The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Let me say right off the bat here, full disclosure, I am not an Artificial Intelligence. I know, some of you would say I’m not even a Genuine Intelligence — and I won’t argue the point — but pretty soon it won’t really matter, will it? Already the future is here, the bots are taking charge, the corporations are adding the algorithms that will replace a good many of us. Take this blog, for instance. I could have Chatbot finish this in … oh … less than one second. If I were paid by the hour, I wish!, my employer (me, in this case) would save a bundle of crypto. You think those writers in Hollywood don’t know this? Or their bosses? They’re not really on strike over pay, they’re fighting Artificial Intelligence writing their scripts and then gussying them up for peanuts.

I design stained glass projects. You think I don’t know already that you could download my past stuff, run it through the AI app, ask it to design a similar work that looks a lot like mine and it couldn’t do it? Oh, it could do it all right. In a nano-second. Some of us so-called artists are probably going to use the app ourselves, save all that creative energy that could be better spent on scrolling the internet and updating our social media stuff. Although, pretty soon we could have ArtApp handle that too.

I don’t kid myself that my own creativity is so profoundly unique that some dumb machine couldn’t duplicate it, maybe improve on it, probably replace me, just more collateral damage on the highway to the future that’s leaving us in the digital dust. The engineers may think they’ve finally gotten the best of us smug art types, programmed us right into obsolescence, but I got news for them too. The best programmers are going to be those machines they built. Not that I expect to get the last laugh. The laugh’s on all of us. Soon as the apps learn how to snicker….

So I’m in the middle of a screwup day, nothing going right, a trip to town to pick up items at UPS they can’t find, another to retrieve a lost microphone at the location of our last gig they said they had but don’t now, still more to correct mistakes in postcards, posters and ads for an upcoming Small Craft Advisory show, how can it get much worse, I’m thinking. Until I park at the grocery parking lot facing directly into the guy with the TRUMP vanity license plate and no, it wasn’t Donald himself, just a Kool-aid acolyte wizened behind his steering wheel scowling at any and all. Meaning me.
On the rear of his rig are all manner of hostile bumper stickers but the one that catches my eye before moving away from this creepy caricature of Yosemite Sam said SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP, TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. Being in a small rage myself already, I wanted to tap on his window and ask the obvious question, ya really think your boy is President? Buttercup. My usual mode of operation is never, ever, engage these people. They are mostly whacked, completely unhinged idiots without so much as a horny toenail on terra firma. Their world is inhabited by lizard people, Jews with lasers in outer space starting forest fires, Democrat pedophiles in basements beneath pizza parlors doing monstrous things to children before eating them. A conversation on these topics is not going to find us a middle ground in the end.

Yesterday a buddy stopped by to ask about those Lahaina fires in Maui, said a client he mowed lawn for, one with a MAGA hat he astutely assumed was a Republican, claimed the fires were started by corporations who planned to buy the smoldering beach front town at rock bottom prices. To his client this sounded reasonable, no further evidence required, just bedrock cynicism for government and now corporations. Buttercups too, I’m betting. My buddy said he didn’t want to provoke this guy and lose his gig over politics, a job is, after all, a job. If it pays well anyway.

No, the batshit crazies are on their own. And if, in the end, they outnumber the rest of us just trying to navigate the already complex universe of our humdrum lives and vote their creep hero back into office, then we can all be afraid, very afraid, not just for democracy as we once imagined it, but sanity as it may newly be defined.

They’re in a terrible kerfuffle down at the Flame-Ons! now that Lottie Johnson quit the post of Women’s Fire Auxilliary President.  Resigned in a huff, a snit, a flame-throwing kiss-my-caboose departure right in the middle of the June meeting  to decide what to fundraise for in the coming annum.  When she hit the door at the VFD meeting hall, the vacuum swept 4 or 5 others out with her in full irate sympathy.  The ladies left on their metal folding chairs with paper dessert plates half finished in their laps said not a word for at least two minutes, exchanging raised eyebrows and hesitant smiles.

“Looks like you’re the new President, Connie,” someone finally said, breaking the silence.  Connie said no, No, NO, someone else, anyone else.

