The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got most of my education from the School of Hard Knocks. To be fair and completely honest (ho ho), I also graduated from a college with a double major, neither of which I used to find a career or even a viable means of livelihood. What finally served me best was wanting to keep learning, try out new avenues, read books and teach myself, see where the highway led, mostly detours and dead ends. I won’t say everyone should try this at home, but hey, the learning part for sure. Nothing wrong with continuing education even though most folks seem to think graduation is pretty much when it should stop.

Lately, though, we’ve all been getting an education whether we want one or not from the Trump University. Mitt Romney recently said “Here’s what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.” Mitt is basically right, but he’s forgetting that we’re also getting quite a tutorial in New American Politics, 101. I doubt in our lifetime so many of us have focused so laser-like on the minutiae of Supreme Court nominations, impeachment proceedings, sausage making, foreign policy decisions, nepotism, cabinet appointments or various Constitutional deliberations. We even know what the term ‘emoluments’ means now. Put that on a red baseball hat and call it a mortar board cap. You’ve graduated with honors!

But … like my first run at the sheepskin fit for hanging on the office wall, it may not mean all that much if you can’t or won’t apply it to life skills. What we’ve mostly learned is that so-called Christian values are more malleable than we previously thought. The end certainly justifies the means. You want an end to Roe v Wade, pretty much everything is okay to get it. Honesty? It’s definitely a 20th Century relic. Patriotism? Ask Putin for help on that one. Compassion? Don’t make me laugh. We’re nasty sumbitches now, Homey. The weak need to get out of our way.

Maybe we do get the leaders we deserve, sad to say, and maybe we can still teach old dogs new tricks. It may take the pups to do it, kids fed up with this pathetic do-nothing-sensible government we have now, but if any of them want to tackle the existential problems of our time, they need to get rid of the Trump U. graduates. They know anyone running for President whose sole modus operandi is to beat Trump, well, they’re not the ones who will solve global warming, student debt, nuclear proliferation or income inequity. Trump isn’t the problem, he’s just the con-artist CEO of Trump U. It may just be time to try that School of Hard Knocks and forget about bogus degrees. Time’s running out.

It’s not every day … or even every year you get to look down into an eagle’s nest. They are, after all, perched high in the firs where they won’t be bothered much. They like a good view of their hunting grounds and probably a better view of raiding crows who seem to be fond of attacking their huge adversaries. Today I watched one of the adults sitting on the two newly hatched chicks (one is one day old, the other two) and the only thing that seemed to ruffle his or her feathers was a passing crow. She watched it like a hawk.

Me, I am too. Here’s a couple shots from my aerie above theirs. Next times, I’m bringing a tripod. National Geographic, eat yer heart out…

I’ve been out of the Loop lately, walking the Pacific beaches over on Washington’s pristine coast on the Olympic Peninsula. No wi-fi, no newspapers, no TV. I know, it’s hard to imagine in this day and age. Cold turkey from the Trump news cycle. Forget the 12 step program, just Total Immersion. Or Aversion. After a day or two the shakes settle down a bit, the fever abates, the absence even grows fonder. Just the slow rolling of waves endlessly soothing, endlessly churning, endlessly washing the sins of the world. Or something delusional like that….

But we’re back now in cell tower range, back to the endless crawlers of the news cycle, back to … yup, Trump stunts. Trying to catch up after a 72 hour hiatus, forget it, too much backlog and like they say out on the coast: Backlogs Kill! Or was it beach logs? Either way, they both probably do.

We’re evacuating personnel from Iraq and deploying a carrier fleet to the Gulf. Sounds ominous. We’re sending troops to the Mexican border, maybe to staunch the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from slipping through. And we escalated a war with China. A trade war anyway. Some other Cracker state has banned abortions. Trump pardoned a crook who wrote a book on what a great president he is. Jared has come up with a ‘new’ immigration plan. Immigrants on the border are being flown to Democratic counties in Florida. Half a dozen more Democrats have thrown their hat in the ring to run for President. The Attorney General is re-investigating FBI ‘spying’ on folks in Trump’s election campaign. Three days out of earshot and the world has destabilized in our absence. I doubt we’ll ever take another vacation again unless we’re hoping for an apocalypse. It’s too stressful coming back to a dystopian America every time.

We had a friend who trekked Nepal for a month and when she returned, she experienced what she called ‘culture shock’. Too much traffic, too many cereals in the grocery store, too much media, too many emails, too much stress, too much overload on every level. I know exactly what she meant. After only a few days…! Today I plan to go down to the beach. Walk in the woods. Work on a stained glass window. Maybe China will pay for it. Sure, China will pay for it.

I listened to a report recently on public radio extolling the virtues of using Instagram to further an artist’s career. As an artist with a career in definite need of a jumpstart, I paid close attention, figuring maybe a tutorial in social media might be just my ticket to fame and fortune. They featured two artists, the first being some guy I’d never heard of (no surprise since I don’t subscribe to Instagram) who painted colorful murals but apparently didn’t make enough money to quit his day job. So, using the power of a photographic platform, he marketed his art on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Sometimes he tried out new mural designs, see what folks bought and what folks wished he’d never drawn. Democratic art, I guess, vote for the winning design.

The other artist was a painter and she was doing okay on Instagram but complained how it sucked up all her time trying to stay current, keep posting, respond to her fans and adoring public. She admitted she was thinking of dropping off the social media rat race, maybe spend some time making art instead. She mentioned how her fanbase would almost always respond negatively to about anything new or different she was trying out — they only wanted the tried and true.

There are folks I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet who think good art is defined by its sales potential. If it sells, it’s good. If it doesn’t, probably bad art. Nice, I guess, to have a quantifiable definition. Jeff Koons’ stainless steel rabbit just sold for 91 million dollars to the dad of our current Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, making Koons the greatest living artist of our time. Give me a break. The guy’s a PR guy who couldn’t, as one critic once said, carve his name on a tree, the kind of putz who photographed himself having anal sex with his Italian porn star wife and calling it art. Jeff would have loved Instagram.

I don’t pretend to be the final arbiter of what good art is. I just know it isn’t what sells the most. Otherwise I’d probably be printing T-shirts and coffee cups with stained glass designs, probably only the ones my clamoring fans bought multiples of. The danger, at least to me, of being an artist is falling into the trap of following the money. I’d rather have a crappy day job if money was the goal. Which, I guess, is why I was a graveyard shift orderly for 10 lousy years. Okay, a crappy night job. Beats boxing up those T-shirt orders, if nothing else.