The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s not uncommon down here on the South End to be at the leading edge of the breaking wave. So far ahead, actually, that those trailing behind misunderstand us. And of course misunderstanding leads to mistrust and mistrust leads to avoidance and avoidance leads to contempt and contempt leads to fear and fear leads to hatred. We artists understand this implicitly. Or at least we like to say that is why our work is reviewed with such negative criticism. We’re just ahead of the Curve. We’re misunderstood. We’re too sensitive for this world.

Just recently the Institute of Medicine called for a review of a malady we South Enders have lived with most of our lives, one that heretofore was considered, not a disease, but a psychosomatic condition. Those who have never known its symptoms easily viewed us as whiners and misfits, slaggards and sloths. We were treated as psychological lepers, shunned by our newly arrived neighbors and subjected to their silent scorn, just as those with depression and anxiety were once similarly abused before science substantiated the underlying root cause. We suffered silently, secure in the knowledge that we were victims of a disease little understood or studied by the medical community.

Until now. What previously was diagnosed by our decidedly non-medical neighbors to the north as chronic laziness or chronic fatigue syndrome has now been deemed a true physiologic pathology deserving of a proper name: Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID), a crippling affliction most of my buddies and me have lived with for years with little sympathy from our mizzuses. Well, guess who’s going to have to apologize now, eh, little Miss Critical?? And, with a kinder gentler healthcare system in place, maybe now we can get the care and treatment we need … and even a sizeable disability check to help us cope with our difficult lives.

So next time you see a South Ender balking at work or employment, maybe you’ll show a bit of compassion. All I can say is you better hope this isn’t contagious.

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I was chatting it up recently with one of the zillion artists we got proliferating on the petri dish of the South End.  Vanessa’s just discovered her bliss now that the kids have gone off to college and her husband has retired early with his dot.com stock options.  He apparently has found his bliss too, not as an artist, but as a gentleman farmer.  Which qualifies him as a definite minority down here.  Not the farmer part, just not being an artist.  I only know a handful of folks who aren’t.  Or who say they aren’t.  A rebellious kid in these parts, if he really wanted to rattle the cage, would smash sculpture or burn a couple of canvasses.  Declare himself passionate about accounting and wear button down collared shirts from the Gap.  Rad!

We got art tours on Mother’s Day weekend, we got plein air painters planting easels on bluffs and beaches any days it doesn’t rain, we got art guilds and art associations and art clubs and art scholarships and art meetings and art sales and art co-ops and art in all the public buildings and art in all the shops and restaurants and cafes.  There’s art in the parks, there’s sculpture parks and the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center was built by artists so they could advertise, guess what?   Right… art.

Vanessa was going great Gonzo about finding her spiritual center through her watercolor explorations.  Muse this, muse that, painting her way to Nirvana.  Being a cynical sort, I was NOT amused, no pun pretended.  Folks around here, like a lot of places, think artists are somehow special beings, a breed apart from the more common variety homo sapien.  They suffer more, they’re more sensitive, they’re more attuned to nature, they ‘feel’ more deeply.  They are entities set apart from the other, coarser beings who live a life less examined.  Or at least less explained, if I can extrapolate from Vanessa’s hymnal.

No wonder they have nervous breakdowns, these artists.  If I thought about myself and dwelled awhile with my deep sensitivities all the live-long day, I’d spend more time at the pharmacy than pushing a paintbrush.  Luckily, at least Vanessa and 90% of her hypersensitive hobbyists, art doesn’t walk hand in hand with poverty.  She’s happily unencumbered by fiscal anxieties.   Finding your bliss without sweating the groceries seems infinitely easier than digging for it under a stack of unpaid bills.

When the paintings fill her guestroom, she’ll just add another room or two to the hacienda for storage.  When all these Matisses we got filling garages and attics and basements leave their mortal coil for true Nirvana, the sudden inflation from all these masterpieces of deceased artists should make us the envy of Western Civilization.  Practically got the left coast annex of the Louvre tucked away.  That, or the thrift stores better get ready for a tsunami of donated art…. I know I got more than a few to give.

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