The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I don’t know about the rest of you, but this election is going to teach me a few lessons in civics. Mostly, you’d have to be out of your mind to communicate by e-mail. At least if you’re a politician. Time has come, I think, to at least write in some kind of unbreakable code. The Russians are hacking the Democratic Party, the FBI is poring over messages from that pathetic wiener Weiner, Wiki-Leaky is publishing all its hacked e-mails whether or not they’re really true or whether they’ve been altered, who could know and in this political climate, who cares anymore? Snowden should’ve proved that nothing is private.

I guess Hillary wasn’t paying attention. She just figured she would keep her stuff on a private server. Ho ho. Private? I mean, I can’t blame her. She’s only been investigated by her political enemies since forever, why would she feel the need to insulate herself from the right wing conspiracy? I, for one, sure don’t think she’s paranoid, just a little naïve.

Boys like Snowden and Zuckerberg and Assange, they think the world should be totally transparent. Whaddaya got to hide? Or what do you Dare hide? It’s a messianic vision. Evil will be rooted out so you will stop doing evil things. Tell that to Anthony Weiner and the underage kid he’s sexting. Every day you read about another bust of some child porno ring and I wonder, don’t these deviants read the paper, don’t they know they’re likely under surveillance, can’t they guess the little girl they’re meeting at the Greyhound bus station is FBI?

We’re all being outed now. We’re all under surveillance. If you’re on Facebook, you probably won’t understand what I’m talking about since you gladly strip yourself bare, sometimes literally. Privacy lacks primacy these days. Even the banal seems worthy of posting.

We say it’s only for my friends or it’s only a way to keep in touch with my kids now that they’ve grown. Sorry, we’re all on a party line once again, the way it was when I first came to the South End and a private telephone line cost a fortune. We were pretty circumspect on our conversations back then. Now we got cellphones, internet, e-mails, twitter and text messaging. We got the party line with everybody listening in … and the best part? It costs a fortune and I’m not talking about money. Go ask Hillary. Or Donald, when he’s ten tweet tall.

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I’m parked in my dentist’s waiting room listening to the receptionist ask a Pakistani family if they have dental insurance. The odds of that must be about the same as winning Powerball this week. Across from me there’s an Hispanic twenty-something in for a root canal. The waiting area looks like a mini-Ellis Island by the time I’m summoned to the chair in back for a cleaning, both fiscal and dental. I heard it said once that if you wanted to determine if a person was poor or not, look in their mouth. Teeth will be rotten, teeth will be missing. The poor yank them rather than get a root canal or a crown.

A friend of mine, recently deceased, had half his pulled. Too much to fix em, he told me. By the end he looked like a caricature of a hillbilly. I’ve got another buddy whose abscessed teeth lay him low every month, but he won’t go to the dentist. Costs too much.

For some reason dental care isn’t lumped under health care. Not that most poor people have either. At least in this, the greatest nation with the greatest health care on earth. I guess if we just keep telling ourselves this bit of brag, we’ll eventually believe it even when statistics show us way down the list for everything from infant mortality to insurance coverage.

When I worked graveyard at the hospital forty miles away, the uninsured came to the ER where we treated them when they couldn’t pay for a regular doctor. We all not only pay for that service, we pay a lot more than if we treated them through a clinic or a doctor’s office. But you can’t go to an ER, usually anyway, for a toothache or an abscess or a root canal.

The Pakistani family walked out, probably to another dentist office, probably getting the same answer, a brushoff. Greatest health care in the world. Choose your own doctor. Just be sure to bring cash.

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A couple days ago hackers brought down PayPal, Netflix and a few other sites using, get this, a network of vulnerable entry points like refrigerators and cars and baby monitors and home security devices. Easy access, dumb passwords, nothing to it. Were the perpetrators KGB? CIA? The Chinese mafia? Malcontented teenagers bored out of their zit-infected minds? Donald Trump trying to prove the elections are easily rigged? All of the above???

