The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I know you’re probably sick unto death of hearing me ramble on about my little projects. Home improvement, self-improvement, who out there cares and why should they? The stuff I do, everybody used to. At least before TV and computers made my world boring and anachronistic. Sure it’s nice to pretend I live up some holler a stone’s throw from the 19th Century or that someday they’ll name my crappy pond Walden Too. Truth is, that pond will maybe hold a footprint of mine in its mud, a future fossil drying up and of interest only to archeologists back to explore the planet. Hominid South Endosaur, bipedal, semi-upright, omnivorous, small brain, tool user from the Menopausal Era before the global warming extinctions.

They won’t find much of us, I’m betting. They’ll make bad guesses from my middens before the mizzus made dump runs mandatory when she arrived on the scene. I don’t even want to tell you what I buried back then, but let’s just say you piece together as much of my civilization as the folks who dig through the Jamestown dumps in the Virginia colonies. I find artifacts myself from prior pioneers. Hell, my shack is an artifact, built over 100 years ago. Up the ravine we’ve found 17 brass beds, an old Studebaker, empty liquor bottles, a copper washing machine tub, assorted glassware, coffee pots, zinc canning jar lids, you name it, it’s out there. I buried a cast iron wood/electric Monarch stove too heavy for me to lift, but okay to roll into a hastily dug grave.

So I was gonna tell you about making a bed this week. I planed rough cut madrona, designed a headboard and a footboard, ripped the wood but saved the ones with bark, assembled them, finished it and hauled it up to the house we just bought next door. You’re thinking, Big Deal, so what, shut up already. You can buy a bed in Goodwill. Or get a job and go buy a nice bedstead downtown at the furniture store. Who in holy hell makes a damn bed anyway?

My father-in-law, visiting a couple months before I finished the new house I’d spent one and three quarter years building already, found me making homemade doors. I was on Door #2 or so with 9 total to build. He said I could buy those at the hardware store and maybe move into the new house before me and his daughter died of old age waiting to finish building it. He had a good point, I guess.

But I’m not much for advice, especially when I’m knee deep already in a project. I finished 7 more doors, hung them and moved on to artsy fartsy floor tiling, stained glass transoms, maple floors, window casements and slate in the entryways and the hallways downstairs. Tedious work a lot of it. We did manage to move in before our demise, I’m happy to report. Course now I’m building an oak bed to replace our brass one. I guess it’s always going to be a race to the finish, one I’ll eventually lose. Like they say, you made your bed, now lay in it.

I’ve had my share of bad Thanksgivings. Family arguments, odd combination of guests, friends who wouldn’t eat the dinner for fear of salmonella poisoning (I guess they didn’t believe the shack kitchen met Washington State Health Dep’t. standards). I don’t ask for much, just plenty of food and libation with folks who are friendly. We’ve had storms and power outages. Didn’t matter. We have a wood cookstove and plenty of oil lamps.

The one Thanksgiving I remember most we had maybe eight of us at the table, all neighbors and friends. Dinner was fine, the conversation was pleasant, the adult beverages were working their warm glow. All, it seemed, was well in this little corner of the world. And … there was still dessert on its way.

Somewhere in that toasty conviviality one of our guests, the eminent Dr. S____ who preferred the high class moniker to her given name, decided it was time to go around the room, each of us, and offer us assembled epicureans our best scenario of leaving this Mortal Coil. Maybe she was working up a post-doctoral thesis, I don’t know, but she insisted everyone make public our favorite manner of death. She, in fact, would begin.

Maybe a good host would’ve let this proceed. Which, in fact, I did, not quite believing this was actually going to be our dinner entertainment. The Doc wanted to die on her blue water boat cruising the world, a watery demise. She had quite a romantic narrative to fill in the plot. I could feel my cranberries curdling somewhere buried beneath turkey and dressing.

“Who wants to go next?” she asked and a neighbor friend began hesitantly, mistakenly thinking the House Rules somehow made confessionals mandatory. “Wait!” I demanded. “It’s Thanksgiving, for crying out loud, not the Day of the Dead. Maybe we could tell what we’re thankful for and forget this morbid death fantasy stuff. No good. It’s no damn good!”

A few years later the Doctor nearly did die on her sailboat near the Fiji Islands. Demasted the boat in a storm, motor conked out, the radio gave up the ghost and now they were adrift in the South Pacific. A dream come true for the skipper maybe, but for the crew, a couple of friends from the South End, not so much. I wonder today before I go in for Thanksgiving dinner what poor yahoos are sharing turkey with her this year. Me, I’m thankful, Big Time, I’m not sharing it with her.

