The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When Sheila’s husband got laid off a month ago from the outfit that supplies thingamajigs for Boeing, she hired on at the IGA up north as checkout clerk. “I haven’t rung up groceries,” she said, “since I was 17 and still in high school. Back then we didn’t have scanners, we had to ring every item up on the register. What a difference!”

The other difference, she says, is how much less friendly the shoppers are in our “Friendly Hometown Store”, not like the A&P back in her small Ohio town in 1966. “I guess everybody knew everybody. These days half the customers don’t say hello, they’re busy talking on their phones. I might as well be a robot.”

“You will be soon,” I offer over a cup of coffee while Earl watches TV in the livingroom, probably glad of an early retirement and a wife willing to go back to work. “Hon!” she yells, “can you turn that down a little?” From where I sit at the kitchen nook counter, Earl fiddles with the remote, but instead of turning his game show volume down, he changes channels. Sheila shakes her head and rolls her eyes. Earl takes a hit off his Budweiser and settles into a talk show.

It’s 9:30 in the morning. In a few minutes she’ll leave for her 10 o’clock shift, work until 6, then drive home to cook dinner for Mr. Wonderful. “I don’t mind going back to work,” she tells me. “Good to get out of the house.”

I bet. We used to drive school buses together, Sheila and me, back in the good old days when we were both single and poor and new to the South End. Sheila married Earl and that finished our friendship until recently when I met her, where else, in the checkout line. We have an occasional coffee, but pretty obviously this won’t work for long, not judging by the volume blaring from the livingroom, a loud hint.

“Good to see you, Skeeter,” she says at the door. The TV noise follows us outside. “Thanks for the coffee,” I say and she says, “No problem,” when we both know there is.

It was a sunny day yesterday so I decided to take a stroll through the neighborhood, maybe see if any crocuses had poked up into the sunlight early this year. Call me an optimist, but I’m forever hoping to quit my hibernative tendencies of these dark winters. Daryl and his mizzus Claudia were out by their garage when I waltzed by so they asked me in for a cup of coffee. I said sure even though I wanted to stay out in the sunshine as much as possible, not sit in their dark kitchen where half the time the curtains remained drawn.

Before I could say ‘cream’, Claudia was off on the election, so heated up she could’ve boiled the water for our coffee on her nose. “You believe that egomaniac?” she started out and by the time I’d gotten my java she was ranting about the cuts coming to Planned Parenthood, the next Supreme Court nominee, the pipeline in North Dakota and the undisclosed tax returns of the newly minted President of the Free World. Daryl smiled at each verbal fusillade and sipped his black coffee, occasionally offering up fresh meat for Claudia to gut and dress.

Claudia and Daryl pretty much stick to their god’s little quarter acre. Like a lot of us down here on the xenophobic South End. But unlike most of us, they see storm clouds on the horizon, tempests coming onshore, pestilence creeping in from the woods. The glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, the earthquake is around the corner and the bird flu will kill half the world. Sinkholes will take their car, the government will ruin the global economy, tomorrow is something to be dreaded. I don’t usually take sweetener in my coffee, but given the extra bite of bitter, I spooned in a little honey. This launched a tirade about killer sugar and the food conglomerates’ greed, high fructose sugar, transfats, GMO’s, additives, diabetes on the rise and the end of Obamacare. I could feel my stomach starting to roil.

By the time I got back outside dark coastal clouds had rolled in and the sun was pretty much blotted out. I knew I wouldn’t find a crocus trying to reach for spring; instead, I’d see the nettles poking up back on the trail in my woods. The groundhog wouldn’t see his shadow this year, he’d be dead of groundhog flu. An ill wind blew through the firs and I wondered if rain wasn’t far behind. Rain and toads, hail and misery. I hurried up, hoping I could make it back to the house before the sky fell in. Darkness seemed to come early. The house seemed miles away. And even if I made it back, it probably would’ve burned down by the time I got there. I thought I heard wolves howling. No, I was sure I heard wolves.

