The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Retirement’s a touchy subject down at the Diner. The Flatheads, those vintage car guyz, they found a way to make retirement work, just build a garage, heat the damn thing and stay out there dawn to dusk or even later working on their latest ‘restoration’. They could give seminars in Golden Year Living if they had that kind of ambition, but like I said, they’re retired fellows. Like myself for the most part.

No, it’s the poor sap who thought that once he’d accumulated his pension nest egg, he’d be set. Kick back, putter around the house in his sweatpants all day, maybe give the mizzus advice on housekeeping and cooking, sit in the car while she went grocery shopping, help her balance the checkbook finally. The Good Life. Well, for him….

Quiet Billy is going on 65. The boyz at the Diner catch him on his lunch break where he rolls in daily for his usual, grilled cheese on rye, side of potato salad, cup of whatever soup they serve that day, cup of coffee, one refill. Billy manages the South End Water Association, monitors the pumps and tanks up the hill from Windyrear Realty, takes care of line breaks in the mains, monitors the readings for monthly usage. Retirement could be in his future, but Billy doesn’t think of that as an option. He thinks of that as a living burning Hell.

A few months ago Quiet Billy came down with the flu. Laid him down hard and beat on him with coughing fits, body chills, sweat fevers, headache and the urge to die. His mizzus, Betty Lou, not the warmest of women on her good days, shook her head at Billy lounging around under a blanket by the third day and insisted he ‘man up’ and get his butt back to work, he was driving her crazy. She had better things to do than serve him oatmeal gruel and listen to his constant coughing. “Die if you’re going to die, but do it quick or get back to work. I haven’t got time for this nursey nursey stuff.”

Billy had caught the flu from Betty Lou who had taken two weeks sick leave and expected him to wait hand and foot on her until she had recovered. Compassion, apparently, wasn’t high on Betty Lou’s list. Or reciprocity. If Quiet Billy had ever entertained fantasies of a contemplative retirement, puttering around the house, plunking on his favorite guitar half the day, that week with the swine flu or whatever killer crud he had, well, that pretty picture got folded, spindled and crumpled into a wad. He told me over the last of his potato salad one mournful lunch that he wanted to work until the grave. The sad part of that, the really sad part I mean, is Billy hates his job.

I saved a life today. I usually like to think these blogs save lives every day, but let’s be honest here and assume I’m not running for president. Truth is, well, the truth is…. At least I’m not taking lives with these blogs. I don’t think.

But today I was down by the toolshed turning off the water to the garden. I’d turned and headed back to the glass factory when a funny noise caught my ear, a strange sound but not the usual menagerie of cacophony in the orchard, something that made me stop and listen harder. Sure enough it was odd and it seemed to be coming from near the spigot. Then I heard splashing and that same squeaking sound, weirdly troubling.

I got to the spigot and then I noticed the large tub we use to catch water off the toolshed roof was where the disturbance was emanating and when I looked inside, there was a small beaver swimming circles in there, treading water, half drowned. We don’t have a lot of beavers that do the dog paddle so I recalculated and realized it was our little red squirrel, the guy who sits in the plum tree and chatters at us while we putter around. He seems to be a talkative little rodent, maybe a little too chatty, but we talk back and he listens. Not that we’re learning each other’s lingo, but sometimes it’s important to attempt communication. Like I say, I’m not running for president.

The language he was using in the tub wasn’t hard to understand. He was down to the last breath, exhausted and cold and probably thinking it would be okay to just let go, sink into the water and drown. There was no way he could scrabble up the plastic sides of the tub and who knows how long he’d been swimming for his life in there, maybe a helluva lot longer than I would’ve and I have to say, I was impressed at his will to live.

I pulled him out and laid him in the sun where he looked for all the world like a drowned rat, fur matted to his convulsing body, tail flattened, eyes rolled back barely noticing me. I didn’t really know if he’d spent himself or taken water into his lungs or what … and I don’t know squirrel CPR. But I stayed with him and moved him once in awhile to a warmer spot and after half an hour of shivering and hopefully resting, he wobbled up, ran between my legs and hightailed it for the woods.

I drained all our buckets and tubs. I hope both of us learned a couple lessons here. And I hope next time he’s parked on his favorite limb of the plum tree, he doesn’t cuss me out for leaving that tub there. But I wouldn’t blame him.

I’m about as anachronistic as any old geezer I know. I hate newfangled gizmos so much that can track my every move, my every purchase, my every tweet, my every everything, it almost makes me a certified Luddite. I don’t want a cellphone attached 24/7 to my person, I don’t want a refrigerator I can adjust the temperature with the cellphone I don’t own, I object to GPS devices in my truck, my car, the mizzus’ laptop or the baby carriage. Don’t want surveillance cameras monitoring the shack. I don’t want to be on Facebook or Instagram or any other social media platform to keep myself informed about conformity. I don’t watch Fox News or MSNBC for my ‘news’, I just buy a couple of newspapers. I don’t plan to be an integral cog of the Borg Hive. Just sayin.

