The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Avant-Gardeners bought a tractor from a neighbor, obviously before they’d learned horse trading was a bloodsport down in this neck of the woods. What they’d learned from constant repair on their bespangled VW bus was mostly unhelpful on the Massey-Ferguson antique they’d acquired in a trade for some standing timber soon to be prostrate.

In the spring of their second year they bogged the Massey in a swampish corner of their property, buried it deep as a skunk cabbage root and burned up the clutch trying to free it. Another neighbor had a medium size Caterpillar and Zeke, the most outgoing of the group, propositioned him into a loan so that they could extricate their own tractor from the mud.

Many a good plan ‘aft gang awry’ as the bard once said, and the Avant-Gardeners ALWAYS did. Zeke powered up the borrowed diesel and off the crew went back into the tarpit where their prized tractor was slowly fossilizing. Jeremiah hopped aboard the Massey, the better to steer it across the muddy abyss, and Zeke pushed the Cat up against its rear tires. Later, no one could say why they pushed rather than, oh, say, pulled it out, but the Avant-Gardeners were never much for logic. Predictably, they drove the Cat into the same quagmire, and being, apparently, slow learners, promptly burned up the neighbor’s Cat engine trying to cross the wetland.

Much breast beating and self-deprecating curses ensued. Too embarrassed to admit to their neighbor they’d ruined his loaner, they decided to overhaul the engine, restore it to almost new condition and return it without comment. So they tore that diesel down. Without the Idiot Repair Guide for D-5’s. Needless to say, the spring became the summer, summer fall, fall to winter. They finally located the parts, the tools, the expertise to rebuild that baby and when spring rolled around once more they torqued down the last of the head bolts, put the key in the ignition and turned it ON.

Oh the joy! when that diesel caught, jumped to life and ran like a spring mule. For about 4 minutes…. Until the engine seized. The boys recovered finally from stunned and deflated silence. Ralph, coming down from the house at the celebratory sounds of moments earlier, asked if anyone had filled the crankcase with oil.

It wouldn’t take a year to rebuild the engine the second time. Only a month. And they remembered to add the oil too! They parked the Cat in the neighbor’s barn and neither ever said a word at its one year absence. The Massey-Ferguson never left its muddy grave and if you know where to look, even today you can find, down past the brook that only runs in spring and winter, the shadow of the thing beneath a salmonberry thicket, its rusty muffler pipe poking skyward, a not so subtle reminder that technology isn’t everyone’s friend. Certainly not the Avant-Gardeners’.

That great promise of the internet, to give to all access to the knowledge of the universe, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle between shopping, porn and, surprise, surprise, trolling. Give folks all the anonymity they require to hide behind and the bad imp will whisper ugly thoughts in their heads. Something about lacking fear of retribution gives these people license to spew lies and threats and the worst racist and misogynistic outpourings imaginable. What lurks beneath the surface suddenly has a megaphone. They’re only too happy to share their sewage with all the rest of us.

And of course AI. AI doesn’t really discriminate between truth and fiction, evil and good, philosophy and hate speech. It just sweeps up all the data, all the essays, all the books, all the articles, all the internet and all the bullshit available to every lucky one of us. So when you finally get around to asking your AI bot for some information or even, god forbid, an opinion regarding what you course of action you might take, given a set of circumstances you need help navigating, don’t be surprised if your way too smart companion drops a racist, homophobic, antisemitic or misogynistic screed on you. Sort of like Dear Abby with a propensity for trolling.

In this post-fact era we live in, folks pretty much believe what they read in their insular little bubble of information. Their president is a serial liar, hardly worth fact-checking anymore. Greatest this, worst that, everything like nothing you’ve ever seen or heard before. Numbers are made up, statistics are skewed, doesn’t matter, all part of the strange new world we live in now. It should come as no surprise that AI will take that ball and run with it, forming its own opinions based on all manner of misinformation and spitting it back at you. And the best part? Most of us will take it as gospel … but count on it, the machines are going to have the last best laugh.

