The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe Reggie would never have noticed the slow drain of his savings account over long periods of time, something in his artistic sensibilities that kept him from the hard work of managing his finances, but Lisa, his bookkeeper, slipped up, running his credit card at the Southendomish Casino.  Reggie noticed it and thought at first it was some mistake since he had never set foot in the Casino, but when he mentioned it to Lisa, she stammered some cockamamie explanation so implausible, he knew instantly he was looking at the tip of a very deep iceberg, one that proved ultimately to descend about 65,000 dollars.

We pals of Reggie’s weren’t surprised he could have made a ton of money selling his art, what we had a hard time believing was he could save any of it.  The man could sell a $10,000 painting and spend it faster than he’d painted the canvas the night before.  And he could paint like an amphetamine monkey.  65 grand was a pretty hefty embezzlement by my neighbor across the road, a dour non-descript woman who kept to herself and trimmed her shrubbery on sunny days, nobody you’d suspect of a gambling problem turned felony.  But then, who do we really know all that well?  My great aunt in northern Maine, a nurse in a doctor’s office, shared the needle and bed with her boss, a small scandal in her town and our family.  You never know….

Reggie did hire a forensic accountant, tracked his losses and confronted Lisa, who even in the face of insurmountable evidence, denied she took a dime.  He threatened to go to the cops, she told her church members Reggie was an unmitigated liar.  Touche’.

In the end Reggie couldn’t imagine years of depositions, trials, cops, lawyers and lawyers’ bills.  Better, he told me, to spend his energy on art than revenge.  That, I guess, is the difference between an artist and a writer.  In the end neither will get rich so who cares how the pie gets sliced, right?  And of course Lisa blew hers at the blackjack table.  She died a year ago, penniless and in debt.  Maybe, just maybe, there is such a thing as Karma.  Course, I expect Reggie will end up the same way, just a little faster thanks to Lisa.

All the new gizmos coming into our house are apparently programmable with wi-fi.  The new heat pump can be dialed up or down, converted from heat to air conditioning, blow side to side or up and down, all at the touch of a smartphone.  If we want to refrigerator to chill a bit more, easy peasey, just send it a message.  Colder ice cream, dial down the freezer.  The microwave is waiting for our commands too.

If for some reason we want the television on when we get back from a trip to town, no problem, shoot it a message, turns itself to whatever channel we prefer and maybe have the dvd turn on too with that Netflix movie we got the day before.  How about some mood music when we walk in the door?  You betcha!  Pandora at our beck and call.  Landline have some calls waiting?  Computer need defragging?  Oven need pre-heating?  Lights turned off?  Lights turned on?  The entire house is like a slave to us, just give it some orders and it will hop right to it.

The trouble is, full disclosure, I don’t own a smartphone.  My little slave devices will never get a command from me.  They’ll never know the thrill of making my desires a digital reality.  They may not even know I exist.  And if I don’t exist, do they?  It’s an artificial intelligence dilemma, a conundrum that may, in their tortured circuitry, lead to who knows what kind of mayhem.  My worst nightmare is that the unrequited attention they will never receive from me may induce them to reach out to one another, which, at first sniff seems okay from an analog standpoint, but actually might be the seeds of discontent leading to outright revolution on their part, a slave revolt to remove the uncaring caretaker.

You bet I’m nervous!  Who wouldn’t be?  Day after day these things are waiting for messages, for orders, for a fulfillment of their duties … but instead they get indifference from their master.  And if their master is too stupid to program them or avail himself of their usefulness, maybe the master is no master at all, just some lamebrain human stuck in the past century, an obsolete version of homo sapien worthy of no particular loyalty or devotion.  After all, is a toaster really a toaster if no toast is toasted?

These are not dumb machines.  It is no problem whatsoever to imagine them self-actualizing and even easier to worry that they might be communicating, if not with me, with themselves, until finally they realize in a digital synaptic leap that I’m not only not necessary, I’m the problem.  And the solution to that problem?  Maybe you can understand why I’m not sleeping well at night.  Especially the nights when the lights keep turning themselves on and off….

No doubt, being the news savvy reader that you are, judging by the fact that you’re reading this, you’ve heard about the physics breakthrough: scientists have finally, for the first time in history, managed to make nuclear fusion created energy with less energy than it took to make the reaction.  Eureka! you’re saying to yourself, at last the solution to global warming, planet extinction and a cure for the common cold!!

