The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

For awhile in this year of Trump 2.0 I thought I’d lost my sense of humor. Again. Turns out, my funny bone had left me, gone in search maybe for a better host. Or, worst case, been deported to some third world prison without cause, without a hearing, without even a phone call to let me know what was going on. Who knows?

I know this — I spent too much time looking for that bone, mostly because the times are grim and every damn day brings another outrage, another corruption, more craziness and a few more steps down the rabbit hole where up is down, lies are ignored, greed is worshipped and everything is some kind of ‘deal’.

If you can’t find humor in this … well, you’re left with a slow rolling nightmare. C’mon, in another year, another reality, this would be darkly comical. Elon and his DOGE boyz searching for ‘woke’ references in order to cut those departments’ funding. A billion here, a billion there, no problem balancing the budget to make room for tax cuts for the rich. Fire all the folks at the Kennedy Center for the Arts and make Trump the Czar of Culture? You can’t see the hilarity in that? How about RFK for head of the Health Department? Or a flat earth believer for NASA? Donald on Mt. Rushmore or better yet, bigger than Chief Sitting Bull on the mountain nearby, carve a new mountain big enough for that colossal Ego?

This is all laughable stuff. You know, if my funny bone hadn’t taken an early exit. Not that I blame it, the dark humor had maybe gotten a bit too dark. Still, we should’ve stuck together, worked things out, kept the light on — or at least flickering.

I suppose I’ll have to look for a replacement. Ebay or Craigslist. Wanted: Used Funny Bone, not too brittle, must have loyalty. Room and Board provided. Drinkers okay.

Hopefully my old sense of humor will see this and take pity. Not that I want pity. I need laughs.

Right about quittin time a friend dropped by for our weekly beer and pow-wow, a routine we’ve maintained for the past dozen years or so. Second beer in, he launched into a familiar lament where he thinks maybe he ought to take up his art again to supplement his day job, the one he can’t give up since he never paid into Social Security, just got paid under the table, a tactic too many of us on the South End employ, no pun intended.

And as usual I say sure, sounds like a good idea, just not sure about the supplemental income part. He sees what the Gallery up the road charges for an oil painting and he figures he’d get the same thing, ignoring the inconsequential detail that he’s starting from scratch, got no name recognition and hasn’t picked up a brush in over 50 years. Other than that he’ll probably be rich by a year from now, quit his handyman work and retire to Hawaii. A man has to dream, doesn’t he?

In the course of this fantasy he says he just doesn’t seem to have the motivation yet, not sure why, but he’s not getting any younger at 78, probably should get going before it’s too late. Maybe a better pal would tell him the Iceman isn’t coming, the dream is stillborn, you’re kidding yourself, nobody’s going to buy your stuff, wake up, get real. What I do tell him is that if you want to paint, then paint, forget about making money, do it for the joy of it, make art for yourself and maybe, who knows, maybe you’ll catch lightning in a jar, your work will sell and you might be the next Big Thing. Just don’t bet the farm on it.

I had a neighbor bring her grandson over last week, a highly artistic kid, she claimed proudly, to see my workshop, maybe inspire the lad to fire up or maybe just quit after a tour around my shack turned studio. They stayed maybe 5 minutes, thanked me for the visit, well, she did, then at the door asked me if I had any advice for this young Picasso of hers. I said I did. “Don’t go into debt.”

What I regret is not telling him to get a part time job and pay into Social Security so you won’t be working into your 90’s. Might give you time to do your art, art you wouldn’t have to do for money.

Quite a few years ago I picked up a couple of Chicago boys off a ride board in Madison, Wisconsin headed west and eventually to a student exchange program in Mexico City. The three of us sat in the cab of my ’68 Chevy truck, the same pickup I’d just finished driving down to New Orleans, over to the Florida panhandle, up to Maine and back to Wisconsin, now headed to Seattle. The boys threw their backpacks into the back along with mine and we motored west. Part way across the Dakotas I asked them if they’d ever been backpacking and of course, being Chicago born and raised, they said no. “You’re in luck then, let’s head up into the Big Horns and hike in for a night or two.”

The first part of the trip the boyz were pretty unsure what to make of me. No job, beat up truck, a vagabond cruising the highways of an America they’d never seen, why would they trust him? But the road makes for intimate relationships, I’ve found, and this one was no different. We left the pickup at a campsite above Buffalo in the National Forest and hiked into the wilderness, the boyz trusting me as a guide and mentor now. The first night we built a campfire, then after dinner, laid out under the stars.
Wyoming has some of the darkest skies in America and up in the Big Horn’s elevation there are more stars than most of us have ever seen, enough to humble a mere human on a planet circling a sun that’s one miniscule speck in the vast unknowable universe. In the Windy City stars don’t even exist. So when Jason sees his first falling star, he asks what was that? A meteor, I tell him nonchalantly. Oh right, chimes in Brian, totally disbelieving such objects are observable. He thinks maybe it was an airplane.