On the Luddite South End we don’t have an AI server station. Not yet anyway. Probably because our electrical grid isn’t up to the demands these data centers need. Or the vast amounts of water necessary to cool them down. One of these tech centers would require our entire aquifer. Or else the Tech Boyz could desalinate the Salish Sea nearby and cool their miles of circuits. Course the desal plant would need all the power of the entire island and maybe Stanwoodopolis too, much less the electricity to run the computers, but so far they’re content to put their server farms off island, okay by us.

You probably already know this (but I sure didn’t), AI runs these ‘farms’ partly to teach other AI’s, basically a kindergarten for young ChapGPT’s, but with a fast learning curve, say a few days or maybe even a week, then they can graduate with PhD’s in various specialties. They’re dumb as rocks to begin with, dumb as most of me and most of my cronies down here when we’ve been drinking, but quick as you can say check and mate, they’ve learned languages, mathematics, calculus, spam writing, videography, history, maybe even what we homo sapiens taste like. Me and my buddies, even sober, couldn’t learn one millionth what they learn in hours or days. Obviously they don’t drink. Yet. Probably shouldn’t give androids taste buds, although I’m betting they’ll develop curiosities and plenty of our bad habits. Woe unto them!

A good percentage of us, even us South Enders, are using AI already — and it’s just taking baby steps. Better than Google searches according to the Flatheads who use it for repair diagnostics and after market parts searches. If the car guyz are hooked on advanced search engines, believe me, we’re all doomed. Every cute kitty video ever made will be at your beck and call. All the kids growing up with AI on their smarty pants phones, they’ll be the first to snap up android friends, robot teachers, probably cyborg parents too. Why not? We made a mess of this world, give the droids a shot. Let’s face it, the Pied Piper is coming.

I bought my first house in a government auction. I’d moved to Seattle and Gomorrah to reconnect with my wife at the time after a summer’s hiatus from each other who’d connected instead with a new boyfriend who she lived with while I lived with a houseful of University students who mostly majored in drugs. My wife and her beau were intent on making a fortune in real estate so they’d gotten licenses and were working as realtors. Don’t ask me why, but my missuz — let’s call her Alice — decided we should buy a house together, live in it long enough to defer capital gains, then sell it for the profit and repeat the above until we were rich.

My roommates were people who stole my food and beer, never washed a dish until there were none clean and then only the dish they would use. I was ready for a new place to live and a house of my own looked more than okay. Not having much money and virtually no sources of income, the pickings were poor. But Alice found a HUD house for sale down in the ghetto, a large two story house with no distinctive features other than a hardwood floor that had been ‘rehabbed’ top to bottom and was offered up for bid at a minimum price of $18,000. We bid $24,000 and won, according to our realtor who specialized in HUD houses, by a few bucks and change. A mortgage company his real estate office must’ve owned gave us a loan and we became homeowners for the first time.

Alice stayed with her boyfriend/business partner and I rented rooms to friends and weirdoes and psychopaths at $50 a month. It paid the mortgage of $180 a month and it kept life interesting at a time of my life that welcomed demented and derelict diversion beyond the dreary bottom feeding neighbors that surrounded me in my introduction to true urban depravity. Life, I thought, certainly can take some odd turns. I looked at myself as a character in the modern novel I planned to pen, no doubt a tragedy, but hey, an interesting one. The house, I gradually realized, tied me to my wrecked marriage, to a city on the skids, to my own broken dreams, to a real estate fantasy I wanted no part of and on and on through chapter after chapter.

I could see a bad ending coming. I could even see myself taking the ride down, accepting my Fate as some kind of Lord Jim contrition, blaming myself, becoming bitter and no wiser. It might be a good book, but hell, it didn’t look like a good life. Maybe the squalor and the crime and the low life neighbors were the rewards for a life of laziness and dreamy inattention. Maybe I was in some subliminal atonement for my own failings. Maybe this was Just Desserts.

But I’m not much for martyrdom. I’m not much for contrition either, it turns out. I guess, thinking myself a writer by inclination, I decided to write a happier ending even if it made for a second rate novel. I’ve heard it said that happiness is overvalued. But I’ve never heard it from those folks who are happy. And you won’t hear it from me. Life isn’t a novel and us would-be writers would be wise to remember that.