The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Steve Forbert sang this back in my youth:
“Here’s to all the shitty jobs that I despise
Here’s to two-bit guarantees and other lies”
I guess I took Steve pretty much to heart in my wayward youth. Worked in a dog pound for awhile, taught school a bit, drove trucks and buses here and there, stripped furniture until the fumes got to me, cleaned Coca-cola bottlers and loaded their trucks, managed a University dining hall, spent one night in the local cannery shoveling corn husks out to a conveyor belt, tried my hand at carpentry, ended up on the graveyard shift weekends at the Everett hospital as an orderly. My favorite days were the ones when I threw down the shovel and quit. My least favorite were the ones spent looking for the next shitty job.

My folks thought I was mostly a slackard and a bum. Quitting was for Losers might have been the crocheted sampler on their kitchen wall, but fortunately for me, I’ve never been looking for parental or peer group approval. In 1992, I had had a dose of bad jobs, bad bosses, low pay and all the rest. We had decided the old shack we had lived in the past 17 years wasn’t going to outlive us and the mizzus was lobbying for us to hire a builder, get a mortgage and move into the modern world. I, of course, was terrified of a mortgage, a ball and shackle on my current job, the one I planned to quit as soon as possible, meaning, right now. So … I begged her, pleaded my case, swore I would build the house myself and even, so help me god, get permits and build it by code, a novelty for us after multiple illegal additions and buildings. No doubt in a moment of weakness, or plain pity, she relented and agreed I would quit my graveyard shift job, build the house and when it was done, make my avocational glass business a real occupation. And if it wasn’t ….? Well, that was the dagger.

The house took me two solid years, almost to the day. Hardest work I’d ever done. Happiest job I ever had. I worked 7 days a week, long days, lots of overtime, plenty of stress. You try building a house by yourself, learning plumbing the night before, electric from a book, most every step a new education. But day by day, nail by nail, the house rose out of the ground, a satisfaction that’s hard to describe.

And then the day came when it was finished. Time to make a living doing art or else it was back to the mine. I always thought artists should have a day job, if for no other reason they wouldn’t be forced to compromise their art for money. But … the opposite might be more true. Necessity might be the mother of creativity as well as invention. If you want to be an artist, nothing focuses the mind like the fear of those crummy jobs throughout the years and more to come. Poverty is okay. But it’s far better to be working for yourself and even better if that work is what you love. Quitting, sometimes, is the best strategy.

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