The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Someone mentioned to the mizzus the other day he was glad to see her husband’s bi-weekly column in the Crab Cracker was funny again. I guess he figured I’d misplaced my sense of humor for awhile there but thankfully gotten it returned from the Lost and Found. Moonshine Wit and Wet Powder Wisdom is the maybe not so catchy name of my diatribes and musings which might imply bad philosophy could easily be substituted for a funny bone. Occasionally I even wax serious, if not exactly profound.

Maybe I’ve misjudged my readership. If so, I apologize to the dozen or so of you who follow Skeeter’s literary meanderings. I suppose I ought to be grateful for the criticism, maybe steer myself out of the ditches and back onto the freeway. Art is like that too. You sell something and straight away you think maybe stick to that design, no point going all ‘creative’ here when you’ve got a winning formula. After all, you need to make a living.

But … this is nothing less than a curse for anyone hoping to explore his or her or they’s creative imagination. I know plenty of good artists whose work in a certain direction didn’t sell well so they went back to work that did. Believe me, this is a prescription for self-imitation and eventually the demise of artistic exploration. I should know — I find myself pulled in the direction what few past successes pointed me. It’s like a riptide, you have to swim perpendicular to the pull, otherwise you’re sucked out to the sea of your own stunted creativity. And yeah, you may die of starvation instead of drowning in your own mediocrity.

Course, here I am once more yammering about something that’s not what anyone would call humorous, probably risking losing those two dozen readers’ attention, maybe yours too, all because I want to keep mine. If you were expecting some punchline to cap this rant off, well, just not feeling funny today, I guess, my apologies. Again. Maybe next time….