The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m taking care of the neighbor’s chickens while they’re vacationing in Europe. Actually, I’m taking care of their hens while their usual chicken babysitters are vacationing in Oregon. The chicken coop, a veritable Trump Tower of a coop/aviary, sits right beside our joint property line so it’s no big deal to wander over and check the water, toss some chicken feed, gather up the eggs and cross back into my woods. The boys who usually handle this asked if I would check the house too, see if burglars had been prowling or were living in the mansion.

Some years back, shortly after the house was finished, the new owner was sunbathing in the privacy of her back yard and someone caught her sans swimsuit out on the lawn. That trespasser, she figured, being an amateur Sherlock Holmes, must be me since I live right next door. This created a bad start for our neighborliness as you might suspect. Nobody really wants to be accused of being a peeping Tom, but my neighbor kept asking friends of mine if they thought I was capable of this. Hell if I know what my friends probably told her, maybe worse than that. But she wouldn’t let it go and that dark cloud hangs over our mutual backyards like a constant threat of rain.

So I said no, I wouldn’t be caught dead or on video surveillance camera snooping around their house, just wasn’t worth the potential trouble to play security guard for them while they were vacationing on the Oregon coast. Michael mentioned that the owner had recently asked about me, whether I was a liberal or a redneck, a libertarian or a banjo whacker, a …. whatever? ‘What did you tell her?’ I asked. I’ve only lived next door to them for, oh, 15 years or so, how would they know what I was like, right? Admittedly they’re absentee chicken ranchers mostly, come up on holidays or a few special occasions, probably check on the trophy house, see if my buddies mowed and trimmed and pruned their fruit trees correctly. Rich folks. The kind of neighbors I love the most, especially the absentee part.

‘I told her you were a story teller,’ Michael said. We were next to the coop, chickens hopping up and down the escalator to the pen from the motel room style appointed laying bins. They were doing their cackle thing. A story teller, I repeated. What the hell does that tell her? A story teller is like, for her probably, a congenital liar, faux facts, Trump supporter, who knows what would run through her suspicious head?

I don’t know either what that means. A story teller? Well, okay, let’s roll with it. Stay tuned, is all I can suggest. If my chicken ranching neighbors have video cameras tuned to that chicken coop and find me prowling around their pen, I suspect we’ll have a sequel to this little story. If not, I get some free eggs and chicken shit on my boots. Life on the South End in these modern times … it’s never what I expect.

Most, if not all, Presidents use national holidays to celebrate their country, to remind us we are One People, all of us pulling together to make this nation what it is and what it has potential to be. Not the current one, of course, who sent out an all caps message to us that read: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country.” Nice sentiment from the Commander-in-Chief, the guy who called prisoners of war ‘losers’ and the troops who died fighting for their country suckers. Thanks, General.

Always in search of a scapegoat the guy can’t help himself denigrating any and all who he can’t see in the mirror. Losers, scum, suckers, deadbeats, gang members — I think he means you and me. But … help is on the way for this once great nation of ours that has lost its way. And that solution is him. Why he’s throwing himself a military parade on his birthday. Not sure why he didn’t get the job done the first term of office but let’s not go there. He gets a mulligan. In his world he always gets a mulligan and he always wins every tournament.

Most, if not all, Presidents aim for uniting the country they’re in charge of, not calling us scum and communists, not investigating anyone who has ever slighted them. Every good autocrat and every dutiful dictator looks for a scapegoat, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, pick one or two and blame the ills of the nation on them. This president has an enemy list longer than his inventory of merchandise he sells. Elite colleges, all Democrats, all immigrants who aren’t white, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, Joe Biden and Joe Biden and forever Joe Biden. He has skin so thin nearly everyone is a potential loser scumbag if they forget to kiss the ring frequently. And if the scapegoats aren’t enough here, he’s got our allies overseas to criticize and threaten. Some he hauls into the Oval Office and gives them the World Wide Wrestling Smackdown treatment, great TV he says, figuring, apparently, everyone loves a bully so long as he’s a winner.

So it’s Memorial Day here in America. Losers Day to him, all those gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery. To the rest of us, just another sad day in a long line of his Presidency.

This past fall my 74 year old body let me down, succumbed to the entropy of old age and geezer mechanics, went beyond the usual aches and pains and finally threw in the white flag of surrender. My left knee, the one I’d injured as a 16 year old kid falling on skis the only time he ever went skiing and the boot didn’t release so that the knee bent to the point of breaking. But not quite. Hello future arthritis.

When, after jerking a recalcitrant outboard motor trying to make it start for nearly an hour, that old knee flared its outrage and walking was suddenly a challenge, I reluctantly went to the clinic for an evaluation where the x-rays and subsequent scans came back with multiple issues, ranging from spurs to chips to misaligned meniscus to bone on bone and even sprained ACL’s. The prognosis for an active old age had greatly diminished in no time flat.

I had a fairly straight forward choice. I could gimp around the rest of my days, two stepping up stairs, hobbling in pain, accepting my fate. Or … I could opt for a new bionic knee. After which I could leap tall buildings in a single bound, no doubt with the assistance of a chip implanted in my brain to control the new titanium gizmo. Part man, part machine, everything I’ve feared most of my adult life. Why wait for the Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse? If you can’t beat em, join em. Resistance, needless to say, is futile.