Turned out it was just the neighbor’s dachshund yapping. I could see the house. It was unburned. The sun had come back out. The Olympics were incandescent across the Sound and a warm breeze greeted me when I came out of the woods. A little cluster of snowdrops were poking up by the woodsheds and the hellebores were blooming. Maybe, just maybe, spring wasn’t far behind.

I was just reading that Amazon has 30,000 non-human employees, what we proletariat call robots. In 2014 Facebook acquired Whatsapp whose worth was 22 billion dollars. The messaging firm had a total of 55 human employees, not that I think they were profit-sharing with them. Google, whose worth is more than most country’s G.D.P., has 60,000 workers compared to GM (worth a tenth of Google) which has 215,000. And you can bet your 401-K GM is on the forefront of automation.

Trump can talk about bringing back the coal mining jobs til the cows come home again, but if anybody thinks employment is going to go up in the land of the digitized, home of the android, they need to adjust their meds. Go ahead and bring those factories back to America’s fruited plain, but don’t expect them to hire us humans. That dream left with the Industrial Age. The discontent from the folks who watched their jobs outsourced to China, Mexico and the robots, well, that resentment is only going to get worse. And the income inequality too.

This is Future Shock rearing its ugly orange head. This is the future roaring up in our rearview way closer than it appears, ready to roar past, curves or not. The folks who think we can close the barn door and wall off the borders, they either need to stop smoking whacky tobaccy or start. Pulling the covers over our heads isn’t really the brightest color in the crayon box. I know, folks are worried about global warming and immigration issues, minimum wage and Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and gun control, abortion restrictions and prayer in the schools. All worthy causes and reasons for concern, granted. But when half the population is thrown out of work, when the 1% who own the wealth become the overlords who wall themselves in armed compounds and patrol the perimeter with drones to protect their largesse from the peasants who suspect injustice is being done to them and their odds of winning the Lottery are actually worse than they ever dreamed, well, all those other issues will take a backseat to the bonfires that light up the purpled mountains majesty.

Like the song sez, the jobs are gone boyz … and they ain’t comin back. And if you think Trump is scary, get ready for what’s coming when people who aren’t stockholders in those companies worth billions with 55 employees can’t feed their families. You might just change your mind about gun control.

A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….

You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.

For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.

“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.

Well, they didn’t like being called Deplorables but I’m not sure they’d have liked being labeled racists either. Or homophobes. Pretty sure they wouldn’t care to be called bigots either. But they’ve elected a guy who feeds their fury and their boundless resentments, a vindictive self-righteous instrument of their revenge. He told them he would be their Retribution and they voted for him to be just that.

Oh yeah, they were sick and tired of the elitists, the East coast yuppies, the Wall Street crowd, the immigrants, the Woke, the trans and the gays and any religion other than theirs. Deplorable? They’ll show you deplorable!

Try this: get rid of foreign aid, eliminate the Department of Education, NOAH, the EPA, half the Department of Agriculture, fire the bureaucrats, deport anyone their Leader takes umbrage to, put totally incompetent sycophants in charge, alienate our allies and suck up to our enemies. How do you like that?

You wanted a Biznessman for Prez, you figured the billionaire who’d gone bankrupt how many times? would be the right fit? Sure, privatize the Post Office, let Musk get rid of his competition for satellites and space travel and EV’s, figure out how some weather company will take the place of NOAA. While you’re at it, ditch the fire and police, just more government, let the private sector sell you protection. Way more efficient, right? Doesn’t take a Harvard professor to figure out government is mostly waste and fraud and incompetence.

And while you’re at it, close the borders, lay tariffs on everything that crosses them, who needs an economist, you got the guy with all the answers. Fortress America! The one true God on the money! Put religion — yours — back in private schools. Get rid of science while you’re downsizing. Vaccines? Who needs em? Scientific research? Don’t make me laugh. Global warming studies? Hell, no, drill, baby, drill!

