The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My mama told me, way more than a few times: Go to College. The first time she told me that was after a buddy and myself made a deal with our neighbor to pull two of his stumps, I think for $10 a stump. Not being professional stump pullers – actually these were our first stump jobs – we had no idea how long it might take to dig around an old maple tree, whack off its roots with axes and hatchets, put a come-a-long on the thing and haul it out. Like pulling a giant tooth, how hard could it be?

Two days later, blisters on both our hands, we finally disgorged the monster stump. Nothing to it! Course, we had the other one to do and now we knew – and dreaded – the work ahead of us. But a contract was a contract, a handshake a handshake, even for us 15 year olds. So much for our summer vacation. Our neighbor gave us each 10 bucks and no tip, no bonus, no thank you. Four days of hard labor. My mother, on the other hand, had a tip waiting for me at home.

“What do you think you made an hour?” she wanted to know. “Not much,” I said, pretty bummed and very tired. I figured a quarter an hour. And yeah, don’t say it, I know a quarter was worth more in 1965.

My mom asked if I had any idea how much my father made an hour. Actually, I didn’t, not a clue, but I hazarded ‘fifty cents?” Mom, well, let’s just say she didn’t have the greatest sense of humor, especially not wise-ass son humor, so she cut right to her Lesson of the Day, told me he made 50 times what I just made, all because – and here was the crux – He Went to College.

Now, I didn’t tell her I’d eventually have my own stump removal company, hire a hundred kids to pull them, franchise the whole she-bang and become a millionaire when the stock went public. I just put my head down and said. “I got it Mom.” I did go to college but ended up working stump pulling wages at various dead end jobs before becoming a starving artist.

Today I was at an oral surgeon seeing about yanking a tooth too far gone for a root canal and crown. My doc came in, said hello, snapped on some blue exam gloves, looked in my pie hole and said make an appointment at the desk for an extraction while you’re paying for this exam. At most, 5 minutes. The bill came to $100. If you’re as expert at math as me, a college graduate, that comes to $1200 an hour.

So okay, Mom, happy now??

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I’m laying bets most of you were pretty weary of four long years of nearly incessant Trump Trump Trump. Maybe thought, oh boy, we get a little peace and quiet. After a year and a half of Covid Covid Covid, maybe not…. Now we got Kabul Kabul Kabul, another Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi. One thing about the internet, repetition is good, just hammer it and hammer it and yammer it some more until that migraine keeps any joy in life at arm’s reach.

Course, get ready for Climate Change. Every flood, every tropical storm, every heat wave, every drought, every wildfire, every sneeze, every everything, we will be inundated by a tsunami of apocalyptic warnings, ominous predictions, dystopian scenarios and future catastrophes.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree, this is the Existential Threat of our lifetime. Donald J. Trump, not so much. Covid, unless it morphs into a flesh-eating monster, not either. Afghanistan, c’mon, just another foreign policy misadventure we’ll forget as fast as Grenada. But the oceans acidifying, desertification spreading, coastal cities swamped, insects dying off, extinctions expanding, the tundra melting, pretty soon the drumbeat will look like the pathetic palliatives they are. You care what Kim Kardashian wore last week on the Riviera when millions of refugees are fleeing collapsed societies?

Okay, quite a few will care. Hell, quite a few would vote for Trump a second time, anything to keep from facing Hard Reality. Covid? Doesn’t really exist. Climate Change? Don’t make them laugh. But … a change, like Dylan said, it’s a’comin’. Probably a little late and a dollar short. Well, trillions of dollars short.

I wish I was more optimistic, I really do. Happy Trump’s gone, happy we left Afghanistan, happy I got a vaccination or two for Covid. But hard times are coming. And just between us girls, what Kim K is wearing, or not wearing, this season isn’t going to stop the glaciers from melting, but it does make my heart grow a few degrees colder.

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So ask yourself, if you refuse to take the Covid vaccine out of suspicion that the government or Bill Gates or Doc Fauci are planning to turn you into a robot or simply outright kill you, why would you believe that a veterinary de-worming drug would be just the cure and prevention for the virus? Because cows don’t get Covid? Or that Fox News runs a story touting its beneficial effects? Paranoia only runs one direction, apparently. Government bad, Trump good. If he says bleach would kill the infection, hell, drink a glass, be my guest.

We got plenty of South Enders here who think mask wearing is the equivalent of handcuffs, that vaccinations are mind control, that Covid is really a phony pandemic no worse than the common cold. They think those of us who buy into the conspiracy are nothing but sheep. And if we weren’t sheep before the injections, we will be after, slaves to Big Brother. Most of these folks, if they bothered to check, would find a smallpox vaccine scar on their left shoulder. Who knows, maybe that’s what’s happened to their logical thinking, the cowpox left them devoid of rationality. Okay, that’s probably not true except on far left media sites, but I know this, we don’t have smallpox ravaging our populations anymore. Something definitely to be said for that.

The truth is, if any of us believe in such things anymore, there’s no point arguing with folks about masks or social distancing or vaccinations or school closures, it’s a total waste of time and probably leads to arguments, fights, family breakups, divorces and eventually rioting in the streets. Show them videos of victims on ventilators struggling to breathe, show them that repeatedly, they’ll tell you more people die from the vaccines than the virus. You say the sky is blue, they’ll tell you that’s a libtard lie to hide the fact that the sky is the color of chemtrails.

Now we got governors who fan the flames, mandate against mask mandates, scream government overreach as they overreach, figure maybe they’ll be the next Trump. The Lt. Gov. of Texas blames the blacks for the Covid surge in the Lone Star state. Add a little racism to the pandemonium, why not? As long as we’re whistling in the dark, toss in a dog whistle too.

