The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Yowzir, it’s sure good to be back in the news flow, back to the vitriolic emails and trollers, back to the 2020 Election. Seems like just yesterday when the Trumpster was insulting all his opponents and no one except Steve Bannon thought he had a rapist’s chance in the world to win the primaries, much less the election of 2016. My my, how time’s change … and not necessarily for the better, despite making America great again.

I’m already on the receiving end of right wing (read: Russian) trolling factories. The Democratic candidates are socialists and communists, dangerous people advocating free college, Medicare for All, Green New Deals, free daycare, all those radical un-American plans and programs destined to make America losers again. They want to let criminal immigrants and massive drug shipments pour through our borders. They want to pay the indolent NOT to work. They want to expand welfare. They want to weaken our gun laws and allow terrorists free rein. They want to tax the rich, can you believe it?? They are crazy liberal whackos, that’s what they are! And they want to destroy this country!!

I’m not sure I’m ready for two more years of this PLUS Trump. I know, and you do too, all these proposals will make for interesting primary fodder and may even propel someone to the top of the ticket. But the depressing aspect of all this is that when legislation gets to Congress, the buck and the bill, as well as the hopes and dreams of the country, stop there. Maybe gridlock is what the Founding Fathers wanted. Maybe we should wish there were Founding Mothers. Course back then, they couldn’t vote. Democracy, kind of an ongoing experiment….

Lately you’ve probably started to realize what a fragile concept it is, this thing called Democracy. Sure, you can vote, maybe thinking your one vote is equal, say, to the NRA lobby or Big Pharma’s lobby or Hobby Lobby’s lobby, but wait a minute, your vote, if you’re in a less populated state that still gets two Senators, well, it counts a little more. And you might think in a Democracy your taxes might be fair and equal … but only if you’ve been living under a rock. You know the laws are written by the rich. You might even suspect the country is ruled by the wealthy, but if you say it out loud, you’re a socialist, an anti-capitalist, a left wing bomb thrower.

The bomb throwers are running for President this election. I don’t know if they’ll win the primaries and I don’t know if they can win the election. But at least they’re raising some issues. If you think America was made great, again, well, you probably aren’t looking for changes. If you think we got some serious problems, you might roll the dice. If you think it’ll make much difference once Congress debates, well, I got some choice real estate here on the South End you might want to consider buying. But I am glad that some real choices are being floated, not slogans, not MAGA, not just insults and pejoratives. They may not fly, but I’m willing to find out.

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If you’re like me – and I know you hope to God you’re not – you have a computer hooked up somewhere in your house that’s connected by something called a ‘server’ (which is a misnomer of the first order) that interfaces with the outside world. All the outside world. So when something glitches, something mysterious and possibly malignant, suddenly turns the machine into your worst enemy, you really don’t have a clue. You are cut off, banished, exiled to the darkness of your now very small, confined world. All your contacts, all your data, all your emails, your precious Facebook friends, Instagram pals — they’re no longer in reach. And the horror? Yeah, they may be gone forever.

What you realize in these dark moments is that we are dependent on technologies outside our ability to comprehend, much less repair. And when things go haywire, who ya gonna call? My computer started acting funny when we got home from vacation. New icons appeared on the monitor, response times were different than before, functions behaved in new and unusual manners, messages appeared that seemed more ominous than informational. At first I thought my machine was letting me know, the way my old dog Gonzo used to, it didn’t appreciate being left behind. But as it persisted, I entertained conspiratorial suspicions that Microsoft was pulling levers behind the screen, changing browsers, forcing me to use its own search engines, probably threatening me with a Total Shutdown if I did not acquiesce to its changes.

I know, this sounds paranoid and crazy. Until my email stopped working. I could receive email, but that was it. No outgoing, no deletions, no forwarding, just reception. I half expected a ransom note: Use Bing or We Will Kill Your Monitor, You Have Two Days, Daddle!!! Do Not Contact Any Authorities or the Screen Dies!! We Are Watching!!

Of course they’re watching. What, am I an idiot? I know what I’ve brought into my house. I’ve brought Big Brother in to babysit the kids. To babysit me!! It knows all my secrets, all my desires, all my shopping list. It knows how to blackmail me without screwing up my email, but for now, it has my email by the throat. Tomorrow, it may disable photoshop. Next day, Word. It can reduce me to a prehistoric food gatherer, naked down from the trees, jibbering chimpanzee-like as I search for nuts. Or a clue.

So far the clues are nothing but dead ends. I can get messages from the Outer World, but that’s it. Communication is over. I can hear but talking is done. If you get this, call Microsoft. Tell them I capitulate. Ask them what they want from me and explain I will do whatever is required. Hopefully you can still send me an email. If not, save yourself.

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I’m a huge believer that where you live makes all the difference in how you look at the world. I know, maybe it seems obvious to most of us, but then again, part of the reason to travel and explore other places is to give us a glimpse into how another environment might shape our lives. It isn’t just the terrain, or the light, or the cold, or the vistas, it’s how we relate to them. Some folks might thrive in our Pacific Northwest mist and fog and grey days, but others might prefer a Big Sky, lots of sun, hard cold winter winds and think this is where they belong. Maybe days of equatorial temperatures, no delineated seasons, 12 hours of light and dark 365 days a year might be what they desire. I left the snows and frigid temperatures of Wisconsin with my tail between my legs. What doesn’t kill you, I figured, might, at the very least, give you frostbite and an irresistible urge to hibernate four months of the year.

But the point is, you want to find that place that feels like Home, smells like Home, sounds like Home, whatever home is to you. The last day of our trip to New Mexico we wandered with our former neighbor into the hills where Georgia O’Keefe made her home after an early career in New York. Big difference, the canyons of the Big Apple to those under a Big Sky. She chose the wide open spaces, a vast view, a terrain of red rock escarpments and thunderstorms she could see coming across the valley for miles. Maybe she even liked the pitiless summer sun, the hot dessicating winds and four seasons that each were challenging in very different ways. Her paintings became spare as the semi-arid land she adopted and life distilled down to essences.

Where you live shapes your perceptions. More so for those of us who live in the actual, not virtual, world. Maybe not so much for the thermostatically pampered, but even so, a little. New Mexico was a panoramic sweep of mountain ranges, red rock canyons, arid lands, volcanic scree, a country shaped by elements that relentlessly carve and sculpt, erode and tunnel through what is mostly wilderness. It’s a primal place with the occasional ruins where others barely clung to the cliffs and disappeared when the droughts lasted too long. You see a few signs, petroglyphs left, signifying who knows what. It’s a place for the imagination to expand, for myths to be written, for dreams to be caught. I admit to feeling the power of the place. But it never felt like home. And home is where we’re headed.

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