The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Go Phish Yourself

It’s Monday morning and the phone is ringing off the hook. Medicare, Microsoft scams, phishers and god only knows what low-life scum hoping for some poor schnook to hand out social security numbers and bank accounts. What I’m slowly coming to realize is that I’m one of the last people in America and possibly the globe who still owns a listed landline. A few days ago a Molly called six times in the space of a few hours to alert me to possible fraudulent credit card activity on an account we don’t even have. And no, in case you’re wondering, I don’t have Caller I.D. I pick up the phone, just like in the good old days, and say hello.

Lately I get calls from robots. “Is this Skeeter?” they begin and once I acknowledge that indeed I am, the facsimile human voice goes immediately into its pitch. If I try to cut them off, they have no pause button. There’s no one there to pause. And yeah, I know in a month or two, they’ll have an automated voice that does respond appropriately, just a matter of coding with a tad more finesse. I have a real woman who calls every week. She is cheerful and bubbly and always starts with ‘it’s so good to hear a pleasant voice’ before mentioning the last hundred which were worse than her mother-in-law’s welcome or some such bogus bullshit you’d maybe think I’d have memorized by now but don’t.

For a time or two I tried to tell her she called a few days ago with the exact same pitch, but she talks over me and okay, maybe she’s not a she, probably she’s an It. I can’t tell anymore and trust me, once the androids come knocking on our door, I won’t be able to tell a cyborg from a Jehovah’s Witness. I suppose I could get an unlisted number, I know I could pay for a cellphone, I could always let the answering machine pick up and see if a human might be calling, but dammit, I hate to pay for privacy and I hate screening calls.

So I’ll probably just keep on picking up the phone when it rings, call me stupid,

“How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?” D. Trump tweet

It’s a brand new year, full to the brim with sound and fury, promising another 365 days of hyperbolic tweetstorms, narcissistic mirror gazing and the release of the Mueller findings. God help us if those findings reveal collusion and criminality. How could we possibly impugn, much less impeach, a man who has done so much for the country? Instead, we should begin prep work on Mt. Rushmore.

When in doubt, tweet. When in trouble, lie. When cornered … well, we’ll have to wait and see. But I suspect we won’t be waiting long. The man is a spoiled brat with a mean temper, accustomed to getting his way always, so when the wheels start coming off the limo, he’ll blame the chauffeur and bail out the back by the Trump Tower’s rear fire escape where he’ll live out his days in squawking exile as a pundit on Fox News. If he avoids prison. Which at this juncture is anybody’s guess. Good luck to Ivanka and Jared and the boys. Someone is going to have to pay for all this success. The only one coming out of this unscathed might be Melania. She won’t have to worry about losing her credit cards. Just another immigrant success story.

Let’s forget about politics for a nano-second. Not that the future with Donald J. Trump looks so bright you’d hafta wear shades …. But looming in the background beyond all that white noise of collusion and criminality something dark is rearing its monstrous head. You can sense it without actually seeing it, a kind of high pitched whirring drone buzz coming up faster than 5G, and when you glance in the rear-view mirror, the objects you can’t see yet are actually about to pass you, sucking you forward in a wind-draft of sudden acceleration.

The future is here and the speedometer is way over the speed limit of comprehension. Cyber-hacking, drone warfare, artificial intelligence, smart houses with smart appliances, self-driving cars and trucks, crypto currencies, blockchain technology, facial recognition, data tracking, government and corporate surveillance, tech monopolies, genetic engineering, fake news — the Silicon Valley boyz are bending the gravitational field, warping reality, moving us toward an unregulated future our politicians can’t comprehend and the rest of us can scarcely imagine.

This isn’t 1984, this is the Matrix. This is a world running on algorithms and multi-layered programs built by engineers and geeks without regard to implication or consequence. If you feel queasy coming into the New Year, it isn’t the punch. It’s the creeping suspicion that things to come are out of control, that the future isn’t just unpredictable, it’s downright scary. We live in science fiction now and the monsters are coming. The monsters are already among us.