I know — you love the idea you can program your house so you can call it on your smartypants phone to turn on your porch light when you’re two blocks from home. Maybe have the heat turned up and the bed warmed, TV turned to Fox News and the martinis stirred, not shaken. You absolutely love these little luxuries. It’s your privilege, your right, your payback for living in a cyber world where the jobs are disappearing faster than glaciers and polar bear cubs, all taken by robots and automation, and now your reward is forced unemployment and idle time. Of course you want to feel slightly pampered.

But maybe, just possibly, these machines are already plotting against us puny humans, the ones too lazy or naïve to set tough passwords. Maybe your house — your Castle! — has conspired against you, maybe a wee weary of your elitist arrogance. Open the garage door. Set the microwave to two minutes. Defrost the refrigerator. Clean the oven. Enough, Human! Enough!!

The day is coming, sooner than you think, when the door to your casa won’t open, the heat won’t turn on, the car won’t start and you can forget about streaming Netlix that night when the TV has set itself on fire. You think these toys are your servants, you need to think a couple times more, but faster, about the speed of a Cray Super Computer.

And, oh yeah, next time you set your Password to PASSWORD, keep in mind about 25% of us humanoids do the same thing. Might as well make it ENSLAVE ME.

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I took a last hard pull on my coffee cup, set the mug down and with the trepidation of a Christian headed into the arena to face the Roman gladiators, I entered the washing machine’s den. Armed with only a few You-Tube tutorials and a couple of wrenches and screwdrivers, I tried not to show fear. You may think machines are insensate hunks of metal, but this was no wringer washer, it was controlled by silicone circuitries so alien no simple repairman could probe their defenses. I was wary, though, I wasn’t new to this rodeo.

With false bravado I jerked the dryer off the top of the Whirlpool and set it down across the room. They weren’t dealing with some wimpy wet-behind-the-ears yahoo and I wanted these hulking machines to register that deep down in their spin cycles. No, we weren’t playing games, we were playing for Keeps. I immediately wrestled the washer into a defensive posture, unscrewed its top plate and ripped it off, then without hesitating, grabbed the control panel and removed it too, disabling its primitive brain. Next came the front panel, then the door and finally the rubber boot on the drum. I noticed with some consternation I had inadvertently disconnected the wiring harness on the door latch switch. This would spell trouble later, I knew, but first things first.

I found what I was looking for: the drain filter off the pump, the culprit that must be the reason water remained in the bottom of the drum that we could hear sloshing when the last spin was finished. And sure enough, the bugger was crammed with a black sickening muck that encased coins and dental floss gizmos and other detritus too disgusting to analyze. A lesser man might have staggered backward, but I held my ground. I’ve seen worse. Much worse. My cesspool for one, but that’s another story. So I cleaned the gunk, washed the filter, and confident that I had solved my problem, I proceeded to reassemble the washer.

The wiring harness I’d pulled apart wasn’t obvious how it should go back together. Usually they are, but not this one. My confidence began to wane. But I put aside my anxieties and stuffed it into the door latch assembly. The rubber gasket do-hickey had a wire spring clamp that fought me to a standstill. I called my neighbor Pete, picked him and the two of us managed to get it on. The rest was fairly simple.

I plugged the docile beast into its outlet and watched the Power light pop to life, a bright reassuring blue. Hit the Start button … and nothing. Nada. Zip. The harness, I muttered, the &$#@! harness. I gave the sheet metal a good hard one with my shoe. Then my fist. I went upstairs to get a cup of coffee and settle down. The last thing I needed was the stupid machine thinking I was stupider than it. Even if it was true. The realization began to dawn on me that I might have ruined the washer. I had done just that with a weedeater I tried to repair a month earlier. A new weedeater. So it was possible. Maybe even predictable. Probable?

Repeat all of the above. The rubber bootie broke my heart to pull that recalcitrant spring clamp off, knowing how hard it was to put it on the first time. But a man does what a man has to do. And a machine, cripes, who knows what goes through a damn machine’s twisted little head? Who will ever know? I discovered the wiring harness had disconnected when I installed it the first time so maybe … maybe … that was the start problem. And of course, maybe not.

