The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill.  The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers.  Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire.  She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know.  “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots.  You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died.  The Casino was their whole life.  We even provided funeral services.  Why not?  Half their friends were us casino workers.  You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined.  Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop.  Jill muttered ‘why not?’  and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question.  “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying.  Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought.  “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go.  She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED.  Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought.  I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

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I confess.  I have a TV.  Not a very big TV, not a drive-in theater size TV, just a TV that our friends find maddening if we want to watch a movie together but that seems plenty big enough for the mizzus and me.  I don’t want to build another house to make room for a 60 inch television.  But I do want to watch the news and a few shows.  And I don’t want to pay for cable or satellite.  Not that I wouldn’t want to watch 100 stations with the weirdest content imaginable just to get PBS.

So it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that I have an antenna on the roof.  Since everyone went to digital, the old antenna wouldn’t pick up anything.  Nada, zip, zero.  Thanks a lot, FCC.  The first UHF antenna would catch a few stations, not most, and even then you had to haul up to the roof, turn the antenna, climb back down and see if that picked up the station you were after and when it didn’t repeat the above.  Great exercise, not good viewing.  Like the internet, TV reception out in the boondocks is for the birds.  Sure, the providers promised high speed updates, but any fool knew they were lying.  And now that the pandemic has forced us all into quarantine, the internet with everyone logged on is reminiscent of the old dial-up days with buffering that lasts longer than TV commercials.

A week ago I did some buffered research on TV antennas, ordered one online and got it a few days later.  The old one, which actually wasn’t very old at all, had replaced the previous one that refused, no matter what compass direction I pointed it, to pick up PBS.  PBS, we learned through further internet buffered research, had a slightly weaker signal than any other station this side of Portland or San Francisco.  Close, but no cigar, so I figured get a slightly bigger antenna but maybe not as big as a large array telescope.  With high hopes and plenty of pessimism I hauled the new aluminum job up to the roof peak, attached it to the metal mast, pointed it in the direction of Seattle and Gomorrah, climbed back down the ladder and turned on the TV.  Wow.  The stations were really a lot crisper, all of them.

All of them except PBS.  Which didn’t come in at all.  PBS asks us for contributions all the time.  Maybe when they offer a repeater station instead of a cheesy coffee mug for a donation of 120 bucks a year, they might have a shot.  Until then, they can quit asking.

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We used to stand in our garden and look out across the highway with great views of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound.  But, of course, inevitably progress reared its ugly head, the acreage on the bluff side got parceled and houses got built.  The new folks refused to honor some of the commitments the developer had agreed to, cut the green belt between us and closed off our promised access to the beach below.  Our ‘view’ rapidly became a suburb, our neighbors had themselves an Association and we planted evergreens along the road.

Jump ahead a few years and our hedge had grown into a 20 foot green wall, giving us total privacy to replace our view, not a bad trade-off.  Our neighbors on our side of the Green Curtain had also put in hedges so that for a stretch of highway across from the Association nothing could be seen of us pioneers and our less than majestic hovels.  Out of sight, out of mind, so say the philosophers of social inequity.

Eventually I made peace with the suburbanites.  Nice folks mostly, especially the second generation of newcomers.  And so one spring day I pruned the lower limbs of all the evergreen laurels lining the road, opening up views of our shack and gardens and greenhouses.  For days, for weeks, I cut and hauled and burned, slowly revealing what had been hidden for a decade and a half or more, our Shangri-La-La chic chalet and its estate.

One by one every neighbor dropped by to tell me how nice our pruning was, what a great difference, how pleased they were.  Good fences, I concluded, don’t make good neighbors, they screen them out.  The next year I cut those laurels down to the ground, the filberts too.  Even put up artwork along the road as a gesture of more goodwill this past year.  We get along okay, but lately, I don’t know, maybe just the ornery curmudgeon in me, maybe all the fighting going on over there this past year, I sometimes miss that big green wall.

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Maybe you’re like me, a little oblivious to the latest trends in fashion.  My last haircut, for instance, was 2019 B.C., Before Covid, but lately I’ve gotten wind of social media sites that allow you — and I use that word hesitantly — allow you to adjust and enhance your profile image.  You want fuller lips, less chin, more nose, wider eyes, they got a program that can do that … and much much more.  You think folks wouldn’t want a virtual facelift, botox without the neurotoxins, breast enhancements or a digital youth serum, hoo boy, stand over here by me, the Nerd Geezer Club.

In the universe of selfies and eternal Facebook updates, what else would you expect?  The computer mirror reflects back our enhanced image, not quite real but then, why do we use make-up, eyeliner, lipstick, mascara and hair coloring?  We’re obsessed with our self-image and now … we can alter that image through the magic of digital plastic surgery.  And if you like that ‘look’, that new and improved you, well, there are real plastic surgeons waiting  to assist you with implants, injections, fat burning, lipo-suction and scalpels.  Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it can be yours for free on the internet or at a price in the doctor’s office.

Sure, I can be disdainful, after all, no touch up or even major surgery is going to help me at this late stage.  Too late for this old fart.  Although … I could use a haircut, maybe a little off the side and a foot off the back, color up those gray hairs, move my ears back a bit, make my eyes look wise — and while we’re at it, how about a hat that wasn’t half beat up?  Okay, how about just the hat.

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Some computer programmer recently entered his digital painting in an art competition — and took first prize.  Much to the disdain and outrage of the artists who lost to that computer generated artwork.  Now, to be fair, photoshop has been competing with photography for years and any photo can be turned into a watercolor or a pencil sketch or a poster at the click of a command, then printed on canvas or watercolor paper or poster board.

This particular prize-winning painting was hyper-realistic … but had elements of classic styles that gave it a retro modern artworkiness.  Obviously the judges were impressed, if not the competition.  Get ready for the Future, y’all, it’s already here, suitable for framing.  You don’t think Artificial Intelligence will analyze the entire encyclopedia of poetry, then create a moody amalgam that will stand up to its human created peers, you been spending too much time on Instagram.  These plucky binary bibliophiles will be writing sonnets, rap songs, plays and novels before you can say Billy Shakespeare.  Paintings, music, literature, they’re boning up on styles and techniques, analyzing what we humans prefer, copying this and improving that, next thing you know they got a bestseller, a hit song, a Pulitzer Prize, the next Big Thing.

I’ve been warning my artist cronies since I got my hands on photoshop, you need to up your game, move into the future before they have a chance to copy you.  Course, they may beat us there anyway, but I say give them a run for their circuits.  Sure, it’s a losing fight, but hey, if that wasn’t your goal at the outset, maybe you picked up the wrong profession.  Probably should’ve gone into Coding, program your own computer to do your art.  Just saying …..

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