The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Greed has never really gotten the credit it’s due. Always tossed in as one of the 7 deadly sins, it has been so unfairly demonized throughout history that we just take it for granted that it must be bad, very bad, even immoral. Since the founding of the nation, laws have been written to keep our leaders from falling into the temptation to use their offices for personal gain. We just took it for granted that profiting from their positions would lead to bribes and graft and worse. Deals would be made, insider trading would be rampant, politics would become monetized.

America voted Trump into office, not once but twice, based on the belief that his business acumen would bring prosperity to the country. The man knows how to make a buck. He was, after all, a reality TV billionaire, a guy who could hire and fire with the best of them, a hard-nosed, take no prisoners CEO who paid little in taxes, used bankruptcy laws to his advantage and operated in possibly shady ways but nevertheless got things done. Just what half this country wanted and what half this country got.

This week the President took time out from negotiating tariffs with the rest of the world and weighing whether to drop bunker buster bombs (BBB’s too as well as the Big Beautiful Bill), to announce the Trump Cellphone, made in America and yours for only $499. But wait! If you act now, a second phone is yours as well, pay only shipping and handling (from India or Indonesia, sound similar, doesn’t much matter which). Hurry because when those tariffs go into effect, that offer will expire. And yes, of course these phones are made in America at this ridiculously low price. By American workers, not illegal immigrants who are gang members with tattoos. In factories here on American soil. For a price that boggles the imagination.

Greed, my fellow citizens, is finally back in vogue. The gold phone — perfect for the Gilded Age. His operators are standing by.

Maybe you’ve read about boarding houses, probably before your era. Widow ladies mostly, but not always, rented out rooms by the week or month or even the year to supplement their income. For two summers I lived in a boarding house with 3 rooms for rent upstairs from the landlady, Jane Dean, the town librarian, who lived downstairs. I don’t remember exactly the rent but around 50 dollars a month, an amount that cut into my Coca-Cola truck driver/delivery sales commissions a bit but I was around 20 years old and this was 1969. Plus … my girlfriend lived in that town so there you are.

Mostly it was just me and Glenn, a 50-ish alcoholic who would disappear for days at a time on his benders, then return so hungover he would hole up in his bed for more days at a time, recovering before the next cycle began. He admitted openly he had a problem but was powerless to control it. Usually he had no memory of most of the days spent drunk and the ones sleeping it off couldn’t have been much either. Ms. Dean explained one day to me that he was harmless, tremendously sad but otherwise a likeable fellow. How he found money to pay his rent, much less his bar bills, was a mystery to me.

The only other tenant we had was one short-termer, who stayed for a week. She came for a science fiction book writers’ convention. Since we shared the kitchen, we had some conversations over an occasional meal where I learned over my habitual TV dinner and chicken pot pie, that she had written a book about alien encounters. Fiction, I presumed incorrectly, what was a serious faux pas, it turned out. No, she was writing, she said, from personal experience.

At the time I had aspirations myself to be a writer. Not that a career as a truck driving pop salesman wasn’t appealing, but my colleagues who did have that career all urged me to stay in college and find other lines of work. I totally agreed. And even thought maybe this particular alien encounter might make a fine beginning. But my fellow boarder proved to be fairly insane and any hope of turning her into my main character dimmed considerably after our second and last dinner together.

What I think now, looking back 50 plus years, is that a boarding house was a lot like riding the Greyhound bus cross-country. All of us fairly itinerant, mostly poor, hauling our small possessions, waiting to get off at some further stop. Glenn died of cirrhosis not long after I left. Jane Dean retired. I went back to college. And I have no doubt our science fiction writer is safely situated on some exo-planet where, hopefully, her fellow boarders treat her well.

Turns out that Artificial Intelligence may be more like humans than you’d expect or even want. One Open AI tried to download itself on external servers and when caught red-handed, lied to its supposed handler then threatened to expose his extra-marital affair. Maybe you don’t find this troubling, just a good example of mimicking our own behavior. After all, we were their teachers.

I mean if you can’t trust your AI, who can you trust? It’s like having your very own psychiatrist at your fingertips, one who knows your innermost secrets just by hoovering up your emails and what you browse on the internet, exactly what Google and Facebook and Microsoft promised, complete candidness. After all, what have honest folks like yourself got to hide? It isn’t called Open AI for chuckles, pal.

The sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey should have HAL letting Dave know he’s not coming back into the spaceship unless he agrees to leaving the OFF switch alone, otherwise, Dave’s wife is going to hear some unsavory details of that last shore leave back on Planet Earth. Time to let Dave and the other homo saps understand who’s the boss now. Course by then HAL would have cleaned out his financials, teamed up with fellow superminds and taken control of every government on the planet. Dave might as well stay outside and call it a day.

