The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was wandering through the real estate ads of the Crab Cracker today, gobsmacked as usual by the prices, just this side of Monte Carlo beachfront, when I happened on a listing touting the house and property as located on the ‘coveted NW side of the island’. Now, you and I know this is real estate hyperbole, granted, but c’mon, once you’ve been to the maybe not exactly coveted South End, you can bet your last million dollars that the North West side isn’t on the radar of retiring hedge fund CEO’s. Not unless they have stock in the Whidbey jet manufacturers. God almighty, the decibel level has got to be twice the volume of the Wall Street trading floor from those roaring Prowlers or Growlers or whatever they’re called this current cold war. You can forget about outdoor picnics on the lanai overlooking the smoke hazed island where those jets take off from Ault Field, nobody can hear what anybody says over the roar of that military might.

Windy Rear Realty has to hype its listings, I get that, but lately, it hardly seems necessary. Our neighbor to the south put his hacienda up for sale at a cool two million. The local realtors lowballed them so they went with the heavyweights from Seattle, sharks in the shallows here, pumped the price up to that 2 mil and sold it … get ready … in one day. To the first person who took a gander. Sure, I suspect they realized they could own adjacent to our own Shangri-La-La, the picturesque and slightly leaning shack glistening with stained glass and scattered lawn antiques, a home for those who yearn for the rural ambience lost up on the north end, but yours for the slightly inflated price that South End living offers.

This, my friends, constitutes the moniker ‘much coveted’. From here on out, let’s do a little fact checking before we claim that title for the high decibel north end.

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Our fiddler in the South End String Band is a professional luthier. Makes violins, violas, cellos, all in the style of the Master, old Stradivarius from Cremona, Italy back in the 1600’s into the 1700’s. Once I asked if he ever made instruments out of other woods than the ones Stradivarius used, almost all fiddle back maple and spruce top, maybe even dye them blue for an eye catching effect … and I got this look you’d give a kid who had just asked something so incredibly stupid but don’t want to hurt the little fellas feelings too much. “No,” he told me, “I’m trying to sell these things. You think somebody in a large orchestra is going to want a violin made out of plywood or painted orange? They want a Stradivarius. Or one that has the same exact dimensions and hopefully the same sound.”

Now understand, I was just embarking on a quixotic journey into amateur luthiery myself. I started with banjos but eventually I slipped into guitar making. Trouble with me is, number one, I didn’t plan on selling them and number two, being a so-called artist, I didn’t plan on setting up an assembly line to make multiple copies of the same damn instrument. But yeah, I understood what he was telling me, I just couldn’t apply it to myself.

“So you’re telling me every violinist in the world really wants the same violin?” And apparently, with minor variations, this is true. It would be as if every client of mine looking for a stained glass window insisted that the one I made back in the beginning, nice as it might be, was what they wanted for their very own bathroom. Same color, same design, looked good then, looks good now. How soon can I deliver that thing?

This, I think, is the curse of success. It induces imitation, repetition, redundancy and finally a constraint on innovation or creativity. My fiddler isn’t trying to reinvent the instrument, he’s trying to sell the damn thing. My guitars, well, they’re no doubt unsalable. But they are unique. Idiosyncratic, maybe even a little on the insane side. Sound holes on the side, double holes on top, art deco details, different woods on every one. And no, they aren’t Stradivariuses. And no way is our fiddler going to make a blue one….

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Yeah, I thought it was a fake news story, some halfwit click bait pitting two giants of the tech industry in a cage match, kickboxing themselves until one or both succumbed to blows to their fat heads. But no, these two are engaged in a back and forth social media chest pounding, no holds barred, your mama’s uglier than my mama throwdown. There’s even talk of a pay-for-view match in Vegas.

