The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been watching the price of oil this morning. Started out at 18 bucks a barrel and last time I peeked, it was a buck and 32 cents. Peak Oil my butt. I was thinking of trading a guitar or three for a hundred barrels, store them in an underground facility I’m considering building, then wait for the prices to go back up to 40 or 50, then retire a rich oil magnate. If we actually drove anywhere in these pandemic plague times, l’d never buy gas again in two lifetimes.

Course, being a shrewd and savvy futures trader, I’m probably going to wait a day or two, let the price go into negative territory when there’s nowhere to store the oil being pumped this month and let them pay me top dollar to take the stuff off their hands. Forget the underground storage facility, I’ll stack them to the top of the fir trees. Seven acres of crude. Black Gold. Texas Tea. Well, the first thing you know old Skeeter’s a millionaire, kinfolks said Skeet, move away from there. Said “Californy is the place you ought to be” so they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.

Holy cow, Batman, I just checked again those oil prices. 20 cents on the barrel. You heard me right. Two dimes. Yep, the future looks bright. Not the oil futures, mine. Yours too if you get off the internet watching coronavirus updates and following Trump Tweets and get on the phone to your broker. If you don’t have a broker, I might be able to offload a few barrels to your patio or garage. Free delivery, just like my pals at Amazon. Course you need to sign up for Skeeter Prime.

Whoa, took another look at the oil price and holey moley, it’s down 35 bucks below zero!! Hard to believe, really, but there’s money to be made here for all of us, looks like to me. God, what a great country…..

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If you’re like me, you enjoy a daily dose of good conspiracy theories almost more than binging Netflix. Bill Gates was behind the development of this killer virus. China unleashed this covid-19 on the United States by setting it loose on its own people and watching it spread to the rest of the world. The Pandemic is a hoax and photos of overwhelmed hospitals are faked. The economic shutdown is a liberal attempt to socialize America. The number of coronavirus deaths is a lie to scare the nation and make us cowering sheep.

Me, I think we should create our own conspiracy theories. To that end, let me toss out the kernel of one and hope that you can expand on it, maybe find some convenient faux facts to accelerate the paranoia and possibly get this going viral. With a little luck we can catch the attention of some Russian bots and before you can say Right Wing Insurrection we have ourselves a full blown crackpot conspiracy with interviews on Rachel Maddow and sketches on Saturday Night Live.

My conspiracy theory is this: the Pandemic was a scheme by Donald Trump and a cabal from the military industrial complex with the full backing of Amazon to unleash it on the world. Testing was withheld to give the virus a solid foothold. To that end Trump put Vice President Pence and Kommisar Kushner in charge, insuring the necessary delays in counteracting the disease. The goal was to give the President his own daily talk show, presumably to update a frightened country on the pandemic’s progress, but essentially to give himself prime facetime. Every day, week after week, the President would Talk. When the pandemic reached a critical death count, the country would shut down, quarantined, with only internet and TV for outlets. President Trump would give a fireside ramble every day.

Add to that the bailout package cobbled together in a few short days. Trillions of dollars would be handed out to major corporations and enough small checks to each individual to make the larger handouts palatable. The country was in crisis! Money would be spent. Trickle down economics would save the day. Corporate welfare would be institutionalized.

And, if necessary, if this Pandemic roared back when red states restarted businesses prematurely, well, the Election might have to be postponed. Might even need to be, for the welfare of the country, put on permanent hold. After all, we would be at war. Thankfully, the General would speak to each of us daily. A grateful nation would listen to his every word. The Trump Show would garner the largest ratings in television history. The War on Germs would never really be won, but in the end, we will have met the enemy. And the enemy was us.

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Awhile back, deep in the recesses of a once fevered brain, I fell into a semi-coma building banjos. Started out as a whimsy, a little test to see if a raw amateur woodworker could possibly cobble together a musical instrument. I’m a banjo player in an old time fiddle band. Old time music, not old time players. Although, strictly speaking, I guess we’re geezers now some 20 years since starting up the band. So a banjo seemed like a worthwhile endeavor.

The first one was a curly maple model, brass tone ring, played okay and sounded, well, like a banjo. Banjos are, to the untrained ear, basically a banjo. Loud, possibly obnoxious, an acquired taste. The Band tells the joke about how I left mine in the truck unlocked when I went into a local store, realized my mistake and hurried back. Sure enough, my worst fears were realized and there, parked in the cab was another one someone had donated.

