The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Happiness, for some, is a warm gun. I swear, the older I get the more I learn about the proclivities of my fellow citizens. But I have to admit, the term ammosexual was out of the blue in an era where everything lately seems out of the blue. You can buy a T-shirt with AMMOSEXUAL emblazoned on the front and you will fit right into the next MAGA rally where red caps and flag outfits are de rigueur. Childless Cat Lady, I’m Voting for the Convicted Felon, I Don’t Care, Black Lives MAGA (not sure what that one even means), there’s even one of Trump’s mugshot with the inscription underneath LEGEND.

I guess we live in bumper sticker times. T-shirts, ball caps, bumper stickers, all shouting out our politics, our grievances, our heroes. But there’s something about ammosexual that makes my butt cheeks clench, something beyond just partisan and creepy, way worse than weird. We already got an alphabet soup for sexual predilections, maybe we don’t need to add ammosexual if we’re not hopelessly woke. LGBTQ+A? Hard enough before. Probably should poll the National Rifle Association membership, see what percentage identify as ammosexual, find out if this is a minority desperate to step out of the closet. “Mom, Dad — I got something we need to talk about….”

Somehow I suspect the evangelicals won’t find biblical scripture or stricture to support anyone’s notion that ammosexuality was forbidden, deemed a perversion in the eyes of the Lord or otherwise pronounced taboo. Thou shalt not lie with thy neighbor’s ARE-15!! Not in the New Testament even and anyway the folks willing to cast the first stones won’t be stocking up with rocks, at least not for this particular proclivity.

Personally I guess if a person wants to engage in whatever with his/her/their guns or cannonballs, none of my business. And not the government’s either – even if, as I suspect, these ammosexuals would welcome Big Brother in your bedroom, probably not theirs. You know, until guns are outlawed and gun sex too.

Gee, I don’t know. Imagine calling Donald Trump and his gang of goofballs weird. What, them? Elon Musk and his X platform of misinformation? C’mon, we all know he’s as normal as you and me and the potted plant in the room with us. So what if he plans to colonize Mars in our lifetime, probably not a bad plan at all, maybe start with Don and JD? Matt Goetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene? How about Lauren Boebert? Rudy, America’s mayor? Nothing strange about those nice people, right?

So what if most of Trump’s cabinet and advisors resigned after spending a little too much time in small rooms with the man. Doesn’t make him weird, does it? Okay, maybe a bit hard to deal with. His Sec. of State called him a f#@%! moron and some of the others claim he has the attention span of a gnat … but hey, that would apply to a lot of us, not necessarily bizarre at all. I got plenty of friends who don’t read much of anything. Like Donald, we got TV we can watch all day long. Plenty of information on TV! Who needs briefing reports?

Is it weird that the Evangelicals support a man who is a convicted felon, a man who states publicly it’s okay to grab women by their genitals, who cheated on his wives, who paid porn stars to stay silent over their sexual trysts? The guy who said maybe Mike Pence deserved to be lynched by those tourists at the Capitol? Seriously, you think that’s weird?

Or is it odd and bizzarro to enrich yourself while in office? Wouldn’t show you his taxes so you think maybe he’s got something to hide. Plenty before him have done the same thing, probably what some would call good bizness practice. What about praising dictators, strongmen who never believed in democracy and rule with an iron fist? So he likes Putin and Kim Jong-Un? Maybe the North Koreans and Russians like them too, doesn’t make him an oddball. Okay, makes you wonder, though… Might be he just wants a Trump Tower in Moscow and Pyongyang.

How about the fact his wife sleeps on the other side of the White House, you ask? Or they never seem to be seen together, holding hands or smooching? Lots of folks have marital problems. Lots of guyz commit adultery, they just don’t get to commit it with porn queens. Maybe this isn’t weird, just jealousy. Give the stud a break.

If the Donald was weird, why would most of the Republican Party follow him in lockstep? You saying they’re ALL bonkers? They refused to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and you have to admit, they knew he did what he was impeached for, they had to know he was guilty of all those indictments he has coming up in various trials. They listened to the phone calls to have states change the results of the election and they heard him tell his MAGA followers to stand by and be ready to take back the White House when he lost the election. They were in the Capitol building when the rioters howled for their heads, smashing windows, searching for Pence and Pelosi so they could hang them outside on gallows already erected. Surely you don’t think it odd they would forget that harrowing afternoon. Okay, maybe a little, but not weird, not bizarre.

Okay, maybe it’s a tad peculiar the man tells more lies than he does truths. Reality is in the eyes of the beholder, correct? Like his advisor, Kellyanne Conway, famously said, these are alternative facts. Doesn’t make them weird, just amusingly whacky. The other day he mentioned how no one died at that January 6 tourist event. Maybe he forgot the capitol police deaths or that woman killed trying to break into the chamber room — bad memory, sure, but weird? C’mon, cut him some slack.

