The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Haunting the near empty halls of our island library, I ran into an old friend, a retired librarian no less, both of us latter day bibliophiles in an era of Tik-Tok, short news blurbs, gaming videos, Facebook and all media non-literary. These days in the New Dark Ages feels like the few of us remaining are a small cloistered secret society, the last of the letter writers, book readers, newspaper subscribers and fact checkers — monks passing one another in the abbey, pausing for furtive conversations, careful that no one is listening.

After the usual How Ya Beens and Whatcha Been Up To Latelys, we slipped into politics, the War, the tired singsong of spectators watching a losing ballgame. Just before we threw in the towel and forfeited, she asked if I knew what kept her awake at night, what frightened her the most.

“Global warming?” I guessed, picking the first existential threat to our species that came to mind. Gee, so many options these days … we could go on until the library closed and still need to continue our list at the tavern next door, finally adding alcoholism to the dozens of societal ills that hide in our closet of anxieties.

“No,” she said, “and anyway, it’s really climate change, not global warming.

“So okay,” I asked, “what spooks you the most?”

And she said, “That Trump will interfere in the elections this fall,” whispering.

And here I was worried about the Iran War, the Android Apocalypse, global warming or however you want to label it, new Pandemics, nuclear holocaust, major droughts and wildfires, ginormous data centers coming to the South End or just about all of the above, now too big to fit in my little closet of night sweats. Not that further subversion of our short experiment in democracy isn’t alarming, but I still have hopes we’ll right the ship this Administration is busy drilling holes in its hull. Call me an optimist. Or call me an idiot.

I guess we all have our worst fears. All I know these dark days, there’s plenty to choose from.

One of my last public art commissions was for the new high school here in Washington State. This was during Covid, meaning our meetings were virtual on Zoom. My original proposal was for two 60 foot long murals, one at the entry, the other facing the main highway. Both were approved by my committee but subsequently overridden by … well, I never knew. The administration maybe. Or a school board. But as we say in the biz, back to the drawing board.

But first the project manager had to tour me through the building again, hopefully choose alternative sites which, oddly enough, weren’t plentiful. When we entered the library on the second floor, there were sidelights at the doorways and over the main entryway just below. About when we decided these might be appropriate sites, the librarian, curiosity aroused by intruders in her fiefdom, strolled over to inquire what we were up to. The project manager informed her we were considering placing artworks here in her biblioteca.

Now you might think this would be cause for some small excitement, possibly even mild interest in what sort of aesthetic enhancement … but then you obviously have not dealt with that public that is so prominently spotlighted in the nomenclature of Public Art. Our librarian, alarmed now at this invasion of her sanctuary, asked, “Why do we want this?”

Indeed. Why do we put art in our new buildings? Before I could posit a possible explanation, my project manager beat me to the punch. “Because,” she stated matter-of-factly, “we have 1% for art money and we need to spend it.”

Simple as that , no further justification, no fancy hyperbole on my part, just basic economics, skip the rest. Sure, I wanted to ask why my librarian thought books mattered, why maybe she became a librarian in the first place and not an accountant or why in god’s name did she think a philistine should be allowed to teach our kids.

Nope, I kept my mouth shut and drove home sadly, considering lopping off an ear. Art … mostly for the thick-skinned. Public art … only for us crazies.

Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

Haven’t you ever wished you could go back and ask the guy who invented the spinning jenny if he had foreseen where that small invention would lead? Did he figure all those weavers’ lives would be made easier with the advent of a machine that would take the drudgery out of their lives of spinning? That the world would be a better place if he could automate those tasks and have those folks run the machines that would ultimately do their jobs? If he could imagine a future of industrial factories and cities teeming with assembly lines, clogged with workers and choking on pollution?
Maybe ask Galileo or Newton or Einstein or Crick and Watson if they envisioned the future their discoveries would eventually create? Could Crick and Watson imagine cloning? Imagine gene therapy ? Imagine Frankenstein? I don’t know, but I always figured Steve Jobs and Bill Gates changed the world because they could see the world they would change it to, visionaries who imagined the future they would whelp into existence.

So when Gates was interviewed recently regarding his views on Artificial Intelligence, I was all ears. What would the guy who brought us the Digital Age think about his Revolution? Had he imagined computers we carried with us every waking hour of the day? Could he have imagined our social media? Did he ask himself if androids dream of electric sheep? Where did he think Artificial Intelligence would take us?

Well, he thought probably it would be a benefit to mankind. For example, he posited, robots on the warehouse floor would be able to see spills that humans might miss. They would also, he said, notice if flesh and blood workers had on their hardhats, thereby preventing potential OSHA violations and industrial accidents. He went on to list a couple more banal benefits of Artificial Intelligence and I guess maybe he hadn’t given this a whole lot of thought, probably busy with his Foundation work, but Holy Hal, what it seemed like was this dude missed the last bus that was going to the 21st Century. I was hoping his bubbly interviewer might ask him a few probing questions, but no, the world was in good hands if our super intelligent cyborg pals could mop up a floor before someone human slipped on a spill.

So much for the crystal balls of visionaries. Henry Ford probably just wanted to sell automobiles. He could have cared less about future automation and humans becoming cogs themselves in an industrial machine. Gates figured out how to market a computer, make it smaller and smaller, more and more ubiquitous, keep the software proprietary and cut the legs out from under his competitors. The future is mostly unintended consequences, judging by Bill’s astute commentary. The bad news is we’re going to be slipping on all those spills he missed.

I got a friend who’s a very good sculptor. When he couldn’t find clients or galleries or museums to appreciate his work, he blamed his lack of commercial success on the dearth of culture here in the Yew Ess Aye, a nation of philistines and nabobs, according to Ed. Fine art was beyond their limited aesthetic comprehension. And probably their checkbook too.

Ed worked in classic forms mostly but he also created modern work too. I have a few of his sculptures, some bronze, some plaster castings. The man was good at his art, I’ll say that, but like a lot of us artists, not so hot at self-promotion, networking or sales, totally different skillsets. Disillusioned with the American art scene and America in general, he packed up and moved to Europe where, he was convinced, his talents would not only be appreciated but remunerated. I guess Café Society sounded its siren call, good friends, fine coffees, excellent food and wines. The guy never made another sculpture, far as I know, but he found happiness, no small substitution.

You might think Ed studied fine art in some University to learn his craft. The truth is he was a painter when he moved to Seattle and Gomorrah where he bought a city log cabin and met a cute neighbor woman who had a young daughter. Knowing Ed, the woman was the draw. But he spent hours on the living room floor playing with the kid, and one of the amusements was making stuff out of Play-Dough, lots of stuff.

Eventually Ed substituted real clay for the Play-Dough, got himself hooked on creating clay sculpture, learned how to make wax castings and cast his own work in bronze where he’d volunteered his time to apprentice free for a foundry. Say what you will about his fiscal success, this is a great story, rags to … okay, not riches, but still an inspirational story.

And maybe Ed wouldn’t agree with me on this, an archetypal American story.