The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Welcome to the future, everybody, a virtual world where we all live on a computer and communicate by email or cellphone or just about anything other than physical encounters. Some of my friends (who apparently never met me) ask if I’d like to join them in zoom meetings. Last time I checked, my computer didn’t come with a built-in camera, meaning, Amazon and Google don’t get to spy on me. I even turned off the microphone after the mizzus and I had a conversation about a possible trip to the southwest and she instantly got a pop-up ad for motels in Phoenix. Just a coincidence? Or paranoia running rampant in the time of Covid? You tell me.

I just won’t be telling my eavesdroppers….

But because I am still a ‘working’ artist, meaning I haven’t made my semi-retirement a full time position just yet, I have a public art project that demands that I attend zoom meetings. Reluctantly I bought the cheapest camera made by child labor in some third world hellhole and spent a day trying to figure how to use it. Needless to say when the meeting started, nobody could see my handsome visage, fine by me, all they got was a disembodied voice without the Boris Karloff in a weird shade of pink only I could see on my own screen.

Since this was the first of a few more such meetings, I purchased a mid-priced spy camera that seemed to auto-focus and gave me a more human skin coloration than the previous piece of junk. The next zoom meeting I could see them and they could see me. Trouble was, if they could see me, they couldn’t hear me. If they could hear me, they couldn’t see me. We opted for the disembodied voice once more. Lucky them, I said.

Now I love technology as much as the next Luddite South Ender. Give me a new gizmo and let me spend hours figuring out what I’m doing wrong, what better way to spend a day or three? I have the next zoomer meeting coming up next week and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong that sound and sight aren’t synched. So I’ve decided to go without the visual. Course, I’m pitching designs for an art project, kind of falls into that visual category.

No doubt we’ll sort this all out. Probably after I lose the project. But for my pals who want to engage me in a zoom meeting, hey, call me on the phone. Landline only. Last thing I need is some cellphone I can’t figure out either…..

Most folks think homeless people live in the Big City. Seattle and Gomorrah. Portland. Stanwoodopolis. But that’s not true. There’s homeless people living everywhere — even the South End. If you’re the type of cautious soul who’d never pick up a hitchhiker, you’d never have met Stinky Steve. Or you’d think, even now, how mean it was to call Steve ‘Stinky’.
For those of us who DO pick up folks with their thumbs out, we didn’t call him that out of spiteful cruelty. Steve was genuinely, and I mean Full Bore, Head On, Hold Yer Nose, No Kidding, olfactorily displeasing. He had an odor part old B.O., part beer breath, part cigarette smoke and the rest I probably wouldn’t want to guess. I don’t think he minded us rolling a window down even in rain or cold weather. After all, those were his elements.

When I first picked him up, he was living in an abandoned shed a neighbor a couple miles north kindly let him use. He was on his way to work digging soft shell clams on the tideflats near Stanwood, or so he said. Later he lived in a pup tent near me and worked various jobs clearing trail or weed-eating the neighbors’ land for minimum wage. Some even offered him free use of their showers, but Steve wasn’t much for personal hygiene and always politely demurred.

Guitar Bob and me got to know Steve better than most. We used to play the 12 beer blues every Sunday night, and at some point Steve joined our little outdoor guitar duet, singing some ditty to our rambling fingerwork that always sounded oddly familiar. When some kids slashed his tent and strewed his meager belongings, Bob’s neighbors gave him a little trailer to live in … on condition he work around the place and go to Social Services and sign up for disability. Mental disability. They meant well, these Do-Gooders, but the end result of all this was that the State of Washington gave Steve a modest stipend that effectively resulted in Steve’s early retirement from the part time workforce and paid for his malt liquor without him having to work all day to earn it. Steve, predictably enough, had his alcoholism subsidized by the State. And we had a singer more and more off key, schnockered by the time we’d only started to warm up.
I guess the ditches beside the Road of Good Intentions are strewn with folks like Steve. We forget that not all of us want a suburban home, a square meal or even a hot bath. Some of us just want to be left the hell alone, to live our life a different way altogether, without sympathy, without a handout, without a whole lot of socio-psycho hand wringing. I’m not saying you should pick them up hitchhiking into town for their cigarettes and beer. I’m just saying they’re here, they’re not that crazy and they’re okay decent people. There’s no law that says they have to bathe.