Three weeks ago I had the surgery performed by a robot bone-cutter programmed for exact slicing and dicing. Post-op, I had a semi-human leg the size of a small elephant’s and an incision running from above the titanium knee to below, a throbbing gash that has kept me from full sleep all this time. I had sincerely hoped the controlling chip implant would also handle the pain as well as the bionic instructions but no, the android apparently hasn’t concerned itself with pain management, not feeling any itself.

Suffice it to say, I’m not leaping even small sheds, much less tall buildings. Folks tell me it’s going to take more time than my overly and unrealistic optimism had led me to believe. Soon, I hope, the pathetically weak human component of me will yield to the inevitable union with the machine masters. Meanwhile, I still have to oil the damn joint.

We take so much for granted, us Moderns. Oh, I don’t mean you, of course. Me, maybe. But the truth is we live in a predictable world, electricity always on, water in the taps, thermostat at our fingertips. Get our food when we’re hungry, get our entertainment at the touch of a button or a mouse. Life’s easy for us Americans. Complacency is our middle name.

So why is it we whine so much?? Are we spoiled brats in the Garden of Eden, always wanting more, never satisfied with what we have? Have we become soft and lazy sitting at our computers, goofing with our ‘devices’? Two Toke Tom thinks it’s something else the night we’re parked on his rickety porch waiting for the full moon to rise out across Port Susan about where Mt. Pilchuck has turned the last of its snow golden as if God Herself had poured butterscotch topping on its ice cream peak.

“You and me, Skeeter, we’re the last of our kind.” Tom had been living up to his nick name while I’d been working on a beer or three. “We’re outliers.”

“Outlaws, you mean?” I asked, not sure what he was driving at.

“We’re outside looking in. We want heat, we cut wood. We want water, it comes from our well. Food’s out in the garden, down at the beach. We’d rather build something than buy something. You built a house and I did too. You build boats, I build furniture.”

“What’s your point, Tom?” I cut in, knowing he could go on past midnight with this. We’d done it many a moon, full or not.

“I mean, we live in the world.” When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “We all live in the world,” but he shook his head. “Naw, not the natural world. They live in offices, they live in fluorescent light, they live inside their entertainment center, they think nature is the weeds out by their sidewalk. They’ve gotten themselves stranded, man, and they don’t get what they’re missing anymore. They got their social media bullshit and that’s their reality, talking to people they don’t know or can’t see or who the hell cares? It’s all two dimensional. It’s all disconnected from this.” He swept his arm out into some galaxy he was apparently Seeing. “People have lost touch, that’s what I’m saying. They’d rather live in the Digital World. Pretty soon they’ll have little automatons living with them. Bots, man, doing their bidding. And when the robots decide to take over, people won’t even notice. Because they’ll be robots too, man.”

“Cut back on the weed, Tom,” I said, popping my next beer. “We got our own issues.”

Fortunately the moon began to show over by Three Finger Jack, just a glow at first, then quicker than you might think, a fat pumpkin of a moon orbiting the globe while we sat lost in our own thoughts on a porch on an island where the world kept spinning whether we noticed or not.

“Just like in the movies,” I said.

“Pretty as a hologram,” Tom cracked back.

One of the hazards of scribbling nonsense in these 21st Century blog sites along with about one billion other yahoos is that there are folks out there who really – and I don’t mean maybe – REALLY don’t like what they read in Skeeter’s pantheon of purpled prose.  Maybe some search engine sends em by mistake, hooks on a key word, next thing you know, instead of a self-help forum, they got some chucklenut waxing profane about a subject they couldn’t care less about.  And now, instead of Helpful Tips from Tom on how to turn their unhappy life into something swallowable, they got precious time wasted scrolling down South End Babble and boy howdy, somebody needs to reimburse them!

So they write to me in the anonymity of the internet.  Which is the digital highway equivalent of road rage on the interstate.  Flip me off, swerve into my lane,  jam the brakes.  They’ll show me who’s who and what’s what.  And the best part: they’re untrackable, anonymous as drive-by shooters.  Splatter my windshield with shotgun pellets and don’t look back, just speed away to the next unlucky target.

These are some very Very ANGRY! people out there with us.  More than you think.  Way more.  I suppose we’re lucky they shoot from the lip, not the hip, but if you ever made the mistake of commenting on a forum or some issue that meant enough to you that you weighed in, then you probably learned firsthand what I’m talking about.  Civility is most definitely not a valued trait in Cyberville.

I’d like to see the volume and vitriol dialed back a bit.  I know, probably won’t happen, probably get ratcheted UP even more if anything,  But personally, I’m weary of the ranting, the hysteria, the apoplexy.  And hey, you, the guy who sells antiques and read the blog by mistake on cleaning out my storage shacks, maybe hoping for bargains:  I’m sorry you thought this offered no insights for living your life.  And I’m doubly sorry if you thought I was so self- centered I used the blog to make myself look attractive.  I guess we won’t be dating.

I don’t have anything to sell, pal.  Not the junk I cleaned out, not the ideas in my head.  And .. .sadly…. it sounds like we’re all a little late to offer you tips on living.  Let’s both just figure it out on our own.