The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End Senior Center —what the wags at the Marina and Bait call the Senile Center— is basically a pole building down by the Camano Cut and Curl, about a stone’s throw from the now defunct Tyee MegaStore.  A pole building, for those unfamiliar with architectural stylings, is a metal sided structure constructed with beams instead of stud framing.  Barns and shops are often built this way.  So is our Senior Center.  Cheap and stout enough.

The Center has a Board and it has a small staff — which is Jenny Hancock and various volunteers who man (well, okay, woman) the desk and phones.  Jenny has the only room, other than the unisex toilet in back, that has its own door.  This makes it perfect for the occasional dance and their annual fashion show, the flea market fundraiser and their gala auction, capital G, that brings in most of their yearly funding.

The auction used to be held at the close of the flea market, sort of an afterthought.  Year after sorry year, the stragglers would bid on bad local art the artists couldn’t sell or give away on the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, plus the usual items from South End biznesses.  A day of fishing Jesse’s Deep Sea Charters.  Believe me, an hour would be plenty.  Or a perm at the Cut and Curl.  An hour of acupuncture down at Pins and Needle Therapy.  Whoa, Nelly, you can imagine the bidding wars!

Just before they decided to throw in the towel on the auction, Jenny convinced the board to go Gala.  Meaning, basically, play dress-up and serve wine and beer, charge an entry and serve coldcuts and cheese with crackers.  The first year the Center made 5 times what they HAD been making.  The second year they doubled that and on the third they served hard liquor.  And made even more.  Two Toke Tom is lobbying for medical marijuana sampling, but he’s not on the Board.

The Center is raising money now for a new building.  The toxic mold is starting to be an issue and anyway we’re feeling growing pains, not so much from all the new immigrants as that demographically we’re inexorably moving into our senile years.  If the auction keeps on improving, we might just make it.  Believe me, 3 martinis and even the Bait Shop Boyz bid a day’s wages for an hour with Janice, head dominatrix at the Pins and Needles.

Hits: 14

Hits: 11

Times are tough these days down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop.  A lot of barnacle-bottomed boats moored idle at the docks, their glory days of fishing now just a dry-rotted memory.  Occasionally you’ll see one of the skippers doing a little brightwork on some faded trim or turning over an engine just to clear the cobwebs from the lines and the tanks, but time and overfishing have taken heavy tolls.

Used to be the fleet was the pride of the island, running from Mabana to Bristol Bay in search of salmon openings and halitbut catches.  We maybe didn’t have the widows’ walks the Narragansett boys had for their lonely wives to gaze forlornly out to sea scanning horizons for men returned from hunting whale, but it was an event nonetheless when captains sailed into view with full cargo holds and tales of Alaskan storms.

Sadly, those catches dwindled and the fleet turned to lesser dreams.  For a time they chartered for the tourist fishermen,  CEO’s up from San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Seattle, in search of trophy gooeyducks and the elusive free range oyster, but even those became uncommon, then finally rare.  One by one the Captains Courageous were forced to sit idle, swapping tongue-worn tales of the Big Catch of ’78 or the killer storm of ’82, mostly lies now, but better than constant complaining.   And far better than hanging out in the unemployment office.

Some of the skippers sold their boats for what they could get, just pesos on the dollar.  Hazy Jake ran Canadian Bud for awhile through the islands until the borders tightened and his nerves frayed worse than his lines.  You see the last of them down at the bait shop most days, those Ahabs whose Mobys disappeared, hunkered down  over big chipped mugs of thick coffee from the self serve pot, predicting tide and weather, predicting  everything except the future, a place they rarely visit now.

Hits: 14

Lately I’ve been noticing a new drumbeat from the far right, the Red States, the Christian jihad and yellers at PTA meetings across this great land. They want books banned. They don’t want our kids exposed to the woke culture, nothing about sex or sexual preferences, nothing about systemic racism or sexism, nothing that would make them feel uncomfortable knowing certain truths, even the ones self-evident. They would close down the libraries and in some places they’re working on that. They want to shut down the Department of Education. If they could, they’d burn books and maybe even the librarians who dare to allow material these parents object to placed on the shelves.

What I don’t understand is how these people think the real danger to their offspring is in the library. Go ahead, shut down the library, lock the librarians up, burn the objectionable books, that should protect Johnny and Brittany, shouldn’t it? Nearly every kid has a smart phone, nearly every kid has access to the same social media as their folks, nearly every kid can watch violence and porn at the earliest possible age. But hey, the parents think banning a couple of books in their local or school library will buffer their darlings from left wing woke propaganda? The unwoke need to wake the hell up. Their kids’ brains are being groomed all right, but not from some novel about growing up gay in America.

Social media and the internet provide them with creepy bullies, trolls that destroy their developing self-esteem, conspiracy theories, whacked politics, a world of Likes and Unfriending, all guaranteed to warp their childhoods in favor of an immature and puerile adulthood. Parents worry about critical race theory and prefer that to critical thinking. They think their kids, protected from the bogeyman of Hollywood or Disney or Bud Light, will grow up with their values, as if they were Amish and driving the horse and buggy would save them from being assimilated into a decadent culture, the one that surrounds them completely.

Too late, too damn late to ban the books and prosecute the librarians, the Pied Piper of the internet has already stolen their children.