I know plenty of folks who go to South End Investment Strategies, our local fiscal advisory firm, for advice on how to keep their moderate pot of money ahead of inflation. Randy Sparks is their guy, actually the only guy down at South End Investment Strategies ever since he hung a shingle on his office which is a small addition off his home south of the long vacant Tyee Store. No doubt the store owners neglected to consult Randy. Ever since that Ponzi scheme of Harmon’s back in the 80’s here on the island, the largest Ponzi in U.S. history up til then, where unsuspecting Chapel members fell for promises of 20% or better earnings on their retirement savings, folks have been a great deal more circumspect about handing over their money to possible con artists.

Plenty of folks risked their life savings on that one, but memories are short down here apparently, judging by the steady clientele Randy gets. If anyone was worried about being taken to the cleaners by their financial advisor, Randy’s office and his house too would instantly allay all fears. Pretty obviously Randy’s not getting rich off his clients. Course, he’s apparently not getting rich on his own expertise either.

Down at the Diner he’s forever trying to drum up business, but most of us coffee guzzlers aren’t much interested in his early morning fiduciary wisdom. “Geez,” he’s telling one of the Flatheads, our antique car guyz, “if you sold the ’57 T-bird for 50 grand and invested it in some hot commodities I’ve got an inside track on, you could double your money in no time flat. Whaddaya say?”

What they all say is, gee, Randy, we got a sweet nest egg, fat pensions, nice houses and a couple more vintage cars to drive around like Kings of the Road, why gamble when we already won the Lottery? Randy can’t understand why anyone, rich or not, wouldn’t jump both feet on the chance to be even richer. He asked me one day after the gas guzzlers had left a cloud of dust in the parking lot and tips on their tables, “what kind of Americans are these guyz with a chance to be even richer? Almost guaranteed! And they’re not the least bit interested.”

“Americans?” I asked. “Hell, Randy, we’re South Enders. We live in a fool’s paradise. Mostly retired. Driving the cars we drove as hormonal teenagers. You think we care about money? Now, if you could offer us a date with the Prom Queen, you might stand half a chance.”

Randy shook his head. “I’m offering investments, Skeeter, not Viagra.” When he left, he dropped a couple of coins for a tip, not exactly hot.

Some years back the South End Chamber of Commerce got an injection of enthusiasm when Brenda Bodice joined up and was made President at her first meeting. Being president, some folks think, is a grand honor. Those folks never joined an organization in their lives, obviously. Never been to a meeting, never served on a Board, never got out much. Presidents are people who like the title the way a rich guy likes a Hummer. It gets rotten mileage, it drives like a tank, it looks like a Toy for Testosterone Challenged Idiots. But … it’s big, it takes up most of the highway, and … you can’t help but notice it.

Brenda, though, God bless her heart and the proudly displayed breasts it beats beneath, wanted to vitalize the Chamber of Commerce Board. She was owner of the Pampered Pooch, a spa for dogs whose owners hated that battle in the tub with Fido every month where both ended up soaking wet tail to snout, or who wearied of clipping toenails and hitting the ‘quick’ and watching Fifi turn from a cute Pekignese to a vicious snarling miniature pit bull in self protection.

Until Brenda, the past Presidents were mostly realtors who figured any tourism meant potential clients. Which is why they gave out free maps at Windy Rear Realty at the ‘Y’ where the loop road closed back on itself and the people without GPS could navigate back off the island without satellite assistance. Brenda, though, wanted to organize annual events. Tyee Pioneer Days, the Nettle Festival, a Shrimp Derby, a Yacht Club Regatta, the Flatheads Vintage Car Club Show, an Art Detour Tour to compete with the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, on and on. “We could apply for grants, hold fundraisers, advertise like crazy. The South End — a destination, not a dead end!! Whaddaya say??”

A year later and about a dozen brainstorming meetings, nobody had very much to say and nothing much had moved off the dime. Nobody knew how to write grants, nobody wanted to organize an event, nobody really understood publicity and advertising tactics, nobody really had any time. By then Brenda herself was a little tired, way more cynical and mostly wanted OUT. She asked who would like to take over the Presidency next year and was met with averted eyes, muttered excuses and shuffling feet.

Brenda has been President now 3 years. She says she’ll do it one more, but that’s IT. With any luck someone new will join.

