The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, Christmas on the overcast South End is gonna be a little less jolly this year. Naw, not because most of us can’t afford presents for our loved ones, what with this half decade recession keeping us in the ranks of the chrononically unemployed, but because of the news that Santa was being investigated by a grand jury on insider trading charges with MasterCard, Visa, Capitol One and American Express. Turns out old St. Nick was nicking all of us all along.

Tis the season, I guess. The media blitz for total consumer obedience is cranking up earlier than Thanksgiving now, urging us to buy buy buy whether we can afford it or not. Personally I like the car company ad that has the kids on Santa’s lap explaining to the bewildered old poop in his droopy cap and fat guy velvet suit how they want a full size pick-up truck or a fully equipped sedan. Captures perfectly the true spirit of the holiday, you ask me. Cash or credit on that? Hmm, Santa probably figured out which side his toast was buttered either right then and there or else it was the umpteenth millionth kid with the minimum wage parents wanting an X-box and a few thousand dollars of video games.

Even worse news for the soon-to-be indicted Mr. Claus and his sweatshop up in the Arctic Circle is the rumor of a class action lawsuit by his undocumented elves for withholding overtime pay and denying them sick leave. He may ultimately avoid legal sanctions and some frigid prison time if he’s got a good attorney, and you can bet he does, but the brutal publicity may take some of the shine off his squeaky clean grandfatherly image. The wolves are circling up there at the Circle and there’s little doubt the Justice Dep’t. will soon start investigating that offshore account of his, North Pole Equities, to see where the money leads. Even if it’s all perfectly legal, the spokesman for Christmas Past and Christmas Present may not get the nod come Christmas Future. The Powers That Be don’t need a cloud of guilt hanging over their pitchman and potential sales threatened by scandal.

After all, Christmas is as American as an ATM machine and the Lotto. For all the bogus controversy about the government clamping down on what might once have been a religious holiday of some sort, let’s be honest with ourselves, it IS about religion. Capitalism. Whatever else it WAS has been swept asunder under a consumer juggernaut that feeds the economy. Keep playing Bing Crosby songs at the mall and haul out the cute reindeer for a few months, most of us are so anesthetized we’d gladly go deeper into debt to shut off the saccharine insanity. This year, put an automobile under the tree. Santa’s getting 1% kickback on every credit card purchase. This year, let’s help the old guy out…. and the economy too. Fa la la la laaaawyer, as we say down here.

I’m visiting my golf-crazed family this winter and so we’re watching the grass grow on manicured greens at the current tournament. I noticed the duffers are attired in caps and shoes, trousers and shirts, all bearing nearly as many endorsements from advertisers as a Ford Mustang at a NASCAR race. These guys are walking, putting billboards for everything from clothing lines to liquors.

What’s next? Politicians with suits endorsing detergents, ties emblazoned with corporate logos? Sure, I could lament the commercialization of the culture, but why? The battle is long lost. From TV to internet, the branding of America is a fact. Indisputable, irrevocable, irreverent and irreversible. Capitalism has won by a landslide. Corporations are legally people, freedom of speech, power of the purse, both unrestricted. I would be a fool to throw myself against this juggernaut.

Which is why I’m throwing in the towel instead and embracing total unbridled entrepreneurial enterprise. Us artists, for too long, have stayed serenely above the fray. But the time has come to … well, let’s not be squeamish any longer … the time has come to CASH IN!!

So … I’d like to announce that as of NOW, any corporations or companies or anybody with money can have their logo or product prominently placed in any and all designs of mine, tastefully of course, but big and bold, colorful or highlighted, in full view within my public glass artworks. My agents can work olut the details with your attorneys, but let the bidding begin. If the culture is indeed a reflection of our deepest aspirations, I would be an idiot not to make product placement the foremost statement of my art. Not to mention being all the poorer for not doing it. Beer logos, car brands, banking names, pop cans, cleaning products, airline slogans, cereal boxes, video gaming devices, all of them sprinkled among abstract designs can only enhance the artistic statement. Act now. I have a couple of projects on the design table, ready for your logo.

I’m learning how to shovel snow again. Only been about 40 years since my brother and I had a client-base in Northern Wisconsin where we’d clear the neighbors’ walkways every storm. We didn’t get rich, but it was a good lesson in entrepreneurial startups, even if we never got to the stage of hiring illegal immigrants, all those frostbitten Ontarians seeking a warmer, richer life in the country where glaciers have receded, willing to work for sub-minimum wages in subzero weather.