We’re now interconnected, a global hive. The checkout woman at my grocery store was muttering how everyone is in too much of a hurry. Oh, ya think? We’ve been in a hurry for decades. This isn’t that. This is an amorphous unsettled angst, a barely audible shriek in broad daylight, something spinning out of our control. We dial up our devices, we hold back the boredom, we reprogram our reptile brains, we ignore what all this means. But deep down we’re scared. We think it’s the economy maybe, or politics, or the endless wars in the Middle East, or terrorists, or Trump, or the immigrants, or another in an interminable series of mass shootings. It isn’t. They’re distractions.

Binge watch Netflix and update Instagram, but outside that cocoon the world is morphing into something unstable, something gathering form, something menacing and dark. Something we’re creating. Don’t ask what, don’t open the door, don’t look out the window. But it doesn’t matter, it’s inside now, in your smartphone, in your gadgets, in the refrigerator, in the computer, in your head. If you think it’s too late … it is.

The immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Build a Wall, take down the Statue of Liberty, man the battlements! The immigrants are coming! The melting pot is boiling over! The borders are being over-run! My hair is on fire! The End is Near!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

These are scary times in Fortress America. When under siege, what else can our Leader do but convince us they’re even scarier? Time to go to the bunkers, bolt the doors, shutter the windows, isolate isolate isolate. The bad people want IN, the immigrants are killers and rapists and drug addicts and carriers of disease, Melania excepted. They want to take your house, steal your educational system, abuse your social services. Bad. Very bad people. I see them every day mowing my neighbors’ lawns, building new houses down the road, probably plotting how to massacre us all. They’re biding their time, working for peanuts, scheming, always scheming.

One of my band members is half Ojibway. She was telling us the other day about a woman who was complaining bitterly about some Indians who had moved into her neighborhood and were bringing down her property values. “She wouldn’t shut up about it” Monika was saying, “just kept going on about those damn Indians invading her neighborhood. Finally she got so exasperated she threw up her hands and screamed ‘Why don’t they just go back to where they came from and leave us alone?’”

We forget where we came from, most of us. Unless you’re native American…. Once we’re inside, we want to build a fence and lock the gate. We were never Them and They should never be Us. Sure, we can turn a blind eye when we need cheap labor, but don’t come knocking for citizenship. We’re full up and the country club doesn’t need new members. The plaque on the Statue of Liberty was meant for us, not them. It was meant back then, not now. Why don’t these people go back where they came from?

Maybe you’ve gotten weary of the news stories about the government shutdown over building a Wall between our frightened citizens and the zombie apocalypse moving north out of the other Americas. Too much, too often, too damn hard to take. If so, the news that the Chinese had landed a spaceship on the back side of the moon must’ve been either heartening or a relief or possibly just the precursor to a lunar Wall to keep the Chinese on their side of the moon. And if that wasn’t interesting enough for the world weary, NASA’s New Horizon space probe photographed Ultima Thule, a ten mile long chunk of ancient something or other, while rocketing by at 35,000 mph, a feat of engineering I’m not even going to try to describe. This is a speck of matter a mere one billion miles beyond Pluto. Wrap yer mind around THAT instead of gnashing your teeth over Trump’s latest tweet.

There will be those, of course, who ask why we would spend our hard earned tax dollars on flinging a satellite out into the Kuiper belt. Can’t mine many minerals on Ultima Thule. Probably couldn’t sell condominiums out there or even build a Trump Tower. Doubt if you could grow tomatoes in that soil. I mean, what earthly good is this adventure? Oh sure, it gives a few engineers some employment, but what about taking care of poverty here on terra firma? We could’ve built a Wall between us and Mexico, plus one between us and those Canadians with the money NASA spent to shoot a sputnik past Pluto.

I get it. Folks probably said the same thing to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand when they bankrolled Columbus. The English, the French and the Portuguese had all turned Christopher down before Spain threw the dice. Why send expensive ships out to the edge of a world where they’d slide right off the face of the earth? You kidding me? We got problems right here in River City, pal. Good money right down the vortex.

But … before you start another Tea Party Rebellion, let me say it has been a welcome diversion from our earthbound impasses to watch our government and the Chinese too engaged in a grand adventure beyond the limits of my own meager imagination. Heartening, is what it is, to cheer the success of a team of dedicated scientists and engineers. Far greater, in my mind, than cheering for a football team or an American Idol finalist. This is what government is capable of, you ask me, daring to boldly go where no one has gone before. Frankly, given the state of our politics these dark days, I can use all the inspiration I can get.

