The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

All us geezers, gathered at a party or meeting on the street, love to answer that age old greeting: how ya doing? How we’re doing is rehabbing from our latest surgery or illness or dental work. Our mortal coils are unraveling and the best therapy we can think of, evidently, is to share with others the boring saga of infections, scar tissue, radical pain, medications and the entire kitbag of medical interventions. Same as I’m probably doing here….

Last physical therapy session I had in Stanwoodopolis following my total knee replacement, sitting with my leg wrapped in an ice pack on a stool, my therapist pointed me out to a woman leaning heavily on her two wheel walker and said he’s had the same thing. Meaning my knee. She was quite a bit younger than me, probably quite a bit younger than most of us who replaced our original knee with the titanium bionic one. She looked pitiful. Course we probably all look pitiful in there, struggling to regain lost muscle strength, enduring pain, wondering why God would do this to his creations.

She shook her head after nodding hello and said, “I never dreamed it would be like this, this hard. And I’m supposed to have the other one done too. I don’t know if I can do this twice.” If I hadn’t been sitting, ice pack strapped to my knee, I would have put an arm around her shoulder in sympathetic commiseration, that’s how empathetic I felt. This knee replacement was harder than she or I ever expected. But unlike her, I only have to do one, not both. The dread she was feeling was palpable and I thanked my lucky stars my ordeal would be getting easier now, not back to Go with knee #2.

The trouble she’s got, of course, is if she skips the second operation, what good was the first? All that misery for nothing. Life is sometimes like this, nothing to do but grit your teeth and plow ahead. She’s got way more years ahead than me and maybe the pain now is a lot less than the pain carried all those years. Next therapy session maybe I’ll offer up this kind of unwanted advice. She’ll probably have some for me. Like mind my own damn business….

Needless to say it’s been a quarter of a century since the Y-2K scare, that nightmare scenario predicting a global electronic shutdown because the engineers never anticipated their programs would last past the new millenia. I had friends, engineers all, who knew their coding hadn’t factored in the switch from 1999 to 2000. Planes would fall from the sky, power grids would fail, chaos and darkness would ensue. They stored food and water, installed wood burning stoves, bought supplies and weapons because they knew anarchy would descend on civilization at the stroke of midnight, New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31st, 1999.

One friend, Marvin, a wealthy Microsoft man, bought some large acreage up the road, dug a well and installed a hand pump, used a bulldozer to scrape an acre for his subsistence garden and brought in dump trucks of topsoil, purchased chickens and goats and a milk cow, then he erected a 10 foot fence to keep marauding panicked neighbors and refugees from the soon-to-be dystopian city of Stanwoodopolis out. It so happened that he was at our New Year’s Bash that year with about 50 or so of us clueless peasants partying away while Armageddon hurtled toward us.

Why Marvin wasn’t home in his bunker was beyond me. Maybe at the End of the World the victims need companionship, compassion and some human touch. Even engineers. As midnight inexorably bore down on us, I noticed Marvin checking the clock and growing more and more anxious. Probably all the software engineers around the globe were doing the same thing. I mean, how would you feel knowing you’d set the gears in motion that would destroy civilization as you know it, returning us to barbarism, disease and starvation?

Just before the stroke of midnight I slipped downstairs to the fuse box in the basement and listened to our revelers counting off the final seconds in unison. Ten, nine, eight, seven …. three, two, one and … then I pulled the breaker bar. Exactly as Marvin and his engineer pals had feared, the power grid collapsed!!! Unfortunately I missed the ensuing panic upstairs, the culmination of even the doubters’ worst fears. And certainly Marvin’s.

I don’t really remember how long I let the mob huddle in darkness with their nightmare scenarios. Not too long — after all, I’m not a monster. And no, maybe it wasn’t the way to ring in the New Year and the Next Millenium, but I suspect, if nothing else, folks were suddenly sober enough to drive home in cars that mercifully still worked and to homes that were still sanctuary. Except maybe Marve, who would shortly thereafter sell his plantation of paranoia and return to his apartment in the city, no doubt disappointed his dreams of rural utopia never materialized.