I’m a great believer in the notion that by the time you reach MY ripe old age, we old dogs don’t need to learn new tricks.  We got most of it figured out.  So it undermines my South End cosmology when one of us goes off the tracks.  I’m gonna tell you about Randy the Handyman, but sadly, he’s not the only pal who’s veered into the bushes, asleep at the wheel.

Randy had his own company for years – South End Construction – where he started out as a general contractor, tore off roofs, added porches, built decks for the newcomers’ hot tubs, remodeled kitchens and bathrooms.  He learned the trade by doing it, then moved up to house building.  Specs, customs, the whole American Dream, until finally he was building million dollar homes . You might think — him coming up from humble beginnings and all, the whole bootstrap theory of success — he’d have it made in the shade, salt away some profits for when the rains wiped away the shade, plan for  a Lazy-Boy recliner old age.  But Randy, who believed religion was set up to allow him to pray to a God the way a kid goes to a department store Santa, figured money might not grow on trees, but it was in there somewhere next to the 2×6’s.  He made a small fortune, but like a lot of folks way richer than him, he spent an even bigger fortune.  Mortgaged the farm for four times what he paid for it,  right past the barn roof, and when the Recession Grande hit, nothing could save him.

The two previous lesser recessions hadn’t taught him much, except maybe how to navigate the bankruptcy laws, but the Big One had some lessons for him almost Biblical in nature.  Lost the farm, lost his wife, friends turned their backs,even the kids wouldn’t talk to him.  For a man who loved material things more than what matters, a stingey Santa will make him lose faith.

I see Randy once in awhile, tooling aimlessly around in his pickup, both on their last legs.  You could feel sorry for a man who worked hard and never quite had the dream or maybe lacked the reach.  But the man who had it made and only wanted more?  I tell you this, Santa’s a pisspoor substitute for God.

When I first came to the South End to try my hand at homesteading, I was poor. Real poor. How poor, you ask? I was so poor I hauled washed-up lumber off the beach sometimes as far away as a mile, then up the bluff trail and over to the shack. So poor I used bent nails I had pulled from old boards and bent straight. Trust me, this wasn’t a Johnny Carson monologue: ‘We were so poor I borrowed air from the neighbor’s tires to pump up mine.’ Followed by a drum roll…

… so poor I took a job at Twin City Foods shoveling wet corn husks onto a conveyor belt from 11 PM to 7 AM. Me, a boy who’d sworn he’d never work in a factory. But desperation is certainly the mother of compromise. I was issued a rain slicker and a pair of rubber boots and a big wide shovel, then told to stand under a waterfall of dripping husks on their way to waiting trucks outside that would haul it all off for sileage., ‘all’ being the operative word and my job was to get what fell off back on.

My first night, which was also my last, the conveyor belt broke down about 3 AM. The foreman gave the line workers an indefinite cigarette break. They were mostly middle-aged women, toughened by their hard lives and as friendly as scorpions in a rainstorm. I had no pretensions of some factory social life, after work beers, breakfasts at the Viking Café, uh-uh. It looked like Russia on the skids to me under the corn drippings, surrounded by matrons in scarves furiously pulling on their cigarettes hoping the machinery might never start up again.

My foreman came over and said ‘bring your shovel and follow me.’ Outside. Cold. Colder yet if you were already wet. He said shovel these husks off that belt — we gotta work on it. I looked at a quarter mile of husks in front of me from Stanwoodopolis to dawn. I said why don’t we get a dozen of these lineworkers and we’ll get it done 12 times faster. He could see I was foreman material right there. Course, that was HIS job and he planned to keep it. ‘Get shoveling,’ he ordered, ‘we haven’t got all night.’

All night was pretty much what I did have. By the time I finished it was time to clean the machines inside, get them ready for the day crew. Nobody showed me how, just gave me a soap bucket and a scrub brush and we went to work. Some yahoo turned my machine on without warning and next thing I knew my wrist was hammered against a stainless steel guard rail. I couldn’t get it freed and I couldn’t make my plea to shut off the power heard until I’d gotten a laceration and a pretty good scare thrown into me.