The trouble is, there’s the Old Guard auxiliaries, the women who remember that era when the station was pretty much Party Central for the South End fireboyz, beer cases stacked higher than fire equipment up the wall, Tuesday night ‘practices’ pretty much a kegger.  Their mothers had served in the Auxilliary and this was their club.  But new arrivals to the area had joined, exhibiting civic pride and plenty of zeal, hoping to make a difference.  And make it quick.  Way of the World, I suppose, but old blood and new blood don’t mix.  Type A’s vs. tired blood.  You see it in the South End Historical Society, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, down at the Bizness Association.  Who ARE those nouveau riche pretenders and what do they want from us?  It was a sociable group before, a lot of fun and friendship — it’s a political nightmare now.  What was tea and cookies now has an evangelical air.  We need to organize, we need to fundraise, we need to lobby the commissioners, we need to get active!  The old plant sale just wouldn’t do.  Would NOT DO!

Now they had a fire district with paid fire fighters permanently at every station.  Well, not the South End station.  They were building or upgrading new stations all over the island.  Well, not the South End station.  It was getting hard to find volunteers when up northcountry the firefighters were being paid handsomely.  Times were changing, Lottie would say, time, ladies, for us to change too.  Oh yeah, there’s a fire smoldering down at the Station, she liked to say, and it was up to us to put it out.

Well, Lottie is gone now, at least for a time.  And that burnt rubber smell in the Flame-Ons! meetings won’t go away soon.  That fire is still smoldering and the trouble is, they got rid of all those cases of beer years ago.  Who knows if it would’ve helped put out this fire.

Down at Jolene’s South End Boutique and Spa, the ladies come for hair repair and a weekly update on gossip.  The B&S is conveniently located just down the blacktop from the Diner so while their menfolk pile on another layer of winter cholesterol, the women can slide in for a touch-up.  Jolene and her cosmetologically adept staff — meaning Wanda and Ronald — offer everything from henna highlighting to full perm.  And, of course, like most retail establishments on the capitalist frontline here on the South End, they offer everything from local artworks and gifts to a plentiful assortment of salon products for the woman in search of a temporary bulwark against gravity and age.

In other words it’s a fine environment to get things off your chest.  Jolene is adept with a scissors and a necessary brake when the ‘unburdening’ gets excessive, but she knows, like most of us on the frontier of a receding civilization, the bitch sessions are not only cathartic, they’re as close to entertainment as we’ll get in the daytime.  Subjects range from Jolene’s no-account sister-in-law’s messy affairs to why there’s no damn holiday in America celebrating a woman.  Because men make the damn holidays, that’s the short and not so sweet of it…  Ronald might pipe in there’s none for gay men either but a moment later, scissors snipping like a crab on steroids, he’ll be off on a tangent about so and so’s snide comment about his new nose ring.  The salon is as abuzz with snide comments as it is with hairsprays and clippers.  Us men rarely pick up the missus there, and if we do, the place goes eerily silent.

Two Toke Tom has his hair coiffed by Ronald.  It changes color every month or two, blue streaks substituted for red locks.  One of the boyz at the Diner asked him what they talked about in there, like it was the Rosicrucians meeting in a graveyard after midnight.  Two Toke just smiled his Cheshire Cat stoned smile, put a hand to sizzling hot purple stripe and said wistfully, Girl Talk.

If I want to keep abreast of current events, it might be time I got my own south end’s trimmed down at Jolene’s.  But I probably won’t tell the boyz…

The other day I was trailing behind a 40 foot RV trailer, sort of a McMansion on wheels, reading their bumper sticker that announced:  SPENDING OUR KIDS’ INHERITANCE.  Pretty hilarious stuff.  I bet the kids fall over laughing when the folks come rolling in for a month to visit.  $200,000 for the camper.  4-5 bucks a gallon times multiple crisscrossing of America.  Yah, I’d say the joke has some real mileage.  Great punchline.  Put another sticker on the SUV they’re towing, you got a bellybuster.

I know these people.  They think they’re taxed like a Roman peasant.  They think government is mostly the real enemy, spending their hard earned money on welfare and food stamps and mental health clinics and emergency relief and worse, wasting it through inefficiency and bureaucratic ineptness and just plain graft and greed.  They think minimum wage should be lowered and taxes eliminated.  They got theirs and good luck to the rest of you suckers.  The road they’re riding can crumble into blacktop sand after they sail by.

They know the country is in trouble, big debt, bad balance of trade, recession, all that economic mumbo jumbo.  But they’re not going to help get us out of the mess they helped put is in.  The bumper sticker they got, they could slap on the White House or Congress or any county courthouse.  They got the union jobs before unions were corrupt.  They worked for the government sector before government was evil, they fought for tax breaks for the rich once they were rich and if you missed out, tough luck.

