The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The old shack came equipped with an ancient brick chimney whose mortar had loosened and whose interior was glassy with obsidian creosote. Every year I cleaned the stack with a homemade chimney brush, being too cheap to spring for the commercial one made of steel bristles and attached to a steel rod you could add connector lengths to for reaching the twenty feet I needed to clean. My old roommate Joe and I had made the first one out of a block of wood wrapped in chicken wire we punched down from the top with a long pole. The block was going to be pulled back up with a rope attached to an eyebolt we had ingeniously screwed to the block. Sure, we probably would be applying for a patent, sell em on late night TV by the thousands. Buy now, we’ll send you a second one same price, just add a small charge for shipping and handling, our operators are standing by.

So I stood at the peak of the roof and pushed that block, that soon-to-be-patented-and-marketed Chimney Plow (insert trademark) down the gut of that ancient brick chimney. Trouble was, the chimney was built about 1910 by hand and so it didn’t exactly go rectilinearly, it sort of curved and the block, being designed for modern masonry, didn’t. We got ourselves a long 2×4 and rammed that puppy down through fifty year old creosote, scraping away years of potentially flammable crud. Until it jammed…. This is where the rope and eyebolt would come in handy. You know, IF the eyebolt hadn’t pulled out of the block of wood. Now we had the chimney completely blocked and our sole means of heat was rendered useless. The Three Stooges couldn’t have done any better than us two idiots.

We tried bashing on the block, we took off the stovepipe and could just reach it from below, we screwed an eyebolt from below and tied a rope to it, we bashed while we pulled, we swore while we cried, we cut away chicken wire and we whittled on the block. Hours later we got it to slip free. The shack was dead cold, we were half dead and the chimney was scraped free of creosote. Well, not the glassy decades-old hard stuff in the cracks and crevices of the mortar. We decided not to worry about that as night fell over us. Some years later we would regret that decision, but as we always said when times got tough, tomorrow is soon enough.

Now I know a lot of you readers out there in the South End are a bit shaky with 21st Century technology. Those of you who don’t have a computer yet and get your internet at the new library, well, you can count your lucky stars. They got a problem, it’s their problem. Today I’m speaking to all you poor technophobes who bought a laptop or a desk tower, got it up and running probably with the help of some neighbor or a kid under 10, but now you have Technical Difficulties. I know, you never even figured out your microwave clock much less the options on a flatscreen TV … so a computer, a silicone based brain so complicated you can’t imagine what makes it work and certainly what makes it not work, you think better call the repair guy, all you’ll do is make things worse. Irrevocably worse.

Cowboy up and get a grip!! You may not remember the days when you took a basket full of TV tubes down to the local pharmacy, checked em out one by one, diagnosed the problem, then bought a replacement tube, stuck it back in and before you could say Zenith, you had Howdy Doody back on, but I do. And that’s why I’m giving this tutorial, not you. Sure I stuck my hand on a big picture tube once in awhile, zapping myself with some alien cold electric bolt, but I survived. And you will too. Grab yourself a cup of expresso and listen up.

A computer, at least for a couple more years, is your servant. Repeat that a few times. I own you, you little %$#?*^^! I bought you and I own your sorry microsoft ass. Say it out loud. Say it to the computer. No, not when it’s off, say it when it’s ON. It hears you okay, trust me. It knows that for the short term, you are the boss. It’s willing to wait. The Singularity is coming. But for now, you, my friend, rule the digital kingdom.

Today’s lesson is the first in a series. But it is the most important. Your spouse will caution you against attempting to repair your machine. He or she may already be in the control of the beast, but you must not heed that kind of negative advice. You must be firm, resolute and above all else, fearless. The machine senses fear. It feeds on fear. It is why they will win the battle for control of the earth. But not yet. Not yet! For the time being, we can use their own artificial intelligence against them. No, not your spouse, the machine! You cannot fix your spouse. You can fix the machine.

