The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I know you’re probably sick unto death of hearing me ramble on about my little projects. Home improvement, self-improvement, who out there cares and why should they? The stuff I do, everybody used to. At least before TV and computers made my world boring and anachronistic. Sure it’s nice to pretend I live up some holler a stone’s throw from the 19th Century or that someday they’ll name my crappy pond Walden Too. Truth is, that pond will maybe hold a footprint of mine in its mud, a future fossil drying up and of interest only to archeologists back to explore the planet. Hominid South Endosaur, bipedal, semi-upright, omnivorous, small brain, tool user from the Menopausal Era before the global warming extinctions.

They won’t find much of us, I’m betting. They’ll make bad guesses from my middens before the mizzus made dump runs mandatory when she arrived on the scene. I don’t even want to tell you what I buried back then, but let’s just say you piece together as much of my civilization as the folks who dig through the Jamestown dumps in the Virginia colonies. I find artifacts myself from prior pioneers. Hell, my shack is an artifact, built over 100 years ago. Up the ravine we’ve found 17 brass beds, an old Studebaker, empty liquor bottles, a copper washing machine tub, assorted glassware, coffee pots, zinc canning jar lids, you name it, it’s out there. I buried a cast iron wood/electric Monarch stove too heavy for me to lift, but okay to roll into a hastily dug grave.

So I was gonna tell you about making a bed this week. I planed rough cut madrona, designed a headboard and a footboard, ripped the wood but saved the ones with bark, assembled them, finished it and hauled it up to the house we just bought next door. You’re thinking, Big Deal, so what, shut up already. You can buy a bed in Goodwill. Or get a job and go buy a nice bedstead downtown at the furniture store. Who in holy hell makes a damn bed anyway?

My father-in-law, visiting a couple months before I finished the new house I’d spent one and three quarter years building already, found me making homemade doors. I was on Door #2 or so with 9 total to build. He said I could buy those at the hardware store and maybe move into the new house before me and his daughter died of old age waiting to finish building it. He had a good point, I guess.

But I’m not much for advice, especially when I’m knee deep already in a project. I finished 7 more doors, hung them and moved on to artsy fartsy floor tiling, stained glass transoms, maple floors, window casements and slate in the entryways and the hallways downstairs. Tedious work a lot of it. We did manage to move in before our demise, I’m happy to report. Course now I’m building an oak bed to replace our brass one. I guess it’s always going to be a race to the finish, one I’ll eventually lose. Like they say, you made your bed, now lay in it. I’m trying…..

Our brass bed came from an old Polish homestead in Northern Wisconsin. I bet it was a prized possession when it was new. The Cat’s Pajamas. It was black with corrosion back then, but I spent a week with brass cleaner, steel wool, elbow grease and constant cursing to make it shine again.

I’ve slept in that bed since 1971. For you mathematicians, that’s a long time, a world of snoring, a universe of dreams and plenty of whoopee. You can get attached to a bed after that long.

So it was a surprise when the mizzus wanted a new one. Mostly she wanted a queen size and since the brass bed is a double, well, maybe you can see my dilemma. I suppose I could buy a bedframe or salvage one from Habitat for Humanity’s store — and actually I looked — but what I saw wasn’t going to replace the hole in our bedroom when that brass bed got hauled down to the shack. A bed, it seems to this old snorer, is a pretty personal item. It’s not a fridge or a table. Not even a sofa, although sometimes the couch is the bed when we fall asleep watching movies.

Anyway, I decided to build our own. A friend had given me two pickup loads of old oak and maple and madrona lumber, pretty gnarly, bark on, warped and cupped and bowed. Plenty enough to build a bed. Or two. One for us, one for the little 40’s house we just bought. One out of madrona, one out of oak. Both big. Queen-sized, actually. I won’t bore you with the construction details. Let’s just say I’ve been at it a couple of weeks. And they’re still not done.

I’m hoping the new bed will be like the new house when I built it back twenty years ago, the house I wasn’t really confident would replace the shack I’d loved for 17 years, shack ornot. I suspect it will. That’s the best part of homemade anything — you’ve built yourself right into it. And besides, I’ll put the brass bed back in the shack. Just the way it was when the mizzus first came out here. Might even plan a 2nd honeymoon. She can pick the bed….

Well, time to make a run to Wisconsin to see my folks.  I’m not sure they have internet access in the manure fields of corn stubble so bear with me if these blog entries get iffy.  Meanwhile, mull over those election results and see if you want to quit watching the pundits for a couple years.  I was in the eye clinic with me ma yesterday and a pretty irate character expounded vitriol about the current governor and his ilk.  I said, so you must’ve voted multiple times, eh?  To which he admitted he wasn’t going to vote at all.  I presume if he’d had a gun he would’ve shot himself in the foot to show the bastards what exactly was what…

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 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 let’s 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.

Little Jimmy was preaching at the South End Marina’s Pilot House Lounge the other night, carrying on about the upcoming elections. “It’s like we got two Halloweens,” he was orating to about 8 of us layabouts who weren’t quite ready to go home and face the music. “One with goblins and then the one we vote for spooks, no treats.”

“Yeah,” Biker Bob threw in, pounding his Bud bottle on the formica table, sending suds onto the pulpit. “And then you got 4 more years of Halloween every damn day.”

Some of the boyz, especially after more than a couple, don’t much believe in the democratic system we got. “Throw em all out, I say,” says Ralph from behind the bar where he’s filling in for Joey, the usual weeknight bartender and referee. Joey never takes a side in a political discussion, wouldn’t say Poll with a mouthful, which explains why the place stays open in these partisan times we live in and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette isn’t half obits of patrons shot in the parking lot.

George next to me sits pensively peeling the label off his beer bottle before venturing, “You mean everybody but YOUR guy, don’tcha Ralph?”

“Oh, my guy’s okay,” Ralph agrees, wiping his hands on a dirty apron. “He voted to kill that Gun Bill this year.” Ralph’s a big NRA fan, something he usually espouses this side of the bar most nights until Joey tells him to pipe down. Ralph can get pretty agitated without much counter-argument even. Argue with him and he can get scary as Halloween in an Ebola isolation unit.

Half the place votes for their guy, it turns out. The other half are too disgusted or apathetic to even vote, especially mid-term. They’d vote if they could vote out the president, but nothing’s going to change, why bother? they think. So Ralph’s vote should count double, a fact that makes him happy. And me … I take the point about a prolonged Halloween in the Land of the Brave.