The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old buddy Marco is getting evicted four days from now. He’s got a court date to tell a judge why he shouldn’t be thrown out on the street for not paying his rent. He’s not paying his rent because he hasn’t worked in half a year because his knee is blown out and L&I won’t pay for an MRI to see what’s wrong in there. He has a court date with L&I too, but by then he will be evicted.

Marco’s girlfriend, his latest, isn’t working either. She has a 3 year old child that she’s taking care of for her daughter and yeah, you probably guessed it, the daughter is too drug addled to take care of her own kid. So Marco and Debbie take care of the tot. The hard –hearted among us will no doubt see this as just another story of the poor making bad decisions that lead to them becoming poorer. And they got a good case.

Marco’s planning to move his and Debbie’s stuff out of the rental house this weekend, haul it to a storage unit that costs $150 a month, then go stay with his brother out of state until they figure out which end is up. I think I already know which of their ends is up, but here’s the kicker. Marco wants to adopt his girlfriend’s granddaughter. I mean, why not? He can’t afford a place to live, he hasn’t got a job and he doesn’t have any viable prospects for one. His girlfriend, if history is any indicator, probably won’t be with him long and he wants to adopt the kid.

Marco has a good heart. His trouble isn’t his heart, although judging by his physical condition, that may not be totally accurate. His trouble is his brain. He keeps making dumb decisions. He walked away this year from a house he owned with his ex that they sold for pennies on the dollar because no one would clean up the pigsty they’d made of it. Marco probably didn’t care; after all, his ex was going to take what profits were left from any sale. And did I mention Marco found his way into opioids and finally heroin? No? Well, there you go. Gateway drugs. To poverty.

I wish Marco all the luck in the world. The trouble is, most of it will be bad. You know it, I know it, probably in his lucid moments, Marco does too. The man is 60 years old and driving off the road into the scenery. If you wonder where the homeless hail from, well, some are from the South End. I just hope that 3 year old kid he wants to adopt gets a break. But the poor, often times, do get poorer.

Back when the Stanwoodopolis Gazette was still, more or less, a viable newspaper — even if it only published once a week — I thought it would add some zest to the Letter to the Editor to run myself, Skeeter Daddle, for Island County Commissioner. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t developed dreams of grandeur or plans to use my influence for personal profit, maybe hold the office for a term, run for the Senate, all stepping stones to the White House and immense wealth. Sure, okay, I had been asked by some politico in Island County politics at some event if I was indeed the infamous Skeeter D., and when I mistakenly admitted that yes, I was the very same, she asked if I would consider throwing my hat in the ring for Commish.

Anyone who knows me would break down in tears of mirth at the idea of my battered hat tossed into the political arena. Which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with my deteriorating hat. As I told the good charwoman, if nominated, I would not run, if elected, I would accept the salary … but no, Skeeter was not the standard bearer she was hoping for.

Nevertheless, it put the idea in my head to send letters to the editor, John, a friend of mine who took my bus driving route years prior, some supporting my candidacy whole heartedly, and the following week, some apoplectic that anyone in their right mind would consider voting for this total moron. John could see where this was headed by the second or third letter, a pitched battle on the editorial page for and against a candidate who wasn’t actually running for any office.

“We have a policy to run every letter,” he explained sadly over the phone. “But this will only cause confusion and mistrust. I’m asking you to cease and desist. Please.”

As the sort of guy who would take an inch and stretch it into a kilometer, I hated to drop the hilarity, April Fools every week. But I did. Looking back all these years, pre-Fox News, bogus social media, fake journalism, all I can say is I was man ahead of my times. Just didn’t have enough sense to monetize my prescience….

Roll over Gutenberg, let Google give you the news! Amazon recently set a limit of 3 books per author on their website. 3 a day. One of our local libraries has set aside an AI-Free Zone strictly for books written by humans. I just listened to a dozen you-Tube videos of an old delta blues musician that were all written and sung by AI. Fooled me.

How long do you think it will be before most writing and most music will be AI generated? A year? A decade? You want to write a mystery novel, just pick a style, a favorite author, you can crank out an entire series, dozens , hundreds, only have to wait a day to post the next 3, means you could publish over 1000 a year.

If you think it’s easy to tell a computer generated artwork, be it poetry or novels, movies or music, think again. Even in these earliest years of Artificial Intelligence, the baby androids are really very proficient at mimicry. If you think imagination or creativity are some sort of evolutionary zenith, maybe even God-given, no way will some machine intelligence paint a Guernica or write Crime and Punishment, maybe just jingles for cereal commercials or mediocre sitcoms for Netflix … you’d be lulling yourself into optimistic complacency.

Two years ago I heard an NPR report that asked AI to write new lyrics for America the Beautiful, which it did in less than a second. The radio hosts were wowed by the speed then mocked the lyrics as second rate at best. Pardon me, but they were no worse than the originals from where I sat listening. The Delta blues songs I heard last month were great, lyrics, instruments, vocal, video. I didn’t know they weren’t human produced. My bandmates didn’t either when I sent them the links.

Most art springs from the art that precedes it. Already there are plenty of my fellow artists using AI to “assist” them in their work, you know, let the android do the tedious grunt, we’ll provide the creative spark. It won’t be long we’ll see the students surpassing us mentors. Creativity isn’t proprietary for us humans anymore. Although … I bet we will still sign our name on the canvas. Who’s gonna know the difference?

The toilet won’t quit running, she says, so I say I’ll take a look. I pop the tank lid and the gizmo that regulates the inflow, hell if I know what it’s called, is spurting water out the top and I wonder if that’s normal or not. The ball float on its brass lever has been bent down multiple times but now it keeps the tank so low the crap won’t flush completely when you pull the handle. The mysteries of plumbing, I sigh to myself and head to the hardware store for a replacement gizmo, full knowing this is only the beginning of what will probably be a series of cascading plumbing issues.