I know these people.  They’re my friends and my neighbors and I can even see them in my own bathroom mirror.  They don’t believe in sacrifice … or the common good … or downsizing  … or that the American Dream is supposed to be for all of us.   It was for them.  The rest, the huddled and tired masses, the immigrants, the poor, the weak and the infirm  —- they got some hard news for you.  They’re spending your inheritance.  Ha ha ha, ho ho ho.  Get the joke?  Do ya, huh?  It’s on you!

My generation will maybe be remembered, not as the most selfish sonsofbitches on the planet, but as those whacky comedians at the Beginning of the 21st Century.  By then, of course, nobody will be laughing.

Some of you fellow South Enders might be surprised — shocked even!! — to learn that there is a movement afoot to ban the teaching of banjo’s contribution to American Civilization. These folks think schools need to banish any and all books from their libraries that mention the role banjos played in our history. They claim their children are being propagandized, groomed to believe the instrument and those who played them were discriminated against. And worse, their children were being told they should consider it as their instrument of choice in certain ‘woke’ communities.

Critical Banjo Theory it’s called and it’s being taught — so they say — in elite eastern snob universities by left leaning faculties. It’s even filtered down into our high schools and yes! it has tentacles into our grade schools. So say these proponents of music purity! Bad enough we have rock n roll and rap. But banjo based music — it makes our students uncomfortable thinking the slave race brought these tools of insurrection and emancipation to our shores, not the happy melodies of our European immigrant ancestors. No, these were instruments of rebellion, a devil inspired percussive beat, a call-to-arms for what might have been a contented plantation worker, one who on hearing that heated jungle beat threw down his cotton picking bags to join in the revolution.

This, of course, undermines the sanguine history of our proud nation according to those who would delete the 5 string instrument from approved school textbooks. It undermines our nationalist need for an unblemished history. If a banjo isn’t a black mark, they argue, what is? A harmonica? No, the banjo conjures up slavery, Negro jazz, protest movements, Black Panthers … and so, for that reason, our youth must be protected from the discomfort such knowledge brings to their malleable minds.

These are dark times, all I can say. How could I know my banjo was a dark reminder of an America we desperately need to sanitize? Forgive me. Forgive me. My goal now is to make amends. To that end I will dedicate myself to mastering the accordion. Surely, at least I fervently hope so, it has no dark past.

The writers and actors are on strike out there in woke Hollywood. Maybe you think they’re after more money —and maybe they are — but the real fight is about the moguls at Disney and Netlix and Prime planning to use Artificial Intelligence as a substitute for their human creators. Let the bots whack out a script in a nano-second, have the two leggeds clean it up, save plenty of money. Actors? Maybe you’ve been busy trying to decide between Threads and X, but AI can create totally realistic digital clones of Brad Pitt or Sandra Bullock, why pay them all those millions?

The fight is really, for the corporations at least, about money after all. For the artists, the writers, the actors, for the rest of us humanoids, it’s about choosing sides. You want an android world or you want one us hominids can call home? You worried about uncontrolled immigration, wake up! The new immigrants aren’t homo sapiens, they’re cyborgs, androids, bots, apps, algorithms, all quietly taking our places. They’re the pods under your bed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, cloning you, becoming you, replacing you.

Sure, they can work way more efficiently, out produce us, save the billionaire class a ton of money, eventually leave us behind to scrape up the scraps. But not without a fight. Trust me, we’re gonna lose. The Tech Boyz have too much invested and it’s not for humanity. So root for the actors, the writers, the creators. Root for the humans! They’re fighting for the rest of us … whether they know it or not.

My teachers and my parents and the TV shows of my youth kept telling us kids that the way to deal with bullies was to confront them, they’re actually, deep down, nothing but cowards. My family moved north from Georgia to Milwaukee when I was 13, a radical transition from semi-rural living to urban discomfort. My junior high school had the usual mix of cliques with one exception, the hoods, guyz who dressed up as gangsters to celebrate Valentine’s Day, the Massacre. Nice bunch, kept switchblade knives on themselves and guns in their lockers. Welcome to the city, Farm Boy!

At recess we played a game new to me called Foursquare, bounced a volleyball around from the four corners, nothing I remember about it 60 years later other than a couple of the hoods used to blatantly cheat at it and no one had the courage to call them out for it. One of my teachers who’d heard our complaints said it was up to us to put a stop to these guys’ cheating, not his problem, and anyway, the best way to end their bullying of the rest of us was to stand up to them, show them we weren’t afraid and more than likely they’d back down. Because … well, you know why. These thugs were basically cowards, that’s why.