I got my vaccinations a few months back. I wear a mask, mostly to protect others, and it looks like I’m protecting folks who don’t want protecting, nothing to fear for them but nano-trackers and the common cold. When the booster vaccine is available, I’ll take that and the one after that and probably the ones coming from here on out. We might have won the battle against Covid if we’d all done the same, but hey, it’s a free country. Like my right wing pals like to say, Freedom ain’t really free. Ignorance is its own kind of prison. So go ahead, drink the horse drug. We’ll all help pay the ER bill.

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When I was a little sprout, we would make the pilgrimage back to my parents’ homes in Northern Maine. If Maine conjures up visions of lobstermen and weathered Cape Cod clapboard houses on the rugged Atlantic coast, let me disillusion you. Northern Maine is not scenic, not postcard picture whatsoever. It is poor, mostly peas and potato fields where the Great Northwoods threatens to reclaim its territory, some logging and plenty of drinking. Like a lot of America in the harshest climates, it belongs to another era.

Our grandparents’ houses, most of the time we went back, lacked indoor bathrooms. On my dad’s side, there was an attached shed off the kitchen and further off that was a two seater outhouse, which, if you want to be accurate, was sort of an indoor outhouse, something I’ve never seen before or since. My mom’s folks’ farmhouse sported an outdoor outhouse, one seater. They were potato farmers, living hand to mouth, and most of Gramp’s carpentry went into additions for the kids they kept having, not, apparently, for fancy double hole outhouses. That, or they were more private in their restroom etiquette.

What we had when we visited was a thundermug. You see em in antique stores now, usually an enameled metal pot with a lid but sometimes porcelain for the Martha Stewart crowd of the early last century. When we came to the South End, we had a working indoor toilet, something folks usually inquired about before they visited the first time, relieved we were so newfangled modern. But our stairs to the bedroom was nearly vertical so I did what my grandfolks did, I kept a chamber pot up there, emptied it every morning, no need to brave those skinny stairs you had to turn sideways to ascend or descend.

The last year or so the toilet in the shack kept backing up. I’m not going to shock you with tales of the attempted repairs, but I finally gave up. We had a few visitors (and ourselves) who stayed down there with apologies for the non-functioning toilet, but hey, here’s the thundermug, save you an accident on those stairs, no need to thank me. Which, I guess, might explain the diminishing number of guests this year.

But I digress. The point is, and yeah, I plan to get to it, the point is I finally decided to return to the 21st century whatever it took. Today I dragged out the old antique model and hauled in a new crapper, one that advertised itself as ‘pressurized’, whatever that means, but what I hoped would mean the contents of the bowl would rocket out at the speed of sound to somewhere else, not just swirl around and possibly flood over the rim like in the past. To be honest, my expectations of success were low. To be totally honest, I didn’t think I had a rat’s chance, but I really hate to admit to defeat and I really hated to go back to using my outhouse back in the woods, not that I mind, mind you, I just remember the woman who came to a studio tour a dozen years ago, desperate to use the loo that was out of order and ended up back in our spider infested one seater back in the nettle forest. Believe me, I never want to see a look on anyone’s face like hers when she was done. Some folks appreciate their modern luxuries. As you can see, I was doing this for them.

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Oh sure, Albert was smart, real smart, I’ll give him that. Knew a lot about relativity, black holes, time warps, all that voodoo stuff nobody here on terra firma cares much about, especially now that science is pretty much on the way out for half the population. So he says, yeah, like he’s a psychiatrist too, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Big whoop. Maybe he never heard that when you conduct an experiment, say looking for subatomic particles, the results change depending on the guy running the experiment. Same thing, do it again and again, but different result.

So okay, I tore down my last acoustic guitar I built over a year ago, pre-Covid, don’t ask me why, I just did, all right? I’d built 5, figuring the next one would be an improvement, and the one after that might be, well, maybe not perfect or anything, but surprisingly good, possibly more than good, even amazing. Halfway through the teardown I felt Albert breathing down my neck, whispering his little litany about insanity and repetition and expecting better results, kind of like having some punk walking behind you with a stick after dark dragging it across a picket fence, ominous beyond reason.

I had hoped the lessons I learned from those 5 guitars might serve me well, but the first 2 didn’t, the first 3 weren’t much improved, and the 4th, well, it seemed worse. And here I was deconstructing the last one, making a mess of it, growing impatient, wondering why I was going to the trouble and listening to the ghost voice of Mr. Unified Theory of the Damn Universe, give me a break. At one point I almost smashed the thing on the shop table I was so pissed off at how it was going, maybe give Albert a quick review of the Big Bang or Galactic Entropy, but, being the mellow man I am, I just smashed some other stuff and plowed gamely on.

I will make no more guitars. How’s that for a learning curve? How do you like that for a definition of Sanity? The trouble is, though, you put your nose to something like this, give it your best shot, try to improve, try to learn from your mistakes, try to justify the hours and the days and the weeks you spent, only to come up short … and that little worm of failure starts to eat at you, starts to make you question all the other misadventures you tried, the other follies that seemed worth trying at the time but, in retrospect, seem, oh, silly or stupid or just incredibly wrong-headed. And then the worm digs a little deeper and you start to think maybe this is the story of your life, these wrong turns, these pratfalls of projects, this whole way of looking at things, until you stand at the edge of your own personal black hole, and yeah, okay Mr. Super Smart, you’re looking at what might be your own insanity, too late to change all the mistakes now, just line up those 5 guitars and listen to them not so gently weeping in your nightmares.

At least they’re not banjos. That would be a madness unendurable. Although I’m certain my next banjo will be a masterpiece….

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