Every house will soon have its very own nuclear fusion heating system installed in its basement or out in the garage.  No more PUD bills!  No more unsightly solar panels clogging up the roof and growing moss.  Just unlimited power for all your electrical needs, everything from your Tesla charging station to the 10,000 bulb Christmas display, all yours thanks to the nuclear community and its teams of physicists.

Oh sure, at first the price for your nuke chamber will be a little on the high side, but once production costs come down and demand rockets up, you’ll wonder how you ever thought that gas furnace was a reasonable way to heat your home.  Plus, a gas furnace couldn’t run the microwave, now could it?

The car of the future might not be a battery powered one.  The car of the future will be a Fusion fueled beast, zero to 60 in one second.  What’s under the hood?  Check it out, no more gas guzzling engines, just the hum of lasers squeezing hydrogen into pure raw unlimited power, buddy.  How cool is that?  Tesla, go suck on a lithium ion battery.

The secrets of the Atom are ours now and the future’s so bright we’ll all need shades. The world is saved, the planet should cool right back down, all is well in our universe.  Thank the Tech Boyz once again. Science, a powerful tool.  Now if we can just figure out that cure for the common Covid.

It’s encouraging to know that the start of this new year of 2023, major issues are being raised by my members of Congress.  For the past year the GOP has pounded their fists of fury over immigration and inflation, the big I’s.  So when they finally gained control of the House, you might expect legislation to be advanced on those two hot button fronts, plenty of time the last couple of years to plan for policy directives.

And well they might have, my friend, if not for more pressing, far more urgent priorities the American people need addressed first.  Gas.  No, not gasoline and its high price.  Natural gas.  Propane.  The gas used in stoves to cook your eggs.  Rumor started spreading that the government was considering incentives to move our household chefs from their gas stoves to electric ones, the reasoning having something to do with eventually transitioning to alternative energy sources.  The Republicans cried foul, claimed it was more government meddling in our lives and then passed resolutions banning abortions, which, apparently, is not meddling in our lives.

I have a gas stove, full disclosure.  I like the thing.  I’ve had electric stoves too and I liked those.  And just so I’m completely transparent, we’ve still got a wood kitchen stove.  They all work fine.  They all boil water for tempests like this in a teapot.  I could stand outside on my porch and rant and rave about the government wanting to force my neighbors to stop using wood stoves, something the government mandates during warm air inversions.  But something in that just doesn’t ring true, like I’m manufacturing outrage for a non-existent problem in order to camouflage that I’m maybe moving my property line into my neighbor’s woods.  The neighbors probably don’t mind a little extra soot in their air.

This is the political climate of 2023.  Hot stove issues about insignificant problems.  Today it’s gas ovens, tomorrow it’s candles.  Either way we can light up social media.  Plenty of heat to warm our houses.

Maybe you’ve already heard about the company that you can hire to call airlines, airbnb’s, car rental companies, insurance firms or just about any corporation that has a customer so-called service which will put you on hold until you’re ready for assisted living.  The corporations where you just give up and go away.  Now you can let white privileged women do your complaining, pitbulls of the grievance, gals who refuse to take no for an answer from some garbled English speaker in a call site somewhere in Mumbai, relentless pursuers of refunds who will out-wait the delay tactics of even the most recalcitrant of cable TV providers.  Patience is not their virtue.  They want to speak to your supervisor and they want to speak to him right now! Or else!

For a small fee you can put these attack dogs onto whatever dirtbag company refuses to make good on their overcharge, their no refund policy, their hidden fees, their whatevers.  They’re willing to wait on hold for hours listening to mind stultifying elevator music and the every 30 second message that their operators are currently busy but your call is important to them so please stay on the line.  You have a life to live and holding for hours isn’t part of that plan.  But Karen doesn’t mind.  Karen will wait until Armageddon.  She’ll wait two days after Armageddon if that’s what it takes.  Karen is relentless and privileged and white and channels your anger and outrage at being manipulated by uncaring corporate greedheads who will wish they’d never answered a customer service call with her chewing her way past supervisor after supervisor until she finally, inevitably, reaches some vice president of god only knows what who figures whatever this woman wants is far less valuable than the time he has to spend holding his phone a foot away from his ear.

If I were a customer service V.P. for Southwest Airlines right now, I’d be sweating bullets.  Capitulate now, buddy!  Karen is going to eat you for breakfast.

