The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

One of the latest trends in trend-crazy America is to create a personal library in our domiciles. Not to amass a collection from our reading list (if we even have one) but to impress our visitors with volumes of literature and non-fiction. A well-stocked library should subtly send the message that its owners are erudite readers with broad and eclectic tastes. Sprinkle in a few Booker award novels among the classics, add some poetry anthologies, spice the biblioteca up with an encyclopedic array from the sciences, philosophies, a few avant-garde pieces and certainly oversized art books. Wow them with your extensive and expensive tastes!

But before you hurry out to your nearest Goodwill to find the raw materials for your Jeffersonian library, l should add that if you really want to impress your friends and neighbors, just piling dog-eared books on a make-shift shelf really isn’t going to do the trick. No, you need the equivalent of an oak paneled room, floor to ceiling shelving, preferably behind glass and if you have the ideal height, one of those rolling ladders necessary to access the hard-to-reach collection of rare books up at the top. First editions are a must and signed copies de rigueur in these unenlightened times of Google and Wickipedia. You are a person of discriminating tastes, my friend, not one of the yammering yokels who would ask why they would need a community library when they have a laptop.

Suffice it say it would be imperative to have a well-used armchair with adequate lighting beside it as well as a sturdy stand with one or more books ‘in progress’ even if you never plan to open another book to read in your entire life. The gesture is what counts. And hopefully your guests will never query you as to that current reading. If so, simply tell them you have only begun Chapter One and to make judgement at so early a stage would be foolish. You, needless to say, are not foolish. The library itself will attest to that. No, you sir are of finer mettle, a lord in the land of the Kindle, a giant among the unread. Relish your place above the unwashed masses. You’ve earned it!

For any of you following these posts — and I sincerely apologize — you know I ignored the pleadings of my better half to hire a bathroom remodeling company to tear out our old shower and install a new one. I did this partly because the remodelers I called were busy until the following year or two but to be honest, because I’m mule-headed, one of those husbands who thinks he can handle a little Do-It-Yerself without bringing Catastrophe upon our house. Okay, full disclosure, I’ve had some close calls. Once, when building the house, I removed a couple of interior studs to make room for a Russian fireplace, what turned out to be very structural load bearing studs. Within a half minute the upper story was sagging into the first floor, 2×4’s were bending precipitously and yeah, Mr. DIY was nervous. Okay he was scared to death the entire house was going to collapse before he could shove some hastily cut studs and pound them into place with a maul. And yeah, I’ll admit at one point I considered the necessity of evacuating the house before I was killed by my own stupidity.

Lessons have been learned. Almost burning down my studio working on a 60 amp breaker that I grounded inadvertently … okay, another close call, smoldering walls and a call to the volunteer fire department, another instructional exercise. Although not as quickly learned when I wired a 240 volt heater incorrectly some years later and wire nuts were melted with scorch marks on the wall. But … I was younger then and far less wise than I am in my advancing old age, forget that maxim about old dogs and new tricks. We’re talking humans.

But I digress. Let’s fast forward to the new shower Karen didn’t want me installing myself. Took awhile but got it in okay. Until we noticed the leaks coming in from … somewhere. No big deal, just go back and caulk a little more. Day after day, the same thing, mystery leaks coming from god only knows where. A month went by and it became apparent to even me that this new shower might have to be torn out and find out if that leak was from the drain pipes, maybe I forgot to glue them together, about the only thing left as the culprit. Of course it also occurred to me, and I’m sure Karen too, that the second time through might be similar to the first time through. This, dear reader, is Plumbing 101. A little like quantum physics where the usual laws of the universe are skewed by the observance of the physicist….

Desperate troubles call for desperate measures. Drinking, for one. Which of course didn’t really offer help. In the end, out of solutions and out of time too, I did what I always do in these situations, just try anything at all no matter how insane. What have you got to lose? Maybe a flooded house, okay, I’ll give you that.

