The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The ‘Make My Day Guns & Ammo” shop does a brisk business these days on the heavily defended South End. Earl and his brother Biker Billy watched their revenues double in the 2008 election, then double again in 2012, most buyers convinced the government was going to confiscate all the firearms in America. Earl and Billy could keep up with their gun inventory, but ammo was rationed and frightened homeowners were put on a waiting list. Ralph Hansen wanted to know if he’d need to ask his ‘intruders’ if they’d mind waiting before they broke into his house, raped his wife and daughters, then killed him. In the end, Earl sold him a Browning over and under and a box of 12 gauge slugs he said would stop a rabid rhinoceros. Billy shook his head when Ralph walked out with the shotgun in its tooled leather case proud as Hemingway. “How many shotguns does he have?” he asked his brother. And Earl smiled as he put Ralph’s check under the cash drawer in the register. “Probably one shy of enough.”

Down my well armed end of the Alamo I hear plenty of gunfire. The mizzus took years to get used to the sudden bark of semi-automatic practice sessions of the local militia excercising not only their right to bear arms, but their obligation to shoot them as often as possible. She’d ask, alarmed, what is THAT?? Gunfire, I’d say nonchalantly, and she’d grow more alarmed, her fears realized and then want to call the police. It’s America, I’d explain patiently, figuring that was explanation plenty, all Clint Eastwood would bother with, why waste words OR ammo?

A few years back we had a bad hombre stroll down Bernie Road when it was a one lane dirt cutoff to Tyee Store, occasionally letting loose with an automatic assault rifle beside the cow pastures up there, alarming more than just the mizzus. Turns out he was wanted on felony warrants and the local gendarme treated him like Machine Gun Kelly on meth, waited until he’d gone to bed at his moll’s place off Dallman, then dropped a stun blast through the window and shot him to pieces reaching for either his trousers or his gun. The sheriffs around these parts don’t much cotton to automatic weapons being practiced on the roadways. Especially by hardass criminals.

I won’t say the mizzus has gotten used to country livin’, but she doesn’t race to the phone to call 911 every artillery session or the opening of hunting season. I guess she just figures it’s slightly better than moving to Beirut or Baghdad or the wrong side of Everett. At least the casualties are somewhat less. Even if supposedly we’re not at war.

I just read in my morning paper that 38% of Americans who make over $100,000 a year would have a hard time covering an emergency bill of $1000. They’d have to sell their BMW convertible or their condo in Kuaia or jerk their kid out of Harvard law school for a semester. Or at least a week. You can only imagine what the rest of us have in rainy day savings, much less tornado day when the fiscal roof gets blown off the old shack. Nearly two thirds of this country don’t have a grand on hand, but they have credit cards. We average about 2 and a half per person. Get in a scrape, put the bill on the card. When all else fails, declare bankruptcy and start over. A million of us do every year. Most of that is because we don’t have health insurance.

Down here on the fiscally conservative South End, a thousand bucks is a lot of wampum. I suppose we could blame ourselves for not filling the piggy banks and our savings accounts, but last time I looked the Fed had kept the interest rates down to practically zero, hoping to stimulate a languishing economy after that Wall Street meltdown of nearly ten years ago, not a lot of incentive to save which is what the Fed wanted. If you’re patriotic, spend it now, don’t wait to buy that Lexus.

If you were like my folks and lived through the Great Depression, you learned some hard lessons. You didn’t want to be in debt. The banks who made you those easy loans wouldn’t be so friendly when the sheriff came to repossess your farm. The Great Recession, I’m not so sure we learned those same lessons. The banks might’ve. They pass out those credit cards instead of loans and they got a lot of extra charges at the brick and mortar, help them make up some of the losses when folks didn’t have enough money to play the stock market the way they used to.

Down here I see more neighbors playing Lotto than the Dow Jones. And a few play at the Southendomish Casino, hoping to cash in on the blackjack tables. I asked a buddy once who’d just bought a brand new John Deere riding mower how he could afford it on his paycheck and he said he figured out the minimum payment on his credit card and calculated how much overtime he’d need. I said do you understand how much interest that would be, probably cost you twice the original price of the mower? He said all he worried about was that minimum payment.

