The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m not a meticulous guy. Not a bone in me is OCD. My engineer pals call me an 80/20 guy, only put in 80% of the work and accept the results. This week I rented a drum floor sander, weighed about what a car does and okay, you haul it up our stairs, see if you think you’re still young and strong. But okay, I did and now I feel old and plenty weak. What did I expect at 74? Although this isn’t about my geriatric condition, it’s about my inattention to details, the old ‘good enuff’ attitude I’ve had my entire life, sort of a hippie ethos. Not trying to be an expert, just, gee, get the job done and let’s move on. Plenty of other stuff needs taking care of, not really working toward a PhD in floor finishing.

But … if I’d hoped optimism and the Can-Do attitude would carry the day … I was sorely mistaken. It’s been a full day sanding down the old finish that looked like hell the last five years or more but I just kept procrastinating, putting it off year after year until finally, this week, I rented the sander and hauled it home, huffed and puffed the monstrously heavy beast up the stairs and plugged it in, figuring the last time I sanded these floors 30 years ago it was fairly easy.

Course it didn’t have epoxy finish on it when I laid it back then, tougher than nails now, tougher than my 60 grit sandpaper in a lot of hard to get at place, tougher than my own grit. By the time I threw in the towel I had plenty of deep gouges, rough corners, finish that sanded uneven — in other words, not the gleaming fresh hardwood maple floor I’d envisioned. Quite the contrary. Story of my life, really, attempting projects like housebuilding or guitar luthiery or furniture making without the proper tools, without the patience necessary, without the requisite skills and just hoping in the end that things would work out fine. The fallacy of this fantasy is obvious in the final details, a failure of craftsmanship, simple as that.

Today I’m questioning a lot of that hippie ethos of mine, licking wounds, kicking myself. Tomorrow … hopefully I won’t see all the mistakes. It is, after all, just a floor. We just put the scratches in ahead of time.

Little Jimmy, a buddy of mine who’s almost exactly the same old age as me, was reflecting on what he’d like to do when he retired. He’s a glass artist – same as me – and so I know, even if he doesn’t, the kind of retirement he’s dreaming of is just that, a pipe dream. There’s as much likelihood of golden years in a hammock beside a South Seas Lagoon as winning American Idol with a tin ear and laryngitis, but like most folks who gamble on a lottery ticket, the fantasy trumps mathematics.

He’s the kind of guy who itemizes his day, schedules his week, plans itinerary into the coming months and can tell you, by rote, the exact steps he’ll take into the coming years. I can no more imagine him poolside with a Cuba Libre beside his sunglasses on the cabana table slathered with tanning lotion reading a novel than I can see him winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Little Jimmy’s a List Maker. An organized, tightly scheduled Planner. He knows far ahead what he needs to do not only this morning but the morning Tuesday first week, next month. He’s the guy who made an outline before he wrote the essay in 12th grade history class and got an A+ with the teacher’s comments: well organized. I don’t need to look in his dish cabinet to know the bowls and glasses are neatly arranged by size and color. Chaos, to him, is MY cabinet, one step shy of disaster, mayhem and death.

Little Jimmy pulls out a tape rule last visit and shows me 80 inches. “See that?” I shrug in incomprehension. “What’re we measuring?” I ask. “Time left,” Jimmy declares. “If I live to be 80, slightly longer than the average U.S. male … and I’m 74 (he puts his finger at 6 feet 2 inches, then this is all you and me got left, buddy, 6inches.” He shakes his head sadly. “Time’s short now.”

Unlike most of us and me in particular, Jimmy’s hit the End of his Calendar. No more days no more months no more years. Just inches. He wants to get more done, he’s got to speed up the Line, blow more glass, sell more stock, finish 2024 by 2025, squeeze into that retirement before the tape rule hits 80 inches. They say dogs don’t understand death. I think dogs are like me — they get the idea, all right, they just don’t carry a tape rule strapped to their collar. I guess we’re a little too busy scratching fleas.