If these folks live in a slightly different reality than most Americans, maybe it’s because they have acute visions for the country the rest of us mere mortals cannot comprehend. Genius, not weirdness. When the new Republican Party regains power, you may have to make a few adjustments. The Christians may never have to vote again, the new dictator will only be a dictator that first day in office, 1984 by George Orwell will be the new New Testament, doublethink and newspeak will make everything clear. Weird? Not anymore…. Welcome to the new reality.

Well, they just discovered the oldest known art on the planet, some zig zag scratches on a clamshell from 500 thousand years ago. This is about 300,000 years earlier than the next oldest masterpiece from the prehistoric era. I guess that zig zag abstract set us artists back, oh, not quite half a million years. Presumably the philistines of the Neanderthal caves weren’t ready for avant-garde minimalist renderings at their clam barbecues, a lesson us contemporary aesthetes ought to take to heart. Sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for another Dark Ages. And … I notice the Neanderthals have mostly died out. Okay, maybe not died out so much as just kept denouncing art and Western culture. Okay, actually they seem to be making a comeback in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and all of the American South. Kind of a heavy price for a couple lousy scratches on some bi-valve shell left in a midden, you ask me. Course there will be a boatload of theories why art languished from then until the French cave drawings. Everything from comets hitting the salons of the shell carvers’ showings to Obama’s predecessors over-reaching their political positions.

Art, not for everybody. The cave renderings in France awhile later were a little better received. Realistic animals the Cro-Magnon boyz hunted, probably used for target practice with slingshots. Practical art. The mizzus probably complained but they didn’t have wallpaper yet and even some animal scribbles probably Martha Stewarted up the damp cave walls. That happily-received realism held sway for, well, pretty much into the 20th century. For you art historians that adds up to about 300,000 years… or pretty much 99.999% of human existence. That’s a lot of painting and sculptures of horses, cute kids, sunsets and nature scenes. I mean, I can’t really get enough either. And so, apparently, can’t the South End judging by the tourist art cramming up the galleries and boutiques . As the gentleman who sent me a hate letter when we built the decidedly abstract Visitor Center two or more decades ago stated vehemently, Modern Art was dead and relegated to the ash heap of history according to his fellow art professors … and pretty much my so-called career was too … or so he hoped. Why, he asked, couldn’t I have done a mural of a mountain or a stream, something equally as beautiful as nature? Why too couldn’t I just go away and spare the island my blighted vision of the world?

A good question, Professor, but since you didn’t give me a return address, it’s one that you apparently weren’t interested in hearing a response to. The Zig Zag Man of half a million years ago might have had a better answer than mine anyway, but since Art beat Literature and Writing to the historical table, we’ll never know, will we? And since I beat the good Professor to the finish line, his criticism was a bit too belated to stop the project. He did, however, write a similar complaint to the Senior Center when he got wind of another contemporary window we’d planned for installation in the entryway, more ‘degenerate’ art he might have called it if Adolph hadn’t sullied the description for future critics. Of course, unlike a lot of artists, I’m a bit tone deaf to criticism. So instead of just a couple of door panels we doubled down and did the entire front entryway to the Center. The Perfesser no doubt was apoplectic, but … it didn’t destroy the building after all. Jump forward a nano-second in the Human Timeline and those abstract shell scribbles are dotting the landscape from the South End to Seattle and Gomorrah and beyond. Someday, no doubt, future art archeologists will pry up remnants of broken glass and marvel that nothing like that has been seen on earth for a quarter million years. And my guess is they’ll probably be thankful. Like my old man always said, You can’t please em all…

The mizzus said to me the other night, fed up and frustrated by folks’ disinterest in History, she was thinking of taking up pottery. She’s invested 40 years down at the Stanwoodopolis Hysterical Society and she feels like she’s swimming against an outgoing tide and no longer seeing shore. I know the feeling, but instead of helpful advice, consoling warbles or another pep talk, I said ‘Pottery? You think art will be any easier??”

I spoze she could make useful items. Make them aesthetically pleasing and add another cultural layer to the nettle farm here. Maybe sell a few downtown when the house and gardens are cluttered, barter with the neighbors, eventually market to the nurseries and galleries, set up the website and the advertising strategies, sell local and then watch Chinese imports undercut her beyond even paying for her clay.

Most folks don’t value what she does or what she might want to do. They don’t value artists or their art, history or historians, writers or literature, musicians or their songs. Folks who hope to make a living that way won’t. Nine times out of ten. Maybe 99 times out of 100. I could bitch and moan — and oh, baby, I do! — but to what avail?