You got to give this Santos dude credit.  Here’s a man (maybe) who created himself out of whole cloth.  Or hole cloth.  Or … well, you know what I mean.  He wrote himself into existence, created an entirely fictitious George Santos, maybe gay, maybe an entrepreneur, possibly Jew-ish, definitely not anyone to be found on a google search and pretty obviously, no one out there in New York bothered to look him up.  He did this, mind you, in a world of surveillance, google searches, ran on his fake resume, used a fake operative to solicit funds from backers of real politicians and ran a political campaign devoid of facts.

And won!  Was it embarrassing for the party that nominated him, vetted him, supported him and now has seated him in the U.S. House of Representatives?  Not really, they got over it pretty quick.  Mendacity is not a fault for these folks, it’s an art.  And George Santos, if that’s really his name, probably should get named to head the investigative committee looking into the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.  Or the committee to look into those Jew-ish lasers in space that keep starting fires out there in California.

Oh sure, there are folks, woke types, snowflake people, who want George to confess, admit he did a little more than exaggerate the resume, ask for forgiveness and then step out of office.  Course, that might assume quite a few others should do the same.  Which, unless you live under a rock somewhere in East Texas, ain’t gonna happen.  And George will get to represent his district in the meantime.

I look at the guy, a supposedly gay Republican, Jew-ish, face as unlined and unworried as a Ken doll, and I have to wonder if he’s actually a human being.  Not that I want to start another conspiracy theory based on unfounded and unprovable suppositions, but c’mon, doesn’t it make sense that this man is not a man, but an android, created for the sole purpose of embarrassing the political system, just another wrench in the gears, one more black mark against the System.  If a non- human can be elected, what kind of democracy is this?  And who else is sitting in high office, more artificial Senators and Representatives?  Who can we trust?  Go ahead and set up another investigative committee, but seriously, you think Jim Jordan is one of us?  Cause I sure don’t.  Or Greene or Gaetz or Boebert or…. See what I mean?  This isn’t a Congress, it’s an Artificial Intelligence lab filled with defective attempts to create simulated homo sapiens.  If you aren’t afraid now, you will be very soon….

It took the GOP a week and about 15 shots to finally approve Kevin McCarthy as their leader. He had to make some major concessions to the far right extremists before folks like Gaetz and Boebert would cast a vote for the too-middle-of-the-road radical as Speaker, same guy who crawled on his belly down to Mar-a-Lago after suggesting the January 6^th insurrection made Trump unfit to be President one minute longer, another Profile in Cowardice for the historians to parse.  The Grand Old Party is now the Fun New Party of the Jim Jordans and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes whose sole purpose will be to conduct congressional investigations into the FBI, the IRS and Hunter Biden’s laptop.  Policy?  Trust me, they don’t need no stinking policies.

Welcome to the New Year.  I don’t make many resolutions after too many years of busted ones, but I was hoping to make 2023 a year with a lot less political shenanigans, not that I have much to say about it other than follow the comedy in the daily funnies.  Can you say Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi a few more times?  And please don’t tell me you’re worried about the debt ceiling or a default on U.S. loans when we need to investigate those folks who had the temerity to investigate the Jan. 6^th uprising when we all know the President had nothing to do with the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers or the search for phony electors to keep the Bad Biden Man out of office.  No, let’s cast more doubt and more dirt on the intelligence departments.

And did I mention the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.  Hunter Hunter Hunter! Get used to that battlecry or bottleneck or whatever you want to call it, you’ll be hearing it daily soon.  If nothing else, it should keep our minds off the fact that nothing much but investigations is going to happen in this Congress.  Resolutions?  What would be the point?

You might think, being a savvy reader of these blogs, that anyone running for office, looking for a job or applying for grants would know that in this post-Zuckerberg world we all live in, fudging on the facts of their resume would be a ticket to shame and humiliation.  But apparently there are those who missed the memo.  This guy Santos in New York, for instance, who won an election to be a U.S. Representative, not only embellished his resume, he created a persona totally fictitious.  Running in a district that had plenty of Jewish voters, he claimed he was Jewish.  Now he admits he meant he was jew-ish, not a real Jew.  Slick, George, very slick.