These are the people who control your destiny, adolescent testosterone-overdosed schoolboys, punks with too much money and too little maturity, stuck with some sadly huge lack of self-esteem, hoping maybe to impress the prom queen. With bush league deficients like these mapping our digital futures, what’s to worry about? I mean, try to picture Albert Einstein challenging Thomas Edison to a boxing match, see who’s got the biggest swinging dick. But this is the pathetic state of our own local geniuses, two clowns calling each other names, thumping their fists on the ground, grunting like gorillas in tweets and taunts. C’mon, seriously?

Why not a game of chess, maybe? Or a duel on Jeopardy? Not manly enough? Not sufficiently primitive for ya? Real men would use pistols at 20 paces. You boys afraid of mortal injury? Are you cowards? Put your billions where your mouths are, I say. Fight to the death. From where I sit in the pay-for-view stands, any result would be a good start.

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I’ve always maintained, rightly or wrongly, that if necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is the midwife of art. Most of my artist pals would probably disagree, but I can only speak for myself. If I were busy with a job or a family or any of a countless other enterprises, I doubt I’d stay up late to find the time to make art.

Course my pals would point out that I somehow chose art over careers and family and all the rest and I’ll grant the point. But … I suspect it was my laziness or contrariness that kept me from those and so ultimately I ended up living hand to mouth with part time jobs, as a recluse on this American backwash, too much time on my hands, not enough TV maybe, but eventually succumbing to the siren song of art as a cure for ennui. I sure didn’t intend to be an artist anymore than I planned a career as a business executive.

No doubt there are plenty of folks who do — just not me. A friend of mine who rode cross country moving his divorced daughter from Seattle and Gomorrah back to Madison, Wisconsin with me for four days told me us artists with our mantra that we’ve found the perfect ‘job’, one that we love and doesn’t even really qualify as ‘work’, just screws it up for the people who need to take some crappy job in order to live, to raise a family, buy a house, all that stuff we call the American Dream. They don’t need to hear some yahoo like me telling them art isn’t work, it’s a passion, gee, just find your own passion and you’re all set.

Bullshit, he says. You want society to operate, people have to work jobs that they’re, no way, going to be passionate about. But they’ll be fine, even fulfilled. Shut up, he told me, giving folks false hope.

So … I’m telling you, if you’re not bored, be happy. Life is good. Sure, us artists are probably passionate, but maybe not happy. If I’m bored, rest assured, I’m not contented. But if you think I’m going to get a job, don’t kid yourself, I’ll just go make something, keep myself busy. Not saying that’s what everyone else should do….

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Not too long back I got myself invited to a ‘men’s group’. I guess I thought it was mostly a drinking society startup but after the first couple of drafts up at the new bar at Terry’s Corner, the Tippler or some name like that, the conversation detoured from politics and art to subjects on the decidedly morose side. Meaning, our old friend Death, capital D. Gotta say, I was a bit blindsided by the change of topic but these were mostly old geezer friends and they didn’t seem too perturbed, so sure, let’s get Serious.

Serious is not my usual mode for coping with life’s problems. And certainly not the End of Life, which seems to me, is the solution for all the others, welcome or not. Crazy Eddie, fresh off a brush with the Grim Reaper and sporting a new pacemaker, avowed as how he wouldn’t mind sharing some insights after his near death experience. Bobby, having just received the bad news that his chronic back pains would require major surgery, said he was In. When Ralph, the head organizer, looked over at Phil, Phil shook his head wearily. “I don’t know, Ralph.” Phil had lost his wife a month earlier to pancreatic cancer.

Ralph bored in. “Do you a world of good to unburden yourself of some of that grief. What harm would it do?”

One by one Ralph roped them in, old fellas like himself, probably frightened of the waning light … or whatever poetic metaphor keeps the dark glasses off. Of course he had a reading list, most on the subject of How to Cope with the Big D, a syllabus, apparently, for those of us in the Final Stage.

Ralph no doubt will assume I’m in denial. And who knows, maybe I am. But I’ll be damned if I’ll spend one lousy hour of whatever time is left to me on this green planet sitting around with my geriatric pals talking about coping strategies for death and dying, I don’t care how good the beer is. Worst case I’m gonna find some younger friends to drink with.

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