The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Here’s some breaking news for all you addicts out there. Facebook was designed, so say some of its founders, to dig deep into your brain and reward you with instant and constant gratification. Likes, dislikes, tweets and pinging. They want you to keep in touch, they say, with your ‘friends’ and relatives. Ho ho. Just trying to help you.

Can you say Ennabler? Can you say Pusher? They do want you to stay in touch, all right. They want you to chain yourself to your phone, your computer, your device and let the ads wash over you like a soothing shower. Just like the tobacco boyz, they’ve studied you and they’ve designed a delivery system you won’t be able to resist after a very short time. The cigarette pushers took some tobacco leaves, chopped them fine, then added everything from formaldehyde to the pancreas of endangered species, put them with 100 chemicals known to the state of California as carcinogenic, made a slurry, then dried the toxins into a compact little roll that resembles real tobacco. They made these neat little filters they perforated so that you had to pull very hard to get your dose and called those Menthol Lights, less tar, more flavor, that kind of ad rubbish.

Facebook, they took some behavioral research from B.F. Skinner’s monkey experiments and Pavlov’s dogs and applied them to you. We always knew social media was addictive, I guess, we just didn’t know the folks upstairs had manipulated us. Just like tobacco. Just like McDonalds. Just like Coca-Cola even after they took out the cocaine. When sugar was under investigation, the sugar daddies blamed heart attacks on fat. Facebook, we’ll have to wait and see who they blame. I’m betting the Russians. Parents who don’t do proper supervision. Video games. But the truth is a lot more sinister than those pesky Ruskies. I’m afraid I have to unfriend Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow gangsters. Your social media is a social destabilizer. Big thumbs down, Mark. But I hafta admit, you won. We lost.

I always knew, deep in my fluttering heart, the Day of Reckoning was going to come. As sure as winter comes every year, as certain as Monday and the timeclock, as predictable as Christmas sales starting in November, it’s got to be faced. And no, I’m not talking about that vote in Alabama too close to be called between a man who as a federal prosecutor brought justice to the bombers of the Birmingham church that killed those kids back in the 60’s and the man who rather date kids, not that kind of reckoning.

Naw, I’m talking a little closer to home, way closer to the bone. I remember the day when I had nearly completed my little homemade sailboat and the time came to cut the slot in the bottom for the centerboard keel to slip through. You know if you make a wrong move, all the work that preceded this will be for naught. So you put it off, you double check your calculations, then you put it off some more. But … there comes that day when you just gird your loins and hold your breath and put the saw right down the bottom of the boat you spent a month building.

The boat survived the saw. I outfitted it with black sails and launched her a few weeks later. It wasn’t the most elegant of vessels and it certainly wasn’t fast under sail. I flipped it on a camping trip up in the San Juans and this time, I survived, evidently not a Day of Reckoning for the builder, not that day anyway.

Today I’m doing the final work on my handmade guitar, the one I’ve been obsessing over for weeks. If all goes well, I’ll have it strung up and played by mid-afternoon. The neck has been attached and the top glued down so there’s no more room for adjustments or corrections. It pretty much is what it is. I’ll put on the nut and the tuning machines, attach the walnut pickguard, screw down the fancy tailpiece and set the bridge. Then wind up six strings, monkey with the action as much as possible, then pick out a song and see what it sounds like.

It may sound crummy, I don’t know. Like I say, Day of Reckoning. If it doesn’t sound good, I can’t do a single thing about it, the deed is done, the die is cast and I can hang it on the wall as a testament to over-ambition, unwarranted optimism, bone-headed endeavor … or just call it wall art. I figure Stradivarius had to build fiddle #1. Course, he probably apprenticed for ten years under a master. Well, like my old man always said, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Nothing lost either, I’m figuring. At least not lives….

I got a pal who wrote a really good book on the Barefoot Bandit, well researched, tautly written, humanely told. He’d hoped to parlay that into a movie with the Academy Award winning screenplay writer of Milk and J. Edgar, but something went sour beside the kidney pools of Hollywood and the movie lapsed beyond the internet interest expiration date. He’s holed up at his cabin on Orcas, doing what most of us artists do, waiting for the phone to ring.

Ten years ago I had breakfast with a local artist here on the South End. He’d just finished a huge mural at the new theater and their outside lobby of the restaurants that ringed the place. He was depressed, he said, now that the project was over. He couldn’t understand it, big artwork installed to great acclaim, good money, all good. And now he was depressed. He poked forlornly at his chicken fried steak. That project was a yearlong undertaking and he figured it would open the floodgates to more of the same. Fame and fortune would surely follow.

I gulped at my 3rd refill of coffee, set it down empty and said, “Post partum depression.” He looked at me with a mouthful of heart attack and said, “What?”

“You got the afterbirth blues,” I said with some authority. “You’ll look at the other stuff, the usual paintings, as piddly-ass. The big stuff as an adrenaline rush. When it stops, the rest seems blasé’ It’ll pass … or else you’ll get another big one.”

I just went two years in withdrawal. They don’t make methadone for this. There’s no cure. And there’s no prescription. You wait for the Next Project, cold turkey and sweating in the wee hours of the night in a blood fever.

Like I told Orcas Bob, you’d think it would get easier for us Old Hands. But it doesn’t. I like to think — when I’m partially rational — the hunger lets us keep an Edge. Too much success, we’d get fat and lazy. Probably go to socialite parties, get accustomed to the applause and the alcohol, then squiggle out the next artwork by rote and routine. Maybe we’re actually the lucky ones. You know … if that phone ever rings again.