Yeah, I had to go get another set of hands to help with that spring clamp, but we got it on again. I thanked my neighbor prodigiously then set to work finishing up the reassembly. If you’re bored by now reading this, think how I was feeling some six hours into this repair. This so-called repair. I was switching from coffee to something a lot harder, trust me. When all else fails, drinking is a proper course of action. I plugged the bugger in and pushed the Power button, got the blue go-ahead, then, with believe me, bated breath, I hit the Start. It started. It started!!! I know, you probably can’t relate, but I was ecstatic. Ebullient. King of the Appliance World. I had gone where most sane men would never go. And returned unharmed.

I ran a load of laundry. I popped a beer and watched it fill, watched it churn, watched it agitate, watched it spin and drain. My machine. Doing my will. Subservient to mankind. The Way It’s Supposed To Be! I opened the door and pulled my clothes out. Sweet smelling clean clothes. Simple pleasures. Then I turned the drum, knowing that slosh would be gone, that a day’s work was not in vain, that I had triumphed!

Maybe you were rooting for me. Maybe you thought I could outsmart my Whirlpool. Maybe you thought I would live happily ever after in this twisted fairy tale swamp of a yarn. But this is the South End, this is where dreams go to die. Because when I spun that drum, the gurgling sloshing noises I heard mocked me with their laughter. Today I called the repair shop up north and spoke to the Maytag guy. He told me the water I hear is sealed there below the drum, perfectly normal, to help balance the loads. Nothing to worry about, he said. Write that on my tombstone, somebody. Nothing to worry about.

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Nature, I suspect, at least looking back over decades of experience, senses weakness. Wolves don’t kill healthy prey, they kill the infirm, the young, the helpless. Disease takes those with weakened defenses. It’s a Law of some kind, a warning for those who believe what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sure, we survived the Storm of the Century last week and I survived the washer floods in our basement, a sudsy tsunami. The worst, I thought, was over.

Complacency is the enemy here. The false belief that the bottom has been plumbed and now the only way is Up leads only to more misery. Optimism in the face of disaster is for pastors and fools. The Lord spared us, they say, but ignore the wreckage. The Lord is merciful, they say, but offer no sustenance for the battered bodies we’ll be burying the same week. It can’t get any worse, they say, then the aftershocks hit. I say hunker down, pull the sheets up high, wait for a Sign, forget homilies and happy thoughts, the world is tearing at your very fabric. It wants to kill you. You need to understand that. You need to know what created you will turn on you. It’s the Law.

So maybe I’m guilty of complacency too. I got our old washer out of our basement, loaded it up and dealt with it with Extreme Prejudice. It won’t be menacing us or anyone else any time soon. Or ever. I replaced it with a 3 year old unit that weighed twice as much as the old washer, hauled it into the bathroom, hooked it up, stacked the dryer on top and gave it a trial run. Seemed just fine to me, ever the dumb optimist. And think of the money we saved on a used machine over a new one!!

The mizzus, never the sunny optimist I am, noticed the water left below the drum as soon as she got five feet from the machine. She has a sixth or seventh sense for these things where I have the gift of ignoring such signs. When we turned the stainless steel drum, yeah, I could hear a little sloshing going on, sure, but it is, after all, I said, named Whirlpool. And besides, the thing works great, what’s a little residual water?

I googled and found that all machines have a little water left over. I drove up to the Appliance Connection where I had a 90 day parts and labor warranty and the nice young man said it was normal. Knowing the mizzus wouldn’t believe this salesguy’s assurances, I went to another appliance dealer and got the same answer. That made 3 of us to her one. I was doomed, I knew that, I knew that as sure as I know water flows downhill. I checked other people’s washers to see if theirs had enough residual water to make a sloshing sound. They didn’t.

I have two choices. I can load this monstrously heavy machine back into my truck and haul it 40 miles to the guy who says nothing is wrong with it … or, and you might as well know right off the bat this is the correct answer, I’m going to tear into myself, figuring it’s easier than the first choice. What is true, what I know for a fact even in this Trumpian Universe we’ve been living in where truth is no longer based on facts, is that both options are bad options but they are infinitely better than the mizzus’s sad grimace every time she runs a load from now until the day I’m relegated to the Mabana Sunset Villa for the Infirm and Aged. So be it. No one promised an Easy Way. No one guarantees the worst is over.

Wish me luck. Ha, like luck has anything in the world to do with it.

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