The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You do-it-yerselfers pay attention. This is a cautionary tale, like most of what I put out here for the edification of fellow imbeciles. I believe I just wrote a sermon on Knowing Yer Limitations, so maybe this is just insult to injury or maybe a double dose of Be Careful, What You Don’t Know Might Just Kill You!!

I’ve been having electrical problems down at the old house, now my glass shack. Lights flicker, then the line goes dead. The breaker doesn’t break, but I turn it off anyway, then in a few hours it’s okay again. For a few minutes, a few days, no telling. I’ve rewired outlets and switches but nothing works. A couple days ago the well pump quit. I tried changing gizmos in the control box, then finally called in the well driller crew who installed this submersible a decade and a half ago. They discovered only half the power was reaching the well house so back to the panel box we went and sure enough the 60 watt breaker was only working on one side, not enough to power the pump.

They tried removing the breaker but it wouldn’t budge. Add to this that this old circuit panel has no way to cut off power from the street so we’re dealing here with enough voltage to fry myself and a 20 pound turkey. That makes two turkeys. Okay, I get a replacement 60 amp breaker, then stand on an old truck tire to (hopefully) keep from grounding myself if I touch the wrong places. I’m nervous as a cat in a roomful of Dobermans but here I go. The breaker just won’t release. Parts of it shatter, the panel box wants to pull off the exterior wall, I try a bigger pliers and a screwdriver, no go, so finally I grab a small pry tool and try not to touch the live buss bar but I know I’m dangerously close to the live feed … and of course I touch it.

Sparks fly out at me like the ending to a sci-fi movie where the monster is climbing the power line towers and gets his alien ass electrocuted. The panel box is now shooting sparks up and down the line, first up top, then a shower of sparks down at the bottom, then up to the middle. The pry bar is shorting the whole thing so I grab a hammer and knock it back out. The sparks mercifully stop.

Then the smoke starts roiling slowly out from behind the box. I check inside the shack and yeah, smoke is coming out from inside the walls. I grab a fire extinguisher and hit the panel box with a blast of yellow powdery chemicals. I wonder if this is what it’s supposed to look like or it’s so old they’ve turned into this weird stuff. I hit it again. And again. Smoke keeps coming so I run over to the neighbors and ask them to call 9-1-1. Back I go and grab two more extinguishers from the shop back in the woods. I know what’s in those walls where it’s smoldering is 100 year old wood, tinder dry siding, crumbling tarpaper and once it gets going, nothing will stop the inferno that will jump up into the upstairs so fast I’ll just have to stand out of the way and let it roar.

Fire engines finally show up, only about six or seven, gleaming red beauties. I think maybe they can at least keep the fire from spreading, lose a wall, save the shack. They ask if I have any buckets of water at the ready. I tell em no, the pump doesn’t run, why I’m in that panel box in the first place. Traffic on the highway can barely get through, neighbors show up to watch the excitement, I’m inside with one of the firemen tearing barn boards off the wall and smashing out drywall to make it possible to get to where the smoke is coming from. They’re doing the same thing from the outside. Huge hoses from the pump truck are ready to spray down the wall.

It’s a day later. The shack is standing. The power has been turned off at the road. The electrical box is fried. The old house is dark. The pumphouse too. I’m trying to find an electrician who will return a call. My days of do it yourself electrical have come to an end. In some ways I feel extremely lucky to be here to tell the tale. If I’ve learned any lessons, it’s that I don’t learn lessons easily. This one was learned the hard way. My advice: don’t try this at home! At least not a home you love….

When I was a hopeless romantic … well, when I first realized I was a hopeless romantic, a state of mind that for the most part has afflicted me my entire life, I was a fan of Richard Brautigan. Brautigan was a product of the ‘60’s, as was I and possibly as were a few of you, altho you may not have scrambled the eggs in your brain the way we did. Richard eventually shot himself in those eggs, depressed that his fame hadn’t followed him into his later, sadder years. I was saddened that he couldn’t just accept the trajectory of his career and maybe make the necessary adjustments, but then, fame isn’t following me much of anywhere so why try to walk a mile in Richard’s boots.

