The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some of you less fortunate few who may have followed this little blog for probably too long won’t be surprised to know that I am actually a stained glass artist. You may even know that I came to my profession in the unlikeliest of routes when, back at the time I bought my old shack with plastic on the windows instead of glass, I chanced to see an item in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette for a night class at the high school to learn the lost art of stained glass. Who lost it, I never learned, but I can tell you one of the lucky ones who found it again. I took one lesson, went home and before the second class the following week my continuing education had terminated once I had finished two windows and a full size door. I never went back for that second class.

I’m a couple of beers past turning 71 years old. I started breaking glass back in 1980 or slightly before, so it’s been 40 plus years. All I wanted to do was replace that plastic in my drafty shack’s windows, but a funny thing happened on the way to a warmer house, I just got hopelessly addicted to stained glass, its design, its unique interaction with light and with seasonal shifts, its uplifting spiritual presence, corny as it sounds coming from a secular yahoo like me. I built a glass studio out back in the woods, piddled around selling show-and- tell stuff at the hospital where I part-timed as a graveyard shift orderly on weekends, then fortunately fell into public art with a small commission by the WA State Arts Commission.

Public art was what I loved. What I love now. When work was slack, I donated public art around the area, nearly 20 large murals with the last one for the new Island County Administration Building. If I were a better musician, I would give free concerts if the paying gigs weren’t coming in. Actually, the South End String Band has. Or if I were a writer, I might write blogs or maybe humor sketches for the local Pulitzer-prizeless Crab Cracker, not for any money but because, well, a writer should really write if he wants to call himself a writer. Because we so-called artists didn’t become artists to get rich, we followed a different piper.

We’re in the plague years now and when it subsides, just as it was after the Great Recession, money for government spending will be too tight to mention. Public art — which is based on construction of public buildings — will grind to a halt the way it did after 2008. I had a few commissions lined up before the drought hit me, kept me going for a few years, then the work was sparse and the competition for the few remaining jobs was ferocious. I expect this will be a repeat performance.

But … before it all goes to hell in an unsanitized shopping cart, I received notice that I was a finalist for three different WA Arts Commission projects. Well, I thought, long shots but maybe one more before forced retirement. And sure enough, I won one. And that one was for, maybe you guessed it already, the Stanwoodopolis High School. If you think we’ve come full circle, I couldn’t agree more. If you think maybe sometimes the planets line up and the stars shine a bit brighter, I’m thinking so too. If you think I’m grinning from ear to ear under my battered old hat, you’d be absolutely right. Life is full of surprises, probably the only thing you should count on.

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As a card carrying bleeding heart snowflake liberal, I watch with bemusement the hair-on-fire panic of my fellow commies who seem to be predicting the end of the world as they know it and the demise of all things progressive. The 3.5 trillion dollar Build it Better budget, surprise surprise, is a political football. My socialist pals are wringing their collective hands, cursing the two senators who are roadblocking the bill and all the Republicans who refuse to raise the debt ceiling, hoping the Dems will take the blame for the deficits of the past, oh, couple of decades.

I admit that I gnash my teeth and pound my fists but when I calm down I try to remember we sent Trump into exile down at Mar-a-Lago to hold court with his jesters and funders, plotting a return from that grave in 2024. I expect he’ll either be in federal prison by then or his hopes for another grand entry down the T. Tower escalator will be more than likely a grand jury, just one more prediction that crashes and burns. Meanwhile, back at the sausage factory, a package will be emerging from this Congress, one that may not have 3.5 trillion as a price tag but will more than likely legislate provisions for more health care, maybe even dental, possibly prescription drug cost reductions, child care, subsidized community college tuition, climate change provisos, rural internet, all this and more. What we down here on the South End call a liberal agenda, one coming to a theater near all of us.

So maybe it won’t be a total Green New Deal and maybe it won’t be single payer national health care and probably it won’t make everyone happy, but … geez, c’mon, we’re swerving to the left in an electric car. Who knows, we might even tax the rich and the corporations that don’t pay their fair share. Quit yer crying, I say, and stop expecting perfection. Progress isn’t a bad alternative.

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Literacy exists on the South End, despite rumors of its premature demise. Oh sure, the Little Library was sacked and books burned in its first month of opening over at Hutchison Park, but pockets of erudition still flourished. The Salish Sea South End Book Club has been meeting monthly since 2010, its membership mostly stable until the Covid Epidemic forced some to avoid public contamination. Finally the Club went on pre-vaccine hiatus, vowing to return when the plague ran its course.

