The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Right next door to our Shangri-La-La sits an old 1940’s bungalow, a small one bedroom, low ceilinged place perfect for one person or two people very much in love. Over the years it’s been a low income rental, one of the cheaper rents on the island. I got a buddy who rents a chicken house a mile north for $200 more per month than this place charged. Not to insinuate that cheap rent equates to low life renters, we have had our share of heroin addicts, malcontents and obnoxious neighbors roll through that place the past couple of decades.

The best neighbors were usually single women, two of whom we practically never laid eyes on the couple of years they rented the place. Barry, the Navy guy, wasn’t too bad, but his dog would come down by the garden and snarl at the mizzus, who, never growing up with the four legged pets, mistrusts the barking beasts. Something to do with bared teeth rattles her. I finally had to wander over to Barry and ask if maybe he could keep his mutt from coming over to menace her. He said his dog never left the property. O … Kay, I said, I guess this conversation is over. I made it pretty clear what would happen to him, not the dog, if the dog that looks like his and growls at us shows up once more. Barry moved on a few weeks later.

We had the guy whose girlfriend went off her meds and her head, then chased him down the highway with his rifle, angry about something or other, alarming us neighbors with gunfire in the night. Three SWAT teams arrived, 50 police cars and who knows how many officers before finally talking the girlfriend into surrendering herself.

The two gay junkies who parked in there for years were usually broke. They borrowed tools and lawnmowers, gas and whatever else they needed, usually without asking. They sent their pals over to the orchard to pick fruit. And their vehicle was usually out front, hood up, another breakdown. When one of the partners died, the remaining junkie took the inheritance and bought an SUV, a hot tub, a motorcycle and all manner of goodies so that over the next few weeks we watched the repo folks come to take back what Jeff didn’t bother to make payments on. PUD turned off his power and for months we thought he’d moved on, but no, he lived in a heroin haze in the dark and cold until finally Lisa, his landlady, kicked him out. Actually, she basically paid him to go, helped him pack, brought the boxes, paid for a storage unit. I should’ve chipped in.

The last guy, a nice enough fellow who kept to himself mostly, drove the mizzus crazy calling for his cat incessantly. She called me over to the garden one day and asked, what is he saying? Here Girlfriend, Here Girlfriend, over and over. I admitted that it sounded strange but it had to be, god help us if it’s not, the name of his cat. I never really saw a cat, but the alternative was too grim to contemplate. Either way, the mizzus was disturbed by this and started to avoid the garden completely.

So when Lisa came up to do what seemed like more than touch-up after Girlfriend’s owner packed up the Conestoga and headed over the mountains, I asked if she was thinking of selling the place. She replied that yeah, the rental biz was starting to wear her down. I said it was wearing us down too, truth be told. And so, that is how — and maybe why — we ended up buying the place. Privacy, it turns out, unlike when we first came out here, is a pretty expensive proposition.

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You maybe have been a little too busy lately with texting and Facebook updating, Google searching and e-mailing, to pay attention to the world accelerating at the speed of algorithms. You probably don’t remember exactly when you got your first calculator (I got one back in 1975) or your first computer (we got one in, oh, I’m guessing, 1988 or thereabouts). The point being, not that you can or can’t remember the date, but that it happened in recent history, it happened in our lifetime. And in the few intervening years, it became an integral part of modern living. It changed everything. It is, just as the invention of the spinning jenny and machinery was, a revolution. The world will never be the same.

Now we take it for granted. Only took a decade, maybe two. Future Shock, just as Toffler predicted, is here, picking up speed, faster than we Cro Magnons can possibly adapt to the changes. Oh, sure, you can send twitters, you can e-mail, you can download movies on your TV, easy as pie. And if it’s hard, the kids can show you how. My parents, not so much. They’re a bit too calcified in the Industrial Age to manage much more than the basics. Try to explain trickier navigations, they’re boggled immediately. The old man keeps a set of directions for operating his TV that his grandson wrote down for him five years ago. Oh yeah, he uses it every time he wants to switch from cable to DVD.

Everyone now, except me and two other Neanderthal knuckle draggers on the planet, carry a cellphone or a tablet or an I-pad everywhere they go. They’re ‘connected’ to the hive in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago. I don’t know if the world has shrunk so much as it has become denser, jammed with data and information, more coming in at the speed of light. If our attention spans have truncated to about 20 seconds max, it’s little wonder, we have to move on to the next new incoming. The world, once external in our early years, is now internal, virtual, digitized and flying at us at incredible speed.

If you’ve been around kids the past decade or so, you know they no longer live among us. They might be in the same room, sleep in the beds upstairs, mumble occasionally when they enter or leave the house, but no, they’re already gone. The Pied Piper of PC and Apple have taken them to a different place, one where you and I won’t be going. You might have learned a few tricks, but they’ve internalized the circuitry. They learned from the machine and the machine is how they think now. Eventually they will add chips to themselves, apps, all that stuff they carry in a box now but will soon be inserted into their physical body. You think tattoos or lip rings are invasive, you’ve got some shocks coming. It’s a brave new world, old timer, and we’re the last of the humans.

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Just when you thought you’d dodged the swine and bird flu pandemics, along comes another black plague to end civilization as we know it. This disease, spread by the usually suspect mosquito, comes with a twist. It doesn’t kill its victim outright, it destroys the fetus it carries, something right out of a science fiction movie. Every day the media reports the northerly spread of the disease in America. Today the numbers hit, get ready if you’re not already sitting down, 30.

