The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Content Advisory: Readers should be aware that the following might contain adult language, sexuality, some light violence and possibly was processed with products containing peanuts. Reader discretion is definitely advised.

You would be amazed, flabbergasted really, gobsmacked actually, what you turn up when you spend days looking for something you lost. In my quest to find my lost funny bone, I searched high and low, near and far, under and over, in and out. I found stuff I hadn’t even remembered losing. In a suitcase up in the shack’s attic stuffed in an alcove I found old manuscripts, early poems and some photos of my ex-wife. I remembered why I stuffed them in a suitcase and buried it behind a couple layers of detritus and memories.

Downstairs, in a desk drawer that hadn’t been opened in about two decades, I discovered mouse-eaten letters from friends and from the mizzus back when I first moved to the South End. Sure, I saved em. And someday I’ll sit down and read them again, same as I did 20 years ago when I found them that time out in a box in the woodshop and brought them where I hoped the mice wouldn’t go nearsighted reading them in the dark. Handwritten letters, imagine! Now there’s a lost concept.

I found a couple of tools I’d mislaid, some plumbing parts I could’ve used when I searched for them a few months ago, an old outboard boat motor in the weeds where the blackberries were strangling it, a backpack I haven’t used in I hate to tell you how long, a couple of cameras that take actual film which is another Kodak moment but one that’s relegated to history. Back in the walk-in closet which is barely walk-in-able anymore there were boxes of photographs and slides. I started to dig through those, but geez, I could’ve gotten sidetracked for weeks and I was on a mission to find that missing sense of humor. Old photos would spin me into a cobweb of inescapable reverie I might not free myself from for days, if not months.

In the back of an old Hoosier cabinet I found some tattered pieces of my innocence. I’m not even sure how long it had been lost, but it sure looked like a long time. A long hard time if the tears and rips were any indication. Funny how you never really noticed it was gone until you stumble onto it and then, what good is it? Probably better if I hadn’t. There were old Boy Scout merit badges and little medals from some school in Georgia for some forgotten things those Southern Daughters of the Confederacy had thought important. I found my old I Ching yarrow sticks that I quit using back probably when my innocence was lost. I remember throwing them when I bought the shack, asking if I should take a chance on moving from my ghetto hellhole to a dilapidated house at the end of the world. It said good fortune would surely follow. Why would I quit the sticks when it predicted my life so accurately?

And of course I came face to face with my long lost youth one night searching the back rooms of the studio. Sometimes I like to think I’m still that same kid who moved out here back in ’77, the same optimistic yahoo who called up his old girlfriend and asked if she’d come out and live with him in a love shack in the woods by the Puget Sound with a view of the Olympic Mountains, the very same boy who never wanted to work for anyone, who kept searching for an alternative to the American Dream which didn’t seem like much of a dream to him, who really had no direction home, no direction at all, just a misguided faith in himself and a longing to be a country boy, a half assed Huck Finn who preferred being a bum to selling himself to some job he would hate but probably learn to accept.

I barely recognized him. And I’m sure he didn’t recognize me even though he had that imbecile grin on his face like something was funny but maybe only to him. It was just a brief encounter, sort of like a shadow you catch behind you before the sun drops behind the clouds and it disappears. But I was sure it was a younger me. You know it when you see it and there’s no doubt. None at all. Course, doubt is what made me lose him in the first place. Ironic, isn’t it?

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