Happiness, for some, is a warm gun. I swear, the older I get the more I learn about the proclivities of my fellow citizens. But I have to admit, the term ammosexual was out of the blue in an era where everything lately seems out of the blue. You can buy a T-shirt with AMMOSEXUAL emblazoned on the front and you will fit right into the next MAGA rally where red caps and flag outfits are de rigueur. Childless Cat Lady, I’m Voting for the Convicted Felon, I Don’t Care, Black Lives MAGA (not sure what that one even means), there’s even one of Trump’s mugshot with the inscription underneath LEGEND.

I guess we live in bumper sticker times. T-shirts, ball caps, bumper stickers, all shouting out our politics, our grievances, our heroes. But there’s something about ammosexual that makes my butt cheeks clench, something beyond just partisan and creepy, way worse than weird. We already got an alphabet soup for sexual predilections, maybe we don’t need to add ammosexual if we’re not hopelessly woke. LGBTQ+A? Hard enough before. Probably should poll the National Rifle Association membership, see what percentage identify as ammosexual, find out if this is a minority desperate to step out of the closet. “Mom, Dad — I got something we need to talk about….”

Somehow I suspect the evangelicals won’t find biblical scripture or stricture to support anyone’s notion that ammosexuality was forbidden, deemed a perversion in the eyes of the Lord or otherwise pronounced taboo. Thou shalt not lie with thy neighbor’s ARE-15!! Not in the New Testament even and anyway the folks willing to cast the first stones won’t be stocking up with rocks, at least not for this particular proclivity.

Personally I guess if a person wants to engage in whatever with his/her/their guns or cannonballs, none of my business. And not the government’s either – even if, as I suspect, these ammosexuals would welcome Big Brother in your bedroom, probably not theirs. You know, until guns are outlawed and gun sex too.

Gee, I don’t know. Imagine calling Donald Trump and his gang of goofballs weird. What, them? Elon Musk and his X platform of misinformation? C’mon, we all know he’s as normal as you and me and the potted plant in the room with us. So what if he plans to colonize Mars in our lifetime, probably not a bad plan at all, maybe start with Don and JD? Matt Goetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene? How about Lauren Boebert? Rudy, America’s mayor? Nothing strange about those nice people, right?

So what if most of Trump’s cabinet and advisors resigned after spending a little too much time in small rooms with the man. Doesn’t make him weird, does it? Okay, maybe a bit hard to deal with. His Sec. of State called him a f#@%! moron and some of the others claim he has the attention span of a gnat … but hey, that would apply to a lot of us, not necessarily bizarre at all. I got plenty of friends who don’t read much of anything. Like Donald, we got TV we can watch all day long. Plenty of information on TV! Who needs briefing reports?

Is it weird that the Evangelicals support a man who is a convicted felon, a man who states publicly it’s okay to grab women by their genitals, who cheated on his wives, who paid porn stars to stay silent over their sexual trysts? The guy who said maybe Mike Pence deserved to be lynched by those tourists at the Capitol? Seriously, you think that’s weird?

Or is it odd and bizzarro to enrich yourself while in office? Wouldn’t show you his taxes so you think maybe he’s got something to hide. Plenty before him have done the same thing, probably what some would call good bizness practice. What about praising dictators, strongmen who never believed in democracy and rule with an iron fist? So he likes Putin and Kim Jong-Un? Maybe the North Koreans and Russians like them too, doesn’t make him an oddball. Okay, makes you wonder, though… Might be he just wants a Trump Tower in Moscow and Pyongyang.

How about the fact his wife sleeps on the other side of the White House, you ask? Or they never seem to be seen together, holding hands or smooching? Lots of folks have marital problems. Lots of guyz commit adultery, they just don’t get to commit it with porn queens. Maybe this isn’t weird, just jealousy. Give the stud a break.

If the Donald was weird, why would most of the Republican Party follow him in lockstep? You saying they’re ALL bonkers? They refused to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and you have to admit, they knew he did what he was impeached for, they had to know he was guilty of all those indictments he has coming up in various trials. They listened to the phone calls to have states change the results of the election and they heard him tell his MAGA followers to stand by and be ready to take back the White House when he lost the election. They were in the Capitol building when the rioters howled for their heads, smashing windows, searching for Pence and Pelosi so they could hang them outside on gallows already erected. Surely you don’t think it odd they would forget that harrowing afternoon. Okay, maybe a little, but not weird, not bizarre.