30. Not 30 million. Not even 30,000. Not 3000. Not 300. Thirty. Two and a half dozen, if my math is correct. More people were shot in Chicago yesterday than Zika has infected all year. But … I don’t live in Chicago and Zika is spreading!!! Well, okay, it’s mostly in Miami. Not really close to the South End, Miami. Chicago is a thousand miles closer. And even in Miami it’s sort of in a small area. BUT!!! It could be here any day now, what with air travel and all. You know an infected Typhoid Mary could get off a plane at Sea-Tac then get bit by a mosquito up here and before Yahoo News could sound the alert, half of Puget Sound would be Ground Zero for Zika.

AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT!!!

Well, you could maybe not be pregnant. And you could stay indoors. And if you had to leave the bunker fortress of your house, you could maybe wear bug spray. I don’t know about you all, but I’m for bombing Miami, get rid of the threat before it reaches Ft. Lauderdale or Tampa. Or the South End!!!! I know, it sounds harsh, but these are desperate times, judging by this year’s election speeches. If we’re feeling a little squeamish, hey, we can use a drone to do the dirty work. Collateral damage, I think it’s called. Millions of lives are at stake here. Decisions have to made. Think about it, but not too long.

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The Flatheads were parked at the Diner, their vintage machines waxed and gleaming in the packed dirt parking lot. They meet every Wednesday morning, rain, shine or engine check warning, slide a few tables together, then hold court as they argue after-market carburetors and auto body strategies. And, of course, politics du jour. The rest of us customers either avoid Wednesdays or else come for the show as a willing audience. I count myself in the latter.

Today’s improv started out with a lively discussion of Jerry’s newly purchased ’50 GMC 5 window pickup, original paint, completely stock, nearly immaculate except for a small rust hole in the left quarterpanel. The Flatheads debated whether Jerry should leave the original paint alone or go for a new spray job, an old argument between the purists and the car show enthusiasts.

But somewhere between the spray booth boyz and the ‘let er be’ crowd, the conversation veered without warning into the deep ditch of this year’s elections. Fairlane Frank, a proponent of two tone Fords, had tossed a fork with a clatter on to his half eaten chicken fried steak, splattering white gravy across the formica DMZ. “Trump’s no Republican,” he growled in a mouthful of rage and food. “He’s hi-jacked the whole party.” Pat, proud owner of a 1972 Gremlin and recipient of countless jeers and guffaws, cheerily suggested the time might be right for a 3rd party. “The Know Nothings,” he suggested as a name.

And so it began…. Bel Aire Bobby retorted that we already have that party, opening up a wild round of just which party qualified before Brenda, coffee pot in hand, said, “Maybe you boys should stick with 4 barrel carburetors and dual hemis, leave the politics to the professionals.”

Frank started to object but Brenda stared him down with her headlights on high beam while she poured seconds and thirds. “Frank, I’m makin minimum wage here. No benefits, no insurance, no 401-K. Now my kid needs an operation. Trust me, you don’t want to get me going on politics.” And with that, she whirled to the next table. None of the car guyz said a word for a full minute. Like the man said, all politics is local. But when they left, the tip from the boyz, usually measley, was enough to buy Pat’s Gremlin and pay for a paint job to boot.

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This past week I hauled up north to my dentist and had my teeth cleaned. For most of my life I’ve been told that flossing is next to godliness, that it’ll prevent plaque build-up and gum disease, that if I were to neglect it, I would probably be at risk for everything from halitosis to heart attacks. Today, the news told me and all my floss flagellating friends, this is scientifically unprovable. Flossing, according to the latest studies, makes no more difference to my dental health than if I gargled with holy water.

Great. A year or so ago I received the news that baby aspirin, forever touted as a hedge against plaque build-up in arteries and therefore heart attacks, was probably not much help. Might even be offset by increased incidents of stroke. So much for the wonder drug of aspirin. So much for listening to the advice of health professionals. You wonder why folks go down to the supplement store and spend fortunes on snake oil, maybe this is why. You might as well believe what you want, the so-called experts are just as phony.

One year whole milk is a killer, better drink skim, this year a study claims we need that kind of fat. Butter, might as well eat DDT, now it’s margarine that’s demonized. Sugar, holy moley, white sugar will eat you alive. Now the diet stuff, worse yet. What’s a poor boy to do???? I don’t know about you, but I like to believe — and science may contradict me tomorrow, then support me the next week, etc. — that we are creatures of the planet Earth, most of us, and we evolved with a diet of natural stuff. All those foods we made easier to cook or made from chemistry labs, well, I’m not saying they’ll give you cancer and make your hair fall out or your teeth rot, I’m just saying we didn’t really get exposed to those things in our climb from the ooze to the treetops.

Folks think science will bring them closer to immortality, and don’t get me wrong, I believe in science, but we’re really looking for magic bullets, pharmaceutical panaceas, artificial remedies, all those medical cures advertised to us old farts on TV every damn night. Just ignore the cautionary list of adverse effects, then go bug your doctor for a cure-all anyway.

I don’t know if I’ll keep on flossing or not now. I probably won’t lose sleep over it, but if I do, I’ll check with my pharmacist and take what he recommends. Just so long as one of the side effects isn’t gum rot.

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