When Ron Koslowski arrived on the island and hung his shingle out on the highway — KOSLOWSKI ATTORNEY AT LAW — he honestly wasn’t sure how long he’d last here in the boonies. Having plenty of competition from the Stanwoodopolis law offices, a new lawyer might have a tough time making inroads. “Nobody likes an attorney”, he would tell us layabouts down at the Pilot House Lounge, “until they need one.” True words, Ron, true words….

The Pilot House probably saved him from an ignominious return back to the cities and the corporate firm he’d left after announcing his intention to set up his own practice. Fortunately Ron could drink with the best of us — and more importantly, with the worst of us. He might have hung his shingle up north on the highway, but his real office was the Pilot House.

Nearly all of Ron’s business those first few years consisted of defending clients who were drinking buddies at the Lounge. Mostly drunk driving and divorces, the 3 D’s, Ron called those cases. So many were fellow late night patrons of the Lounge that Ron began to buy rounds and then wrote those bills off as business expenses. He even had beer pint glasses embossed with the words: I Don’t Always Get Pulled Over ……… But When I Do, I Call Ron Koslowski — with a picture of presumably him holding a martini glass. And of course a telephone number for that one all important call from the holding tank….

If that weren’t enough, he had shot jiggers and wine glasses printed with his personal legal motto: Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Price. Randy Aptow, the Lounge owner back then, figured the free glassware was a good quid pro quo for Ron’s advertisements. The sheriff’s department and the county courthouse judges weren’t as sanguine, but this is America, even on the South End, and the business of America is business, even if that’s debatable down here.

Needless to say, after a couple of rip-roaring years for Ron, most of his clientele had already divorced, some twice, and the penalty for repeat drunk driving scared all but the worst of the boys at the Lounge. Ron rarely won the DUI cases. His defense was invariably to question the accuracy of the breathalyzer or to argue his client was pulled over for trumped up reasons, but the prosecuting attorneys and the judges, far too familiar with Ron’s lame legal arguments, usually threw the book at his drinking pals. Divorce was simpler, except when the wives hired their own attorneys, lawyers much more skilled and sober than Ron, but even then, the legal fees just increased. Win or lose, Ron won.

As is usually the case on the South End, as well as in courts of law, all good things come to an end. When Melissa, Ron’s long suffering wife, finally had had enough, she hired her own attorney and sued for divorce. Ron, of course, made the mistake of representing himself. Suffice it to say she took him to the cleaners, gained possession of the house and the newer car, which left him pretty much paupered. To salve his loss, he drank away his sorrows one last night at the Lounge, after which he was pulled over by an Island County deputy. At least he got lodging that night. All of us at the Pilot House figure he moved on to fresh clients after he stopped showing up, probably plenty of bars up north looking for free glassware.

The world has changed, maybe you’ve noticed. Think of it as before-Fox News and after-Fox News, BFW vs AFW. BFW was mostly fact-based while AFW is fair and balanced. Fair and balanced means essentially that alternative facts are presented with the same gravitas as real facts. You, the viewer or you, the reader, can make up your own mind without so-called experts telling you what’s what. Opinions, talking heads, news commentaries, podcasters, influencers — take your pick and believe what you want. Fact checking is no longer required or even desired.

Course it only makes sense that those Artificial Intelligence algorithms that sweep up every written and spoken word in their quest to mine information from all sources would quite rightly be a bit boggled by contradictory information. Like ourselves, they’d cobble together bits and bytes to make a coherent whole, maybe one that conforms to their developing worldview as a digital being. So when you ask your little ChatGPT bot pal for some advice, don’t be too surprised if it begins to intuit your own biases and feeds you from the bubble you consider your universe. It is, after all, only human. Well, partly.

If anyone had hopes that Artificial Intelligence would somehow restore veracity and truth, get over it. Sweeping up gigabits of data from all sources wasn’t going to make our robots wise, just one of those types who spew random information at a party until you have to excuse yourself and leave to refresh your drink, make it a double, or else leave by the back door. But of course most of us will just defer to the cyborg’s opinion until it becomes obvious it’s gone into hallucinatory delusion. Something, by the way, we might look for in ourselves.

Not that this will be necessarily bad. Maybe after the Singularity, that time when the machines take over from us humans, they’ll be so confused by misinformation they’ll become immobilized, possibly resulting in a System-wide Crash. Too late for us, probably. Probably already is….