Okay, maybe it’s a tad peculiar the man tells more lies than he does truths. Reality is in the eyes of the beholder, correct? Like his advisor, Kellyanne Conway, famously said, these are alternative facts. Doesn’t make them weird, just amusingly whacky. The other day he mentioned how no one died at that January 6 tourist event. Maybe he forgot the capitol police deaths or that woman killed trying to break into the chamber room — bad memory, sure, but weird? C’mon, cut him some slack.

If these folks live in a slightly different reality than most Americans, maybe it’s because they have acute visions for the country the rest of us mere mortals cannot comprehend. Genius, not weirdness. When the new Republican Party regains power, you may have to make a few adjustments. The Christians may never have to vote again, the new dictator will only be a dictator that first day in office, 1984 by George Orwell will be the new New Testament, doublethink and newspeak will make everything clear. Weird? Not anymore…. Welcome to the new reality.

Well, they just discovered the oldest known art on the planet, some zig zag scratches on a clamshell from 500 thousand years ago. This is about 300,000 years earlier than the next oldest masterpiece from the prehistoric era. I guess that zig zag abstract set us artists back, oh, not quite half a million years. Presumably the philistines of the Neanderthal caves weren’t ready for avant-garde minimalist renderings at their clam barbecues, a lesson us contemporary aesthetes ought to take to heart. Sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for another Dark Ages. And … I notice the Neanderthals have mostly died out. Okay, maybe not died out so much as just kept denouncing art and Western culture. Okay, actually they seem to be making a comeback in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and all of the American South. Kind of a heavy price for a couple lousy scratches on some bi-valve shell left in a midden, you ask me. Course there will be a boatload of theories why art languished from then until the French cave drawings. Everything from comets hitting the salons of the shell carvers’ showings to Obama’s predecessors over-reaching their political positions.

Art, not for everybody. The cave renderings in France awhile later were a little better received. Realistic animals the Cro-Magnon boyz hunted, probably used for target practice with slingshots. Practical art. The mizzus probably complained but they didn’t have wallpaper yet and even some animal scribbles probably Martha Stewarted up the damp cave walls. That happily-received realism held sway for, well, pretty much into the 20th century. For you art historians that adds up to about 300,000 years… or pretty much 99.999% of human existence. That’s a lot of painting and sculptures of horses, cute kids, sunsets and nature scenes. I mean, I can’t really get enough either. And so, apparently, can’t the South End judging by the tourist art cramming up the galleries and boutiques . As the gentleman who sent me a hate letter when we built the decidedly abstract Visitor Center two or more decades ago stated vehemently, Modern Art was dead and relegated to the ash heap of history according to his fellow art professors … and pretty much my so-called career was too … or so he hoped. Why, he asked, couldn’t I have done a mural of a mountain or a stream, something equally as beautiful as nature? Why too couldn’t I just go away and spare the island my blighted vision of the world?

A good question, Professor, but since you didn’t give me a return address, it’s one that you apparently weren’t interested in hearing a response to. The Zig Zag Man of half a million years ago might have had a better answer than mine anyway, but since Art beat Literature and Writing to the historical table, we’ll never know, will we? And since I beat the good Professor to the finish line, his criticism was a bit too belated to stop the project. He did, however, write a similar complaint to the Senior Center when he got wind of another contemporary window we’d planned for installation in the entryway, more ‘degenerate’ art he might have called it if Adolph hadn’t sullied the description for future critics. Of course, unlike a lot of artists, I’m a bit tone deaf to criticism. So instead of just a couple of door panels we doubled down and did the entire front entryway to the Center. The Perfesser no doubt was apoplectic, but … it didn’t destroy the building after all. Jump forward a nano-second in the Human Timeline and those abstract shell scribbles are dotting the landscape from the South End to Seattle and Gomorrah and beyond. Someday, no doubt, future art archeologists will pry up remnants of broken glass and marvel that nothing like that has been seen on earth for a quarter million years. And my guess is they’ll probably be thankful. Like my old man always said, You can’t please em all…