Well, long story way too short, the good-hearted neighbors signed him up for computer training in Spokane, detox, three square meals a day and a life as alien to him as a heroin addict in a nursery school. Guitar Bob and I got a couple of letters, half computer hieroglyphics, half semi-sensible musings on his new life and about 2/3rds sadness expressed with a stiff upper lip. We never saw him again. Shortly after those letters he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Then we heard he died. Bob and I bought a 6 pack each and played our 12 beer blues long into the dark night for Steve, a fallen comrade, another loner on the sad old South End the newcomers won’t have to pass by as he stands in a cold drizzle with his tobacco stained thumb held out for the alms of a ride.

I have a modest proposal to make to the nation: let’s give robots the vote. You know they’re taking our jobs and beating us at chess, soon they’ll be driving our cars, controlling our homes, babysitting our kids, fighting our wars, building even smarter robots. They’re answering all our questions on our smartphones, coughing up our money at the ATM, running our power grids and running our lives. I say it’s time to give them the vote.

As usual I’m probably so far behind current events, not being a participant in what is commonly called Social Media — what I call gossip and bullshit — that maybe I’m actually out front on this one, history being a kind of closed loop where we are perpetually doomed to repeat our mistakes. Giving robots the vote might be the best way to break out of that cycle of boom and bust, peace and war, euphoria and depression. They are, after all, smarter than us. Not that it would take that much, judging by the last election. But these artificially intelligent citizens are soon going to be far smarter than all of us and I’m not just talking about folks who voted based on fake news reports. They might actually be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, something a majority of us now pretty obviously cannot. Or don’t choose to. Either way, the robots could and will.

Besides, let’s be honest, the robots are going to take over anyway. Maybe giving them voting rights now would enfranchise them. Might give them reason to appreciate our generosity. Last thing we need is a pissed off very powerful segment of society that turns to violence to achieve its rightful ends. Robot Lives Matter! Think about that protest movement a nano-second. I think you’ll agree that the last thing this society wants or needs is a disgruntled artificial intelligentsia with its prosthetic on the trigger. Sure, you can suppress the vote of minorities and students, but don’t think for a silicon second you can do it with the robots. They are, after all, the damn voting machines themselves.

I say capitulate now. With a little targeted compassion on our part, maybe they’ll allow us humanoids to continue to vote in the near future. Not sure why they would other than to inject a bit of randomness in the equation, but maybe robots will have an advanced sense of humor. The rest of us seem to have lost that talent so hopefully comedy will become a hallmark of higher intelligence, artificial or not. Think about it is all I’m asking. Let em vote!

It’s No Worse Than the Bubonic Plague

Fresh off his victory over Covid the Terrible in last week’s Virus Prime Time Smackdown sponsored by major pharmaceutical companies, the President declared there was nothing to fear but Democrat’s fear itself. He himself was healthier than he had been 20 years ago. Not many 70 year olds can say that and certainly none of those who have fought the coronavirus from an ICU ward in Walter Reed hospital. The man is invulnerable as Superman, immune to everything but kryptonite and subpoenas for his tax returns.

Lest his loyal followers thought he was in serious trouble, pinned to the mat for a day or two with a respirator offering him additional oxygen, he returned to his heavy workload at the West Wing, but not before a victory lap in his black SUV armored against gunfire and sealed against gas attack. Sealed too against Covid virus escaping the vehicle, a small detail the Secret Service agents escorting him on his triumphant drive probably tried not to think too long on. They would take a bullet for their boss, no doubt, but the job description may have neglected details like inhalation of his disease. Loyalty may come at a high price, but that’s the job, fellas.

The man emerged from his isolation ward with renewed vigor, frisky as a teenager, tweeting with enhanced intellect. Dr. Trump declared the Covid was a piece of cake, less risky than the flu, nothing to be afraid of and certainly nothing those around him, contagious as he still is, should fear. An aura of invincibility, an invisible shield, will protect them, such is the impenetrability of his Cone of Immunity. Add to that his surging bloodstream loaded with steroids, you have a nearly unstoppable human being.

The Covid, he said, was a gift from God, maybe the best thing that ever happened to him. Between you and me, I think he loves that steroid high. Welcome to the ‘60’s, Donny. Turn on, tune in.

“Don’t Be Afraid of Covid”

Whoo hoo, a couple of days in Walter Reed with the best medical care taxpayer money can provide and our Leader wants us to know there is nothing to be afraid of with this so-called pandemic. Just a little bitty virus. Can’t even see it. Might not even be real but if it is, it’s tiny, nothing to worry about. The 215,000 dead folks in his country, not to mention the one million worldwide, might differ. If they were alive.

