The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.

The Piranha Brothers, those fly-by-night, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants itinerant carpenters of the South End, hammered their last nail back in 1980 or thereabouts. Cascade Lumber had just opened their new location coming onto the island, and while they knew us by name and reputation, they also knew we flew under the radar of the state business licensing and the county regulations. Permits? Our motto was: We don’t need no stinking permits.

My partner in crime and carpentry was up this 4th of July, so we toured a few of our illegal structures, most still standing, albeit a few are leaning slightly, but then, so are we. Joe had moved to various places before settling down in Seattle and Gomorrah where he bought a 1923 bungalow. Needless to say, he put the Piranha skills to work and doubled the size of his house, now worth about a cool million. He even got permits — or so he claims. In his spare time he built boats, sailboats and kayaks. The Piranha Brothers aren’t just landlubber contractors.

Me, I stayed put on the South End. Built some small buildings, a woodshop, boathouse (yeah, I built kayaks and sailboats too), greenhouses, saunas and finally built our mansion on the hill. With a permit. To save a marriage. Joe’s mizzus really hadn’t heard tell of the Piranha boyz, probably couldn’t imagine us slamming additions together with used lumber and nails we’d pulled and straightened. We were poor and untrained but we didn’t let that stop us. Or the building inspector either.

When Joe drove off, I decided maybe retirement was premature. Got a knee replacement that’s hobbled me physically and spiritually, but it’s time to strap on the tool belt, I figure, and let the Piranha Brothers ride once again. Today I tore off the old deck. Tomorrow I start framing a bigger one. The Piranha Brothers, legends in their own minds….

Gyppo John dropped by today with a block of old growth straight grain fir he’d whacked off a tree he’d felled just north of here.  You see a few old timers left on the bluffs where the loggers of old couldn’t get them down easily.  Gyppo John’s got the know-how, the tools, some equipment and enough cronies to get it down without losing the whole thing down the hill, then sectioning it into 25 foot lengths some 5 feet in diameter, loading it up on a lowboy trailer and dragging it down to a muddy side road south of the Diner while he figures out how to sell it.

It’s been dead on the stump long enough to be completely dried.  It’s vertical grain, tight ringed and beautiful, what goes for $10 a board foot at any good lumber yard.  A board foot, for you city slickers, is the Width x Length x Thickness.  Probably not on the WASL test these days.  Unless you go to high school in Darrington.  A plank 1 inch by 4 inch thick would only need to be 3 feet long to make one board foot if my 6th grade math serves me….  An eight foot 2×4 would be worth a little less than $60.  Gyppo John had 5000 board feet on the hoof and he was trying to figure out who would pay him the most.  He’d tried the mills.  He’d called the specialty hardwood places.  He’d talked to some luthiers and he’d been sniffing around some cabinetmaker shops.  John need the cash and he needed it fast, but he sure didn’t want to give this tree away for someone Else to make the profit.

Such is life on the gentrified South End.  The days of Les Benz’s sawmill down the road are long gone.  Me and my neighbor Pete put poor old Les in the morgue one night, toe tagged and cold storage, when we two orderlies at Everett General Hospital delivered him to the fridge.  His mill is Pete’s now, but the old Chevy 350 h.p. engine and the rusty 3 foot diameter blade scared us boys too much to fire it up for a nostalgic run at pre-OSHA sawmilling.  Naw, those scrappy days are long gone.  Thankfully for those of us who hold dear to things like fingers and limbs….  But the infrastructure to help Gyppo John is gone too, unfortunately.

Still, it warms my heart a little to think of John, gimping now at 50, straddling a chainsaw with a 4 foot blade, almost a ghost sliding into our digital present, winching up a dinosaur for the gawking crowd who never saw the real thing in the wild.  Yah, you betcha, I went down and took a picture of the beast myself, strapped and secured on the trailer, dead as Kong.  John isn’t far behind and most of us won’t know, not really,  what we lost.

Barney, my barber, is about to take down his red white and blue rotating tubular pole for good. He’s been cutting hair since back in the day when South Enders either opted for a butch or let it grow their arses, as Barney puts it. You could tell a man’s politics by his hair back then. Needless to say, I didn’t require Barney’s services back in my radical days. And Barney probably would’ve refused to let me sit in his leather chair. “Go to a stylist, someone who’ll cut a woman’s hair.”

His shop has sat at the same spot for about 45 years, open for business and gossip both behind the mini-storage just north of the Diner. He owns the mini-storage which is why it’s there. In fact, Barney owns a lot of the land around him, mostly good business acumen … and tips from his customers on who’s selling out cheap and moving lock stock and rainbarrel to someplace where the sun shines more than once a month.

