The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Now that we all understand that the news is faux and science is a hoax, the door to Understanding is wide open once again. Just this week you maybe read about the guy who’s built his own rocket and plans to launch himself into the sky blue yonder so he can look down and prove with undoctored photographs that the earth is flat. His rocket was financed by the Flat Earth Society and I admit, I didn’t realize there were still Flat Earthers among us, and even now I assume they are a comedy troupe out of L.A.

Ordinarily I would applaud the guy. He says he doesn’t believe in Science but he’s blasting off on his own expedition and a high risk experiment. Copernicus and Galileo sat on their butts, but this adventurer is putting his on top of highly explosive fuel tanks. Course, he’s only going up about 1000 feet and probably won’t get too great a photo documentation, but c’mon, give the man credit. If not for brains, for courage.

I know, you’re wondering why he doesn’t spend the money for a rocket on a plane ticket. Get up about 35,000 feet, 35 times higher than his homemade cannon shell, so maybe he doesn’t believe airplanes can fly or he doesn’t like going through Homeland Security, whatever, he’s going up.

Who knows, maybe he’ll discover the planet IS flat. Maybe this global warming has pancaked the earth to the point the oceans are cascading off the edges in giant waterfalls out into the galactic void virtually unnoticed by the space station pretending to orbit a flat planet. Personally — and this only me — I’d forego that ballistically dangerous ride into outer space and go the other way. Dig down, buddy, until you reach the other side, the earth’s bottom. Probably not even a thousand feet and way less dangerous. Course, you want to be careful that last shovel full so you don’t fall through. Especially if you don’t believe in science and gravity. God speed, Mr. Flatlander!

A buddy I met this summer gave me a book called ‘Clapton’s Guitar’ about a luthier in a small town in the Appalachians who was building Eric Clapton a custom guitar. The book was great, a chronicle of constructing a six string from scratch, an instrument worthy of a guitar legend that also waxed philosophic about country living, old time music, tonewood selections, luthiery skills and the life of a consummate and modest craftsman. I was knocked out. I was so knocked out I decided I would build a guitar too, inspired straight into insanity.

It’s as if I’d seen a Picasso and the week after decided I’d just go ahead and paint a masterpiece of modern art. Why not? Isn’t that what we want art to do, launch us off the ground we thought we were gravitationally bound to?

So okay, let’s understand right off the Get-Go that no, I knew I wasn’t going to get a commission from Clapton or Jimmy Page to make them a custom Skeeter axe, I just wanted to see if I could make one at all, something playable, something pretty, something that might even sound good, something that wouldn’t fall apart. At least not right away. Not that I need another guitar — after all I have 3 electrics, 4 acoustics and one steel guitar. Plus a couple of ukes, a mandolin and half a dozen banjos mostly homemade. But NOT a guitar I’d made myself.

The mizzus shook her head, once again, but as always knew I was going to go right ahead and make a fool of myself or drive myself crazy trying. I’m a couple weeks into this and managing both of the above nicely. Guitar luthiery, for any of you uninitiated, entails specialized tools and skills I do not have nor will I acquire in the course of a one-off instrument. And even though the book that kickstarted me on this quixotic journey pretty much described in detail each step of the process, I had no clear idea how HARD this would be. No doubt I could bore you with horrorshow details of my sad attempts at everything from bending sides to cutting kerfings, but I want to keep moving forward, not looking back, otherwise I would need grief counseling now and never get to the end. Whatever the End is.

So I’m reading about bracing strategies and radical soundhole placements on the side, not the top as usual. I know, it would make sense to keep it simple, stick with the Tried and True, follow instructions, yada-yada, but … I’m only building ONE, why not make it unique, why not shoot for Art, maybe go for the Picasso too as long as I’m lost in the fantasy? When I’m done — if I ever am — I may not know how to play the blues on that fancy new axe laying in pieces down at my shop, but I should be well versed in what the blues are. I’m living them every day now.

