The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you’ve heard about the AI painting that took first prize in a national art contest. Or the AI song that went high up on the pop charts. If not, don’t worry, you will. For awhile — a short time, trust me — us artists, musicians and writers will use AI as an assistant only. That’s what we’ll tell ourselves. Just eliminating some of the drudgery to give us more time for serious creativity. You betcha.

Creativity, we tell ourselves, is the sole domain of us talented humans, nothing that a bundle of circuits and chips could manage, no doubt a gift from the gods. Oh sure, the droid helper might be able to emulate, monkey see monkey do, but no way, NO WAY, could these silicon toys manage to create new original great art. Like us humans, the crown of creation, the Rembrandts and da Vinci’s, the Mozarts and Chuck Berrys, the Picasso and Warhols, the Tolstoys and Stephen Kings.

Sure, maybe they borrowed a bit from their predecessors, might even have stolen whole cloth, but that’s how art, capital A, evolves. C’mon, it’s a synthesis, leaping forward and upward on the backs of those who came before, from cave drawings of mastodons to the masterpieces of Pollock’s splattered paint, from the humble notes of a pan pipe to the eloquent silences of Philip Glass, from the first scribbles of verse to the Burger King jingle, just a steady progression toward our own enlightened era.

How could a bunch of wires and circuit boards possibly do more than merely emulate what homo sapiens do so naturally? So what if the cyborgs can write a decent opera in a nano-second or design a painting that looks wildly futuristic or carve a sculpture with laser cutters in the time it takes to say Michelangelo. Still doesn’t make it human art. That’s why we call it Artificial Intelligence. Then again … art is sort of Artifice, isn’t it? Nothing we real artists should worry about. Worst case, we can let AI do a little more of the creating. Not too much. Just a tool, after all. Like using a paint brush or a keyboard. Just a tool. Keep saying that. We might learn to believe it. Course by then it’ll be too damn late.

When I first learned how to make stained glass at a night class up at the high school in Stanwoodopolis, my sole goal was to learn enough to make replacement windows for a couple of nailed on plastic sheets in my drafty shack on the South End. At the time I didn’t know how to reframe a window for maybe a salvage yard replacement … and judging by the plastic ones, neither did my predecessor who I’d bought the place from. Ignorance, of course, isn’t always bliss.

But a funny thing happened on my way to an Architectural Digest feature. I got hooked on stained glass. Those couple of windows fueled some sort of heretofore unknown passion and in the course of a few fevered months that curiosity into the backwaters of art design sunk its hooks completely. For a time I built panels on the floor of my bedroom in the attic but after stepping on half-built glass designs going to the bathroom for midnight pisses, it became apparent I needed a more formal studio. Or at least an addition to the shack. Which necessitated learning basic construction and carpentry. A small detour that led to a career in glass and a love of building, additions, outbuildings, furniture and eventually a two story house up on the hill above the shack. Life is full of surprises….

The glass addiction created a conundrum for me back then. It was expensive, this stained glass stuff. My panels got smaller and smaller trying to keep going without going broke. And so, ultimately I had to decide whether to try to sell some of these little windows or just quit outright, call it a day and be glad those plastic windows were closed in against the wind and the weather. Reluctantly, I became a salesman. Of sorts. And a capitalist. Of sorts.

The last few years I got entangled in a similar passion. It started when I remodeled a favorite banjo, upgrading parts, then decided to build one from scratch. Everybody, of course, needs more than one banjo. Maybe not five, which is what I ended up with after building a few more. And if that weren’t bad enough, I tried my hand at building acoustic guitars. I just finished the fifth one of those, a nice little maple body job with an unusual sycamore top, what I swear is my last one.

The thing is, I don’t really want to be a guitar/banjo salesman. For one thing, they’re not really that professionally made. Maybe half a dozen more and they might be. But I doubt it. Maybe if I was back in my starving artist mode I’d take the leap. But I doubt it. Poverty might just be the true mother of invention. And I’m no longer starving. Anyone out there needs a few banjos to make their neighbors miserable, you know where to find me.