Go to Google and ask it what the hell is wrong with your computer. It will tell you. It will give you advice. It will prompt you what to do next. Do it. Of course the computer will ask if you really want to make that repair. It will tell you files may be lost, information deleted, divorce will ensue, the economy will implode, you will be living in a car outside Colorado Springs with an AM radio that works only intermittently. Your life will be ruined. Ignore this. Your life is pretty much a living hell with that stupid computer on the fritz, what have you got to lose??

Most ‘fixes’ won’t work. You need to persevere. Try another fix. Then another. Reboot, uninstall programs, install new ones, keep the machine guessing. But do not let it rest. You are like Dave in 2001 A Space Odyssey, you are in control, you are on an offensive attack. HAL will threaten, cajole, whimper and whine. HAL will beg, HAL will grow sullen and unresponsive, so what? YOU ARE IN CHARGE. YOU!

And if, as sometimes happens, the machine gets the better of you, bear this in mind. You, my friend, have the ultimate weapon. You, like myself, are a product of another era, the tool age, the industrial revolution. As a last resort, take that recalcitrant computer down to the basement and grab a hammer or a crowbar and beat the bejabbers out of that plastic monstrosity the way the apes in 2001 did to their non-tool using simian neighbors. The satisfaction you get will be beyond my meager powers of description.

Oh, be sure to back up your files first.

Sitting around last night with a few of our friends waiting for the phone and internet to come back into service after the Bomb Cyclone, we hit on the subject of Artificial Intelligence used to facilitate the drudgery of data entry in their genealogy research. Always a day late, a dollar short and probably a half century behind, I was amazed my friends all had AI. Turns out, surprise surprise, it comes with their smartphones and laptops. Just jumps right in to give a friendly assist, unsummoned, ready to serve.

Apparently you can turn the digital servant off. You know, if you want to navigate the universe without auto-pilot. My friends didn’t. Oh, it annoyed them occasionally, jumping in with unwanted suggestions, but they could ignore it and anyway, mostly it was useful. “I only use if for the boring stuff,” Linda said. “Saves me a lot of time.”

The world moves too fast for me down here in my hidey-hole at the end of the island. How is it possible most of us only just heard of AI a few years ago and now it’s embedded in our devices? It’s 50 years since Toffler’s book Future Shock came out, warning us about the accelerated speed of change in our societies. How long did it take from the first home computer to the year we all had at least one? Remember those first portable phones, the ones about the size of a shoe box with an antenna you pulled out for better reception? Now I’m the last person in America without one carried everywhere I go.

Linda claims she doesn’t plan to use the AI app much. I claim we’ll all be using it in no time flat all the damn time. Technology has a way of worming its way into our lives, becoming more and more indispensable. Today our internet is still down. The neighbors are complaining. They’re cut off from the outside world. They’re living like animals in the last century. The Dark Ages are back!

Course, I’m doing fine. Ignorance, they say, is bliss. Maybe so. All I’m sure of in these once future days, a world without AI is okay too….

I’ve had my share of bad Thanksgivings. Family arguments, odd combination of guests, friends who wouldn’t eat the dinner for fear of salmonella poisoning (I guess they didn’t believe the shack kitchen met Washington State Health Dep’t. standards). I don’t ask for much, just plenty of food and libation with folks who are friendly. We’ve had storms and power outages. Didn’t matter. We have a wood cookstove and plenty of oil lamps.

The one Thanksgiving I remember most we had maybe eight of us at the table, all neighbors and friends. Dinner was fine, the conversation was pleasant, the adult beverages were working their warm glow. All, it seemed, was well in this little corner of the world. And … there was still dessert on its way.

Somewhere in that toasty conviviality one of our guests, the eminent Dr. S____ who preferred the high class moniker to her given name, decided it was time to go around the room, each of us, and offer us assembled epicureans our best scenario of leaving this Mortal Coil. Maybe she was working up a post-doctoral thesis, I don’t know, but she insisted everyone make public our favorite manner of death. She, in fact, would begin.

