The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Unknown attribution.

I have a friend down in Taos who was kind enough to send me a clipping about a musician who decided to become a guitar luthier. The guy embarks on this new career with the same gusto I did when I decided to try my hand at my own brand of wood butchery and immediately realizes, he is quoted, that this would be a 5 year project. Meaning, this would be a long, long learning curve to build little boxes that project sound. I knew exactly what he meant. The trouble was, I didn’t plan to make this a career and I don’t want to spend the waning years of my life in that learning curve to a cliff.

So okay, I built a couple of guitars last winter and spring. After the first one I told the mizzus and myself this was crazy, way beyond my meager abilities. So when I launched into the second, she shook her head but … it was nothing new to her, this quixotic tendency to obsession. After all, I’d built four banjos, not to sell, not to become a banjo luthier, just … well, just to … geez, I don’t actually know why. It’s not as if I expect to become a real luthier. The fiddler in our band makes violins and cellos, incredible things of beauty and sound. His shop is immaculate, his templates perfect, his tools razor sharp, his techniques honed from years of school and thousands of repairs and dozens of instruments he’s made. He is, in other words, a consummate craftsman.

I, on the other hand, am not. I am an errant fool when it comes to woodworking and a complete ignoramus when it comes to instrument construction. My shop is a mess, my tools are not luthier tools, my expertise is limited and my patience is non-existent. Needless to say, I don’t let this get in my way. I have no illusions that I will stumble into the Stradivarius of guitars by some quirk or accident. No, I just keep thinking one more try and maybe the next guitar will sound, I don’t know, more pleasing. Play easier. Be visually exciting.

Or, if nothing else, that guitar will be mine, built by me, warts and all. I recall a neighbor who was telling me he had built his house. I knew the guy who actually had built his house , the guy who had hammered the nails and sawed the boards and hung the doors and put on the roofing shingles. My neighbor had signed the checks and now he was telling me he’d built the damn house. I built my own house a long time ago. Sure, it’s a bit homemade, but I like that word, homemade. I’d rather have something I built myself than something I bought at the store or hired to have done for me. When I say I built this, I mean I built this.

So, I’m building another guitar. What can I tell you when I can’t really explain it myself. I told the mizzus this would be the last one. I think I said that twice before. She knows eventually I’ll lose interest and move on to something else I won’t get very proficient at. If nothing else, she assumes it keeps me out of trouble. Or at least out of her hair, anyway….

Let me start out by setting the record straight. I don’t like Trump. Actually I guess I hate the lying little ignoramus. I don’t like most of the yes-people he has around him either. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, most of his cabinet, all toadies, all the kind of folks who would condone gas chambers if the boss wanted them built, good little Nazis, all of em. These are the lowest people who ever inhabited the White House. Or infested the White House. They would happily oversee the dismantling of a democracy and they may actually achieve that sad distinction. I want them gone. I want Fox News and Breitbart to go with them. And those GOP congressional cowards, afraid confronting the President and his yo-yo policies would cost them their jobs, they give government the bad name they’ve been calling it for years. Vote me out! So yeah, I got an ax to grind, just so you know.

But it bothered me to have some restaurant owner come out from the kitchen and ask Sarah Sanders to leave. Mid-meal. And now there seems to be a call to action from some legislators to confront and harass these people I don’t like at their cafes or homes or plane rides or anywhere they can be shouted at. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to predict where this animosity leads. It leads to public beatings or even assassinations. The rhetoric is scalding hot right now and you bet, I get it. Some of us see Trump as a wannabee dictator, a bully who would gladly sell out this country if it would make him a few million richer or it appealed to his enormous ego. He needs to be voted out or kicked out or impeached.

Oh, I do take pleasure in the victims’ cries for decency, for some civility, knowing they have dragged politics down to the lowest levels I’ve seen in my lifetime. And I’ve seen the Chicago riots of ’68, Viet Nam protests, Nixon, Watergate, Newt Gingrich, an epic cast of creepy idealogues. But nothing quite like Donald J. Trump and his minions. Bullying from the pulpit, disregard for anything factual, self-aggrandizement at others’ expense, the list is numbingly long and my sympathy is commensurately short.
I can imagine worse yet to come, trust me. I’m not Pollyanna about what is happening to this country. Gerrymandering, corporate welfare, a rise in racism, a rightwing Supreme Court, union-busting, income disparity, a very uncompassionate conservatism, trade wars, economic upheavals, border walls, another list too long. Sure, it scares me. It alarms me. It makes me lose sleep and it disturbs my peace of mind. The thing is, if we stoop to these people’s level, we’re lost. We’ve become them. The Obamas always said, when others go low, we should go high. Sounds glib, sounds corny, sounds like a Sunday School sermon. But … I don’t want to wake up one morning and look in the mirror to find myself staring at exactly what I despise.

So I got a buddy who’s building himself a house. In a tree up 14 feet off the ground. He’s doing it the South End Way, skipping the permits and just grabbing a hammer. A treehouse, in case the last one you built was when you were a kid, is a little more complicated than nailing a couple of 2×4’s to a fir tree and its neighbors. You need to factor in 80 mph winds lashing those firs, racking the structure and breaking windows. Treehouses need to be engineered, in other words, not slapped up. They require forethought, not foreskin.

Treehouse Terry was a contractor so he went into this eyes open, did his homework and bought these specialized gizmos that get drilled into the firs and hold the joists out away from the tree which lets the house ride a few inches in the winds and still hold about 25 tons of structure. Terry left one fir to grow through the bathroom floor and ceiling — which should be interesting in two or three years when it starts widening the holes. Firs in these parts grow a few inches in diameter a year. I guess Terry figures it’ll just seal the hole nicely with bark instead of caulk.