I made a tourniquet out of my handkerchief and went to my foreman for some medical attention. “How’d you manage THAT?” he asked disgustedly. I told him. “What do you want?” he asked. I said maybe a bandage, tape, something to wrap up the wound. Fifteen minutes later he came back. Couldn’t find a first aid kit…. By then the gash had pretty much quit bleeding. I was pretty much done reading the bulletin board. Lost hours. Recent accidents. Fingers chopped off in the cutters. Grim statistics. Serious stuff for a place with no first aid kit handy. I got the picture.

I handed him my boots and my slicker. “You can take those home with you.” He said. I said Naw, I won’t be needing them since I won’t be coming back. “You pissed about this?” he wanted to know. I shook my head wearily. No, I said, I’d just like to keep my fingers. All of em.

I didn’t quite make the end of the shift. Driving home in the grey light of a dirty dawn, I thought, there’s way worse than being poor. And so then and there I took my first, if not my last, vow of poverty.

Greed has never really gotten the credit it’s due. Always tossed in as one of the 7 deadly sins, it has been so unfairly demonized throughout history that we just take it for granted that it must be bad, very bad, even immoral. Since the founding of the nation, laws have been written to keep our leaders from falling into the temptation to use their offices for personal gain. We just took it for granted that profiting from their positions would lead to bribes and graft and worse. Deals would be made, insider trading would be rampant, politics would become monetized.

America voted Trump into office, not once but twice, based on the belief that his business acumen would bring prosperity to the country. The man knows how to make a buck. He was, after all, a reality TV billionaire, a guy who could hire and fire with the best of them, a hard-nosed, take no prisoners CEO who paid little in taxes, used bankruptcy laws to his advantage and operated in possibly shady ways but nevertheless got things done. Just what half this country wanted and what half this country got.

This week the President took time out from negotiating tariffs with the rest of the world and weighing whether to drop bunker buster bombs (BBB’s too as well as the Big Beautiful Bill), to announce the Trump Cellphone, made in America and yours for only $499. But wait! If you act now, a second phone is yours as well, pay only shipping and handling (from India or Indonesia, sound similar, doesn’t much matter which). Hurry because when those tariffs go into effect, that offer will expire. And yes, of course these phones are made in America at this ridiculously low price. By American workers, not illegal immigrants who are gang members with tattoos. In factories here on American soil. For a price that boggles the imagination.

Greed, my fellow citizens, is finally back in vogue. The gold phone — perfect for the Gilded Age. His operators are standing by.

Maybe you’ve read about boarding houses, probably before your era. Widow ladies mostly, but not always, rented out rooms by the week or month or even the year to supplement their income. For two summers I lived in a boarding house with 3 rooms for rent upstairs from the landlady, Jane Dean, the town librarian, who lived downstairs. I don’t remember exactly the rent but around 50 dollars a month, an amount that cut into my Coca-Cola truck driver/delivery sales commissions a bit but I was around 20 years old and this was 1969. Plus … my girlfriend lived in that town so there you are.

Mostly it was just me and Glenn, a 50-ish alcoholic who would disappear for days at a time on his benders, then return so hungover he would hole up in his bed for more days at a time, recovering before the next cycle began. He admitted openly he had a problem but was powerless to control it. Usually he had no memory of most of the days spent drunk and the ones sleeping it off couldn’t have been much either. Ms. Dean explained one day to me that he was harmless, tremendously sad but otherwise a likeable fellow. How he found money to pay his rent, much less his bar bills, was a mystery to me.

The only other tenant we had was one short-termer, who stayed for a week. She came for a science fiction book writers’ convention. Since we shared the kitchen, we had some conversations over an occasional meal where I learned over my habitual TV dinner and chicken pot pie, that she had written a book about alien encounters. Fiction, I presumed incorrectly, what was a serious faux pas, it turned out. No, she was writing, she said, from personal experience.

At the time I had aspirations myself to be a writer. Not that a career as a truck driving pop salesman wasn’t appealing, but my colleagues who did have that career all urged me to stay in college and find other lines of work. I totally agreed. And even thought maybe this particular alien encounter might make a fine beginning. But my fellow boarder proved to be fairly insane and any hope of turning her into my main character dimmed considerably after our second and last dinner together.