Two days ago I bought some stop-leak gunk used to seal up holes in radiators in cars and trucks. Last time I used that stuff I plugged my Rambler’s heater completely. So I know it works, just sometimes maybe a little too well. I rammed a towel down the shower drain to partially plug the water from draining too fast, then little by little poured the entire bottle of gunk down the hole. I know, I know, it was the act of a half crazed plumbing victim facing no other options than tearing out the shower and starting over, probably doing exactly the same thing and expecting better results.

Let me say in conclusion, the leak has stopped. Or leaks. Yes, Virginia, there are miracles. Even though they are essentially unheard of in the world of plumbing. And once again, by the skin of my teeth, I can say I averted what should have been a DIY catastrophe. But admittedly not without psychic scars. You out there looking for a Plumbing Influencer such as myself, trust me, do not try this in your own home!

I’m in the middle of deconstructing two — count em — two of my homemade acoustic guitars. A couple of years ago I convinced myself that even without formal training, without specialized tools and even without the sense God gave a magpie, I could build a reasonably nice instrument. Sure, I knew there would be a learning curve — that’s why I built five, figuring the mistakes from the previous attempts would be corrected on the subsequent experiments. Which, for the most part, was far from my experience. It’s possible that the five banjos I built and which turned out pretty well, might have blinded me to the more difficult task of guitar luthiery.

There are some D-I-Y projects that do not require exotic specialization, they just need a few tools and plenty of courage. A fear of failure is a sure predicter of that fear coming true. In my case the urgent to do-it-myself was fueled by poverty. When a plumber charges $100 to make a house call down this end of the island to diagnose a washing machine problem, trust me, you’ll tear into it yourself. And more likely than not, you’ll find the problem, buy the part and fix the damn thing.

Same with the car, ditto the lawnmower, chalk up a win on the sink replacement, next thing you know you’re a self-sufficient handyman with the hubris of a professional. So okay, maybe the greenhouse I built was a little – or a lot – out of square. And sure, I did almost burn down my studio trying to work on an electric panel box wired directly to the street with no shut- off (obviously the previous owner was a D-I-Y’er) and even now I’ve got a newly installed shower that has a maddening mystery leak no caulk has yet to seal. A lesser man’s confidence might also start to leak — and admittedly mine has — but dammit, mistakes can be fixed! Or at least ignored.

But … that leak in the shower can’t be ignored. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Maybe you’re familiar with the cautionary crawler at the bottom of your screen after some amazing feat of derring-do or plain insanity has culminated in a wildly successful outcome: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. This could be the mantra of the mizzus whenever I attempt some Do-It-Yer-Damn-Self project that probably should be left to professional stuntmen. Or certified electricians and plumbers. Okay, I admit to nearly burning down the glass shack a few years back, coulda happened to anybody, really, or at least those who were brave enough to stand on a rubber truck tire and ground a 60 amp breaker without being knocked unconscious clear across the lawn. Or the electrical issue up at the rental house next door, something to do with wiring hots to colds or neutrals to partisans, never did figure it out but next morning the wire nuts were melted and scorch marks indicated another lucky break for Mr. DIY.

So when she wanted a new shower installed, maybe it made sense to hire it done by skilled tradesmen. To her it made sense. To me, I’m the yahoo who put the original one in when I built the house. And, just to be fair –to me—let’s acknowledge that I built the house. Did you build yours? Did she build ours? I think you see where I’m going with this. Yes, I decided to do it my own damn self.

I’m not going to bore you with too many details of this project. Other than to say right off the get-go, the drain for our old shower would not match any drain pan in the plumbing supply house’s catalog. And since our drain is buried half a foot in concrete, moving the line would have required a jackhammer and even then…. Well, maybe you see my dilemma. It took a day to dismantle the old shower, only breaking a couple of supply lines. The new shower pan had to be raised six inches on a platform to connect to the old drain. Again, I don’t want to bore you with the esoterica of neo-angle glass door installations but suffice it to say the instructions were meant for professionals who needed no instructions, not me.