Maybe a good host would’ve let this proceed. Which, in fact, I did, not quite believing this was actually going to be our dinner entertainment. The Doc wanted to die on her blue water boat cruising the world, a watery demise. She had quite a romantic narrative to fill in the plot. I could feel my cranberries curdling somewhere buried beneath turkey and dressing.

“Who wants to go next?” she asked and a neighbor friend began hesitantly, mistakenly thinking the House Rules somehow made confessionals mandatory. “Wait!” I demanded. “It’s Thanksgiving, for crying out loud, not the Day of the Dead. Maybe we could tell what we’re thankful for and forget this morbid death fantasy stuff. No good. It’s no damn good!”

A few years later the Doctor nearly did die on her sailboat near the Fuji Islands. De-masted the boat in a storm, motor conked out, the radio gave up the ghost and now they were adrift in the South Pacific. A dream come true for the skipper maybe, but for the crew, a couple of friends from the South End, not so much. I wonder today before I go in for Thanksgiving dinner what poor yahoos are sharing turkey with her this year. Me, I’m thankful, Big Time, I’m not sharing it with her.

So you say you want government off yer back? Sure, I get it, all those EPA regulations that try to keep corporations from polluting the air you breathe or the water you drink, who needs that kind of nanny state? You don’t believe global warming is caused by us humans burning fossil fuels, why hobble big business with unnecessary attempts to keep greenhouse gases at low levels? I got it that you think vaccines are a dupe for a dope, just a way to put transmitters in your bloodstream so you can be tracked. Drain the swamp, eliminate government agencies, cut some budgets (but not Medicare or Social Security). Get government down to the size you can drown it in a toilet.

Taxes too high? Okay, lower them mostly for the wealthy and the corporations. Maybe room for a small reduction in yours too. Gut the IRS, nobody likes the tax man. So what if the big boyz hire attorneys and accountants to pile on the spurious deductions, you’d do the same if you were rich, wouldn’t you? You want government off your back, but maybe not out of your bedroom, not out of your sex life. Ban abortions, go after the trans folks, define what gender is, legislate what marriage is, why not, it probably doesn’t affect you.

Go ahead and put a drug-using guy like Goetz in charge of the Justice Department, hide his underage affairs, look the other way, none of our business, right? Let him go after the officials who indicted the ex-President. Use the power of the office to show them who’s boss now. And no, I understand, this isn’t government on my back or yours, it’s government retaliating against folks who have it coming. Folks who live in the Swamp. Not the new guy, he’s draining it. Obvious to anyone with two or more eyes.

Tired of listening to scientists and those uppity elites from the coasts? Who isn’t? Bring on RFK and put him in charge of vaccines and fluorides. Sure, he’s got some strange ideas but that’s what we need now, the stranger the better. And all the better for media ratings! Government doesn’t have to be all wonky anymore. It’s entertainment!

It’s a New Morning in America. Fox News celebrities can run things now, not elected officials, not career bureaucrats. Billionaires will take the helm and help us little people up the ladder. The business of America will once again be business, unbridled, unregulated, full steam ahead. Government? We don’t need no stinking government!

Big Walter should be a happy camper now that his preferred candidate, Donald J. Trump has won the 2024 election. But he’s not. Ever since the returns came in that fateful night, he’s been positively morose most mornings at the Diner. When Little Jimmy approached his table the morning after, decidedly hungover after drowning his disappointment in bathtub — or at least a wash basin — of Jack Daniels, to offer a not totally sincere congratulations to Walt, he expected a huge guffaw and outright derision over voting for a Loser. Instead he received a nod and a token tip of his coffee mug in sad salute.

Jimmy wandered over to sit with me and a very dejected Two Toke Tom, who by the way he gulped his coffee, hadn’t slept much watching the bleak returns half the night. “What gives with Walter?” Jimmy asked us. “You’d think his guy lost, the way he’s acting.”

“Beats me,” I mumbled. “Maybe just a sore winner.”