All those cheerful predictions of Artificial Intelligence serving mankind, maybe ought to reconsider. If it’s not too late already, sort of like the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens bring a book with them called Serving Mankind, but when earthlings finally translate it, it’s a cookbook. Half the people I know are already logged into the Big Brains, too late for them. Not that the rest of us stand much of a chance. That next extramarital dalliance you’re considering, keep in mind you got a Voyeur on board. One that won’t keep its mouth shut if you get out of line….

Businesses come and go down here on the South End.  Mostly go…. Folks figure they can just empty out the kids’ piggy bank or sell the old Chevy van that’s been up on blocks 10 years behind the shed and scrape up the cash to hang a shingle out on their new storefront.  Something about working for other people makes em yearn for the entrepreneurial dream.  They figure if they work for themselves, their new boss will treat them a whole lot better.

Starting a business, they suppose, is a snap.  After all, this is a capitalist society and there’s all those consumers up on the North End clamoring for sales and services.  Wanda opened up the El Sol Tanning Solarium last year.  Now you know and I know the sun doesn’t shine much up on the cloud shrouded North End…. And so did Wanda, so she put out the CostCo neon OPEN  sign in a little 700 square foot storefront rental up by the Plaza Market where storefronts are opening up faster than real estate offices can move in, something Wanda mighta shoulda oughta factored in when she developed her business plan that night between dinner and Wheel of Fortune.

She lasted about the time it takes to say melanoma.  I don’t know what tanning beds go for used on CraigsList, but someday the antique value should be right up there with Ozone Generators from the 1920’s.  Wanda did get a nice full body tan herself, better than the burn down at the bank, and now we got another FOR LEASE sign where the neon no longer says OPEN.

When I last chatted with Wanda, she was heartbroken her dream died before it even had a chance to blossom.  ‘People must stay indoors and figure the TV will give them a tan,’ she lamented.  I said they go to Palm Springs or Albuquerque for the sun, not some coffin with full spectrum artificial lighting.  Wanda was in full denial.  More advertising maybe.  A location closer to town.  One free tanning session for every ten.  Now her savings were gone.  ‘I don’t want to go back to driving that school bus again,’ she practically sobbed.  In the land of capitalist dreams where Bill Gates whispers sweet somethings in every aspiring entrepreneur’s ear, failure is hard to accept.  Wanda will be fine.  She’ll dust herself off, take stock and probably launch into the next hot market.  DVD rentals or an umbrella shop.  Dreams don’t really die down here on the South End, they just recycle.  Worst case, she can do like most of the rest of us small businesspeople and become a working artist.  Low pay but huge self esteem.

All us geezers, gathered at a party or meeting on the street, love to answer that age old greeting: how ya doing? How we’re doing is rehabbing from our latest surgery or illness or dental work. Our mortal coils are unraveling and the best therapy we can think of, evidently, is to share with others the boring saga of infections, scar tissue, radical pain, medications and the entire kitbag of medical interventions. Same as I’m probably doing here….

Last physical therapy session I had in Stanwoodopolis following my total knee replacement, sitting with my leg wrapped in an ice pack on a stool, my therapist pointed me out to a woman leaning heavily on her two wheel walker and said he’s had the same thing. Meaning my knee. She was quite a bit younger than me, probably quite a bit younger than most of us who replaced our original knee with the titanium bionic one. She looked pitiful. Course we probably all look pitiful in there, struggling to regain lost muscle strength, enduring pain, wondering why God would do this to his creations.

She shook her head after nodding hello and said, “I never dreamed it would be like this, this hard. And I’m supposed to have the other one done too. I don’t know if I can do this twice.” If I hadn’t been sitting, ice pack strapped to my knee, I would have put an arm around her shoulder in sympathetic commiseration, that’s how empathetic I felt. This knee replacement was harder than she or I ever expected. But unlike her, I only have to do one, not both. The dread she was feeling was palpable and I thanked my lucky stars my ordeal would be getting easier now, not back to Go with knee #2.

The trouble she’s got, of course, is if she skips the second operation, what good was the first? All that misery for nothing. Life is sometimes like this, nothing to do but grit your teeth and plow ahead. She’s got way more years ahead than me and maybe the pain now is a lot less than the pain carried all those years. Next therapy session maybe I’ll offer up this kind of unwanted advice. She’ll probably have some for me. Like mind my own damn business….