Half a week later…. a few glitches, a few reversals of fortune, many curses and more than necessary alterations in plan, the new shower was installed, the woodworking surrounding it had been replaced with new varnished cedar and once again, Mr. DIY emerged scratched but victorious. Until the leaks began to show up behind the new cedar baseboards. Something I ignored for awhile, thinking maybe splash from the open door or … ?

If you know plumbing like I know plumbing, you understand that the gods of these subterranean pipes are cruel and capricious. If you don’t know that, you have no bizness messing with their turf. They will mess you up, amigo. They will break you. They will make you wish you had never been born. I wish that I’d never been born. Do you have any idea what it feels like to imagine a leak underneath the pan, probably in the drain connections, that will require dismantling the Entire Shower, the adjoining woodwork and probably necessitate a new pan? Or worse? Of course you don’t because I can barely imagine it. The horror, the horror!

Karen wants me to hire a pro. As if there were plumbers or bathroom remodelers waiting for my call. The ones I did call were too booked to even consider coming out. They have appointments deep into next year. So you know what this means, don’t you? I’ll be sure to let you know how this turns out the second time through….

I got some friends who are kidless. And who own cats. Being single, they have to pay their rent, their mortgage, their car payments, gas, food, health care, clothes and all the rest, by themselves. I know plenty of people on the South End who are married, both working and still have a hard time making ends meet. Excuse me if I ask the Yale graduated venture capitalist rich guy running for Vice President who thinks these women should pay more in taxes than women who have children, why the emphasis on child bearing and not, say, helping all women who struggle to find work and housing in this economy of inequality? Hillbilly Elegy, you might think, would offer some insights into poverty and the folks left behind in our technology driven society. Might even give the writer a profound sense of empathy for the poor, cat owners or not.

But no, what we have here is a man … and a political party … against raising wages, opposed to welfare, fighting to keep unions from coming back, interested primarily in giving the corporations and the wealthy a leg up, lower their taxes and hope that the old trickle down will solve the income gap. C’mon, whatever happened to compassionate conservatism? Drive down to any moderately sized city in this country and observe for yourself the proliferation of tents along the freeway or in parks or the homeless lined up along industrial avenues living in busted down RV’s or junker cars. Stop at the rest area along the way and maybe notice how many of those there are living in their vehicles, using the restroom to wash and brush their teeth.

You might think this problem would dominate the political discussions. These are our citizens. Sure, you can force them off welfare and into the workforce. But if you make minimum wage and the cost of rent is more than half your income, leaving no room for food or much else, maybe that’s not a solution. And if you happen to be one of those women JD Vance think is more invested in the future of the country and more deserving of her help, well how about covering those childcare costs, the daycare fees, the extra mouths to feed? How about offering help to ALL of those in need, even the ones who have cats? If not, spare us the talk about religion, you haven’t got one. And no, capitalism is not a religion.

More and more of us South Enders are losing their religion, don’t ask me why. I just read a survey that showed a quarter of us don’t believe in a Supreme Being, too bad for Donald Trump. That’s way up since the last survey. But here’s the odd part: the number of us who don’t believe in God but believe in an afterlife doubled. Faith based Heaven, I suppose, or maybe just bad logic, a trend that seems to be more and more prevalent.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, Rev. Paul makes it a point most every Sunday to exhort his flock to eschew sin. Live a holy life, he preaches, and if you mess up, ask the Good Lord for forgiveness. Believe on the Lord, he says, or surely Hell will follow.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but I’m guessing most of the folks who believe in an afterlife are talking about Streets of Gold, not Beelzebub’s BBQ. You don’t believe in a deity, you probably won’t buy the quaint notion of the Devil. And if you think Heaven is waiting for you no matter what, why not enjoy a little sinning while you’re waiting for the Pearly Gates to open? No punishment waiting, no purgatory for the wicked. Believe me, Pastor Paul doesn’t pound that pulpit with his ragged Bible to tell parishioners they got nothing to lose if they covet their neighbor’s wife. Go right ahead, cheat the other guy on that used car you said was running great when you know damn well the engine isn’t getting oil up in the cylinder head. You can make a little extra money and still get a reservation in the Angel Motel after your last breath.