I decided back in 1974 to be a homesteader. I had no interest in a career or a traditional marriage or a bourgeois lifestyle, not me, not that kid who wanted to blaze a new trail, make the world his own, leave the suburbs of his folks’ last few moves behind. I wanted to be a writer maybe, a school bus driver probably, an itinerant worker of dozens of jobs but none too long, plenty very short. So we hauled our hippie asses up to a farm in Northern Wisconsin and planted a garden, pumped our water, built our outhouse and left mainstream America in our wake. But it doesn’t take long to realize how ill-equipped for that alternative lifestyle you are, about the first truck repair when it won’t start and you have no idea whatsoever how things work. How an engine combusts, how to frame an outhouse, how to fix a pump, how to repair most anything and everything. When you’re poor because you don’t have jobs that make money, you best believe you will need to learn all those skills you didn’t learn in the suburbs and I don’t mean calling the repairman.

I got hold of a mail order correspondence automotive course’s books, studied them and began to learn auto repair. The army pickup truck I bought from some sweet lady who turned out to be a used car salesman’s daughter gave me ample opportunity for hands-on experience. School of Hard Knocks and Knuckle Busting, the very definition of a continuous education. When I bought the shack here on the South End, my graduate courses came fast and furious. Well pump repair, chainsaw use and maintenance, small engine diagnoses, house framing, electrical installations, furniture building, plumbing, concrete work, tree felling, woodworking, remodeling, you name it, I took the exams, sometimes failing, but after a few attempts, passing even if barely.

Over the years I added additions to the shack, rooms out the back, a kitchen off the front, a dormer upstairs. When I learned stained glass I built a shop back in the woods far from the prying eyes of the building inspectors. I built a sailboat in 1990 or so, built some kayaks, built plenty of outbuildings on the 7 acres, then built our house up on the hill. I guess I’d learned enough to feel confident to tackle a two story building, although I will tell you, most of it I learned along the way, reading the week or night before how to California frame a corner or wire a 3-way switch or plumb a vent for the toilet or tile a bathroom floor or caulk in windows or hang an overhead fan. Took me two years working most every day. Learned how to build a door, lay hardwood floors, build cabinets and bookcases, all this from library books before Google came along. It was hard. It was also the most fun I ever had, this building our own house. It was, like all the hardscrabble stuff that homesteading requires, the building blocks of my life, the life I wanted to build from scratch, the one I would call my own.

So I’m down under the toilet hacksawing apart the threaded pipe that holds the gizmo that’s leaking for no apparent reason, catching the water left in the reservoir, most of it, the rest running down my sleeve. Yah, it’s a funny life all right. Things fall apart, entropic as always, and who ya gonna call? Me, I’m not calling anybody.

The era of door-to-door sales was, or so I assumed, relegated to the distant past. Tinkers from the 1800’s, Avon and Fuller Brush in the 20th Century, thieves in my ghetto neighborhood selling stolen TV’s and stereos in my urban nightmare days, encyclopedias and magazines, cutlery, gyppo loggers, the list is long but not long now. Until last night when I heard a rapping on the front door and found a uniformed young man introducing himself as a Pest Exterminator. As he explained more than a few times, he was in the vicinity, had clients across the road who needed his services and wondered if we might be looking for similar remediation of our mice, wasp, spider, ants, bats or any other varmint problem.

“I have traps and poison in the van already,” my Willy Loman explained, “so I could offer you a considerable discount since I’m here already.” I said that’s mighty generous but we’re doing okay so far. “Don’t you get mice?” he asked. I said we get all those things, it’s the country, kind of comes with the territory.

“You take care of those by yourself?” he wanted to know. Gee, maybe he’s guessing my age, calculating the geriatric decay and figuring this old geezer probably is past setting mice traps, just let the buggers run rampant in the house, maybe keep one room sealed and locked, live like refugees. But I told him yeah, I’ve kept them at bay so far. He told me again how the neighbors were signing up for pest eradication and since he was here, he could make me a helluva deal, then pulled out a price list of services. Curious, I took the laminated sheet and perused it for a bit, prices based on square footage starting at 400 bucks, then a monthly service of just under half that. I’m guessing the buggers adapt to the poison or mutate like bacteria no antibiotic will kill.

The kid wanted to know, since I obviously underestimated the threat to person and property if these rabid rodents and disease carrying creepy-crawlies managed to penetrate past my insufficient barriers, how long I’d lived here, no doubt thinking I’d just fell off the turnip truck and had no clear notion whatsoever of the danger we were putting ourselves in by thinking we could handle the scourge plaguing our neighbors single-handedly, probably city refugees.

I said 50 years come this fall. My salesman immediately concluded his next line of argument was probably doomed, unlike ourselves. He took back the laminated price list and asked if I wanted his bizness card, the price list he couldn’t leave with us. “Not really,” I said, but to hasten the removal of his shoe in the doorway, I said I’d take it. “You never know,” I said and he agreed whole-heartedly.

After he handed me his company card and wrote his name on the back, he turned to go back down the driveway to his van full of toxins, traps, poisons and god only knows what killing strategies. I said, “Wait.” Of course he figured, maybe, just maybe ….

“Listen,” I said seriously. “Do a good job with my neighbors’ rats and mice and all the rest. I sure don’t want them escaping across the highway. We got our own varmints, don’t need a mass migration.”

The kid nodded. “I’ll do my best.” I was pretty sure he would.