The trick in life is to do what you love. If you need to make money too, good luck to ya. This society values money. Winners. American Idol or the NBA. You love history, you are one of the lucky few, however. Most people never find one damn thing they can be passionate about. That’s why we invented television and You-Tube. They don’t have anything better to do, nothing that fills their void with passion or joy or the sheer love of that thing that possesses them.

But the people who make music, who write poetry, who tell our histories, who make art, who dance and sing and celebrate, ask them if they needed to be paid to do it. Ask them if money was the reason. They do it to sing, to dance, to paint, to tell stories, to remember history. They are, without a doubt, the richest people on the planet. Starving artists? I don’t think so — they breathe the very air for food.

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill. The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers. Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire. She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know. “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots. You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died. The Casino was their whole life. We even provided funeral services. Why not? Half their friends were us casino workers. You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined. Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop. Jill muttered ‘why not?’ and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question. “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought. “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go. She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED. Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought. I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

News blurb: A Waymo car went up in flames in San Francisco’s Chinatown after a crowd surrounded it, scrawled graffiti, smashed windows and then threw a firework inside the driverless vehicle in the middle of a crowded street Saturday night.

Now, I’m not really certain a driverless taxi cab qualifies as a cyborg or a robot, but it definitely has similarities. But I’m willing to celebrate the good folks of San Francisco for what no doubt will be the opening salvo against the coming Android Apocalypse. Admittedly the cab wasn’t armed with defensive weaponry which will be required gear in the near future. And eventually the robo-cars will outfit with offensive firepower. Start with tasers, tear gas, work up to more lethal strategies if required.

Right now, though, the AI assisted automobile has few defenses, making it a prime target for anti-android citizens. Start with destroying a wheeled droid and move on to whatever iteration the Silicon Tech Boyz inflict on a fairly clueless society whose members mostly trust the puerile billionaires to act in humanity’s best interest. Sure. If you define humanity as themselves….

The Luddites of the early 1800’s battled the industrialization of their weaving guilds by smashing the mechanical looms in burgeoning factories. Didn’t take long to squash that revolt … and it won’t take long to round up these modern technophobes either. But it does strike a blow against the empire, does it not? A small spark that might ignite a revolution. The bots are coming and the android evolution will be like nothing the old Luddites could ever have imagined. First the machines will replace jobs, then they’ll replace us. Probably why the Silicon Valley geniuses are building vast underground bunkers and stocking them with caviar and champagne. They plan to be the last ones standing. Which might be true, but only for a very short time. Their inventions aren’t going to be calling them Daddy when they come calling one last time.

I keep hearing these ads for Artificial Intelligence that promises their ‘product’ will not be hallucinating. This is probably good news for the clients who purchase this software, but it does little to allay my own anxieties about a future with robots who are far brighter than me (yes, I know, my digital clock is probably brighter than me) but who evidently slip into alternate realities without LSD or other circuit altering drugs. I’ve been around humans who do this and trust me, I’m pretty certain I don’t want my android creating fantastic worlds to entice me into too. Pretty obviously AI has some psychotic breaks occasionally, enough that corporations P.R. department feels the need to reassure the public that their androids have normal psyches.

As opposed to their competitors…. Whose whacked out AI’s are slipping into La La Land undetected by you, a possibly normal human user. Buyer beware! No doubt these cheaper imitations use contaminated silicone, save a few bucks and let the hallucinations fall where they may. I’m picturing HAL on 2001: A Spaced Odyssey, having a little fun with Dave outside the spaceship, stoned out of its digital head, giggling like a chimpanzee. But of course, what if your little cyborg is on a bad trip? That hatch door might open up all right, but maybe all the other doors too, let a little air into the servers.

Tell you the truth, I’m already starting to mistrust my computer. It turns itself off, adds new stuff at night, glitches and acts suspicious too many times. Not that I suspect drug usage or a drinking problem. At least on its end. Just has a mind of its own and doesn’t care to ask me for permission of any kind. If it’s hallucinating, I haven’t noticed yet. Then again, I might be the wrong guy to notice.

It seems another lifetime ago when we heard phrases like ‘compassionate conservative’, doesn’t it? The new conservatives, definitely gone MAGA, briefly flirted with a kinder, gentler campaign after their chosen one (and possibly God’s) had his life spared in an assassination attempt. That lasted about a week, but now we’re back to all-out war, incessant name-calling and the usual bullying. So why would we expect less of the veep pick?

Right out of the box we have J.D. Vance decrying his opponent as a childless cat lady, what, it seems, is a woman who doesn’t want children and therefore is an enemy of parents and family values. He even proposes a tax system that penalizes such people and rewards those with more kids, figuring, apparently, that when the immigration ‘problem’ is solved and the borders shut down, we’ll be needing those kids for the jobs that go unfilled. Now, full disclosure, I don’t have kids. I know, un-American. Selfish. Probably unnatural. Definitely worthy of higher taxation. I have friends who tried to have children but couldn’t. And friends who are gay who never felt the need to adopt kids. They should pay for turning their backs on providing for our workforce. Tax them! Tax the traitors!