In 1966, hot on the heels of Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General in Big Sur, he wrote a book called The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, which was about a guy who kept a library for anyone who wished to drop off their unpublished or unpublishable manuscripts. Kids who wrote in crayon, people writing their boring memoirs, teenagers spilling their angst-ridden guts, you name it, the librarian in the novel accepted, quote, “the unwanted, the lyrical & haunted volumes of American writing” unquote, anytime day or night, no questions asked. For a would-be wannabee writer, this was a pretty notion. Nowadays, of course, we got the internet for all that. I even have a blog … so I guess I’m the librarian of at least those slim archives.

And of course there are Brautigan Libraries all over the country from Vermont to Washington where manuscripts can be dropped off and where they’ll presumably be cared for and probably remain unread. Literature, apparently, is a lot like news in these blog-riddled days where we’re awash in unedited, un-verified flotsam washing up on the debris-strewn beaches of our consciousness. For all I know, this, like plastic, will be the defining characteristic of our epoch. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts. Put that on the gravestone of the 21st century.

Walking recently with an old friend who’s a writer, we got to talking about our late life chapter as artists. In the course of our conversation strolling the moss and fern world of the Sauk River up north, meandering under huge fir trees and listening to the language of the river, we commiserated about the publishing world and gave voice to the usual lament of writers since time immemorial. Meaning, who reads us?

Which eventually gives rise to the question, why do we write? Would we do it if we knew pretty much nobody would read what we wrote? Neither of us have anything but a puny audience. We’re the perfect candidates for Brautigan’s Library. Haul those unpublished manuscripts in late at night and ring the silver bell at the entrance, let the attendant put them on a shelf while we walk away.

My friend may have a different answer than mine, but I would write if I were the last man on earth. For the same reason I play a song on my banjo even if no one is around to hear it. For the same reason I make stained glass windows without caring if I sell them or not. For the same reason I build furniture and guitars and too many banjos, none of which I’ve ever sold. For the same reason I built a glass studio and a sailboat and the house we live in now. Because … in the end what we’re creating isn’t just a poem … or an acoustic guitar … or a song … or a stained glass window. We’re creating our life and these are the bricks, these are the doors and the windows, these are steeples. Corny as it sounds, this is why we write, why we make music, why we dance, why we grow a garden, why we get out of the bed we’ve made every morning. Because somewhere along the line we realized life is our real canvas and the world is our creation.

The folks who tell me, and there are plenty, oh, they don’t have a creative bone in their body, couldn’t paint if they took classes the rest of their lives, well, I’ve got bad news for the artistically invertebrates. We‘re all artists. We just don’t know it yet. I was pretty old when I discovered I had more than just a funny bone and if you want to know the truth, if someone had told me I’d end up becoming an artist, I’d have laughed in their face. I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag, couldn’t make a decent stick figure much less a portrait, never took an art class, didn’t come from a family that appreciated art. My point is that art isn’t necessarily something you’re born with. All those stories of Mozart writing symphonies at 5 or Michelangelo painting masterpieces as a kid, forget about that, those are what stop us from even trying. Those are the myths that need to be ignored. Art isn’t necessarily the Sistine Chapel mural. Sometimes it’s just the way you arrange a bouquet of flowers or the change you make in a recipe for dinner. Art is simply … and as complex … it’s simply self- expression. It’s a way of seeing the world that’s uniquely yours. And in the end, it changes the world.

Maybe you’ve never made a speech to a crowd of people you don’t know. If you haven’t, I’m totally envious. You have taken the right path! You have probably added a year to your life expectancy. And most importantly, you have kept your self-respect.

I’m an hour or so away from giving a speech to an auditorium full of bibliophiles and library administrators. What I could possibly say to them regarding Libraries, I seriously have my doubts. The potential seems immense that I will leave here with an omelette on my face, a long bitter drive home with a vow to never again stand in front of a crowd hoping to provide … what? Inspiration? A peek into an aberrant mind? A tutorial on an Unintended, much less Unexamined, Life?

