The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 35 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 40 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the bibulous South End.

So I’m in the Dairyland State here in Wisconsin showing the liquor store clerk my driver’s license and he notices I’m from Washington. He notices this every time I come back here so I know he’s going to mention he was out my way a few years back. Which he most certainly does. But instead of waxing nostalgic over his memories of the San Juans like usual, he segues surprisingly into a reverie of wanting to return to the mountains.

Okay, I say, we got those. “I want to look for Sasquatch,” he announces. “You ever seen Sasquatch?” he wants to know, a look on his face that tells me he’s dead serious. We’ll be on alien abductions before I can get my change and I’m seriously considering bolting for the door.

“No,” I answer, “haven’t seen him.”

Plenty of others have though,” he says, “and I wouldn’t mind seeing him myself. Might even have to drive down to Oregon.”

“Yeah,” I say agreeably, “Oregon seems to have lots more Bigfeet than we do.” My boy doesn’t seem like the outdoors type, more a full time mouse jockey, but the quest for Bigfoot has apparently gotten a grip on him, probably alien voices controlling his dreams, maybe just the thrill of the hunt, who the hell knows and what fool would ask, not me for sure. We live in a world coming unmoored from facts or logic, untethered from gravity or reality, a world populated by people who obviously rarely visit my own.

Sure, I want to respect their visions, their different perspectives, their unique world views. I don’t subscribe to the idea that normality is real, or quantifiable, or even desirable. I am, after all, a child of the ‘60’s. But … I don’t want to live in the psycho ward either. This past week folks were traveling to Area 51, UFO-ville, alien sightings, crashed flying saucers, green people autopsied in government morgues. Me, I just go to my liquor store in Wisconsin. You think about it, there’s no escape.

I think it was Einstein – or maybe some other Bright Guy – who famously said Insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. What others might call Magical Thinking. What a quantum physicist would explain as the observer influencing the results of the experiment simply by observing.

When it comes to the definition of insanity, I guess I’m no stranger. So when I tell you I’m embarked on building one more acoustic guitar, you can certainly invoke Einstein and I’d probably concur. But … I have a small sliver of superstition in me, a sprinkle of magical thinking, that makes me believe, maybe, just maybe, this next quixotic luthier attempt will succeed where the others fell short. I admit, I lack the skills, I lack the tools, I lack the patience … but if at first I didn’t succeed, why not flail again?

For you folks who ask not what goes into creating a wooden box capable of making noise, count yourselves the fortunate many. A guitar for you exists merely to make music in the same way a sailboat catches wind to move through the water. You don’t need to build one, you need only set the sails. People like myself hear the siren call to build one, lashing ourselves to the mast.

This is my fourth guitar. When friends ask how many I have already, the unspoken question is Why? I don’t know why is the unspoken answer. But here I am, knee deep in shavings, glues, clamps, designs, various woods, lost in a quest for a sound I think I’ll know when I find it. And probably will never find it.

My maple guitar plays rockabilly, bright, hard, no nonsense, not very sweet. The walnut one is sweet, but the trebles not so much. The last one, the bubinga, is loud, balanced, a little hard to play but close to that sound I’m after. But only close.

This one now is African-American. Black limba body. Jobota and padauk neck. All African hardwoods with an old growth redwood top and a birdsye maple fretboard. The design is different too, retro-deco, two soundholes to match. Which means the bracings beneath the soundboard are a guess. And they make a world of difference in shaping the sound that the instrument projects.

If I were 20 – which I’m not – I might imagine 200 guitars, each a lesson in tonewood and design, each a learning curve, each a step toward another sound. A person could dedicate a life to that pursuit only to discover the ‘sound’ was as elusive as ‘truth’ is. Maybe that’s the definition of insanity. Or maybe just magical thinking.

When you realize that every morning you crawl out of the fartsack, haul down to the mailbox for the morning paper, grab that first cup of caffeine and settle down to an hour of news before starting your ‘real’ day, you might figure, like I did yesterday, enough is, well, enough. You might even, like I did, think to yourself, stop shooting up the news, stop acting like a political junkie, stop stealing time from your days.

Course, yesterday it came out that a whistleblower had reported our President had called up the Ukrainian president to demand repeatedly he investigate a company Biden’s son had worked at for improprieties his competitor’s boy might have committed, in exchange for a deal to send over 250 million dollars of weapons that country needed to fight the Russians. Yet another sad story of how we’ve seemingly lost our way, this country of ours run by a man who apparently has no idea or interest in constitutional limits on his behavior.

Meanwhile millions of kids and adults too were marching in the streets, clamoring for politicians to wake up before climate change was irrevocably ruining their future lives. The Saudi oil fields were bombed with drone warfare, the Iranians say it wasn’t them, the asylum seekers at our borders were being shipped to El Salvador which is a country you want to escape from not be returned to, the Koreans are testing missiles, the Canadian prime minister is wearing blackface and, well, enough is more than enough.

My father is 96 years old. He watches the news but doesn’t seem all that interested anymore. His favorite expression lately is ‘crazy world’, as if that assessment was about all anyone could come up with to explain the endless daily assault on our sensibilities. Crazy world. He was a right wing Republican most of his life but Trump escapes his logic. Horse’s Ass, he calls his president. He fought on a P.T. boat in World War 2, thought Viet Nam was a good idea, supported the Gulf Wars and doesn’t know what to think about Afghanistan. Crazy world indeed.

I’m going out to see him in a couple days. We won’t be talking politics and we won’t watch much news. I’m looking forward to a break from the addiction. We’ll go up to my brother’s cottage in Northern Wisconsin, listen to the loons and watch the autumn leaves turn color. We’ll spend a little time in a world that hasn’t gone crazy, just two old guyz idling awhile. I might even think of it as a vacation.

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