Barney himself isn’t much of a talker. He’s mostly a good listener. He isn’t much of a barber either, in most of us customers’ opinion, but he’s reasonable about price and it’s a kick to sit with a few other South Enders in for their 2 week trim on what’s left of their hair and jaw on the politics of the day. Discussions can get pretty lively, especially around election years, but even the weather is open to debate these days.

If anyone asks Barney ‘how’s business?’ he shrugs, grabs a scissor and comb before answering, ‘pretty slow.’ He mentions every time all the funerals, how us customers are dying off faster than replacements roll in. I admit, I only go in every 6 months or so, which doesn’t help his retirement fund. He knows I like to stir the pot when I’m parked, waiting my turn, just rev up the discussion for the hell of it, something I pretty much only do at the barber shop, don’t ask me why.

I’m going to miss Barney’s Barber shop. I can go years without a trim, but I’ll miss that finger on the pulse of what my neighbors really think, no holds barred, no punches pulled. Go down to Super Cuts and see if you can get past banalities about the weather. Although … I could always bring up Global Warming, see where the coiffed crowd stands on that.

I was chatting it up with my UPS driver a few years back.  He had a shack like mine, burned wood for heat, lived in a remote spot up in the hills east of Stanwoodopolis.  I asked him how he liked driving for a living and he said, well, it’s okay if you don’t mind only making wages.

I said what does that mean?  And he took some precious minutes from his frenetic schedule to explain he delivered to all the dot.com millionaires up the road, boyz who retired at 40, cashed in their stock options and lived like shahs in their palaces on the bluff while he was making mere union wages.  You know, with health insurance, vacation and pension.  Stuff me and my pals don’t get….

Wealth, I guess you already know in the land of the free, is relative.  All these folks with early retirements, McMansions, dot.com money, his and her BMW’s — well, it can sure make a decent salary with benefits look like pauper’s wages if you care to do a comparison test.  Make you feel positively deprived.  Make you think if your time isn’t worth $500 an hour you’re being cheated, sorta like being homeless at Christmas in Beverly Hills.  Probably explains why folks play the Lottery.  Even up their playing field if they hit big.

We spend too much time wanting what we don’t have than enjoying what we do — and that maxim that money won’t buy you happiness, well, save that for the simple minded.  Money for most of us will BE happiness.

My UPS driver left awhile back.  Maybe a new route.  Hopefully one delivering to minimum wage earners.  My guess is he’s starting up some new software company, fishing for venture capital, looking for investors.  Probably in a couple of years he’ll sell out to IBM or AT&T, retire near me with enough money to buy the bluffs across the street and build a Taj South Hall.   UPS trucks’ll line up at the coded gate and he’ll regale the drivers with stories of when years ago, in another lifetime, he drove big brown trucks and worked for slave wages.  Won’t be long, we won’t have enough folks left to drive delivery.

The organization that maintains all the county parks and most of the state park trails on the island occasionally holds a potluck get-together. Since I take care of the only South End park, the one they don’t bother listing and the county doesn’t either, I get an invitation. A few years back I went to one of these, made a dish to share and hauled up to the Senior Center with about a hundred other volunteers. After waiting for the buffet line to clear I loaded up a plate with whatever was left and proceeded to sit down. Tables seated about 6 folks and so I looked for one with a vacant seat.

Maybe you were a popular kid in high school, one who sat with your popular pals at the formica table and refused seating privileges to the geeks and the nerds and the losers not in your group. I was not in your group. My family moved about 20 times before I graduated high school so I was forever the new kid on the outside looking in. You learn a lot being the new kid, trust me, and one lesson is that humans love their cliques. They love being exclusionary. And they don’t mind hurting others’ feelings. In fact, they really enjoy it.

The other lesson you learn is growing comfortable being on the outside. Okay by me then and okay by me now. As I went from table to table at our little potluck, each and every one told me that their vacant seat was taken. Not by anyone left in the buffet line obviously where I was last, but just that they needed that chair empty. Imagine yourself going table to table, one after the other, plate in your hand and repeatedly being told that empty chair was taken. I suppose you might take it personal. I suppose you might even feel shunned. I suppose you might even be reminded of those good old high school days.

I took it personal, I felt shunned and I definitely was reminded of my high school days, 50 years past that adolescent bullshit. After the last table with a vacant spot informed me someone might already have that space, I took my plate and walked outside to eat alone. When I’d gotten about halfway through the potato salad, macaroni mash and Costco whatevers, I got up, walked back inside and tossed the rest in the garbage bin, went back and grabbed my quinoa salad and hightailed it to the door and outside to my truck.

Needless to say I don’t go to their potlucks anymore. I can eat alone without making the drive and I don’t have to share my dinner with jerks. And no, I don’t go to my high school reunions either, in case you were wondering.

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.