The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Go Phish Yourself

It’s Monday morning and the phone is ringing off the hook. Medicare, Microsoft scams, phishers and god only knows what low-life scum hoping for some poor schnook to hand out social security numbers and bank accounts. What I’m slowly coming to realize is that I’m one of the last people in America and possibly the globe who still owns a listed landline. A few days ago a Molly called six times in the space of a few hours to alert me to possible fraudulent credit card activity on an account we don’t even have. And no, in case you’re wondering, I don’t have Caller I.D. I pick up the phone, just like in the good old days, and say hello.

Lately I get calls from robots. “Is this Skeeter?” they begin and once I acknowledge that indeed I am, the facsimile human voice goes immediately into its pitch. If I try to cut them off, they have no pause button. There’s no one there to pause. And yeah, I know in a month or two, they’ll have an automated voice that does respond appropriately, just a matter of coding with a tad more finesse. I have a real woman who calls every week. She is cheerful and bubbly and always starts with ‘it’s so good to hear a pleasant voice’ before mentioning the last hundred which were worse than her mother-in-law’s welcome or some such bogus bullshit you’d maybe think I’d have memorized by now but don’t.

For a time or two I tried to tell her she called a few days ago with the exact same pitch, but she talks over me and okay, maybe she’s not a she, probably she’s an It. I can’t tell anymore and trust me, once the androids come knocking on our door, I won’t be able to tell a cyborg from a Jehovah’s Witness. I suppose I could get an unlisted number, I know I could pay for a cellphone, I could always let the answering machine pick up and see if a human might be calling, but dammit, I hate to pay for privacy and I hate screening calls.

So I’ll probably just keep on picking up the phone when it rings, call me stupid,

“How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?” D. Trump tweet

It’s a brand new year, full to the brim with sound and fury, promising another 365 days of hyperbolic tweetstorms, narcissistic mirror gazing and the release of the Mueller findings. God help us if those findings reveal collusion and criminality. How could we possibly impugn, much less impeach, a man who has done so much for the country? Instead, we should begin prep work on Mt. Rushmore.

When in doubt, tweet. When in trouble, lie. When cornered … well, we’ll have to wait and see. But I suspect we won’t be waiting long. The man is a spoiled brat with a mean temper, accustomed to getting his way always, so when the wheels start coming off the limo, he’ll blame the chauffeur and bail out the back by the Trump Tower’s rear fire escape where he’ll live out his days in squawking exile as a pundit on Fox News. If he avoids prison. Which at this juncture is anybody’s guess. Good luck to Ivanka and Jared and the boys. Someone is going to have to pay for all this success. The only one coming out of this unscathed might be Melania. She won’t have to worry about losing her credit cards. Just another immigrant success story.

Let’s forget about politics for a nano-second. Not that the future with Donald J. Trump looks so bright you’d hafta wear shades …. But looming in the background beyond all that white noise of collusion and criminality something dark is rearing its monstrous head. You can sense it without actually seeing it, a kind of high pitched whirring drone buzz coming up faster than 5G, and when you glance in the rear-view mirror, the objects you can’t see yet are actually about to pass you, sucking you forward in a wind-draft of sudden acceleration.

The future is here and the speedometer is way over the speed limit of comprehension. Cyber-hacking, drone warfare, artificial intelligence, smart houses with smart appliances, self-driving cars and trucks, crypto currencies, blockchain technology, facial recognition, data tracking, government and corporate surveillance, tech monopolies, genetic engineering, fake news — the Silicon Valley boyz are bending the gravitational field, warping reality, moving us toward an unregulated future our politicians can’t comprehend and the rest of us can scarcely imagine.

This isn’t 1984, this is the Matrix. This is a world running on algorithms and multi-layered programs built by engineers and geeks without regard to implication or consequence. If you feel queasy coming into the New Year, it isn’t the punch. It’s the creeping suspicion that things to come are out of control, that the future isn’t just unpredictable, it’s downright scary. We live in science fiction now and the monsters are coming. The monsters are already among us.

We’re now interconnected, a global hive. The checkout woman at my grocery store was muttering how everyone is in too much of a hurry. Oh, ya think? We’ve been in a hurry for decades. This isn’t that. This is an amorphous unsettled angst, a barely audible shriek in broad daylight, something spinning out of our control. We dial up our devices, we hold back the boredom, we reprogram our reptile brains, we ignore what all this means. But deep down we’re scared. We think it’s the economy maybe, or politics, or the endless wars in the Middle East, or terrorists, or Trump, or the immigrants, or another in an interminable series of mass shootings. It isn’t. They’re distractions.

Binge watch Netflix and update Instagram, but outside that cocoon the world is morphing into something unstable, something gathering form, something menacing and dark. Something we’re creating. Don’t ask what, don’t open the door, don’t look out the window. But it doesn’t matter, it’s inside now, in your smartphone, in your gadgets, in the refrigerator, in the computer, in your head. If you think it’s too late … it is.

The immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Build a Wall, take down the Statue of Liberty, man the battlements! The immigrants are coming! The melting pot is boiling over! The borders are being over-run! My hair is on fire! The End is Near!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

These are scary times in Fortress America. When under siege, what else can our Leader do but convince us they’re even scarier? Time to go to the bunkers, bolt the doors, shutter the windows, isolate isolate isolate. The bad people want IN, the immigrants are killers and rapists and drug addicts and carriers of disease, Melania excepted. They want to take your house, steal your educational system, abuse your social services. Bad. Very bad people. I see them every day mowing my neighbors’ lawns, building new houses down the road, probably plotting how to massacre us all. They’re biding their time, working for peanuts, scheming, always scheming.

One of my band members is half Ojibway. She was telling us the other day about a woman who was complaining bitterly about some Indians who had moved into her neighborhood and were bringing down her property values. “She wouldn’t shut up about it” Monika was saying, “just kept going on about those damn Indians invading her neighborhood. Finally she got so exasperated she threw up her hands and screamed ‘Why don’t they just go back to where they came from and leave us alone?’”

We forget where we came from, most of us. Unless you’re native American…. Once we’re inside, we want to build a fence and lock the gate. We were never Them and They should never be Us. Sure, we can turn a blind eye when we need cheap labor, but don’t come knocking for citizenship. We’re full up and the country club doesn’t need new members. The plaque on the Statue of Liberty was meant for us, not them. It was meant back then, not now. Why don’t these people go back where they came from?