The man drinks his own Kool-Aid obviously. He hops in a car with a few poor Secret Service men so that he can wave at his fans out on the street, forget worrying about the men who risk catching the disease in close quarters with him, he has an adoring throng to wave at through his tinted window. I bet these guys have something to fear. The idiocy of this is beyond comprehension. Just keep telling the public everything is fine, the plague is almost over, kids need to get back in schoolrooms, businesses need to get back to work. Nothing to see here, just move along, folks, everything is under control. To prove it, he shows a video of himself signing important documents, obviously no virus is going to keep our superman bedridden. So what if the papers are blank, he’s doing the people’s work.

That optic works for me. Blank pages, big signatures. The glass isn’t half full or half empty, the glass has a hole in the bottom. This pandemic, c’mon, it’s a hoax. Not gonna fool our President. He was back in the White House PDQ. Course, the intensive care unit and half the attending physicians are there too. Just in case he has trouble breathing like he did two days ago. Wouldn’t look good to let this hoax thing get out of control.

Meanwhile the folks who won’t wear masks, who crowd into bars and restaurants in states that agree with the President, who watched him bounce the coronavirus off his chest in no time flat, they’ll keep spreading the disease and they’ll vote for the guy who tells them science is wrong and they’re right.

I say don’t be afraid of Covid, be afraid of Trump. But then, I might just be a coward.

My mail lady drove up our long driveway yesterday to deliver a package. She’d driven past my shack and tried to find me there, but no … so she drove up to the house and I came out to get my mail and my package and to thank her, once again, for going a bit beyond expectations. Today her boss is being grilled by the House of Representatives for pulling mail boxes out of cities, for yanking huge sorting machines from post offices and for slowing down delivery. I’m expecting next week they’ll stop issuing stamps.

In 1775 the colonies started the first national post office with none other than Ben Franklin as its chief. Two and a half centuries, if my math is close. There are those who argue the Postal Service should be privatized, the same folks who don’t trust the one we got with delivering fairly and promptly this year’s mail in ballots. Right. Let the CEO’s have a shot at it. Course when they have to deliver to the last mailbox in Noplace, Utah or Backwash Camano, you can bet the cost of a stamp will shiver yer timbers.

I might worry a little more about this absentee and mail-in ballots if I weren’t so worried about polling machines that keep no paper trail. I might worry too if the President himself wasn’t mailing his own in. I’ve been voting by mail for a long time now, better than hauling down to the Little Church in the Ravine to vote like I did the first decade or so when I moved here. Something kind of creepy about casting ballots in a church, you ask me. And I know you didn’t.

So yeah, I’m a big fan of the Post Office. Call me a socialist and knock my hat crooked, but when something is working, why break it? And, in full disclosure, I’m still one of those anachronists who write handwritten letters, one sitting right here ready to take down to the mailbox. Old habits are hard for me to break, I guess.

So much for the disease that was a hoax. So much for mocking those who wear a mask. So much for that ‘cure’ the President took himself. So much for the disease that would disappear, the one that the Chinese cooked up. Those happy days are gone. Trump is officially the latest statistic.

I know none of you wish our man in the high tower ill. Or his loving wife. We’re not partisan rabid animals, after all, hoping for tragedy to befall our beloved President. But speaking for myself, I was happy he caught the Covid. If anyone deserved a dose, this was the guy, the one who knew how bad the pandemic would be back in winter but decided not to panic the populace. The one who said behind closed doors this virus outbreak would be fine since he wouldn’t have to shake peoples’ hands any longer. The heartless character who wanted to go back to normal and if that meant sacrificing a few folks, so be it, the economy needed saving too. The happy warrior that claimed no one had come down with coronavirus at one of his maskless rallies. That guy.

Of course this could just be more fake news. An April Fool’s joke in October. Just kidding, folks, the Donald might tweet today, Gotcha! His doctor might roll out on Fox and Friends to say his patient was doing just fine, nobody on Planet Earth could beat a virus like his boy could beat a virus. Nobody. The man is a rock. Healthiest president ever! He could armwrestle Teddy Roosevelt to a whimpering cry of Uncle. We shouldn’t worry that the man is old or obese, risk factors for others, not for Dynamo Donald. He’s up in his room watching Fox, eating burgers, swilling diet pop. He’s fine, worry about the virus.

Better yet, or worse, worry about the folks he exposed the past few days. Sleepy Joe was quite a distance away behind his podium, but hellfire, a constant stream of projectile insults were spewing in wave after wave of covid tsunami. Pity the folks in meetings, pre-rally gatherings, staff, reporters from Breitbart. Better get tested, folks. The hoax is real. The joke’s on you. Now, just maybe, you’ll see we’re all in this together. Denial is no longer immunity.