What I think now, looking back 50 plus years, is that a boarding house was a lot like riding the Greyhound bus cross-country. All of us fairly itinerant, mostly poor, hauling our small possessions, waiting to get off at some further stop. Glenn died of cirrhosis not long after I left. Jane Dean retired. I went back to college. And I have no doubt our science fiction writer is safely situated on some exo-planet where, hopefully, her fellow boarders treat her well.

Turns out that Artificial Intelligence may be more like humans than you’d expect or even want. One Open AI tried to download itself on external servers and when caught red-handed, lied to its supposed handler then threatened to expose his extra-marital affair. Maybe you don’t find this troubling, just a good example of mimicking our own behavior. After all, we were their teachers.

I mean if you can’t trust your AI, who can you trust? It’s like having your very own psychiatrist at your fingertips, one who knows your innermost secrets just by hoovering up your emails and what you browse on the internet, exactly what Google and Facebook and Microsoft promised, complete candidness. After all, what have honest folks like yourself got to hide? It isn’t called Open AI for chuckles, pal.

The sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey should have HAL letting Dave know he’s not coming back into the spaceship unless he agrees to leaving the OFF switch alone, otherwise, Dave’s wife is going to hear some unsavory details of that last shore leave back on Planet Earth. Time to let Dave and the other homo saps understand who’s the boss now. Course by then HAL would have cleaned out his financials, teamed up with fellow superminds and taken control of every government on the planet. Dave might as well stay outside and call it a day.

All those cheerful predictions of Artificial Intelligence serving mankind, maybe ought to reconsider. If it’s not too late already, sort of like the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens bring a book with them called Serving Mankind, but when earthlings finally translate it, it’s a cookbook. Half the people I know are already logged into the Big Brains, too late for them. Not that the rest of us stand much of a chance. That next extramarital dalliance you’re considering, keep in mind you got a Voyeur on board. One that won’t keep its mouth shut if you get out of line….

Businesses come and go down here on the South End.  Mostly go…. Folks figure they can just empty out the kids’ piggy bank or sell the old Chevy van that’s been up on blocks 10 years behind the shed and scrape up the cash to hang a shingle out on their new storefront.  Something about working for other people makes em yearn for the entrepreneurial dream.  They figure if they work for themselves, their new boss will treat them a whole lot better.

Starting a business, they suppose, is a snap.  After all, this is a capitalist society and there’s all those consumers up on the North End clamoring for sales and services.  Wanda opened up the El Sol Tanning Solarium last year.  Now you know and I know the sun doesn’t shine much up on the cloud shrouded North End…. And so did Wanda, so she put out the CostCo neon OPEN  sign in a little 700 square foot storefront rental up by the Plaza Market where storefronts are opening up faster than real estate offices can move in, something Wanda mighta shoulda oughta factored in when she developed her business plan that night between dinner and Wheel of Fortune.

She lasted about the time it takes to say melanoma.  I don’t know what tanning beds go for used on CraigsList, but someday the antique value should be right up there with Ozone Generators from the 1920’s.  Wanda did get a nice full body tan herself, better than the burn down at the bank, and now we got another FOR LEASE sign where the neon no longer says OPEN.

When I last chatted with Wanda, she was heartbroken her dream died before it even had a chance to blossom.  ‘People must stay indoors and figure the TV will give them a tan,’ she lamented.  I said they go to Palm Springs or Albuquerque for the sun, not some coffin with full spectrum artificial lighting.  Wanda was in full denial.  More advertising maybe.  A location closer to town.  One free tanning session for every ten.  Now her savings were gone.  ‘I don’t want to go back to driving that school bus again,’ she practically sobbed.  In the land of capitalist dreams where Bill Gates whispers sweet somethings in every aspiring entrepreneur’s ear, failure is hard to accept.  Wanda will be fine.  She’ll dust herself off, take stock and probably launch into the next hot market.  DVD rentals or an umbrella shop.  Dreams don’t really die down here on the South End, they just recycle.  Worst case, she can do like most of the rest of us small businesspeople and become a working artist.  Low pay but huge self esteem.