The last few weeks we’ve had a few windstorms so I’ve been patrolling my little county park lately, picking up fir branches and limbs, looking for downed trees, all that stuff we get in the winter storms. I had pretty much made the circuit of trails right about dusk, but when I rounded the last corner, I stumbled on a guy with a hoodie and bags of what I assume were groceries from Tyee Store sitting on a wet log scrolling through his cellphone that cast an electronic light on his nearly hidden face. We’re talking here about a spot back in the park where virtually no one goes even in the daytime, much less after dark. Being the vigilant ranger I am, I assumed he was homeless, probably had a makeshift campground nearby.

Not certain he had even noticed me, as intent as he was on his phone and possibly drug addled to boot, I just moved along in the gathering darkness. If he needed a place to sleep, why not leave him alone? If Hooverville starts to form in the coming months, well, I guess I’ll have to recalculate my response. I don’t really want garbage and human waste building up back there.

But what I thought about as I left our mystery man was this: if he’s as destitute as I suspect he is, how does he afford a cellphone?

I remember my couple of years living in the ghetto of Seattle and Gomorrah with neighbors who could barely afford rent, but managed to own a plasma TV in a barely furnished living room and a Cadillac parked on the lawn. I know, priorities might be different for folks. But if I were nearly destitute, what luxuries would I jettison? My boy tonight obviously had ditched the Cadillac. Or any wheeled contraption. And I suspect a TV hookup in those woods was out of the question, even one without cable, just an antenna hanging from a tree.

What I wondered is if the last vestige of civilization for us when the dystopic future strikes … or abject poverty in this case … would be a cellphone? Once that was gone, after all, what slim shred of society remains? I picture my park indigent tonight, huddled near a smoldering campfire, the trees wild in the wind and a darkness closing in, scrolling through his text messages. Even if I had a cellphone myself and had his number, what on earth could I possibly say to him? E.T., phone home? Tomorrow, I suppose, after tonight’s storm, I’ll have to go over there and see if he’s okay.

We just got an inquiry from a woman who wanted to rent our little bungalow next door, the 1940’s house we bought that Ruby, our resident stripper from the ‘30’s built with her vaudevillian husband Harry Vine. Nice stage name, Harry! Ruby grew up in our old shack before hitting the circuits but eventually came home to the South End, built her house next to her mom’s and taught dancing in town. Probably not pole dancing, just waltzes and such.

The inquiry wanted to know if we could disconnect wi-fi and if there were power lines around the house. She had recently returned from Nepal and apparently the electronic ‘grid’ was more than she could bear, having become sensitized in her absence to what the rest of us barely notice. We replied that the wi-fi could be turned off but the electricity that flows throughout the house might be an issue. Me, I’d have told her we could shut it off at the breaker panel and she could live in the dark without heat or hot water, might feel like a Tibetan monk in a cave after a few days. But the mizzus told her that maybe Ruby’s wasn’t the dream vacation she envisioned for herself and good luck finding what was.

I suppose if I spent a year in Nepal, coming home would be a shock. Television, internet, commercials, billboards, the constant bombardment of 21st century technologies. Most folks, it’s just the opposite. They can no longer imagine living life if it meant sacrificing those. We got a renter up at Ruby’s this weekend and last night the power went off about 4 in the morning. When he woke up, no lights, no toaster, no coffee maker, no TV, no reason to live. He called his daughter who texted us and said her pop was ‘freaking out’. I had gone down to get the Sunday papers and noticed all his curtains and shades pulled. I guess if you have no lights, why let any from the outside in either? Or … maybe this was an indication that our guest was in full panic attack. As you can well imagine, the situation was Grim. How many more minutes could he manage? How long before suicide seemed the better option? When, oh Lord would help arrive or the power come back on? Was the entire country de-electrified? Had the Russians cyber-struck the Grid? Or aliens? Or … worse?

Well, one minute after the distress call came in, the power company had restored the lines and electricity was flowing normally down to the South End. Yeah, it was a close call. But no life was lost. I did notice, though, the shades are still drawn, probably an indication of lasting scars. Even an hour living in pre-digital America can leave irreparable wounds.