So okay, maybe I’m being a bit sensitive. And besides, what a great way to reduce the national deficit. You could even cut the taxes of the corporations and the rich by raising mine. I mean, I want to help. I’m patriotic. I love my country. I can see now what a thoughtcrime it was to not have children. Too late for me but we could certainly force the child-bearing age couples to have a few. Might even legislate that. The Chinese had the right idea, just backwards, by limiting the number to One. We could learn from that mistake. And if the rich are still paying too much, we should consider taxing people who don’t own pets. Save us all that money for animal shelters and cut the deficit. So many possibilities. And after all, isn’t that compassionate and still conservative??

Biker Bob rides with an odd assortment of outlaws. He’s got a Honda he’s tricked out to sound like a Harley, meaning he’s got a glasspack muffler you can hear from Tyee Store to my shack, a ferocious rumble that belies the pussycat bike he can barely keep running. I had a bike once, a beat up 350 ready for the scrap heap but scary enough to give me nightmares of highway wrecks, skidding sideways down on gravel and blacktop, legs scraped to raw meat, my football helmet exploding plastic into my brainpan.

You want to ride, Biker Bob will tell you, you need a death wish. I didn’t have one so shortly after I got my street license, I sold it. $100. Cheap life insurance is how I figured it even if I paid someone to take the suicide ride off my hands. That was 40 years ago and I’m still alive with two legs and semi-functioning brain.

Bob’s a good guy, at least when you’re one on one with him. You get around his outlaw pals, his loyalty is with the Pack. If things go bad — and they invariably do with this crowd – he doesn’t recognize friendship when the dogs go hunting the weak and infirm. This is not good news when you realize you’ve become the prey. I try very hard not to antagonize the pack, but there are lines you cross without recognizing them until it’s too late.

I don’t see Bob much these days. He had a cabin I helped build up in the foothills, sold his Harley to help his ‘lady’ out, a woman who was a schoolbus driving friend of mine from the city days. Bob kept a little dirt bike at the time for off road fun, but one night he took it down to the local watering hole off Highway 9, stayed a few too long, then hit the highway late, no lights or license, just a dark run for home. The county sheriff did a U-turn when they passed each other at 50 miles an hour, hit the bubbles, but Bob didn’t see much sense in pulling over and as he explained later, thought maybe he could outrun the deputy. Yah, he said, I was pretty drunk.

A mile before the road to Bob’s cabin the deputy could see he wasn’t going to pull over so he did what most county cops would do under the circumstances: he rode up alongside the little dirt bike and came into Bob’s lane. Bob hit the shoulder, lost control and sailed over a ditch and into a field where he crashed and burned. Being drunk as a skunk, he survived without much damage, spent a night in the Bellingham jail and came home a couple days later. For a few weeks, anyway, Biker Bob was bikeless. Too bad he couldn’t stay that way….

Money talks, buddy, and bullshit walks…. We all know that. But now, in the 21st Century, we got Big Money and Big Money doesn’t just talk, it yells, it screams, it commands. You want to understand politics or the economy or the world, start listening to that hollering. Go down to your local grocery store, it’s one of about 3 or 4 chains, not much competition. Fly the friendly skies, take your pick from 3 or 4, prices pretty much the same, all high. Listen to your favorite AM radio station, right, owned by one mega company probably, mostly right wing hot talk. Looking for something, anything, on your computer, that search engine probably is Google, maybe a couple others. Ordering something you want, sure, chances are you used Prime. Get your news from X or Facebook? Hearing the Roar yet?

The Murdochs, the Bezos, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, all those fat cats aren’t just accumulating billions, they’re shrinking the world to fewer and fewer choices. Competition — remember competition, that quaint notion that in a capitalist economic system it would bring prices down for the consumer? — well, it’s vanishing. The corporate boyz bought up the competition. Stock holders are happy, not sure how you feel about it. Need a good doctor? Probably get a choice of one or two clinics or hospitals. Need meds? Big Pharma has made sure you can’t compare prices with what they charge other countries. Price gouging, you ask? Or maybe you don’t, not that it matters.

Artificial Intelligence is coming next. Hell, Artificial Intelligence is here now. Who do you think is running that? Fat Freddie’s Bot Shop? Try again. The Congress hauled in the Tech Giants awhile back, maybe get a handle on what the implications for what’s coming down the pike are, possibly put some guardrails up before it’s too late. Fat chance, Fred. The genie is out of the bottle and you won’t be getting three wishes. You’ll look back at 3 options before too long as the Good Old Days. When competition was limited, but at least you could shop at Krogers instead of Safeway. Cost the same though…