The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got an e-mail awhile back from an old girlfriend from my high school daze.  How she got hold of me is no mystery since it’s how a lot of folks get in touch these days now that we’re all on the great data bank of the internet.  She probably could’ve gotten my driving history, my credit rankings, my employment information, my political affiliations and hopefully my marital status with a few clicks of a keyboard.  No accidents, no tickets, no job, no credit rating, no kids, no tea party memberships.   One wife.  Happily married.  Very happily.

We had a nice and cordial correspondence in which, in a few paragraphs, we filled in the years since we held hands in my folks’ Buick and smooched in the woods near our place before I had to trundle off to my job on the second shift at the Coca-Cola Bottling plant in Northern Wisconsin.  She would soon be off to college while I would be two more years getting out of my hellhole high school.  She was really my first love, a platonic affair that was something we both could look back on and smile at, if not laugh out loud for how sappily sweet and innocent we were.  Outside the Amish community, those relationships are as unlikely now as a horse drawn carriage.

I don’t think she had any interest in one of those Facebook affairs or anything like that.  You know:  look up an old flame and see what they’re doing now that maybe we’re lonesome or divorced and the kids have moved on and our parents have died.   Send a few photos to see if we’ve grown a bad paunch or lost our teeth or maybe our smiles or gone to seed and old age.  If not, maybe make a date for dinner or drinks, fall in the sack, fall in love, give that 45 year hiatus a kickstart and see if our adolescent judgement was still okay.

Happens everyday on the internet.  Nothing to smirk about either, you ask me.  Love is a commodity in short supply these days and I wish folks the best at finding it, whether it’s a seedy bar or an e-mail to that kid they dated back in the good old days who went off with old so-and-so and found out 20 years later it was a bad marriage.
But it is odd to have the distant past come around the corner at you.  A sort of ‘what if?’ moment.  Not just what if for some imagined life with someone you knew when you were sweet 16 and never been kissed, but all the forks in the road, all the imagined possibilities one choice made unfeasible for all the others.  I am not immune to such flights of fantasy, having gone back to find a love thought lost, hoping beyond reason she would not be married, would not have kids, would not have a life real enough to make any fantasies of mine dissolve like a cold fog in a summer sun.  No, if anyone understands the impulse to go back, to take the fork not taken, you bet it’s me.  It is a rare thing to backtrack, to see the mistake and go back for a possibly well-deserved rejection, then to have it fall the way your mind’s eye imagined it, corny and uncynical, an old Hollywood love story nobody could sell today.

I’m fairly certain my childhood squeeze isn’t looking for anything more than some spark of nostalgia, a small suspended friendship from across the gulf of years, a gentle reminder that we parted friends, no hard feelings either, and went off to live lives totally apart and different from the other’s.  She does, after all, have a husband, kids, grandkids, a complete life in a small town near where she was born.  Teaches Sunday School at her church, goes to her kids’ weddings, just retired from her job even though her husband still has a year or two.  She’s not looking for a romance novel here.  Although the missuz may not be as certain.  And I’m not looking for a bodice to rip.  Unless it’s the missuz’s….

There’s nothing like reading about the future in the morning paper to wake you right up to Full Alert. This morning, buried among the scintillating stories of the Prince of England’s funeral and more mass murders, was the article about the company here in Washington state that was deploying its mobile lasers to prowl the agricultural fields at speeds up to 5 mph zapping weeds. I know what you’re thinking, probably those Jews in outer space that start forest fires in California, but let’s leave that for the Qanon folks to chew on when they get tired of wondering how the Donald never quite managed to penetrate the Deep State and the assault on the Capitol ended with him retreating to a mansion in Mar-a-Lago.

Part of the article concerned the plight of the poor strawberry pickers and the field workers whose low paying jobs might disappear when Artificial Intelligence Machines could pick apples or harvest cucumbers. Hello? I guess the writer thought maybe we should go back to the happy days of slavery and resume picking cotton by hand. The laser weeders would eliminate the need for pesticides, but hey, maybe that would cut down on oncology doctors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excited about a future of drones taking away good paying factory jobs or self-driving vehicles eliminating taxi drivers and Uber folks.

Now I know lasers don’t kill, people kill. And I suspect drones will be given all the protection the NRA can muster for their 2nd amendment rights to keep and bear arms. And if one of the weeding machines runs amok, well, that’s the price we pay for freedom. Just another unfortunate incident of malfunctioning technology, frequent but nothing that should be considered grave enough to ban automatic lasers in our suburbs when dandelions are taking over the fescue.

I was on the campus of the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, my old alma mater, down near the cafeteria I used to work at for 3 years, watching these little R2-D2’s at the intersection waiting for the students who had called in their pizza orders to come and pick them up. Pizza delivery folks must be weeping. But at least the boxy white drones weren’t armed with lasers. No tip, buddy? Try a small burst from the rear laser then, maybe you’ll remember next time. And have a nice day, kid.

My suggestion? Carry gratuities at all times. You don’t want to piss off a laser armed drone when they all start to ‘carry’.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the White House a caged animal paces back and forth, channel changer in clenched hands, howling for attention, howling for his twitter, howling hour after long hour. Imagine a prisoner held without food or water. It’s nothing, NOTHING, like the torture of this miserable creature denied access to Twitter where his every keystroke is available to millions of his minions. Hell has no fury like a Trump without tweets, bet your sweet biddy on that, buddy.

I feel for the man, I really do. No Geneva Convention can help him, no First Amendment will give him access to those lost and locked platforms, no Human Rights Watch will intervene. If this isn’t an enhanced interrogation technique, I don’t know what is beyond 24/7 rap music piped into his cell, drowning out Fox and Friends no matter how loud he turns the volume up on his big screen TV. If this is not torture, what is?

Well, maybe what we endured for the past 4 years. But shouldn’t that give us an enhanced empathy for what he must be going through down in his personal dungeon. The man’s oxygen is attention. He lives for the headline, the latest outrage, the gasps of disbelief. When the time comes for an accounting at the Pearly Gates, all those lies, all those illegal activities, all those attempts to undermine the Constitution will come back to haunt him, but for now, are we to be his judge and jury, no sympathy, no quality of mercy? Couldn’t we maybe let him on some right wing app for a few minutes, something to give him balm in his darkest hour of need? Oh, I know what you’re thinking, he separated parents from their children down at the border, why not give him a taste of that kind of horrendous severance, the man from his social media?

And yet … aren’t we better than some Old Testament eye for an eye revenge, and yeah, I know, it’s one of his favorite passages in his favorite book, but c’mon, we shouldn’t let ourselves descend to that low a level. I know he thinks waterboarding was just fine and it would be easy to inflict the equivalent. But we’re evolved beings, not fighting dogs, not CIA rendition operatives. Although … I would wager a month’s salary he won’t make it to the Inauguration Day ceremony with anything like a semblance of sanity. Not that I’m proposing an office pool. Just sayng…