The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-aging-gracefully.mp3[/podcast]

Nobody seems to like growing old.  Can’t blame em,  I guess when you factor in the aches and pains, the wrinkles and hair loss, the diminished mobility.  Well, almost nobody, cause I don’t mind.  Sure, I got the same ailments, but hellfire, you ought to pay  SOME price for all this accumulated wisdom, for some peace of mind, for a more stable financial grip on this hard world.

My brother’s father-in-law, a dairy farmer in Northern Wisconsin who knew a few things about Hard Living, told him at a ripe young age to quit worrying about money.  Money, he said, takes care of itself.  You’d be better off to tackle the rest.   Love, marriage, family, career, happiness.  My brother, being young, didn’t believe him until he too was older and wiser.

We used to value maturity.  We used to respect the accumulated wisdom of all those years of living.  We used to pay homage to our elders.  Now that I’m an elder, I sure wish we still did.  But we don’t.  We value youth, energy, good looks, clean skin, svelte bodies, shimmering hair.  We’re a bit superficial.  Okay, we’re TOTALLY skin deep.  We’d sell our souls to be beautiful, to be athletic, to be rich.  If I was the devil, boy oh boy, I’d be banking more souls than I’d have rooms to rent in Hell.  I’d be building infrared suburbs, you bet.  Plenty of beauty parlors, fitness centers, spas, sports injury treatment facilities, so many mirrors a 60 watt bulb would heat the place up to full sizzle.

You reach my advanced age, you ought to pat yourself on the back.  You probably figured most things out.  You must’ve learned plenty from all those mistakes.  You should’ve learned to live in your own skin.  When kids ask who your heroes are, tell them YOU are.  It’s not egotistical.  It should be the truth.

The truth is, we got this far.  Meaning, we had a hearty dose of living, our fair share….  We learned a thing or three.  We witnessed the world.  We even changed it a bit, don’t underestimate yourself.  Pass some of it on to the young’uns.  They might listen.  More than you think.  Just don’t wish you were them, young and starting out fresh.  Why go through that twice?

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-the-little-league-of-life1.mp3[/podcast]audio — the little league of life

Well, down in the recesses of the Great Recession, the South End always welcomes new biznesses, fresh entrepreneurial risk takers and innovative fiscal strategies.  The Chamber of Commerce could use some substitutes for those vacant storefronts and failed capitalist endeavors.  Marty Robemblind, the current President of the C of C, whose own real estate practice has slid off the fiscal cliff, likes to tell the membership in their monthly meeting in the conference room of Windy Rear Realty’s south office, that times will pick up …. but first we have to pick ourselves up.  Marty talks like this after a couple of bourbon pick-me-ups.  And by the time the gavel calls the meetings to order, Marty has had a couple.  By the end, it’s a question of whose going to pick Marty up.

This last Chamber meeting he introduced our newest member, Brenda Livingood.  She had recently opened an office in the old art studio behind her house now that her husband Ralph had burned every last watercolor he had stacked in every nook, cranny and corner out in the burnpile in the nettles before the woods took over the lawn.  A ‘breakdown’, the more sympathetic neighbors clucked.  ‘About damn time,’ Linda reckoned, and then moved in to the nearly empty studio with a desk and a cellphone and enough energy to move mountains.  Life coach, she proclaimed herself.  New career , new identity, new Me …. and once she’d rearranged her own mental furniture and Ralph’s too, she figured she could do for others what she wanted done to herself.

The Chamber membership heard her business plan and her sales pitch and each and every one of them took her brand new business card, the one with her name and the name of her new outfit:  Brenda Livingood   LIFE  COACH  ‘You can live good too!’   She took their cards in fair exchange.  Shelly Robinson made the mistake of inquiring into fees, somewhere in the neighborhood of a dinner out for herself and her husband Jerry at a restaurant too expensive for their lunchbucket budget for an hour of life-altering suggestions.  ‘Call me,’ Brenda insisted, not detecting the sticker shock in Shelly’s voice, ‘we’ll find a new you.’

