The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-galapagos-north.mp3[/podcast]audio — galapagos north

Being’s how we South Enders are naturally indisposed to work — and work is pretty much non-existent down here anyway — we have a lot of neighbors who turn to alternative means of employment.  Meaning, they become, in the parlance of the day, ENTREPRENEURS, a fancy French word for I’ll-be-my-own-boss-thank-you.

The artists pretty much have that trademarked.  Get up before noon, putter around in their bathrobes with a cup of cappuccino, wait for the flash of inspiration to strike, then paint another watercolor sunset they can add to the wallspaces of the islands’ retailers with a handwritten FOR SALE tag, usually no more than 5 times the going rate.  But the artists, with a bit of overbreeding, have pretty much saturated the area.  We can’t all be artists, I suppose, although some years it sure seems that way.  The creationists would have a field day with the evolutionists, since obviously Darwinian selection doesn’t seem to apply to artists here.  Course, neither does intelligent design, you ask me.  And I know you didn’t.

What Darwin does apply to are all our would-be animal entrepreneurs who pound a couple of corner stakes out back, fence off a piece of nettle acreage and commence to raising llamas or alpacas or show dogs or ostriches.  For awhile the South End looked like a zoo for the insane.  With the animals, I mean.  My neighbor raised thousands of quail to sell to the Hawaiian market he imagined existed.  Quail of the Nile, he called his ranch, to give it that international mystique.  A year and $10,000 of bird feed later, he was broke and despondent and drunk as a goose so he let them all go.  Coyote smorgasbord for awhile down here.  The Mexican restaurant in Stanwoodopolis carried ostrich meat on the menu for a couple of years from O-Zi-Ya Ostrich Farms, not exactly authentic Hispanic cuisine, and anyway supply always exceeded demand, something Quail of the Nile might have revealed if we had an Ag College down these parts.  Llamas ran their course a few years later —- looked like Machu Picchu for awhile.  And now we got alpacas.  Cute little buggers, but not much meat when you see one recently shorn.

Pygmy goats showed up in the Fog Farm fields last year.  And for a time we had Vietnamese pygmy pigs.  What most of these entrepreneurs figure is they’ll sell the newborns to other entrepreneurs, kind of a kennel dream, breed yourself to success.  What they never figure out is the pyramid scheme it actually is, a Ponzi for pygmy pigs, until the feed bills mount and the poop filled fields look like muddy tarpits and finally they give up.  And take up oil painting or driftwood sculpture.

Meanwhile we got a woods down here that’s home to every weird creature on the planet.  You entrepreneurs out there might consider starting tours of Galapagos North.  Easy money, but I recommend you jump on it before some damn fool brings in a breeding pair of Bengal tigers.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-tanning-salons-for-albino-bears1.mp3[/podcast]audio —- tanning salons for albino bears

Down at the Camano Cut and Curl, Sheila was opining last week how the weather seemed to be getting preternaturally colder and wetter this so-called summer.  “I’ve burned a cord of wood,” she said, “since April.  And here it is almost July and we’re down to twigs and kindling.”  Mrs. Flatterowski, vice-president of the women’s fire auxiliary, the Flame-Ons, put down her mirror for a pause in scrutinizing her freshly tinted blue curls to say, “Well, if there’s so much Global Warming going on, where is it? I want to know.”

Sheila, diplomatic as always, recognized a political turn to the conversation and tried to divert what would inevitably lead to a potential loss of customer base.  “All I’m saying is, where’s my summer?  My garden won’t even grow peas this year.  The slugs are wearing tea cozees, for heaven’s sake.  The corn is frost bit and the mosquitoes are starving for anything warm blooded, which sure isn’t me!”

Mrs. Flatterowski, not be detoured so easily and expecting full service for her $30 perm, muscled through the chemical fog of Cut and Curl to give full throated polemic on everything from polar bear extinction to glacial recession.  “Who cares about an albino bear anyway?” she challenged.  And Sheila, making brief but meaningful eye contact with Rhonda, the owner of C&C, sighed and admitted she didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it was, how about a little summer?

Rhonda shook her head before finishing Alice Norad’s henna highlight, spinning the chair toward the backbar mirror so Alice could examine the results.  Alice touched a finger to her bangs and nodded a curt okay.  “You ask me,” she said, addressing Mrs. Flatterowski now, “I don’t like my weather to be so political.  Fred and I have a family reunion this weekend and if it’s hot, I’m not going to blame it on greenhouse gases.  If it rains, I’m going to cook indoors.  God Almighty, I’d like to have one silly weekend where I can eat a hamburger without debating the ethics of meat or what I should do about Eskimoes or raise money to save an igloo.  My kids and their husbands and wives, they want to solve the world’s problems, go ahead.  But not this weekend.”

Sheila spun Mrs. F to the mirror too, maybe to kaibosh a retort, but Mrs. Flatterowski was up, plastic gown shedding blue curls.  “The polar bears are screwed,” she said sadly, “and I’ve never even seen one.”  At the counter, paying her bill and adding a more than generous tip, she met Alice’s sideways glance.  “I hope you have a sunny day for your family’s reunion.”

“Thank you,” Alice said.  “The polar bears will have to make it without our help, I guess.”

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-independence-days.mp3[/podcast]audio — independence days

Some of us layabouts at the Poker Parlor were trying to think up something special for an upcoming 4th of July celebration.  We figured we got so many Vets down this way the Diner might as well declare itself a VFW South End Auxilliary.  And since most of them are vintage car guyz too, they could hold their own annual Independence Day Parade from Camano Head to the Elger Bay Store.  I, of course, wanted to just use these militiamen as an excuse to secede from the Island, but cooler heads prevailed.  As usual.