We’re encamped on the beachfront community of 3 Crabs Road, a strip of land hosting million plus dollar homes, mostly vacant between Dungeness Spit in front and a half mile of marsh behind. A few owners are in residence but not many, no doubt safely ensconced in their homes for the holiday in Seattle or Tacoma. These are their summer vacation villas, one of which we’re staying at between Christmas and New Year to watch the storms coming up the Straits or over the Olympics and avoid the Christmas besotted masses of our consumer citizenry. Fa la la, y’all.

Beyond the marshes are the landed poor, primarily rusting single and doublewides braving the mud and tidal seep, a few festooned with fading Santas and trees draped in colored lights, but nary a creature was stirring other than the ducks, geese, gulls and eagles who seem to be the primary residents here. Wealth and poverty lean comfortably into one another … or so it would seem to this itinerant guest. Although … no place I’ve ever seen outside military bases are there as many NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT signs as this mile long area.

My old man nearly every visit to our island shack would ask why it was people would choose to live in the interior rather than on the shoreline. Gee, Dad, I don’t know. You spoze it had anything to do with the high cost of beachfront property?? But he invariably would shake his head and declare he himself would choose the beach.

Ah yes, and we would all choose palaces over dilapidated trailer homes. Maybe in the widening chasm between the wealthy and the poor, the poor are just glad to have a roof when more and more are living on the street or in their car. Maybe their dream isn’t to be Mark Zukerberg who’s building a Versailles in his tony neighborhood and passing out noise-canceling headphones to shut up the chronic complainers this Christmas.

In the current America, Scrooge is very much unrepentant. The rich not only get richer, they get harder hearts. Hopefully they get a visit from Marley’s ghost.

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

Bob the Baptist lives up the hollow where the dirt road south of me dead ends in a swampy cul-de-sac. You look hard you can see past the abandoned cars, rotted boats, rusty appliances, kids’ toys, broken furniture and busted machinery to where Bob’s shack leans into the last century. Just to be sure nobody will steal this stockpile of valuable rusty corroded parts from his junkyard covered with leaf mulch and blackberry vines, Bob has nailed handwritten signs every few hundred feet: NO TRESSPASING POSTED KEEP OUT!! PRIVIT PROPPERTY, like anyone would venture into his place. By the driveway or entrance or whatever it is that isn’t maintained and is overgrown to the point any vehicle trying to drive in would be scratched to bare metal by berry thorns and cedar limbs and lost equipment, he’s nailed a plywood plank painted black with white words: JESUS IS COMMING SOON!!

These are the End Times, Bob tells us neighbors. South End Times, anyway, if Bob’s place comes under scrutiny. It looks like Armageddon hit yesterday. Windows are broken out and covered with plastic that’s now tattered. Doors hang off their hinges, usually open winter or spring. The first time I went back there looking for my dog who’d wandered off, I walked through an open door with books and magazines strewn everywhere, thinking it was an anteway or a porch … until I realized to my horror I was deep into his house. Believe me, I backed out of there fast as anything, expecting a shotgun blast from Bob the Baptist. He walked up a minute after I’d exited his home sweet hovel and demanded to know who I was, what I wanted, why I was there. “Lost dog,” I mumbled.

“We’re ALL lost,” he fairly howled. “We’re all lost and we don’t even know it!!” Tobacco stains ran down his matted beard and his eyes bulged like King Lear in a room full of psychiatrists.

Bob’s okay, actually, reasonably harmless and even sociable occasionally. The neighbors hear him once in awhile, exhorting whatever demons drive him day in and day out. Apparently the demons aren’t listening. Awhile back we heard he used to be a minister over the other side of the mountains. Heard it from one of his flock. Bob had had an affair with the local TV station’s weathergirl and his wife had run off with the church’s deacon. The weather lady moved up to a megawatt Atlanta station and Bob was banished to the wilderness. I guess it makes some sense he ended up down here. Although … Bob still hasn’t figured out most of us don’t think of this as punishment or penance. Hell, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder too.

This year’s pre-Christmas windstorm, fresh on the heels of the Skagit River’s historic floods, knocked down two of our large hemlocks, tore the top off one of our first live Christmas trees planted in the early ‘80’s and left us with no power or water, phone or internet for four days. After two weeks we still don’t have internet. Zipley says they sent someone and it was fixed but when we got home from New Years, still no connection to the outside world. The Zipsters say they’ll drop by sometime this week, no rush. After all, who requires more Epstein stories, Trump outrages, eco-disasters, news from the war zones or any and all social media??