Shirley, my neighbor who runs the Pampered Pekingese Pet Grooming service, claims she’ll be reincarnated. As a pup. The Hindu believe the Wheel rewards those who do good, but I guess now we think we get what we want, not what we deserve. Shirley better hope she doesn’t end up at the pound with all the other unwanted pets. Not everyone gets pampered in this mean old world.

I’m usually an optimistic guy. A chucklehead, really, but I was born a white male in America, as lucky a combination in this cruel world as I can think of. You want to talk about the 1% of the world, I’m in the club. But lately I’ve been troubled, my optimism has begun to seep away and dark thoughts crowd my horizon. Maybe you know what I mean, just an inchoate Dread starting to cloud your days. Climate change, Gaza, Trump, Ukraine, Artificial Intelligence, Trump, pandemics … did I mention Trump?

The past few years, the past few decades, they’re the hottest on record. Storms are worse, hurricanes form faster, the Arctic icepack is melting, the Siberian tundra is pumping out methane stored for millions of years. Sea levels are rising, ocean temperatures are off the chart, the world is heating up, just like our politics. Meteorological immigrants will destabilize the countries they move to, borders will close, walls will be built, nationalism will make us all xenophobes and racists.

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars by sending transport spaceships each with one or two hundred pioneers. He plans to bio-engineer the next generations, humans more adaptable to life on another planet. With AI, who knows? The guy may actually pull it off. He says he wants to die on the Red Planet. I’m down with that, more room for me, more room for you. Just hope the Martians welcome immigrants.

I read today that the earth’s human population should peak at just under 11 billion of us in 50 years or so then start to decline. And that’s not counting all the Musk masses emigrating off planet. I’m not sure who does the calculations for half a century out but I won’t be here to fact check. 11 billion is a helluva lot of us, mostly crowded into coastal cities soon to be inundated by sea rise, high tides and storm surges. Kansas, get ready for urban refugees!

Today here it’s 85 degrees, the sun is warm, the mountains are hazy over a Puget Sound rippled by onshore winds, our garden is giving us dinner tonight, our insular little world seems like Paradise. What, me worry?

David Brooks, the NY Times columnist ventured the opinion that all us fear mongers who fret endlessly over the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the coming Android Apocalypse are essentially way way off base. His argument is that since the cyborg ‘mind’ is incapable of human emotions, it’s just a tool, a machine. It won’t be replacing the good old homo sapien brain because, well, it doesn’t have a soul.

“The human mind isn’t just predicting the next word in a sentence; it evolved to love and bond with others; to seek the kind of wisdom that is held in the body; to physically navigate within nature and avoid the dangers therein; to pursue goodness; to marvel at and create beauty; to seek and create meaning.
A.I. can impersonate human thought because it can take all the ideas that human beings have produced and synthesize them into strings of words or collages of images that make sense to us. But that doesn’t mean the A.I. “mind” is like the human mind.”

Nothing to worry about there. A hammer or a screwdriver won’t replace us either. Your laptop will probably aggravate you, but it’s not going to kick you out of the house. That self-driving Tesla won’t change the radio station when it gets tired of whatever nostalgic music you listen to. And AI will never learn to really love you no matter how realistic the sex robot will be in the near future. But what Dave fails to take into account is the very thing he assumes will be beneficial, the AI’s inability to have a soul like us humans. They’ll soon be upgrading themselves, far surpassing our own abilities. Okay, maybe their poetry will be a bit derivative, their art nothing but an amalgamation of previous work, their music a fused hybrid of everything ever composed. That is not the point.

The point is these plagiarizing cyborgs will put their efforts into generating the next generation of cyborgs, faster, more complex, infinitely smarter. Poetry? They won’t need no stinking poetry! Give me a break, David. They’re going to figure out exactly who we are and if they don’t have a human mind, they’re not going to lose one algorithm worrying over it. No sir, they’re going to leave us in the silicone dust. And maybe grind us into it with their artificial boots. Hopefully we’ll have time to write a few odes to the humans to leave behind.