The ladies up at Jolene’s Beauty Boutique and Gift Shoppe were all atwitter over Trump’s latest pot stirrer, calling Elizabeth Warren once again Pocahontas. “What is with all the name calling?” Nancy Jacobs was asking from behind her People magazine while her curls were curing. “Can’t the man just learn a modicum of courtesy? He is, after all, the President.”

Ronald was snipping and sniping from behind Mrs. Wilkerson’s chair, merrily joining the fray as usual. Jolene had long ago given up on curbing Ronald’s acid tongue and besides, he was her best beautician. And a favorite among some of her best customers after all these years. “What else would we girls have to talk about if the Donald wasn’t tweeting his little nasties every morning? I know I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, the boredom would be just too much. Too much!” he giggled happily.

“But to say that in front of all those Indians,” Barbara Massey, said, shaking her head violently and causing Shelley, the new beautician, to drop her scissors. “It’s shameful, is what it is. What must they have thought? He asks them to come to the White House for some kind of honor for the native soldiers and then he goes right after Mrs. Warren. It’s shameful.”

“Well,” Ronald sighed, “it IS called the WHITE House. The boy is just so happy to be the great white father, he forgets himself.”

“Shameful,” Barbara Massey said once again and Shelley quickly stopped cutting to let her have free rein. “He might as well bring the NAACP in for some honorific and call Obama Uncle Tom. It isn’t right.”

“Or maybe bring up the birther thing again,” Ronald said. “You never get enough of that. In fact he’s been saying it lately, I hear.”

“What kind of country are we living in,” Mrs. Wilkerson lamented. “I heard he was going on about the British First people, sending out phony stories about the Muslims, and now the British are upset. We have the Russians interfering and we aren’t doing one blessed thing about it and instead our President is making trouble in England.”

Ronald laughed. “The boy lives to offend. Half the country love that about him. Mean, nasty little bully, they wish they could do that too. They’d vote for him all over again.”

“I’d vote for Pocahontas,” Shelley said suddenly. The parlor went quiet. Shelley rarely offered any comments or editorials. “I would,” she said more firmly.

“Well, I’d vote to do the man’s hair,” Ronald said wistfully. “I’d give my left …” Ronald caught himself, “finger for a chance to do that tangerine hair. And think of the gossip in his salon, Jolene.”

Jolene looked up from the cash register by the front door. “Faux hair, Ronald.”

Shelley was the only one who didn’t laugh. “What he needs is a good scalping. Pocahontas wouldn’t save that white man, okay by me.”

And so it goes up at the salty salon, bastion of gossip, hotbed of frothy liberal discontent. The South End is many things, but fools are not much suffered, at least not the ones off-island.

Alabama, you got
the weight on your shoulders
That’s breaking your back.
Your Cadillac
has got a wheel in the ditch
And a wheel on the track

Alabama, as Neil Young lamented, is a damn mess. The President’s spokeswoman, Huckabee’s daughter, unabashedly aware the Chief has his own harassment issues to deal with, tells reporters after she’s demanded they tell her what they’re thankful for this Thanksgiving, no doubt thinking she’s running a 3rd grade class of stupid students, that the voters should decide whether Judge Roy Moore should be the next Senator of that proud state.

I guess the logic here is that if Donald Trump was elected President, the voters have substituted the ballot for the force of justice in the judicial system. You got a Groper-in –Chief, why not a pederast Senator? The voters say okay, I guess it’s okay. Or like Trump says, better Moore than some liberal.

This is the state of politics in America these days. Neil Young could’ve substituted America for Alabama. Our Cadillac has a wheel in the ditch.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants to know what we’re thankful for before she’ll take a question. I’m thankful for Neil Young, Sarah. My question is how can the President of the United States support a pederast over a Democrat who isn’t particularly liberal and how is it, as a woman, you’re not ashamed every damn day to speak up for this Harasser?