Me, I didn’t wait for some wag to drop their unwanted instrument on me, I just went ahead and built three more after the first one. Banjovirus! I don’t know how many banjos a man needs and science hasn’t studied the affliction up until now, but I can safely say 6, which is how many I have, is plenty. You might think once the fever died down, I would have a certain immunity, antibodies aplenty. But you would be wrong. You would be very wrong.

A year ago I fell into another trance after I had learned how to bend wood in a steambox repairing the oak ribs on an old 1920’s Alaska fishing boat and so naturally I got to wondering what else could I bend wood for. Who wouldn’t, right? And about that same time a buddy gave me a book about an Appalachian good old boy who made some of the finest instruments in the world in his crummy shop back in the hollers. If he could do it … well, one thing led to another and next thing you know I was bending wood for acoustic guitar sides and constructing gitboxes without much understanding of what, actually, a guitar really was.

I’ve always figured if you put your mind to it, most anything is possible. Right. So go ahead and build a cyclotron, why don’t I? People go to luthier school for years to learn the craft. They buy the proper tools, learn about the tonal qualities of various woods, study bracing strategies, all those esoterics. Me, I knew how to bend wood. And even that, trust me, proved harder when I began to experiment on figured exotic hardwoods that did not want to bend even after steaming.

I won’t bore you with my multitudinous mistakes. Suffice it to say I was in way over my head. Each guitar was unique so learning from the mistakes of the previous one didn’t necessarily offer hints on the next one. But dammit, I wasn’t trying to be a factory, I wanted an artistic design for each instrument. You know, a cyclotron that was a rectangle, then maybe a figure 8, see how the electrons behaved in a knot. I learned a lot. Trouble was, not necessarily how to make a great guitar.

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‘Whatcha been up to this week?’ my old pard Guitar Bob used to ask about every weekly musical session and beer binge. ‘Logging,’ I told him most every spring, at which he would let out a mocking laugh. ‘Oh right, logging. Paul Bunyan, right?’

Guitar Bob burns wood just like me, but he buys his wood already split and delivered after one long year of manhandling a maul that mostly manhandled him. We have cut up logs together, one time sliding down a ten foot high pile of stacked and snotty logs, but Bob is no logger. And despite his sneering cynicism, I am. Year after year I cut alders, maples, firs and deadfall back in the woods, buck it up, stack the slash, split the sections with an 8 pound maul I’ve prized for decades, haul it by wheelbarrow or garden cart up to the woodsheds and let it age for two years before burning it. We’re talking 10 or 12 cord a year, a cord being, for you not familiar with dendritic measurements, a stack 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet.

In other words 10 cord is a helluva lot of wood. And a helluva lot of work. So when Guitar Bob mocks me, I don’t find it amusing coming from a man who buys his wood cut and split. Paul Bunyan? Trust me, there are years when I feel like that, just wish I had a Blue Ox Babe to drag the trees out of the back 40. I’m turning 70 in a couple months. Those 10 cord get bigger every year and sometimes I think I could learn to envy Guitar Bob, just order up some aged maple, stack it in the shed and use my time for something more useful and way less strenuous.

So just when I get to thinking this way, a storm comes along and topples trees back on my trails and yeah, I could just let them rot, home to pileated woodpeckers and raccoons, but a couple years in and the woods would be a debris field of branches and impassable trails. This year we lost two huge maples in the last storms, the biggest with a trunk easily 3 feet in diameter. I own 3 chainsaws but none big enough to cut through the barrel of that base. Some of it is going to sit and rot, it looks like to this old timer. The rest is enough to fill one year of woodsheds, what I’m working on now and will be working on for the next few weeks.

The truth is I didn’t move out to the island to live an easy life. Maybe I thought I was the son of pioneers or just liked the fantasy. Maybe I just didn’t want a suburban or urban lifestyle, turn up the thermostat and watch TV. Maybe I really didn’t give it much thought, which is probably closer to the truth. It’s been 50 years now, cutting trees, planting more, burning firewood to keep warm, both the house and the studio and the woodshop. It’s so much a part of my life I usually take it for granted. Well, at least until every spring….

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