The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

You can lead a jackass to water … but you can’t make em think. Some years back a 1960’s rectangular telephone booth mysteriously appeared in Hutchison Park from out of nowhere or possibly outer space. Since I’m the de facto ranger of that most southerly of county parks, it fell on me to deal with its unlikely appearance. A friend, who at the time was head librarian for the Camano branch, suggested we convert it to a Little Library so we did just that, put shelving in and stocked it with books donated by her. Literacy had come to the South End. Or so I imagined.

A week later the library was sacked, graffiti written on the walls, the shelves and books thrown into the rain and some burned. Undeterred, I restocked the shelves, cleaned up the graffiti and hoped this would be a one time event. Ho ho. Not long after the place was vandalized again, the shelves knocked over and the books strewn outside. Ever the optimist, I restored the place and hoped for different results. Which, for a year or more, was what happened. Until one day a window was broken out.

My solution was to make a stained glass replacement. I’m a believer that art will triumph over ignorance, that installing an aesthetic fix might act as a talisman against future vandalism. And for awhile it seemed my faith was substantiated. Last night, however, a pal called to say he’d found the library knocked over on its side, the windows broken out and one sculpture and the stained glass window stolen. When I got there the hundred or so books were a sodden mess, shattered glass was scattered everywhere … and my optimism was too.

Today I’ll go clean up the mess. And try not to count this as a personal failure. But I will confess, this does seem like a metaphor for the times we live in now, braggingly ignorant, malevolently self-righteous, just happy brutes knuckle down in a world shutting the door on science and knowledge, reason and rationality. Then again, maybe it’s just a couple of dumb punks whose idea of fun is knocking over telephone booths, maybe better not to read too much into it. Either way, that library ain’t coming back.

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 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.

Some of the ladies down at the Salon were engaged in a Round Table discussion during perms and touch-ups. It’s a mixed clientele at the Salon, partly the result of stylists who run the gamut from tattoos and piercings with rainbow streaked hair to the primly permed. It does make for lively debates under the blowdryers. Ronald, the token gay guy, he of the nose ring and silk puffy shirts was listening to Carol Wanderman’s diatribe on the Pope’s call to tackle global warming as a moral issue. She was deeply Catholic and she didn’t want the Holy See stepping into politics, especially when she disagreed with him. “What does he know about science?” she asked the room.

“Oh, sweetie,” Ronald sniffed, “you are SO right on. Didn’t they send Galileo to the Inquisition?”

Carol shook her curlers like evil talismen at him, started to respond, but Jill in the chair next door, jumped in first. “I don’t mind the pontiff piping in,” she said while Brenda snipped and clipped Jill’s new bangs. “But if he thinks global warming is a moral question, what about population control? You think all these new people in 3rd world countries aren’t the REAL problem?”

Mrs. Ketchum arched a penciled eyebrow from above her apron. “The world has to grow, dear. You can’t dictate morals in the bedroom.” To which Ronald snorted wildly, tossing back his newly curled coif. “Tell THAT to the queer haters.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word, Ronald,” Mrs. Ketchum protested. “It’s unbecoming.” Ronald giggled. “The Q word, you mean. Well, darlings, that’s a word of pride now.”

“Oh Ronald …” Kathy at the far chair sighed.

“And,” Ronald continued, “you ladies should thank us for NOT contributing to population growth. Talk about cutting down carbon footprints! I mean ….!”

“Oh we do, Ronald,” Jill laughed, “we do. We broke the mold after you.”

“All I ask,” he smiled, “is the proper appreciation.” He handed Betty, his walk-in client who must have thought she was getting styled in Oz, a mirror and asked, “How do you like the New You?”

I don’t care WHAT T.S. Eliot says, November, not April, is the cruelest month. The bottom drops right out of autumn along with all the leaves, then the rains come and so do the winds. Up here in the northern latitudes, the sun sets further and further south and earlier and earlier. God help the poor folks who live on the north side of the hills — they might as well be in the Arctic.

Humans, or so the scientists tell me, aren’t programmed to hibernate. That may be true, but you can’t tell me there’s no vestigial urge to hunker down and wait until spring brings my sap back up with renewed energy. I know folks who sit in front of a full spectrum lamp trying to fend off the winter blahs, hoping to trick the hormones that trigger the blues into thinking it’s a summer morn. Some of them revert to alcohol, balm of all us northern climate dwellers, probably just a self-induced hibernative state. And the neighbors who can afford to, they just pack it up and leave. Head for the sunshine of Arizona or Nevada, figure a trailerpark in the desert beats what we got.

I spoze we all have burdens to bear. Tahitians got coconut grenades dropping, Hawaiians got island fever. If there was a paradise, the cruise ships would ruin it in a season, the investors would cover it with resort hotels and Vegas-style casinos, the residents would work as maids and valets. Count yer lucky stars, I tell the mizzus, if there was Garden of Eden, we’d be the landscape crew, minimum wage, with Adam and his cranky wife barking orders, never satisfied with the weeding and edging, always wanting that damn apple tree pruned half to death, no wonder it never produces fruit. Naw, a month or two of rainy, windy weather, what the hell, maybe ought to catch up on our reading. And … a little extra sleep wouldn’t hurt either.

n 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 berth too.