Snowblowers are standard equipment in most garages now, as ubiquitous as John Deere lawnmowers back home here or leafblowers in Colorado or pool skimmers in Southern California. Big, loud, clanking metal wormscrews powered to push through a foot or two of fresh wet snow and hurl it up to the mountaintops of all the previous snows where, sometime near summer, the dirty iceball will finally melt into pools perfect for skeeter breeding.

I won’t be here long enough, but if I stuck it out until, oh, March, say, the action moves up, way up, past the gutters and onward to the chimney and roof ridge. Long seasons of snow build up some serious tonnage on the roofs, so yeah, we shovel those too and not just to make Santa deliveries less slippery. Nothing quite as homewrecking or heartwrenching as a cave-in of rafters giving way under a spring avalanche….

By this point you can usually walk right onto the roof, no ladder necessary. Just find the right drift on a windward side of the hacienda and stroll, shovel in hand, right into a winter’s worth of glacial accretion. Good luck, though, figuring out where to shovel it to, Nevertheless, it’s a breathtaking view up there. Ten foot tunnels connect to the street, to the garage, to the neighbors, a beautiful white ant colony of winter dwellers waiting for the Great Thaw or Global Warming or just a retirement in a trailerpark down in Tampa where you might see, in the little metal shed off the porch out back, a battered old snow shovel, scarred and bent, a relic of another era, as odd as a mastodon on a leash off the clothesline pole.

Old Skeeter’s got to fly out to the tundras of Wisconsin this next week. Ma and Pa Daddle are getting up there in age and I need to go see them more often these days. Sure don’t want to look back and feel like these opportunities passed. I guess this is true for most everything. I  don’t want to find myself in the rocker on the porch of the Mabana Retirement Villa wishing I’d done that or wondering why I didn’t do this…. just watching the traffic out on the highway whizzing by while I’m waiting for my feedbag or the next group social hour in front of the bigscreen babysitter.

So I’m going to be basking in the warmth of the red state Heartland, talking to my folks with their twin hearing aids while Fox News is on 24/7 at a decibel level that would kill a liberal democrat. Over the years I’ve built up some pretty solid immunity, but then, you never really know, do you? Anyway, I’ll leave you some old stuff down at the bottom of the blogsite’s compost pile you can maybe scroll down to if you have the patience. I’ll turn the volume down before I go. But be forewarned: it’s going back up when I get home.

And don’t forget: I got a book reading and book signing at the Snow Goose Bookstore Friday the 13th, 7PM. Give you a fine opportunity to criticize the critic. Only fair….

Me and a sculptor neighbor were out and about the other day when we decided to go visit an old friend who was building a dome house out of a mixture of earth and cement, one of those South End homes the county shakes its head at but pretty much tries to ignore. It’s totally heartwarming to this old lapsed, apostolic hippie to see folks going back to the land and the basics. After all, that’s why I immigrated to the South End half a lifetime ago and why a lot of us are holed up down here today hiding from reality.

Our friend offered us some home-made scrumpie — she’s English — which is hard apple cider she’d pressed and fermented. It was, well, really drinkable. Excellent, actually. She offered us some artisan bread, baked, it turned out, in an outdoor wood-fired oven right behind my homestead by a neighbor I hadn’t met yet. I’ve made bread for forty years but I thought this was incredible bread. I maybe needed to meet the baker and take some refresher courses.

I’m always amazed and totally exhilarated to stumble on folks who are building their own homes or making their own wines, who play music on their back porch and sing to the highway, who plant their flower gardens and their orchards, who build boats or fashion an instrument, who take the time — even when time is precious — to make the world theirs. Of course you don’t have to go back to the land to do this. But you do have to return to a simpler time, to a slower pace with a natural rhythm, not a regimen or a routine. You have to return to why you came here in the first place.

Sometimes I forget. Like most of us, I’m in a hurry these days, but I couldn’t tell you why the rush? The times I meet folks who sway to the tidal ebb and flow rather than the tick and the tock, I’m reminded of an earlier South End, where jobs were mercifully sparse, money was a luxury and work was for your own ends. Make bread, brew beer, build your house. Life was good. I’m surrounded by friends who make art and music, who grow gardens and orchards, who teach me, when I most need it, how to recapture what is potentially so easily lost….