The other day I stopped by. I used to like to put my county STOP WORK order up just to put the fear of government into my pals, but these days I worry they’ll do something rash when they think the building inspector has discovered them and shut them down. Sure wouldn’t want Terry calling the county to straighten matters out. If he were required to get a permit on a treehouse 14 feet off terra firma, he’d be looking at a bureaucratic fishline knot he’d never extricate himself from Plus thousands of dollars for structural engineering, probably for naught. The county isn’t good with thinking out of the box … much less up in the air.

Instead I brought him a favorite stained glass window, figuring, I guess, I’ve never installed an artwork in a treehouse and I might never get another chance. So I snuck it up to his aerie and propped it into a window opening for him to find. Climbing back down the ladder, I noticed his truck’s bumper sticker: TRUMP! RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

I know, I considered taking my window home. Instead, I just left a small note: ART! TRUMPING TRUMP! If nothing else, he’ll be installing a small protest.

You gotta love the promotional competitiveness of our fast fat food industries. I know I do. Whoppers, Big Macs, fries and 72 oz. Cokes, what’s not to like? Especially if you’re a diabetes doctor in the time of gluttony and morbid obesity. These folks are the new Tobacco industry, purveyors of disease and possibly early deaths, nothing, they’ll testify soon before congressional hearings, they knew anything about. Just selling the public what it demanded. Junk food.

They’ve paired up with the movie industry to sell Star Wars and Jurassic Park toys to the tots in their Happy Meal deals, they’ve got games and contests, they’ve spent billions to sell us fatty foods so we won’t have to bother cooking nutritious meals at home. Thank you, McDonalds! You’ve done about everything we could ask without bragging that your saturated fats make us smarter.

Course now Burger King has upped the ante. The Russian chains have offered any woman (or girl, I guess) 47,000 dollars plus all the burgers she can eat for the rest of her life if she can get herself impregnated by a World Cup soccer star. I missed the part of the deal that spells out whatever proof Burger King needs for the pregnancy. DNA tests, video recordings of the blessed insemination, soccer star autographs?

The athletes must have been inundated with offers over there in the land of the Tsar, maybe give them half their lifetime Whoppers for a night of Whoopee. I know, it sounds tempting to me too, but then again, I’m not a world class soccer star. But I can see the ad wars heating right up. Wendy’s offering lifetime chili for babies born from golf stars’ sperm, Taco Time countering with burritos AND hot sauce for the moms and the kids born from football star trysts (unless they had taken a knee during the Star Spangled, of course). McDonalds would have to up their ante with franchises in China for the lucky woman who seduced the NBA team that won that year’s championship. Sex and fries, babies and burgers! The kids born out of wedlock in this fast food competition will be the new stars themselves. We’re all winners, looks like to me. Or as McDonalds likes to say: I’m lovin it. Although not as good as the new Burger King slogan: She’s gettin some.

Let me review the previous episode of Plumbing Hell in case some of you missed it, ignored it or, like me, probably tried to forget it. We had a leak in the upstairs bathroom’s sink, enough to run down through the ceiling into the basement bathroom. No big deal, you’re probably thinking, but if that’s what you were thinking, then I know you are the type of person who dials his cellphone for the closest plumber to come out and fix the problem. For us on the South End, that has never been an option. The trip out and back costs more than whatever was wrong in the first place.

No, we do what our predecessors here in the nettle jungles of the backwash have always done. We shudder, we perspire, we break into palpitations and finally, after an appropriate procrastination, we take a good hard belt from straight from the whisky bottle and without bothering to wipe our chins, we bore in. Tools come out, the cursing starts, the whimpering follows. If you recall, I had no more begun to work on that sink when an obstinate inlet valve snapped off the hot water line, spewing 40 gallons of a fast draining hot water heater onto the floor until I finally got a bucket or actually two under the floodwaters.

Yesterday I reassembled the entire kit and caboodle, what we semi-professional plumbers refer to as the ‘whole shitaree’. Got the valve on okay, lifted the hundred pound century old pedestal sink into position, got the drain pipes reassembled and voila, turned on the taps. And yeah, the same stupid leak was still there. Plus a new one. Sure, I cursed, I cast blame near and far, I wept. But … I knew this was the probable, not the possible, outcome. Plumbing is not a one step venture. It is a journey of a thousand miserable steps.

I’m not going to bore you with a litany of what followed; suffice it to say, the procedure was reversed, more parts were disassembled and since they are a century old, small washer screws inside the brass faucets crumbled and had to be drilled out. Of course the screw threads had dissolved with time too. An experienced hand at plumbing like myself, KNOWS this will happen. It’s why he didn’t replace them the last time even though they were leaking then. This time, however, I dared to tread where others dread, a motto I may copyright for when I incorporate my plumbing bizness.

I’m into the third day, three or four trips to the hardware store, and no, I haven’t rehooked up the water yet. What’s the rush? The mizzus is out of town galavanting in New Orleans, so what if I have company coming in two days. Plenty of time for a pro to make the necessary repairs, clean up the damage, put away the tools and pretend that all is well in the homeland. Picture of idyllic rural living, eh? If things don’t go well, and you and I both know it’s looking iffy as of this moment, the guests can do what I do, wash their hands in the bathtub, brush their teeth over the toilet. At least I’m not making them use the outhouse.