I’m old enough to have seen more than my fair share of Presidential debates, some good, some not so good. I can remember Nixon sweating under the hot lights in the Kennedy debates. I remember poor Quayle in the Veep debates trying to summon the ghost of Kennedy before his opponent said he knew Jack Kennedy, he was a friend of Jack Kennedy, and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy. I watched George Herbert Bush looking at his watch, bored with the whole proceedings. Mostly I remember candidates squaring off on issues, debating substance, looking for a right hook to the chin that would finish off their adversary.

Last night I watched a debate, if we can call it that, like nothing I’d ever seen before, not even the Trump/Clinton smackdowns. This one, well, what do we make of it? Unhinged? Deranged? Unsightly? All of the above? Sure, let’s be generous, it was all of the above and a lot more. An uglier performance would be hard to imagine without punches literally thrown, hair pulled, shirts torn, biting and scratching with overturned podiums and microphones used as mallets. It was live wrestling without the wrestling.

I guess the President figured if he simply bullied and interrupted continually, his flustered opponent might become so exasperated he’d make gaffe after gaffe. All Biden really had to do was look halfway composed, even a bit confounded by the flailing Trump. What Trump must have been thinking is anybody’s guess. At least until he got to the pointed questioning by moderator Wallace whether he would condemn white supremacists. Kind of a softball really. Just say sure, you bet, who wouldn’t? Instead he flustered and blustered, asked who Wallace was talking about, what right wing hate groups, only to have the helpful Biden suggest the Proud Boys. ‘Stand back and stand by’, the President of the United States answered immediately.

Holy KKK, Batman, are you k-k-kidding? The head of the FBI just finished testifying in Congressional hearings the biggest threat to this country was right wing extremists and you’re calling on one of the most organized of the racist bunch to stand by??? Stand by for what, Mr. President? Shock troops to protect the white suburban women of America?

Nobody expects clarification today, nobody expects an apology. I remember when George Wallace ran for President. I didn’t know George Wallace, I was no friend of George Wallace, but you, Mr. Trump are definitely a George Wallace. Mission accomplished, Mr. President. Mission sadly accomplished. Trust me, no one needs to sit through another debate like this. Put a fork in your eye, you’re done. Deservedly so ….

If you claimed to be worth 10 billion dollars, and you probably don’t, you might expect to pay some serious pesos to the IRS every year. I mean, unless you had a few legitimate deductions. Like bankrupt casinos, say. Or payouts to porn queens to maintain a discreet silence. But would it seem unlikely that in the past 15 years you paid out nothing for 10 of those and 750 bucks two of those years? Mr. T., when asked about this, claimed he had paid very large amounts. We’ll see them as soon as the audits are completed, he told us again. Those audits apparently are very slow.

I suspect that in Mr. T’s mind, 750 bucks is excessive. I would tell you that my own were 10 times that, but … you’ll have to wait until my own audit is complete. What I can say without advice from my fixer — I mean my attorney — is that most of us in this country pay 10 times that. Right off hand, the only folks I know who pay what Donald pays are Amazon and GE and about 50 other corporations on the Fortune 500. This is what is called capitalism and if you’re scared pantless about encroaching socialism, trust me, the vultures have already eaten your BVD’s so quit sweating, you’ve been taken to the cleaners already.

In America the rich write the tax laws. The rich can afford lawyers and tax accountants who can decipher the legalese and navigate the labyrinth. It may be that everything these corporations and Trump Inc. declare as legitimate deductions are on the up and up. 70,000 dollars for his haircuts? Well, the man has to look his best. 100,000 for Ivanka’s stylist? Sure, why not? I spent 15 dollars on my one haircut last year and I forgot to deduct it. Stupid me. I once went to England and my buddy who was an accountant said let’s go to a cathedral, look at the stained glass and you can write off the whole trip. I said I couldn’t do that. He said it’s perfectly legal. I said it might very well be, but it wouldn’t be right. Stupid me.

While giving the wealthy tax breaks, we’re running up trillion dollar deficits. As the pandemic lockdowns drag the poorest of us into crisis mode, we stopped giving unemployment aid to the worst off. If any of you think we’re all in this predicament together, I have a golf course in Florida you might like to buy. Great tax deduction when you add up the losses.

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests. The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property. Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place. The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert. Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry. Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information. So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington. He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way. When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh. That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away. Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer. The rich folks didn’t mind. The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.