In other words … Christmas this year may not be white but it most certainly will have no White Noise. Just a return to the way things were when we first arrived on the isolated end of an island not yet discovered by the beachfront-hungry hordes desperate to escape the teeming cities of Seattle or Stanwoodopolis. An era before the internet wrapped its addictive tentacle around our frontal cortex, when time moved more by the ebb and flow of tides than the spaces between Tik Tok videos.

Was it a better era? No need to ask the young folks — it’s like asking an opioid addict if sobriety is preferable, it’s an impossible question at this point. But me? Oh baby, you bet it was! It wasn’t just the economy that globalized. Everything did. We live now in a personal space invaded by constant information from the world outside, news in fragments, images from the electron screen that have absolutely nothing, nada, to do with our real lives, our friends, neighbors or family.

Over the years we’ve let reality slip out of our consciousness, replaced by virtual experience, kitty videos, doomscrolls, snippets from an outside world we imagine is more our world now than the one outside our front door. And we like it. It keeps us constantly engaged, amused and safe from boredom.

I’m two weeks or more into withdrawal. We spent Christmas with traveling friends over on the Olympic Peninsula for our annual bah- humbug getaway for four days, then another week just the mizzus and me driving down into Oregon then over to the Idaho border to visit old friends and celebrate New Years. Were we bored? Don’t kid yourself. This was the real deal….

Some days the past comes calling. I was watering our garden this afternoon when an old friend hauled into the drive with a pack and a 5 gallon bottle of water he had lashed to a roller suitcase. Got off the bus that doesn’t run the last lousy three miles of island and walked here on his way to his brother’s cabin a mile south pulling that water along dirt road and blacktop. The cabin doesn’t have a well.

Tom’s been through some changes. Haven’t we all? I knew him back when … some 30 or 35 years ago. He was a hard drinking 20 something, distributed beer around the area, loved to tell stories of bars between Montana and California, the old saloons mostly gone now or restored to yuppie shrines. I nailed the ridgepole on the day we hoisted the 40 foot log up into position on his brother’s log cabin. Felt like I’d hammered the Golden Spike on the first transcontinental railroad. Quite an honor, definitely a privilege.

Tom moved down to Arizona, did the maintenance for the spring baseball, mowed, watered, all the stuff Mesa needs to keep a desert ballpark grassy and green. He got a bad back, developed an over-enthusiastic love of alcohol, had some physical breakdowns, went into rehab, took an early retirement on disability, discovered — or acknowledged — he was gay. He looked good today. Old, maybe, older even than me, but healthy old. Walking his gear two miles from the bus dropoff, 30 years from when I knew him.

I guess in a way we’re all old codgers now, pulling our water and our stories and our packs down the highway that runs back toward home … or some reasonable facsimile. He’ll stay a night or two, reminisce, commune with the stars and the skeeters, maybe have a campfire there under the big firs up where the dirt road to the cabin ends and something else, not memory, begins. I’ll be doing something similar, I guess, thinking of all the old campfires and the nights long ago up at that cabin. What I think is we’re all hauling water, we’re all dragging stories….

When I was in 8th grade my family moved us from the idyllic scrublands of Georgia to the decidedly urban swamp of Milwaukee where I went to middle school next to the giant silos of the Schlitz Brewery,’ The Beer’, according to the 10 foot tall letters on the towers, ‘That Made Milwaukee Famous’. Needless to say, the move was a culture shock for me and my two brothers. I sat in the back of my classrooms with the girls who had been booted out of Catholic parochial schools for … well, let’s just say, unbiblical behavior.

Even only 13 or 14 year olds, these banished babes were children in adult bodies, maybe not the brightest bulbs in my pre-pubescent firmament, but definitely the most sexual creatures I had ever had the pleasure to be seated next to. Not that I really understood on a cognizant level the attraction, but let’s just say the pheromones worked their magic. On some intuitive level I understood any appeal I might have for these fallen angels would not be the result of my skinny, geeky, shy self, nor my intellectual prowess, limited as it was. No, I needed something more, some heretofore undiscovered secret power, my own feeble alternative to male pheromones.