Hits: 14

Hits: 11

Let me say right off the bat here, full disclosure, I am not an Artificial Intelligence. I know, some of you would say I’m not even a Genuine Intelligence — and I won’t argue the point — but pretty soon it won’t really matter, will it? Already the future is here, the bots are taking charge, the corporations are adding the algorithms that will replace a good many of us. Take this blog, for instance. I could have Chatbot finish this in … oh … less than one second. If I were paid by the hour, I wish!, my employer (me, in this case) would save a bundle of crypto. You think those writers in Hollywood don’t know this? Or their bosses? They’re not really on strike over pay, they’re fighting Artificial Intelligence writing their scripts and then gussying them up for peanuts.

I design stained glass projects. You think I don’t know already that you could download my past stuff, run it through the AI app, ask it to design a similar work that looks a lot like mine and it couldn’t do it? Oh, it could do it all right. In a nano-second. Some of us so-called artists are probably going to use the app ourselves, save all that creative energy that could be better spent on scrolling the internet and updating our social media stuff. Although, pretty soon we could have ArtApp handle that too.

I don’t kid myself that my own creativity is so profoundly unique that some dumb machine couldn’t duplicate it, maybe improve on it, probably replace me, just more collateral damage on the highway to the future that’s leaving us in the digital dust. The engineers may think they’ve finally gotten the best of us smug art types, programmed us right into obsolescence, but I got news for them too. The best programmers are going to be those machines they built. Not that I expect to get the last laugh. The laugh’s on all of us. Soon as the apps learn how to snicker….

Hits: 34

So I’m in the middle of a screwup day, nothing going right, a trip to town to pick up items at UPS they can’t find, another to retrieve a lost microphone at the location of our last gig they said they had but don’t now, still more to correct mistakes in postcards, posters and ads for an upcoming Small Craft Advisory show, how can it get much worse, I’m thinking. Until I park at the grocery parking lot facing directly into the guy with the TRUMP vanity license plate and no, it wasn’t Donald himself, just a Kool-aid acolyte wizened behind his steering wheel scowling at any and all. Meaning me.
On the rear of his rig are all manner of hostile bumper stickers but the one that catches my eye before moving away from this creepy caricature of Yosemite Sam said SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP, TRUMP IS PRESIDENT. Being in a small rage myself already, I wanted to tap on his window and ask the obvious question, ya really think your boy is President? Buttercup. My usual mode of operation is never, ever, engage these people. They are mostly whacked, completely unhinged idiots without so much as a horny toenail on terra firma. Their world is inhabited by lizard people, Jews with lasers in outer space starting forest fires, Democrat pedophiles in basements beneath pizza parlors doing monstrous things to children before eating them. A conversation on these topics is not going to find us a middle ground in the end.

Yesterday a buddy stopped by to ask about those Lahaina fires in Maui, said a client he mowed lawn for, one with a MAGA hat he astutely assumed was a Republican, claimed the fires were started by corporations who planned to buy the smoldering beach front town at rock bottom prices. To his client this sounded reasonable, no further evidence required, just bedrock cynicism for government and now corporations. Buttercups too, I’m betting. My buddy said he didn’t want to provoke this guy and lose his gig over politics, a job is, after all, a job. If it pays well anyway.

No, the batshit crazies are on their own. And if, in the end, they outnumber the rest of us just trying to navigate the already complex universe of our humdrum lives and vote their creep hero back into office, then we can all be afraid, very afraid, not just for democracy as we once imagined it, but sanity as it may newly be defined.

Hits: 23

Hits: 32

Hits: 16

They’re in a terrible kerfuffle down at the Flame-Ons! now that Lottie Johnson quit the post of Women’s Fire Auxilliary President.  Resigned in a huff, a snit, a flame-throwing kiss-my-caboose departure right in the middle of the June meeting  to decide what to fundraise for in the coming annum.  When she hit the door at the VFD meeting hall, the vacuum swept 4 or 5 others out with her in full irate sympathy.  The ladies left on their metal folding chairs with paper dessert plates half finished in their laps said not a word for at least two minutes, exchanging raised eyebrows and hesitant smiles.

“Looks like you’re the new President, Connie,” someone finally said, breaking the silence.  Connie said no, No, NO, someone else, anyone else.

The trouble is, there’s the Old Guard auxiliaries, the women who remember that era when the station was pretty much Party Central for the South End fireboyz, beer cases stacked higher than fire equipment up the wall, Tuesday night ‘practices’ pretty much a kegger.  Their mothers had served in the Auxilliary and this was their club.  But new arrivals to the area had joined, exhibiting civic pride and plenty of zeal, hoping to make a difference.  And make it quick.  Way of the World, I suppose, but old blood and new blood don’t mix.  Type A’s vs. tired blood.  You see it in the South End Historical Society, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, down at the Bizness Association.  Who ARE those nouveau riche pretenders and what do they want from us?  It was a sociable group before, a lot of fun and friendship — it’s a political nightmare now.  What was tea and cookies now has an evangelical air.  We need to organize, we need to fundraise, we need to lobby the commissioners, we need to get active!  The old plant sale just wouldn’t do.  Would NOT DO!

Now they had a fire district with paid fire fighters permanently at every station.  Well, not the South End station.  They were building or upgrading new stations all over the island.  Well, not the South End station.  It was getting hard to find volunteers when up northcountry the firefighters were being paid handsomely.  Times were changing, Lottie would say, time, ladies, for us to change too.  Oh yeah, there’s a fire smoldering down at the Station, she liked to say, and it was up to us to put it out.

Well, Lottie is gone now, at least for a time.  And that burnt rubber smell in the Flame-Ons! meetings won’t go away soon.  That fire is still smoldering and the trouble is, they got rid of all those cases of beer years ago.  Who knows if it would’ve helped put out this fire.

Hits: 14