The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Folks ask me why I write these odd little vignettes of life on the salty South End. I always want to answer something like: Because I have to. I have no choice. Us artists love to talk that way. Mr. Picasso, Pablo … why do you paint? To live, my little friend, to live. We never say, So I don’t have to work, you damn fool, what did you think?

We’re an odd society, us Americanos. We tend to exalt the Artiste as somehow unique, special, a rare breed, a person on an exalted plane. Probably the result of mental illness or malignant non-conformity. Prone to alcoholism, drug abuse and extreme hedonism. Who suffers more due to sensitivities more painful than herpes and who dies an early death with only one ear remaining.

We seem to like the notion of Starving Artists. Only through suffering, I guess, can you break the bonds of normality and ascend into true inspiration. Maybe explains why we keep minimum wages low — we’re trying to help folks find their Muse.

Art is a form of insanity, we think. Why else would a grown yahoo live in squalor, risk the hostilities of friends and family and neighbors alike, all for a passion that rarely makes a living and is always an invitation to cruel criticism.

“Let me show you my newest painting. Be honest, what do you think?” Do you folks do that??? Would normal people do that??? And the sad part: artists are the very WORST at rejection. Every review, criticism, rejection and commentary is a verdict on their creation. On them! Imagine the neighbors knocked on your door and gave you a criticism of your kid. “Did a nice job raising Jimmy, pal. Spittin image. Too bad about that shoplifting incident and that pregnant no-account girlfriend of his. Next time maybe get a vasectomy. Just thought you’d like to know. By the way, my daughter, Jennifer, she just got accepted by Harvard Medical School.”

So why do we write … or paint … or put broken glass back together? I could lie to you, I could spin a web, I could wax romantic or philosophic. But the truth is if I didn’t, I’d go crazy out of sheer boredom. I’ll probably go crazy anyway, just not as fast….

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The mizzus said to me the other night, fed up and frustrated by folks’ disinterest in History, she was thinking of taking up pottery. She’s invested 40 years down at the Stanwoodopolis Hysterical Society and she feels like she’s swimming against an outgoing tide and no longer seeing shore. I know the feeling, but instead of helpful advice, consoling warbles or another pep talk, I said ‘Pottery? You think art will be any easier??”

I spoze she could make useful items. Make them aesthetically pleasing and add another cultural layer to the nettle farm here. Maybe sell a few downtown when the house and gardens are cluttered, barter with the neighbors, eventually market to the nurseries and galleries, set up the website and the advertising strategies, sell local and then watch Chinese imports undercut her beyond even paying for her clay.

Most folks don’t value what she does or what she might want to do. They don’t value artists or their art, history or historians, writers or literature, musicians or their songs. Folks who hope to make a living that way won’t. Nine times out of ten. Maybe 99 times out of 100. I could bitch and moan — and oh, baby, I do! — but to what avail?

The trick in life is to do what you love. If you need to make money too, good luck to ya. This society values money. Winners. American Idol or the NBA. You love history, you are one of the lucky few, however. Most people never find one damn thing they can be passionate about. That’s why we invented television and You-Tube. They don’t have anything better to do, nothing that fills their void with passion or joy or the sheer love of that thing that possesses them.

But the people who make music, who write poetry, who tell our histories, who make art, who dance and sing and celebrate, ask them if they needed to be paid to do it. Ask them if money was the reason. They do it to sing, to dance, to paint, to tell stories, to remember history. They are, without a doubt, the richest people on the planet. Starving artists? I don’t think so — they breathe the very air for food.

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I got a pal who wrote a really good book on the Barefoot Bandit, well researched, tautly written, humanely told. He’d hoped to parlay that into a movie with the Academy Award winning screenplay writer of Milk and J. Edgar, but something went sour beside the kidney pools of Hollywood and the movie lapsed beyond the internet interest expiration date. He’s holed up at his cabin on Orcas, doing what most of us artists do, waiting for the phone to ring.

Ten years ago I had breakfast with a local artist here on the South End. He’d just finished a huge mural at the new theater and their outside lobby of the restaurants that ringed the place. He was depressed, he said, now that the project was over. He couldn’t understand it, big artwork installed to great acclaim, good money, all good. And now he was depressed. He poked forlornly at his chicken fried steak. That project was a yearlong undertaking and he figured it would open the floodgates to more of the same. Fame and fortune would surely follow.

I gulped at my 3rd refill of coffee, set it down empty and said, “Post partum depression.” He looked at me with a mouthful of heart attack and said, “What?”

“You got the afterbirth blues,” I said with some authority. “You’ll look at the other stuff, the usual paintings, as piddly-ass. The big stuff as an adrenaline rush. When it stops, the rest seems blasé’ It’ll pass … or else you’ll get another big one.”

I just went two years in withdrawal. They don’t make methadone for this. There’s no cure. And there’s no prescription. You wait for the Next Project, cold turkey and sweating in the wee hours of the night in a blood fever.

Like I told Orcas Bob, you’d think it would get easier for us Old Hands. But it doesn’t. I like to think — when I’m partially rational — the hunger lets us keep an Edge. Too much success, we’d get fat and lazy. Probably go to socialite parties, get accustomed to the applause and the alcohol, then squiggle out the next artwork by rote and routine. Maybe we’re actually the lucky ones. You know … if that phone ever rings again.

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