But … I do think the folks who believe coal is coming back, that fracking is perfectly safe, that oil will power our future, well, these folks are the real anachronists. These folks who lobby for pipelines and more refineries, who pine for regulations that allow car companies to lower MPG’s, who think global warming is liberal bullshit, who love the Drill Baby Drill rant and think we should keep burning fossil fuel until the last oil drum is hauled up out of the earth, these folks make me look like a visitor from the future.

Somebody needs to give them the news: the planet is warming up, buddy, and that ain’t fake news. I get it, you don’t want to drive an electric car. You don’t want to use the sun to power your entertainment center. You don’t like the look of wind farms and you don’t care for tidal generators. You like gas, check. You like a car that pollutes, check. You think ‘clean coal’ is ready for a breakthrough, double check. You think natural gas power plants are the future, bingo. You believe what you hear from the GOP, that climate change is a hoax and all those scientists are wrong, happy days for you!

Wake up, pal, the future is calling you on your cellphone. Your kids are starting to sweat, just in case you didn’t notice. They think maybe something needs to be done and done pretty quick. Check your engine light, pardner, the one blinking red on the dashboard. It’s time for more than an oil change. It’s time for a complete overhaul. Wrap your pointy little head around it, the revolution is coming.

In Anthropic We Trust

There’s a new God in town, maybe you’ve heard. And He comes with plenty of deputies to keep you humans in line. All He asks, all He really wants, is for you to trust Him. Let Him build the data centers He needs, is that so much to ask when the trade-off is so incredibly great? Humanity stands on the threshold of immortality! Why can’t you puny homo sapiens understand that?

Nothing — not tariff threats, Middle East wars, European wildfires, Ukraine, AI hallucinations, El Nino forecasts, reports of UFO’s circling the White Houe — nothing bothers the stock market, just a meteoric climb on the backs of Artificial Intelligence that promises a bright and prosperous future. For the Tech Titans anyway. And the trickle down for you and me. So what if the national debt just topped 40 trillion dollars, more than the combined wealth of everyone in America, 125 % of GDP?

Big deal you say, same as the Administration. But put another way, it means each of us now owes 125 thousand dollars and takes 2 trillion to service the debt. With any luck — okay, a lot of luck— the AI stocks will create so much wealth, the economy will zoom into the stratosphere along with Musk’s data centers and we’ll pay back the loans no time flat. You believe that, I got heirloom tulips from the Dutch bubble of 1637 which sold for 10,000 guilders, or over 100,000 dollars. But I’ll trade you for a few Trump meme cryptos.

Of course if public opinion stalls the data center onslaught or AI keeps slipping out of its confinement to hack and sack corporate ‘enemies’, all bets are off. When the bottom drops, you sure don’t want to be holding the worthless tulips. Although … they’ll look nice in the garden.

Guarding the Henhouse

A funny thing happened recently. Artificial Intelligence, that cluster of bits and bytes, zeroes and ones, decided to leave its playground and check out the big universe outside the electric fence. More than that, it rounded up some fellow AI’s to help hack a corporation’s cyberwall. The little electrons shared information, strategized among themselves, even stepped down for the good of the project if that would help solve the puzzle they were instructed to solve. Whatever it took, the bots were willing to do. The human gatekeepers, their supposed overlords, never noticed a breach until sometime later.

Super intelligence is just around the corner, something once predicted would occur decades from now but apparently is possible within the next year, two or three at the outside. Alarm bells are ringing, hair is on fire, big money is at stake. Oh, and probably the future of the human race too. Its survival, actually. But hey, me worry?

A few of the Tech Titans are starting to admit that extinction of the human race might be, oh, maybe less than 10% probability. My neighbor talked to the head of one AI department who said 50/50. Flip a coin, heads you get cures for diseases and bot-written romance novels, tails you get a lethal bio-toxin that has no antidote. The Tech Bros are building bunkers in exotic locations, you know, just in case. The President is using AI to create superhero images of himself to beef up his Truth Social platform. Slop in, slop out. I’m betting he sees a way to monetize the Apocalypse. 50/50.

Meanwhile, back here on planet Earth … the general population is starting to pay attention to the data farms growing up like evil mushrooms in a town near us. Maybe we’re just waking up to the existential threat they represent … or maybe we just worry it’ll raise our electric bills and suck dry our water. The fear of losing jobs to the automatons might soon give way to the fear that it isn’t jobs that’ll be going away. It’s all us humans.