So okay, it’s easy these days to criticize the President, to take him to task for every little peccadillo, misstatement, faux pas or small exaggeration. The poor guy can’t blow his nose without the failing N.Y. Times or the lying Washington Post going honkers on it. Sure, it took him awhile to visit the troops on the battlefield. Big deal, the man is bizzy. So what if he waited until he announced he’s pulling the troops out of Syria and declaring victory, Mission Accomplished! Might as well take a victory tour. You know, in Iraq. The country he criticized Obama for pulling the troops out early. Not much action going on there, no need for flak jackets. Hell, bring the mizzus. Sure not going into Kabul or Kandahar.

And I know, he fudged a bit telling the troops he got them a 10% raise, first one they’ve seen in a decade, but god almighty, he’s trying to boost their morale. After all, they’re stuck in some desert hellhole during Christmas so why not play Santa? They’ll learn soon enough it’s only a quarter of what he promised, about what they get every year, nobody really believes there’s a Santa anyway.

Of course there was that kerfuffle about blaming the Democrats for not funding the Wall, not spozed to turn a visit into a political rally, after all, there might be a couple of soldiers who voted for Hillary who might get bent out of shape. They lost, get over it, Private! And now that Santa’s back stateside, he doesn’t even get to spend his New Year at the Mar-a-Lago bash with all his pals because … well, you know why. Because those same Democrats who wouldn’t give the troops a raise, they’re blocking his Wall and letting all those killers and rapists and gang members and disease carriers and future welfare cheats into our country because … well, you know why. Because they’re un-American. He’s going to stay at the White House until they decide to come on over and negotiate a Deal. As in, the Art of…

Negotiation is his strong suit in case you hadn’t heard. That talk and bluster about being proud to own the government shutdown if the Dems wouldn’t fund a Wall, just that, a hard line, a bluff, a negotiating tactic. Chapter 7 in the book. If you don’t have a copy, you ought to get one on Amazon Prime, get it in a day, but still might be too late before the Democrats cave and once again, the man wins, the man shows em who’s boss, the man carries the day. Mission Accomplished, amigo!

And this, just so you understand, just so you follow the logic, this is how you make America great again. Welcome to 2019!

This past summer a buddy and I were hauling up from the crab fields out front, bitching about our current President’s latest idiocy as we were wont to do almost incessantly, when we met Ken, my neighbor across the road, and in a burst of enthusiastic rancor I decided to share our political animosities with him, starting with, “Well, not really sure what your politics are, Ken, but Dave and I were just …” As most people know by the time they’re in long pants, assumptions about politics or religion are, what we call on the South End, a slippery slope. So naturally Ken pointed out that he and his mizzus had voted Trump/Pence, stopping my screed in mid-screech, sending Dave and me and two buckets of crabs home kind of embarrassed. Or at least as humiliated as two crab killers are capable of.

But just before we exiled ourselves Ken asked if I would participate in our local library’s new podcast series he explained he was putting together. Possibly it was out of a chagrined fluster brought on by our curtailed political gaffe, but in a moment of weakness, I said yeah, sure and immediately put it out of mind and returned with Dave to our pleasurable ranting and an agreeable afternoon of crab mutilation and devouring.

Well, maybe I forgot about my promise, but Ken didn’t, so when he called a few months back, I drove to the Sno-Isle headquarters, entered a state of the art sound booth, put on big cushy headphones, sat close to a very sensitive microphone our Band would dearly love to own and let Ken and his cohort, Jim Hills, ask anything they wanted. They weren’t the Mueller investigation, thankfully, and better yet, they were very nice fellows who were sweetly gentle with this old codger.

For any of you out there in Cyberville who’ve read more than a couple of these blog sketches of Skeeter’s, you probably notice I don’t talk much about my so-called career as a stained glass guy. So you can maybe imagine my argument with myself about injecting a podcast interview into the Skeeter Diaries. But it’s New Years Day, the year of our Lord 2019, and I’m a tad hungover and sleep deprived from last night’s late hour bash, meaning my willpower is weak and my logic flawed. If this podcast seems long and boring, you are probably right … but in my defense, I blame Trump. Unless of course you voted Trump/Pence. In which case I have no excuses.

For the foohardy, here’s the link:
https://blog.sno-isle.org/news/podcast/episode-12-the-art-of-breaking-glass-with-jack-archibald/

For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.