Slash the IRS too. Why make the rich endure an audit for those bogus exemptions? Social Security must be rampant with abuse, all those 150 year olds collecting your tax dollars. Time to slash and burn, so what if you get your check a little late. If at all….

Deplorables? You tell me. What I think is you’re just ignorant. Time will tell if you’re making America great again … or just breaking its back.

Rebecca Snowalter runs her own business, the Top to Bottom Cleaning Crew. The crew consists of, well, her. Primarily — and nearly exclusively — the clientele are VRBO and Airbnb leasers, houses all over the island rented out by the day or week to tourists who vacation here. Used to be winters were slow but not sinc Covid kept folks in lockdown. Now everyone wants to travel. Rentl prices soared but Rebecca’s cleaning fees really didn’t, just more profit for the landlords.

Rebecca rents an old double wide down at the Mabane Mobile Village. Rumor has it lately a Canadian consortium may buy the Village lock stock and rain barrel, then jack up the rents. Way of the world, she figures, but she’s not happy about it. These days she’s not happy about much of anything.

“I’ve got to hire help,” she told me the other night at the Pilot House Lounge. “I can’t live on the few clients I have.”

Trying to detour her pessimism, I said, “Maybe the new owner’ll turn the Village into vacation rentals, more work for Top to Bottom.” Rebecca looked at me like I’d just spoken in glossolalia, babbling gibberish about the Promised Land. Or the sweet hereafter, the after being her death.

“Sure,” she said, “and maybe I’ll make a fortune in the next year, buy a house or maybe two to live in, sell the business and retire in Costa Rica, live happily ever after.”

She was imagining what it would be like to find affordable rents here on the island, the same island the millionaires have found the last decade or two. The only cheap rents were being converted to VRBO’s, vacation rentals five times what the owners charge for yearly. “I’ll be living in my car before long,” she moaned.

What can you say? Hope you got a big car? You won’t have to cook for yourself? Think of it as road trip vacation every day? Instead, I just said, “Next drink’s on me, Rebecca.”

The South End — might not be a paradise for the poor anymore.

There are plenty of folks who would gladly send their hard-earned dollars to the TV ads for abused dogs and abandoned cats but would never give one thin dime to some charity that helps us humans. Which, in all fairness, is their right. Their money, their choice of charities. We can’t save the world so pick a cause and hope it does some good, maybe even makes a difference.

The Tyee Rescue Farm, just down the road from the now shuttered Tyee Store, take in unwanted dogs and cats, injured raccoons, eagles with broken wings, lost possums, unsaleable ostriches, crippled llamas, sick parrots, three legged squirrels, well … they take in whatever critter or creature gets dropped off by its owner or the Island County deputies, the concerned citizens and even Jim Jensen, the official ‘animal control officer.’ Martha Petersen started taking in strays back about 1975, built a small kennel, taught herself basic veterinary skills and within a year she was swamped with a veritable zoo of inmates, detainees, patients, the unloved and the unwanted. Which, when her husband John left her the night she drove to the State Park to retrieve an injured deer, she became too. Unloved, I mean. John said he’d had enough. “You love that rabbit more than me,” he accused her before she shut the door on both their way outs.

Martha has told that story to most every volunteer and staffer who’s helped her build her 10 acres to what it is today. Kennels and barns, sheds and walking paths, a small hospital, aviaries and pig pens. “He said I loved that rabbit with the ear half torn off more than him,” she’d narrate, immobilizing a crow’s bent wing or applying antibiotic to a raccoon’s dog-eaten tail while the newest volunteer held the injured beast. “And you know,” she’d say, pausing for effect like she always did, “he was right. The animals people bring in when they don’t want them anymore … you know what? They’re better off here.”

Love, all I can say, is love. Martha, I guess, has more than most. John? I’m betting he doesn’t have a dog or a cat or gimpy alpaca. He probably counts himself the lucky one. Maybe they both are.