I used to think folks didn’t understand interest and percentage. I used to think they had bad math skills, maybe didn’t realize the odds down at the Casino or the fee at the ATM. I used to blame the education system for not teaching basic economics, household economics, you know,bank accounts and loans and interest calculations. As usual, I was wrong. They understand it probably better than me, they just want that riding lawn mower. And hope overtime doesn’t dry up. I guess they’re not as nervous as me.

I was recently introduced to a stranger the other day as ‘the artist who did …’, a designation that invariably makes me squirm in my underwear. I don’t go around introducing my friends as Joe the accountant or Wendy the professor or Ralph the serial adulterer. No point in tying them to a preconception, putting them in a neat well-defined box and leaving them to futile extrications. The person I was introduced to said, “Oh, I saw your glass in the train station….” And then she asked where I’d taken my art studies, expecting, no doubt, some university or salon, possibly an apprenticeship under Chihuly.

“I took a night class at Stanwoodopolis High School,” I said, giving the answer I’ve given since the first time I was asked this. “Went to one class and came home with just enough information to be dangerous.” I lived in the shack I bought in 1977, a place with plastic on window openings that needed to be boarded up or filled with conventional paned glass. But since I didn’t know then how to frame a house or remodel a window opening to make a used window frame fit into the wall, I got this eureka moment when I saw a stained glass class offered in the local night school. Why learn framing when I could make a window that fit exactly the opening where the plastic was?

I know, I know, I could’ve just as easily learned woodworking and carpentry, but I didn’t have much faith in my skills on that front and anyway, I didn’t own tools either. So, like always in my life, I took the easy route instead, rolled into town for a night class, figured one hour was plenty, bought some glass the next day and a glass cutter, then went to work. By the next class I had one window installed and a six foot doorway filled. Why go back? I was practically a pro. So what if it took me decades to learn what I didn’t learn by finishing that class?

But a funny thing happened on the way to my career. I learned how to frame a wall, learned how to build a house and learned how to cut glass. I made a few windows, but being poor, the glass cost a fortune and those windows got smaller and smaller. By then I’d gotten kind of hooked on stained glass, all that color, all that sparkle, all the magic of it, corny as it sounds. And I hated working small. I’m the sort of guy who could never be a clock repairman. Those tiny parts would drive me nuts. Doesn’t help that I have ten thumbs.

So I started selling stained glass windows, much as I hated to given my disdain for all things commercial. Victorian designs, roses, cute iris windows. Do a few of those and you too might venture toward doing your own stuff even if it was odd or bad or semi-weird. The woman I’d been introduced to said ‘you must have a natural talent.’ I replied that she hadn’t seen my first attempts, otherwise, she would know I didn’t.

But … I’m living proof you can learn. All this mumbo-jumbo of right brain, left brain, maybe you buy that. Okay, but keep this in mind: we all got a brain and it has both sides, no assembly required. Doesn’t cost any extra to use both and the funny thing is, they get better the more you do.

We got a little Art Tour going on this weekend on the island, about 50 artists, then about 50 more who’d rather ride the coat tails of the ones who advertise and promote this event. Since I was one of the original artists at the beginning some 19 years ago and watched it grow into a successful regional event, you might think I’d resent all those artists who avoid dues and meetings just to profit from the work of others.

But I don’t. It warms my cockles to see the entire island — for two weekends — celebrate art. Sure, there’s the profit motive, but the island is in America, land of capitalist excess, a fact even us artists can’t ignore though we try our damndest. My old shack (let’s call it a studio) was on the Tour for 9 years at the beginning. Had four of us starving artists down there and by the end we had 3000 visitors in the 3 days we were open back then. For you non-math majors, that’s a thousand people a day who drove clear to the South End for aesthetic entertainment.

I didn’t sell much except the notion that the island was the Art Island, plenty enough for me. Folks wandered the acres of gardens the mizzus had planted, saw how we lived, how artists lived and maybe where their inspiration came from. What we wanted, of course, besides getting filthy rich those few days, was offering a glimpse into our own creativity, how art isn’t so much just an art form, a blown glass vase or a pastel painting, but a way of seeing the world, then creating one. Gardens, tool shed architecture, found object sculptures, hand built houses, all of it a tapestry flowing from the imagination.

What we hoped was to inspire others to explore their own world. To the folks who told me they didn’t have one single artistic bone in their body, I always said sorry to break the news, but we all create our lives, some consciously, some not. We’re all of us artists, but some of us fools try to make a living at it.