Naturally the final book selections dealt with … well, you guessed it, disease and epidemics. Sheila Brockhurst wanted to select Andromeda Strain, some nightmare scenario of extraterrestrial origin unleashed from secret labs in the American desert, but she was outvoted for the last selection before the group went into quarantine. Last Town on Earth, the Club pick, scared everyone enough to go into Lockdown themselves, a frightening little novel about the Spanish Flu and a town, supposedly modeled on Darrington, that sequestered itself from outside contamination. A little close to home in more ways than one, Ginny Schwimmer complained over her Chablis and cheese.

Half wine club, half literary review, some of the members were notoriously averse to reading, coming primarily for the camaraderie and vino. Sylvia Nostrum once voiced her opinion that those who didn’t read the week’s selection should just stay home and binge-watch Netflix serials, but the bibliophiles tabled that, worried that too few of them would be left for a meaningful discussion. And anyway, the social aspect of the book group probably outweighed rigid enforcement of reading rules. Besides, the non-readers were entertaining in their own right. And they brought the best hors-douerves.

The Club members took turns meeting at each other’s homes, which, if you’re the spousal unit, literary or not, meant heading for a nearby tavern, a friend’s house or just sequester voluntarily in a back room. The ladies were always inviting us menfolk to join in, always nice to get a gendered opinion on the book of the month, see if the pheromones could get a word in edgewise. I admit, as one of the menfolk, I considered the invitation but in the end decided discretion might be the better part of valor. Or at least an easy way to avoid divorce.

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What, me worry? Gee, just that human life on this hotbox of a planet is doomed? C’mon, let’s be optimistic, look at the bright side, the cockroaches will live on, maybe evolve into big brained bugs, solve the global warming conundrum, build pyramids four feet high, worship their gods, set up governments, fight wars with the termites, continue the proud legacy we homo sapiens couldn’t quite extend into the planetary future we screwed up. We had our shot, gave it a brief run, but decided we preferred Cadillacs and speedboats to survival. Party on, Bro!

We kind of lived for today. Be Here Now, right? The future, the next generation, the kids, the grandkids, well, we figured it would work out fine. Okay, we didn’t worry much about that, a little bizzy making ourselves happy, the next generation be damned. Sure, a bit selfish, but hey, we were the Entitled Ones, the folks who couldn’t lift a finger to help those who were poor or hungry or homeless, those sad people who apparently didn’t invest in the stock market or go to college or get hired by the tech industry, what can you do if they won’t help themselves??

We all had an equal chance, right? Not our fault you were born in Yemen. Grab those bootstraps and haul yerself up, climb the ladder to the top, pal. No whining! Can’t have that whimpering. No, sir, cowboy up! So what if we left a few messes to clean up, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, now can you? But hey, give us some props. After all, we invented the internet and social media and bitcoin mining. Plus, how about artificial intelligence? We built machines smarter than all of us put together and if you work it right, they’ll solve all these world problems in no time flat. Pretty soon they’ll be improving themselves. And figure out they don’t really need us wreaking havoc on their planet, the one they will soon have Total Control of. I mean, how hard would it be to outsmart the people who believe in Qanon? One prosthetic tied behind their back and they’d still win.

Maybe it’s for the best. Artificial Intelligence, the next evolutionary stage of life on Earth. Unless, of course, you’re one of those bipedal Darwin deniers, then … well, good luck! When the droids get done with you, you’ll wish you really were a monkey’s uncle.

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It is cold comfort to know that the tech giants who control the 21st Century economy must still be reading superhero comics in their endless adolescence. Some think they’re Buck Rogers and Captain Kirk combined, why not spend billions of their untaxed money on space tourism? And then there’s Zuckerberg, the boy android, as smooth and plastic as any automaton created in a special effects laboratory, creepy as an evil doll pulled from the closet of anxieties. He’s single handedly addicted the planet to his social platform, intoning all the while that all he wants is to connect human beings to one another. Welcome to the Borg!

But now he’s got bigger fish to fry and problems to hide. Rebranding Facebook as Meta, he wants the world to go virtual. Nice name, Meta, but why not just call it The Matrix? Yep, bringing the world’s inhabitants closer together. Mark has missed the news apparently about Facebook’s algorithms contributing to the civil war in this country, not to mention plenty of other countries, lots of money to be made on incivility, not so much on connecting with peace love and understanding. If Facebook is having problems on this front, why bother fixing the algorithms when you can just double down, take the game into the 3rd dimension, put on the Google Glass blinders and provide the illusion of real networks and virtual friendships.

Boldly going where no man has gone before, I think the idea is. Space, no longer the final frontier, not when you can explore the Matrix, the Metaverse, the profit margins. I know, I’m a hopeless Luddite, not very trusting of these brainy little Pied Piper engineers who never really left their bedroom with the Star Wars posters on the wall and the model of the Saturn rocket on the shelf. I fervently hope they can go where no man has gone before. But hopefully go by themselves. Leave the rest of us out of it….

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