Two Toke Tom served in Viet Nam and now is pretty much anti- every war.  Jimmy Z, who’s old enough to be Tom’s old man, fought the Japanese in WW2.  Tom thinks Jimmy’s still fighting em and maybe so, but I notice Jimmy driving a Toyota pickup now even though he swore for 60 years he’d never buy a ‘Jap Car’.  Baghdad Bill fought in the second Iraq War and Big Larry just got back two years ago from Afghanistan.  Jerry spent a year in Korea and frostbit a couple of fingers he wishes he had back, but he still can play a mean guitar.  We even got Crazy Eddie who ‘liberated’ Grenada.  We’re missing Somalia and Panama and Bosnia, but with all the newcomers rolling in, we may cover those too eventually.

Sometimes the boyz argue among themselves about those wars and sacrifice and what patriotism really means at the Friday night poker game we’ve been running since 1986 down at the Marina and Bait Shop.  Two dollar limit on bets, no limit on alcohol.  The pots don’t do much damage, but single nettle Daddle Distillery moonshine sometimes does.  I sit in with these war-hardened patriots most Fridays and serve as their patsy and their sometime referee, the one who never served even in peacetime.  Or what Two Toke calls a draft dodging, student deferred, flag burning, Summer of Love hippie protester.  He takes great joy in telling me I would’ve loved the smell of napalm in the morning over there on the Delta.  Jimmy Z chimes in how his platoon could’ve won Viet Nam single-handed although Jimmy never once has told us one iota the hell that must have been Iwo Jima.  But he’s the one who puts a liver spotted hand on Bill’s arm whenever Bill gets overwhelmed by memories of buddies lost in the HumVee he was driving when it was blown off the road to the airport in Baghdad.

We’ve fought too many wars, I think, before realizing I’ve said it out loud.  I see by their pinched lips and averted eyes I won’t get an argument tonight.  Patriotism comes in all uniforms, even no uniform at all.  Big Larry finally breaks the swelling silence, pushes a handful of quarters into the pot and says, real quiet, “I’m willing to spend a couple bucks, Skeeter, to see if you got more than bluff in this hand.”  Grateful to change the subject, I say, “Name of the game, Big.  Read em and weep.”

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-throwing-the-book-at-myself2.mp3[/podcast]audio — throwing the book at myself

Folks ask me all the time – well meaning folks mostly – why in Blue Tarnation would a right brain sided yahoo who makes his so-called living on the fringes of the art world sit down and write himself a blog.  Blogs, they reason, are the direct polar opposite of the visual arts.  You could cut away the entire left hemisphere of my frontal lobes  –if you had a magnifying glass big enuff to find it — and I probably wouldn’t miss a banjo beat.  Van Gogh mighta been trying something similar with his ear surgeries, see if it might equalize the polarity.

People nowadays believe in specialization.  Find your niche and stay put.  Brain surgery, okay, don’t try chainsaw sculpture too.  Hard on the scalpel hand.  Maybe it’s cause I never was much good at anything in particular.  Couldn’t find a niche …. Or a crack or a crevice in the world that seemed like something I wanted to spend my whole life on, give my whole self to, dedicate all my energy for.  Probably just attention deficit before we gave it a name and diagnosis.

This blog writing – it was something to fiddle with.  Explore it a little, see where it led.  Life, it seems to me, now that half of it’s in the rear view mirror, objects appearing closer, life should be an exploration more than an explanation.  Writing, I suppose, to most folks, is different than painting an abstract, or sculpting a nude, or cutting glass to pieces and gluing the scraps back together.  It’s different than building a house.  Or making music.  Or becoming a physicist.

Or so they think.  And, they think this way because instead of seeing the universe as a whole, they see it as its pieces.  They see their life the same way.  Compartmentalized.  Fragmented.  Broken up like my glass art ….. only they don’t know how to take the pieces and make them cohesive again.

We live our lives, not so much in quiet desperation as quiet isolation.  We’ve lost the sum of our parts.

Folks tell me way too often, oh, they could never be an artist.  They think artists are BORN that way.  They think Mozart and Picasso.  They think if genius doesn’t come pouring out by age four,  the fountain’s probably dry.  No point trying.  Can’t do it.  Not an artistic bone in their body.

The world, I think, is a grand experiment.  Meaning, failures are okay.  What’s not okay is not even trying.  Not learning.  Not exploring.  Not imagining.  I got some real bad news for the artistically invertebrate …………….. we’re all artists.  We’re all born with an empty canvas and our life is what we’re all painting.  The only art that matters one iota …. is creating ourselves.

So, I’m doing some writing and I’m playing banjo in a fiddle band and I’m building my house and I’m struggling along in this vastly inexplicable world the best I can, trying not to bore myself more than necessary.  I’ll no doubt prove  I sure wasn’t born a Mark Twain, but I didn’t let it stop me.

The Skeeter Daddle Diaries are really about the arc of a life on Camano’s backwash South End.   I came out here to lick some wounds and hide from the world.  Turned out, I learned most everything I know down here.  But mostly I learned that the fun of life is the adventure of learning.  If you’re not afraid to look the fool sometimes, everything’s possible.  This fool, you better believe, got more than a few laughs from watching himself trying to figure things out……