Let’s say you got a bizness like mine and maybe Ford Motor Company. Most of us corporate types worry about short term profits to keep our investors happy and our shares on the Dow Jones up. But we always plan for the future, five years or so at least. If we have a regime in power that gives incentives, say, for buying Electric Vehicles and maybe supports government investment in public art, particularly stained glass art, me and the Ford boyz will probably tool up, upgrade our facilities, plan for additional hiring and basically veer in that direction rather than, say, stick with fossil fuel guzzlers or, in my case, residential bathroom window art.

Now the Detroit crowd can’t run around the country installing tens of thousands of charging stations that will incentivize EV purchases, even with some heavy discounts on pricing, which means their investment needs that kind of infrastructure support. You drive a Model T cross country back in grandpa’s day, you wouldn’t go if you worried about locating a gas station in Nowhere, South Dakota. You might not even buy a horseless carriage at all, just stick with the nag and the buggy. And if the government’s Art in Public Places Program disappeared, why would I buy extra inventory, rent a large studio or hire assistants when all I need is a table, minimal supplies and just myself as underpaid employee?

What me and my corporate companions need most is some consistency in our government. The last thing in the world Ford MoCo wants or needs is the New Regime rolling in with a pledge to drill baby drill, discontinue buying incentives for EV’s and cutting the infrastructure funds to build a nationwide network of charging stations and loudly proclaiming that fossil fuels are the real future of America. All those cheap and very competitive EV’s being built in China, well, we’ll just ban them from being imported into our country. Trouble is, China will sell them to every other country in the world. Competition, the capitalist motto? Fuggetaboutit!

And as for public art? Well, let’s be honest here, we used to build courthouses, fire stations, university buildings, city halls and all the rest with the idea that the architecture and the art would inspire its citizenry. Think Rome, Athens, Paris, London, Stanwoodopolis and Smokey Point. They didn’t build the cheapest and quickest construction. They built modern day secular cathedrals. Those days are past for this capitalist yahoo. I only hope folks still want some artistic privacy in their privvies….

I’m reading a book this week. Yes, a real one, not an audiobook, not an E-book, but a Gutenberg ink-on-the-papyrus novel that’s 500 plus pages. I can guess what you’re thinking: I’m missing 500 cat videos, nature flicks, influencer suggestions and who knows what else on Tik-Tok, X or Instagram. I got friends now who can’t wade through a two paragraph e-mail, not after Twitter convinced them less is more. Or at least enough.

Without ratcheting into an essay on loss of concentration, short attention spans, ADHD and the evils of social media, I just wonder how libraries still survive. Or bookstores. Or the U.S. Post Office. When was the last letter you got? How about the last letter you ever wrote — and no, that Christmas card with your signature on the bottom does NOT count. Forget about claiming your name has six letters in it, don’t gaslight me!

Sure, by year’s end AI will write whatever you want for you. Even write a 500 page novel. A poem. A short story. An essay. Lyrics to a song — and the music too.

The Tech Boyz will tell you this is the Brave New Future, faster, better, way more intelligent. Oh, I know, at first we’ll tell ourselves the Bots are merely an adjunct to human creativity, an appendage, not crutch. And anyway, you can probably tell the difference, poorer quality, so you think. But have no doubt, the machines will go beyond mere mimickery, they’ll learn our tricks and they they’ll become, for want of a technical term, creative. What, you think humans are that special?

So okay, maybe I read books to escape the world I see passing me on the shoulder of the digital highway. When I find out the author isn’t human, just a box of algorithms, those cat videos may look damn tempting. Course by then the Bots will probably be making those too.

START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, well pump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

If none of these suggestions work for you, plan on moving soon. Life on the South End is mostly for those with alternative-fact occupational schemes. If you landed here thinking this was just a suburb of America, get yourself a GPS and head back to the mainland. Not guaranteeing jobs necessarily, but at least the possibility exists out there in Trumpland when America’s CEO brings them back. And those of us who stay, well, we could use the extra elbow room. Good luck to ya!