The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Reinvent yourself!  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So maybe  it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!

Every year I say the same thing: next year I’ll downsize our garden, maybe grow one tomato plant and a row of peas, toss in a row of greens for salads and call it Good. And every year, as sure as the plums blossom and the nettles rise up from the dead, I haul out the old rototiller and start planting two months too early. The pea seeds are gonna rot and the lettuce won’t come up, but I’ll plant again in a couple of weeks, about when the cherries bloom. Same as last year, same as the year before, same as every year since I moved here 37 years ago.

Who’s kidding who? I can buy vegetables WAY cheaper than most of what I grow. They practically give you potatoes by the time I’m digging ours. They even taste better than my scabby ones. Corn? I did quit corn last year. But I’m thinking maybe one token row would be tasty come fall. I can grow mutant squashes here to Stanwoodopolis, but I’m not real big on squash although maybe I should reconsider seeing’s how easy they are, sort of a fruiting kudzu.

And of course it’s a battle with slugs and snails, cabbage moths and cutworms, scabs and aphids, deer and rabbits, weeds and crows. We all want to eat, I guess. When they vote me in as God, I’ll do it different. Maybe just do it like the plants, grow on sun and air and water and dirt. Us animals turned Paradise into a Jungle. Tastes good, but kind of brutal at times.

It’s a lot of work, this gardening. But then, so is shopping. Bump cars with folks in a hurry, the parking lot mayhem, self serve registers trying to find the bin number for organic cauliflower not the Monsanto cauliflower, the bag choices, the plastic store card they swipe to track your buying habits, coupons and sales gimmicks. It’s a jungle in Safeway too.

And anyway, I didn’t move to the country to watch bad TV, I hope. I don’t kid myself — I’m not growing food here so much as I’m trying to get back to some Roots. I’ll have to share it with the vermin and the predators, the pests and the worms. Like always, I’ll have to learn to live with the neighbors, two legged, four legged, no legged or practically invisible. After all, we’re all in this thing together.

This week there’s a viral video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on top of a building, fists flying, feet kicking, punches given and punches taken. What this is is an AI creation. One you or me or the other countless viewers could never, in the past we once inhabited, tell was not real. If seeing is believing — and it probably still is — we’re in trouble. A brave new world of trouble.

Because now the virtual world will look every bit as real as the one you once knew. For awhile the gullible will take every photo, video and political interview as gospel, those are the actual people, they saw it with their own two eyes, same as they did with every clickbait ‘news’ story. But eventually it will dawn on them — and us too — that none of this is certain. Everything will be suspect. You won’t necessarily believe your own eyes. Or your ears. That song that sounds like Dylan, maybe not….

The actors and screenwriters who watched Tom and Brad duke it out on an urban highrise rooftop are just the canaries in the deep hole where reality dropped below the ground. Their jobs will be the first casualties but not the last. AI can duplicate anyone’s voice, now it can generate anyone’s doppleganger. That phone call you got from your best friend? That message on Instagram from the President? Maybe it’s not him.

If you distrusted mainstream media before, hoo boy, you’re going to love the next wave. No need to believe anything but what you want to believe. The rest is bogus B.S., fake news, propaganda, no point even trying to sort fact from fiction. For the people or the countries who want to sow misinformation, what a godsend! Welcome to the anarchy of ideas. By the way, neither Brad or Tom won the fight. AI did.