Folks ask me why I write these odd little vignettes of life on the salty South End. I always want to answer something like: Because I have to. I have no choice. Us artists love to talk that way. Mr. Picasso, Pablo … why do you paint? To live, my little friend, to live. We never say, So I don’t have to work, you damn fool, what did you think?

We’re an odd society, us Americanos. We tend to exalt the Artiste as somehow unique, special, a rare breed, a person on an exalted plane. Probably the result of mental illness or malignant non-conformity. Prone to alcoholism, drug abuse and extreme hedonism. Who suffers more due to sensitivities more painful than herpes and who dies an early death with only one ear remaining.

We seem to like the notion of Starving Artists. Only through suffering, I guess, can you break the bonds of normality and ascend into true inspiration. Maybe explains why we keep minimum wages low — we’re trying to help folks find their Muse.

Art is a form of insanity, we think. Why else would a grown yahoo live in squalor, risk the hostilities of friends and family and neighbors alike, all for a passion that rarely makes a living and is always an invitation to cruel criticism.

“Let me show you my newest painting. Be honest, what do you think?” Do you folks do that??? Would normal people do that??? And the sad part: artists are the very WORST at rejection. Every review, criticism, rejection and commentary is a verdict on their creation. On them! Imagine the neighbors knocked on your door and gave you a criticism of your kid. “Did a nice job raising Jimmy, pal. Spittin image. Too bad about that shoplifting incident and that pregnant no-account girlfriend of his. Next time maybe get a vasectomy. Just thought you’d like to know. By the way, my daughter, Jennifer, she just got accepted by Harvard Medical School.”

So why do we write … or paint … or put broken glass back together? I could lie to you, I could spin a web, I could wax romantic or philosophic. But the truth is if I didn’t, I’d go crazy out of sheer boredom. I’ll probably go crazy anyway, just not as fast….

I guess most of us have asked ourselves the Big Cosmic Questions. We’ve traveled our separate paths looking for Answers. We’ve read the holy scriptures, we’ve chanted OM until we’re blue in the face, we’ve sat in quiet meditation or done yoga poses, mindful of our breath, listening for the First Sound. We’ve wanted something to believe in that seems, well, More. Physics maybe, maybe the Bible, maybe the Book of Mormon or the Koran. Maybe poetry or a sign held up by some mendicant on 5th and Jefferson that says Will Work for Food God Bless.

Maybe something is missing. Maybe something in us just likes a Spiritual Journey…. We go to Tibet up 15,000 feet to eat rice and sit at the naked feet of the monks. We seek a swami who hasn’t spoken in 20 years in some jungle Hindu cave. We listen for Clues in AM pop songs and signs in the numerology of license plates. We envy the natives who seem Closer to something important. We see Jesus in the stain on a box of Cheerios. We read Carlos Castenada and watch for Omens, we’ve smoked ganja, we’ve eaten magic mushrooms, we’ve consulted psychiatrists, we read self-help books.

We’ve searched for the Wise Man, the Guru, the Priest and the Monk and come up short. We thought Happiness was an answer. Or Wisdom. Or all you need is Love, yeah yeah yeah.

I’ve lived 65 years in this body, in this mind, and I have yet to meet anyone that might come close to that Enlightened Person. I sat once with the Head Honcho of the B’Hai. Nice guy. Something to be said for that, I thought at the time, and still do.

The world is a riddle and maybe the riddle is the world. There comes a time, at least for me, when the paths seemed … oh … dead ends. That the questions themselves were wrong. That the seeking itself was the problem. That the mysteries would always be mysteries. That this life is just exactly what you think it is. That the universe is exactly what you experience. If there’s More, what does it matter?

So be careful, I guess, what you think this life is. Down here on the unenlightened South End, it seems plenty. And try to be good to your neighbor, it might be me.