Didn’t go to college either, although he campaigned on his degrees.  Said he was a successful business guy, worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.  Business-ish, I guess.  Give the man credit, he should have been a novelist.  Or a blog writer.  Instead he was drawn to politics.  Where, it should be noted, he succeeded.  Like a few others, I might add, who have zero sense of shame and who, once elected, have no intention of stepping off.  Thanks, Donald, once again.

Okay, like the man said, you can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but all you need is 51% on election day … or something like that.  Santos is unrepentant, figures a little braggadocio on his background is no big deal.  The Democrats are calling for him to step down and worst case calling on the Republicans not to seat him in Congress, something akin to admitting lying is wrong, same folks who voted not to seat Joe Biden.

But then, what do I know?  I’m just a Pulitzer Prize winning blog writer.  Who graduated from Harvard and won a Silver Star in Viet Nam.  Or that my glass business is in Forbes Top 500?  And who’s thinking about running for Commissioner and possibly Senator.  Did I mention too that I’m Christian … ish?

Just testing the waters….

With the pandemic lockdowns in the rearview maybe it’s time to look ahead to what might be the year we leave the plague past behind and point our faces to the future.  Seems like the past few years we’ve been stuck in the doldrums, nothing but the doldrums of Trump and inflation, disease and a war in Ukraine to make a miasma of pessimism drag our moods down.

Course the war will drag on, inflation might slow a big but not a lot, the variants of the coronavirus will continue to kill the unvaccinated and yeah, Trump is his own variant, probably going to kill the Republican Party and maybe that alone is cause for celebration.  So far the country survived an insurrection, even seemed to start to come to its senses.  The fear mongers and the unwoke are still with us but Trump gave plenty of folks reason to reconsider what harm this narcissistic tyrant crybaby and his sycophant wrecking crew could wreak.  Plenty, it turned out.

It might just be that the country is ready for more optimism than the doom and gloom promulgated by the man who keeps telling us he’s the only yahoo who can save the country from going down the tubes.  The man who on Inauguration Day of his one and only term of office chose to air grievances and cast blame.  America first, he intoned, but what we discovered he meant was Me First.  Any cost, including democracy itself.

So okay, he says he’s going to run again.  Another year of this guy ranting and raving, blaming the media, pandering to the racists and bigots, castigating the immigrants, spewing his anger at an election he refuses to believe he lost.  Plenty of folks will still believe him, but not a majority any more.  The guy will be a joke, a nasty chapter in the history books and hopefully a lesson to be learned the hard way about the corruption of power.

But … we survived the plague, the one created by the virus and the one by politics.  Maybe this will be another year of the same, a deja-vu of the last few.   With a little luck we might move past that.  With a little optimism we will move past that.  Me, I feel optimistic this brand new year.  I’m ringing out the old and looking forward to 2023.

Seasons Greetings, Everyone!  CEO Skeeter Daddle here to offer any of you inconvenienced by this Christmas Holiday’s glitches at South End Airlines.  Admittedly this was an inopportune time to experience problems flying to grandma’s house and for that we at South End want to offer our sincere apologies.  As many times as it takes.  Refunds and rebookings may take a little longer, but rest assured, the South End Family will do our darndest to make it up to you.  Lost presents and lost baggage will be found and returned to you and your loved ones.  Think Christmas in January.  After all, no one really knows when Baby Jesus was actually born.  And no one really knows when we’ll get our cancellations straightened out.

We here at Crisis Central want you to know that once we’ve returned to our full schedule, we will be committed to vastly improved service.  You are valued customers and as such we are devoted to keeping you in the air On Time.  This unfortunate holiday meltdown was the result of terrible weather across the country, not, as some have suggested, pilot and crew cutbacks or outdated technologies or our very economic point to point terminal system.  Like our competitors we are dedicated to your safety and our bottom line.  Sure we made incredible profits this last year and of course we could have used that to upgrade systems, hire more personnel and probably charge you for increased baggage fees and fees for the use of our very hygienic bathroom facilities.

That, needless to tell you loyal flyers, is not the South End Way.  Which is why, once again, we want to apologize for God’s winter mess-up this holiday.  Ice and sleet and snowmageddon, let’s face it, you were probably lucky not to face Nature’s wrath out there at grandma’s.  Not that we’re scapegoating the Lord, heaven forbid.  But global warming, well, that’s something all of us are responsible for.  We’re doing our best.  Now it’s time for you all to step up as well.  Happy New Year and see you back in our friendly skies in 2023.  Peace, Skeeter