The South End, sorry to say, Shelly, kind of likes the old us’s.  Kind of like our cars.  The new models are nice, we’ll admit, but if all you can afford is the old jalopy, we’ll learn to love them, even if they’re slowly bankrupting us.  No point hurrying.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-olfactory-alarms.mp3[/podcast]audio — olfactory alarms

I got an e-mail today with a link to the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ jobs in America.  Gotta tell you, I dreaded opening it up, fully expecting to find Artist probably the worst.  In all honesty, I almost hit the DELETE button, but this had come from a friend and he probably expected a response or a confession or a vow to do better in my next career choice, one from the ‘best’ list.

Turns out the ‘best’ jobs were pretty much judged on the basis of salary.  Actuarials, statisticians, mathematician(!), no kidding: high paying, technical, number crunching corporate gigs.  Boy oh boy, if I’d only know known back when I drummed out of school and began my desperate search for a ‘meaningful’ job.  Nobody told me the best careers were the highest paid ones.  I thought maybe they would be the ones that made me the happiest.The ‘worst’ jobs were the dangerous jobs.  Like Lumberjack.  Probably cut your leg off or be killed by a miscalculated cut in a leaning Doug Fir.  Poor pay, hearing loss, amputations.  And forget health care or vacations or sick leave or a pension.  Not gonna get to pension age anyway….

No mention of Artist in the group.  I guess poor wages, no bennies, no pension, not really the ‘worst’ job if it isn’t dangerous too.  Although I got to thinking how about those glass installations I did back when I was too eager and too stupid, climb up on a skinny ledge two stories above a concrete floor to hoist 30 square foot panels of stained glass into place with barely a few toes on secure footing at 3 a.m., every cell in my body screaming NO NO NO! and the sweat smelling like fear.  Fear, in case you don’t know, that kind of fear at least, smells like excrement.  Truly, unforgettably.

Anyway …. I didn’t find my ‘job’ listed on this link.  I’m just sort of glad I got something I can call a job.  Although, between you and me and the pegleg lumberjack, I never think of what I do as a job.  Someone asked me about retirement two nights ago at an art gallery opening. Would I — could I — just stop?  It’s not like punching a time clock, I guess.  It’s not about making the money.  And it’s not about being afraid of the danger.  My danger was really starvation, poverty, failure and humiliation.  Too late for that now.  The fear now is the creative well drying up, the days growing longer and emptier, the boredom settling in like a slow metastasizing dread.  I don’t know yet, but I bet it still smells the same.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-dragent-reunion.mp3[/podcast]audio— dragnet reunion

I’m really saddened to report that after decades of hiding, I was recently ‘found’ .  I haven’t dug spider holes like Saddam, but I did go to the end of the world the way the Unabomber did, just dropped off the radar, got deep into the hinterlands, eschewed credit cards and cellphones and the other obvious digital crumbs that lead the hunters to the lair.  I didn’t change my name  —- although I sort of inhabited the alias Skeeter of late, who, judging by a Google search, is more real than me in virtual reality.

But it wasn’t Skeeter who was Outed.  Naw, I got a phone message from some mumbling person who apparently knew me as a high school graduate of a Northern Wisconsin paper mill factory prep school and want More Info on me to put in their anniversary reunion book.  The ‘tracker’ left a call back number and an e-mail depository that, incomprehensible to me, referenced an old schoolchum that I should remember nearly half a century later.

Now I know High School is pretty much a war experience for most of us unpopular kids, one indelibly etched into our scarred brainpans, a peak experience.  Add to this the fact that I didn’t grow up in this redneck burg, didn’t ask to be transplanted there and ended up in classes inhabited by two different age groups.  I was an Outsider, in other words.  Or what I like these days to think of as an Outlier.  Although not yet an Outlaw.

Damn the stupid internet!  Damn the idiotic Facebook!  Damn these boosters of a past that holds no nostalgia for some of us!  I couldn’t leave my hellhole town fast enough.  Although apparently I left without the memories.  Course, judging by my rentention level of recent events, this was no hard task.  My interrogator even sent me a  j-peg of some group of us Young Turks offering a prize of some sort if I could identify the others.  Yah, they looked vaguely familiar.  Me too.  Vaguer still.

All I ask:  let me live in obscurity, gang.  Let me forget the war years, the snubs, the adolescent angst, the petty politics of cliques and in-crowds.  You NEED a few of us who left and never came back.  You NEED a little mystery.  That, or a scapegoat.  I don’t much care.  Just don’t call again.  And please, don’t ask me to join Facebook.   There are limits to my forgiveness.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/audio-rich-guys.mp3[/podcast]audio — rich guys