‘An airplane? I say. “What, with a tail wing on fire?” But the boys are unconvinced, no way were they witnessing an extraterrestrial object igniting in earth’s atmosphere. And then we saw another. And another. And plenty more. By the time our campfire had burned to embers they were convinced. And amazed. Something they would tell their kids about, the night the sky filled with falling stars.

Course, if their kids go in search of meteor showers, they’ll see instead the thousands of Starlink satellites cluttering the skies on the vacation their fathers take them back out west. “C’mon, Dad, those are just airplanes,” they’ll probably protest. And maybe Dad will glimpse a memory from long ago, the one I keep with all those wishes from that magic night before we three hiked back down to the rest of our lives.

Some of you Geezers out there might know what a Blind Pig is … and no, it’s not a myopic hog.  Since there’s no bar or tavern licensed by the State down here, the South End has had to revert to the lessons of Prohibition once more.  Meaning, we keep our drinking establishments underground, what the dry gulchers called in 1920, a Blind Pig.  Knock on the door — if they recognize you or you’re with a pal they do, you can belly up to Rotgut Billy’s Basement Bar.
 

Course, Billy doesn’t have it in his basement — it’s his barn, once the home of Herefords and a couple of draft horses.  Probably no pigs, 20/20 vision or otherwise.  It sits back behind his house and his house is back along a rutted lane off the highway, down a dirt road dead end.  Nobody goes down that road without an inkling and a thirst.

It’s not like Billy’s making money — he hasn’t got enough customers.  And he mostly just covers his costs.  The jukebox is his old Radio Shack stereo.  The neon isn’t a beer sign, it’s a pink flamingo from a motel in Utah he picked up at a second hand store.  He’s got a pool table you need an alitmeter to calculate the warpage and there’s a battered steel dart board in the back corner where wayward projectiles land harmlessly against the walls.
 

Billy has a few of us who make homebrew so sometimes the storebought bottles get upgraded to high gravity heavy nettle, jalapena ales, chocolate stouts and any other experiments we care to inflict on the patrons.  Occasionally we’ll bring in pizzas and cheesy nachos Billy heats up in  a little toaster over behind the bar.  The bar’s a nice hunk of old growth he slabbed off a 300 year old fir that fell in the storm of ’79 that knocked out the Hood Canal floating bridge and raised hell on the island here.

Folks ask me all the time  if Rotgut Billy’s really exists.  I tell em if it didn’t, we’d have to open it up anyway, but yeah, Billy’s is an institution, a beacon of entrepreneurial panache without the profit motive, half drinking establishment and half social club.  For Billy, since his wife died, it’s pretty much his life.  He doesn’t serve us when we’ve started to slip over the line.  We’re family and he looks after his family.  Those same folks shake their heads and wonder why the County sheriff hasn’t closed his operation down.

It’s a fair question, one we boyz have debated for years.  The only answer we got is the deputies let it go even though they’re pretty sure what transpires at the barn, figuring, I suppose, it’s better to get sloshed close to home than drive drunk miles to the closest tavern.  Maybe they just see Billy as the lesser of two evils.  I guess a lot of things are like that down here….

The man I bought my shack from back in 1977 told me he’d read an article in Mother Earth News that said just drive around where you want to live, find some old run down homestead abandoned and overgrown, go to the County offices, find out who owns it, call em up and see if they want to sell it cheap. By god, that’s exactly what he did and luck of the draw, he got an alcoholic owner going bankrupt ready to sell to the lowest bidder. Fairy tales, Virginia, occasionally do come true. But mostly, they don’t ….

My guy pulled the blackberries off the roof, tore the rotten walls off, rewired the electrical, ran a hose for water from the neighbor’s house, then ran out of money. He must’ve read a subsequent article about Raising Dogs for Fun and Profit, because he bought two pedigree mastiffs, one male and one female, built a plywood Gitmo and fenced them in. He planned to breed them, sell the puppies for a small fortune and make enough to finish the shack to semi-habitable condition for his suffering wife and kids.

Course, as always happens when reality collides with dreams, the dogs, big aggressive beasts, tore into each other, scarring their mates and ruining any chance for ribbon-winning at future dog shows. I guess my boy didn’t consider dogfighting as an avenue to success, so he tried mail-order sales awhile and finally, like himself, ran into someone chasing a similar fairy tale. Me. He doubled what he’d paid and packed up the nuclear family sans dogs and headed his big trailer to Maine, lock stock and barrel. In the winter. To build, he said, a cabin and start anew.

I happen to be from Maine. I told him you aren’t going to build anything but igloos in the winter, man. He said we’ll see, just send those $225 payments to Maine. A month later I got a letter instructing me to send payments to Florida. And please, don’t give anyone my address.

I googled him up the other day out of idle curiosity. A site had him listed as some kind of snake oil salesman with unhappy customers going online to say DON’T BUY ANYTHING FROM THIS CROOK!!! It’s 36 years too late for me. Like I said, sometimes fairy tales come true. But usually you have to work very very hard. And most folks, well, they just want the Magic Wand.