So I decided to put an end to this cheating. Kind of ruined the game and we were required to play the stupid game. This, dear reader, is probably as good an allegory for life in these partisan times as you’re gonna want. Needless to say, the cheaters, once confronted, feigned courage. “Who’s gonna make us?” one of the gang said, and I said, well … you know what I said. Me. And then we ‘rumbled’ as they say in Milwaukee. I took the first punch to the stomach. I took the second punch to the face. After that I don’t remember what body part I slammed against my opponent’s fist, but I do remember the teacher who advised us to handle this ourselves, breaking up the slaughter and dragging us both to the principal’s office. Where we were given verbal lashings and detentions, both of which my coward bully laughed off in the principal’s face.

What I learned from this and a few other similar confrontations, bullies aren’t necessarily cowards, they’re just bullies. Creeps and sadists, brutes and users, I don’t know where my teachers and my folks got their psychology degrees, but from personal experience I have to say they should ask for a refund on their tuition.

21 years ago the South End String Band got asked to Help Save the Grange. We’d played the Tyee Store parking lot once, the Elger Bay Store parking lot once, and we were still recovering from monoxide poisoning but we said yah shure, u betcha, why not? We put on a concert, had a spaghetti dinner with spumoni ice cream for dessert, held a raffle for goodies we’d had donated, charged 5 bucks a head. Even though it was a cold and rainy night in February, folks turned out and stood in a long line outside, so many that we had to ask two times for people to leave so we could get the next shift inside, after all, it was a fundraiser. In the end we managed to make thousands of dollars, folks signed up to join the Grange, hundreds of Camano Islanders rolled in to help.

Last night we played a short remix of that event long ago. Spaghetti dinner cooked by Mike Nestor, same guy who was chef in 2002. Pat Major collected 10 bucks for the dinner, still the Grange Master. And of course the Grange is still here. Bad bathrooms and all. After dinner the Band played our set on the same stage we used back then and the same one we used on quite a few benefits we put on over the years for the place. Made them a lot of money in 21 years and were happy to keep the Hall a community gathering place.

But … I’m not sure we can take credit for saving it. Although, I do know this: if you’re an upstart band and you get to play for hundreds of folks who came down to the South End on that cold rainy winter night, the Grange might have saved us.

About 1980 I picked up two good old boys hitching into Tyee Grocery, which was Ted and Ellen Snowdens’ back then.  Part store, part junkyard, part tow truck outfit, part well drilling, part gas station.  Looked like an Ozark shopping mall run by Ma and Pa Kettle.  These two gentlemen were hitch-hiking in the middle of nowhere, drunk as purple skunks in the afternoon, so naturally I was curious where they’d come from, them being neighbors and all,  so I offered to take them back home after they’d purchased their groceries for supper.

Supper, it turned out, was some crackers and a big can of tomato juice they’d mistook for tomato soup.  And a couple quarts of their fortified favorite wine, Thunderbird, their drink of choice.  I kindly declined their dinner invitation, but I WAS interested in seeing where they lived, which was back in the boonies I’d never been, a nice little cabin they’d trashed up nicely sitting on a half acre trout pond like you’d see on a picture postcard.  Turned out they netted the trout and smoked the fish and sold them down at the Pike Street Market for a small fortune.

Well, finally they got to arguing about the ruined dinner menu, what with the big can of soup being juice, and who was to blame –so I said I got to go now, boys.  They said stop by any time and fish all you want and I said thank you kindly, I might just do that.

Course it being the only fishing hole on the entire South End, I was back there, pole in hand, two days later as soon as I knew they’d gone back home to Seattle and Gomorrah.  Had three two pounders in no time flat, dinner for Ma and me.  For awhile I thought I had a gold mine.

But I kept noticing nasty notes on the door of their cabin from creditors and ex-spouses and aggrieved parties and folks who just plain didn’t like the trout ranchers, folks who’d come all the way to the hollers of the South End looking for money or revenge or Lord knows what from these boys, and one day I noticed somebody had stuffed garbage in the wood smoker and let it rot, not a good sign for making flavorful smoked fish.  And that was when the fish were gone, netted up, I figure, on one last drunken weekend.

Every once in awhile I’d go back, hoping the trout might reappear, but of course, like a lot of our fishing around here, it never rebounded.  Still, I can say with some pride, I’m the only fisherman you’ll meet who ever caught a trout on the South End.