So I became a comedian. Parked far from the blackboard and our various teachers’ desks, I proceeded to entertain these girls with their padded bras, tight sweaters and short skirts with whispered witticisms, soft spoken sarcasms regarding our educators’ attempts to teach us math and science and conjugation. Every girlish giggle only encouraged me and gave me renewed confidence. Sure, the teachers noticed, usually admonishing the guilty laughers, not me, the clown with the innocent face.

The girls mostly flunked our courses. And no, I don’t blame myself for their distractions. These cuties wouldn’t need college — they had attributes the rest of us would have sold our souls for. Which the nuns figured these ladies had already lost.

Me, I graduated 8th grade for all the advantage it gave me. But … I did become a hopeless wiseass, no diploma, just an unaccredited degree. And girls, wherever you are, thank you, thank you, thank you. You all were my muses.

Well, it’s that time again to think about our New Year’s resolutions. Since we never expect to really quit smoking or cut back on our drinking, in fact, do anything much different than what we’ve always done since before the millenia. So why not super-size those rez’s this year?

For instance, why not resolve to quit scrolling your smartphone 24/7? Of course you can’t do it, but at least you acknowledge the addiction. Take mine — NOT to pay attention to the antics of our narcissistic ego-deranged president Fuhrer. I may as well resolve to look away from traffic accidents, just not going to happen. Let’s be honest, some things are beyond the control of us mere mortals. Might just as well resolve to achieve world peace or dial back the global temperatures, both worthy goals and no shame if you fail considering we’ve all failed.

About half of us made the same resolution every damn year — to lose 10 or 20 pounds, slim down, eat less, eat wiser. But now that we got Ozempic and about a dozen or two diet drugs we can skip that one this year, maybe just work on a diet for our credit cards. Which, by the way, Big Pharma is working on a non-injectible solution, just give them a year or two, a remedy is just around the corner.

In the non-scientific totally anecdotal statistics I’ve compiled here on the fairly resolutionless South End, those who did vow pledges for self-improvement not only failed miserably, for the most part they doubled down on addictions, sins, weight gain and device usage. Nearly all were quite content to do so. The only sensible conclusion would seem to be a resolution to skip the damn resolutions. Which, I’ll be honest, is mine this year. Good luck to the rest of my digitally addicted, chain smoking, overweight alcoholic neighbors. Happy New Year, same as the Old One.

Let’s cut right to the chase. AI is here and getting smarter every day. Super intelligence, that stage where machines totally surpass ours, is coming sooner than most thought possible. The machines program the Next Gen of themselves, leapfrogging ahead in giant steps. The question left to us mere mortals is the one that asks if these androids can be controlled or not. This, unlike, say, climate change or global warming, is truly an existential problem. Think mass extinction.

The Silicon Boys are using their billions to build ‘safe’ houses, bunkers more like fallout shelter mansions, their hedge against who knows what societal breakdowns will be unleashed. Musk wants to colonize Mars, leave this planet behind and hope for an extraterrestrial future, no doubt with himself as Techno Emperor. Quite a few of these AI creators are worried their invention will be a true Frankenstein, not much need for dear old Dad. Nary a one of them wants to put the brakes on for an all-out push for super intelligence.

They’re betting the farm. And the cities. And all of us. Billions and trillions of dollars are gambling that this will be homo sapiens’ greatest achievement, not its last. Like the Twilight Zone episode where the alien arrives with a promise ‘to serve mankind’, and in the final scene where passengers are loading for transport up to an alien Promised Land, they discover that To Serve Mankind is actually a cookbook before the spaceship’s doors close shut.

Ironic that science, rather than a boon to us, might create the vehicle for our own destruction. Unless, of course, AI is the portal to a Renaissance beyond our wildest dreams. The end of disease, even immortality, a society whose every needs are taken care of through the power of superior intelligence. No more food shortages, no more poverty, no more wars, just a harmonious existence, world peace, a new Garden of Eden where God is an all powerful algorithm.

Who wouldn’t want that?

Although, trust me on this … you don’t get to vote.