I feel like Don Quixote on roller skates. Course I can’t tell these literary folks I’ve never read Cervantes’ little book. I can’t mention I have no idea why I was invited to be their keynote speaker at the end of their day. And I certainly can’t admit that I don’t know why I accepted their invitation.

I guess occasionally I get up on my high pony and think I might actually have something to say. Hubris, we call it. I used to do this in Stanwoodopolis at the Kiwanis or the Rotary, go on the stump to pitch public art, cultural identity, community involvement. Ho ho. We ate breakfast, pledged allegiance to the flag, prayed, collected dues and then I would do my tap dance, invariably a yawn-inducing disaster. A slow learner, I apparently am. No news there.

It takes a lot of something, courage maybe, to get up in front of people, especially strangers, to do your song. Or read your poetry. Or show your paintings. What you’re doing is actually opening yourself up, revealing something about yourself, so if folks don’t like your art, we artists feel like they don’t like an important part of us personally. Probably why we cut off our ears occasionally like Van Gogh.

I’ve wanted to cut off an ear or two in my years as a struggling artist. Course, when you play a banjo, folks want to cut off their own ears. I don’t have any ears to spare so I decided to keep at it. What I think is important to remember is you have to keep doing what you love. You may not get the loudest applause, you may not get rich doing it, you may go thru times when you question what you’re doing. But if it means something to you, keep doing it. Success isn’t so much about talent, it’s about perseverance.

I know a lot of folks who just can’t take rejection. Nobody likes rejection, but I promise you, it’s part of the deal. I used to paper my wall with rejection notices for stories and poetry I’d sent in. I compete for glass projects all over the country and trust me, I lose most of them. But I didn’t give up because I loved doing what I do and I always hoped I’d figure out a way to do it. Not saying I didn’t think about quitting a few times. Mostly I’m glad I kept my ears. Another one of these speeches, all bets are off.

We got a new neighbor recently who apparently thinks his mansion needs architectural lighting the way airport parking lots need sodium security. We live at the end of a dark road on the terminus of an isolated island, but my fellow escapee has decided to bring 5000 watts of candlepower to bear on the night. His place looks like a Hollywood mega-star’s palace, security lights and spotlights all glaring from our quiet little neighborhood. His driveway could be seen from the international space station and if we still had a shuttle, it would have no trouble landing here even in the fog.

If any of us in half a mile of this cone of light wanted to step out on a moonless evening to catch a glimpse of the Milky Way or the constellation Pleiades, fat chance, not with the searchlights beaming up from across the road. Whether paranoia drives this lighting strategy or vanity, none of us know. But the cosmos are gone from view, that we do know. One of the boyz wandered over to ask if maybe the lights could be diminished a bit, possibly just put in motion detecting lights that turn off after a burglar or a raccoon pass by, leave the ‘hood some darkness at night instead of a blazing artificial constant daylight. Naw, not gonna happen. My lights, my business, my rights.

I remember when Ruth next door installed a night light behind her house that shone right in our bedroom window. She lived alone and she was worried about prowlers, which is sort of understandable despite the fact that the only prowler in these parts back then was probably me. It took a few years but some fir trees finally blocked that light. And when Ruth asked me to cut down a few for her, I said no, they give me darkness once again, you’ll have to find someone else to cut them. Kind of hard hearted, I know, but I like seeing the stars. And I like not having lights shining into my bedroom at night. I didn’t move to the country to have searchlights blinding me at midnight.

My neighbor will eventually move on. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after four decades here, you can outlast the bastards. Anyone that nervous about the dangerousness of our neighborhood probably won’t last long in this jungle. What he needs is razor wire, security fences, burglar alarms and probably a Doberman behind the door. All I can say is it must be hard to fall asleep over there. And even then, the dreams must be frightening.