations, limited shopper numbers, more long lines, enough rumor to convince me to avoid the enchanted warehouse. Forget buying bulk, I growled, I’ll pay more for less at the local markets. But after a month I realized I needed half a dozen items that would make it worth my while to return to the consumer cathedral and so when I heard they had Geezer Hours early in the morning three days a week, I set an alarm and drove up to the nearest Costco from me, about 40 miles or so.

I got there an hour after they opened but even so the store was wonderfully vacant. I cruised a couple of aisles with the other geriatrics, snatched my required items, queued up with only one cart in front of me and sailed out in the unheard of time of 7 minutes, no doubt a national Costco speed shopping record. Not that I got any medals, but… I had reward enough.

These are strange times in Plague Town. Driving through Stanwoodopolis, like most towns around here, the scene is post-apocalyptic, a dystopian glimpse of a future we thought only existed in sci-fi. Gas stations are open with unheard of llow prices we haven’t seen since the golden years of the 60’s, but they’re basically empty since no one is driving much of anywhere with no stores, no malls, no shopping other than groceries and cannabis, the essentials. Pretty soon they’ll pay you to store their excess gas in your tank. And as incentive, offer you a free roll of toilet paper now that toilet paper is more precious than gas or gold.

Personally I’m waiting to fill up … til they offer geezer incentives. Adult diapers, not toilet paper.

This is going to come as a shock to many of you, but … the government has determined that my little guitar building shop is not really an ‘essential’ business. This was not really a surprise to me, to be brutally honest. For one thing, I never sold a single stringed instrument I made over the years, not that lack of profit has ever deterred me in artistic pursuits then or now. And for another, the government has also determined my glass shop is non-essential too. Art, music — we can all live without them, I’m being told. Nothing new there.

The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band (soon to be renamed the South End Non-Essentials), builds violins. Exquisite instruments of incredible craftsmanship. I asked him once, however, why he always made them out of flamed maple. Why not some other kind of hardwood? Because, he explained, Stradivarius made them out of flamed maple and so when he learned luthiery, he was taught to construct his violins with the exact thickness, measurements and dimensions that the Master used. I wondered aloud why not be a little more, oh, experimental, maybe more artistic, maybe shake things up a bit. He looked at me like I’d just climbed out of a tree searching for nuts. People who buy these instruments aren’t looking to stand out in the orchestra, he said. They want what Stradivarius had. And I want, he explained, to sell them, not put them in an art museum.

Well, I guess I could have absorbed that advice when years later I decided to try my untutored hand at making banjos. All kinds of exotic woods, multiple strategies in construction, various experiments with shapes and sizes. A banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. You could string up a tin box with a neck and you got yourself a banjo. A guitar, not so much. Don’t ask me why I decided to build one. Hubris, I suspect. Or maybe I figured I’d build a work of art rather than a musical instrument. I don’t, in retrospect, really remember the thought process. If there even was one.

Five guitars later I understand why my fiddler keeps making copies of Stradivariuses. My guitars each had different woods, different bracing systems, different necks, odd sound holes, each its own little experiment. I was the monkey at the typewriter pecking away hoping to write War and Peace. I had no fine woodworking skills, I had no luthiery background, I didn’t in the beginning know what was inside a guitar or how it was constructed. I guess I thought it was like building my house, just get a hammer and saw and start building, you’ll get it built eventually.

My last guitar got strung up yesterday. It’s a koa guitar, back, sides, with a spruce top and a neck laminated from padauk and maple and madrona. I played it expecting the worst but hoping for a miracle. It has good action, it even has good sound. It’s a keeper. Course, so are the others since none are really marketable. I got my own little luthiery museum.

The brain fever is dying down now and the government is probably right to deem this as non-essential. But for a couple of years, more than I care to admit, building guitars was, for one of us, pretty much essential. For those of us in the arts, that is the sad but passionate truth. I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Out here on the Left Coast we have slightly different sets of priorities than the Heartland. When the Governor shuttered all but ‘essential’ businesses to quarantine us citizens from superfluous gatherings, one of those businesses was the cannabis stores. Apparently this was because they offered medical treatments. Both physical and mental, I guess. Yesterday I read that liquor stores previously closed would be allowed to reopen. Grocery stores were reporting that shelves of beer and wine were bare and so … once again the argument for medical treatment must have applied to liquor stores.

When the going gets tough, as the saying goes, the tough turn to medication. I’m fully expecting oxycontin stores to open soon, a last ditch panacea for Forced Isolation Syndrome. Surprisingly the restrictions on church services are still in effect, but then, like I mentioned, this is the Left Coast. More likelihood yoga classes will reopen before mainstream and fundamentalist churches. And today in the newspaper that still gets delivered, obviously an essential service, I read that the gun rights folks are up in arms, or possibly without arms, over the closure of gun stores.

When the going gets tough, buy an assault rifle. They argue that in this era of pandemic panic, they have to protect their families. If that isn’t essential, what is? Well, cannabis, evidently. And liquor, obviously. Their rights are being violated, they howl, as if being restricted to their homes is somehow not a violation of their freedom of assembly. I feel their pain, I really do. When the toilet paper runs out and the peasants take to the streets, pitchforks in hand, how do they protect themselves and their huddled family? Throw empty liquor bottles at the mob? Explain patiently that they must cease and desist, return to their quarantined shelters, go home? Without brandishing a weapon to make their case?

When this epidemic has run its course, one thing we will learn from this disease: what exactly is an essential business. My pals in the business, so-called, of art, or of music, well, if they didn’t know already their true value in this society, they do now. I just hope they aren’t the ones lobbying for those gun stores to reopen.