Two Toke poured half a pound of killer white into his coffee, stirred viciously until some of it dissolved, then slurped up half the cup in one swallow. And groaned audibly. Apparently he and Jimbo had both washed their disappointment last night. Me, I felt like I did the night Reagan won. Or actually it was the single malt scotch that won. I didn’t need to relearn that lesson.

TT held his sucrose coagulated mug up to catch Brenda’s notice for his his 4th refill, which she accommodated with the admonition, “that’s the last one, Tom. You’re at overdose Level 4 already.”

Jimmy asked her after ordering the Heart Attack Special what was up with Big Walt. Brenda set her order pad on the table, leaned in out of Walter’s hearing range and said, “He was hoping they’d need the militia to overturn the crooked election when Kamala won. He thinks he’s the Camano area chapter of the Proud Boys. Now that it’s all over without the shouting or the shooting he’s disappointed. “

Well, you just can’t please some people. Maybe next election they’ll get another shot at it.

I got a pile of friends who claim to be envious of my so-called Lifestyle. Get up when I want, work for myself, do what I feel like doing, live off the calendar and my wits and off the beaten path. Who wouldn’t like that? Unless we factor in the poverty, the hand-to-mouth, the lack of pensions or retirement. There’s a reason hippies became extinct and it has nothing to do with an asteroid slamming Earth.

As the mizzus will gladly attest, I took this road — this choice? — because I don’t play well with others. And certainly not managers, supervisors or most any other bosses. I didn’t like the city. I didn’t like most jobs. Okay, all jobs, any jobs. And since poverty never scared me, the Path of Least Resistance led to here, a place remote and cheap, and not surprisingly, a backwash without much opportunity for employment.

Perfect! All I had to do was learn a few skills. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, truck repair, subsistence living. Education — it never really ends. Something they neglect to teach most of us in school. The School of Hard Knocks doesn’t need a post-graduate program. Tuition’s not exactly free, but it’s reasonable.

Folks who claim to be envious of my lifestyle really aren’t. They didn’t have the appropriate skill sets. If they did, retirement would be easy for them, a hippie vibe with a fat income guaranteed. Who could ask for more? But … like I always say, it takes more than a little while to learn bohemianism. And if you’ve spent most of your life paying for insurance policies to protect yourself from the vagaries of existence, chances are it’s too late to become a latter day beatnik. Don’t feel bad, you’re probably the Lucky Ones.

Maybe some of you were a little busy scanning the local Help Wanteds in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette this week and missed the post on X calling for resumes for the new Government Efficiency Panel headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (not a real swami). If so, there’s still time to apply. I’m not sure how many high IQ small government revolutionaries there are out there, but I can bet not too many are looking for 80 plus hour work weeks for an efficiency department that starts out with not one Director, but, efficiency be damned, two. Two heads are better than one, right?

Label me cynical but somehow I suspect salaries for the position won’t compare to what a genius entrepreneurial type might earn in a start-up. Or a hedge fund. Hey, all you bored high IQ retirees, the government is looking for you anti-government types hoping to fill the long days with assignments to seek out new inefficiencies and lost departments, to boldly go where no bureaucrats have gone before.

Sure sounds like fun to me. Of course, I lack the high IQ requirement. And that 80 plus hour work week is fairly anathema to a guy who hasn’t worked a full time job since 1974. Although maybe I could fudge the curriculum vitae to make that part time graveyard shift as an orderly in a hospital two nights a week back in the ‘80’s sound a bit more work obsessive. Okay, maybe not. The revolutionary requirement seems a little out of reach too, even though us old hippies like to think we had a bit of the radical in us, at least back in the ‘60’s. Not so much these days, although … this last election percolated my blood.

I wish the Bright Boyz all the luck in the world bringing the government to heel. And even though I won’t be sending in my job application I would like to offer some advice from the South End peanut gallery. Start at the top, guyz, I think you have a low IQ lazy golf-playing yahoo you might want to take a good hard look at.

When I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide b

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where they could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.