The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Randy Thornton has been a contractor since we first met back in about 1990 when I was thinking about building my own house and leaving the shack we’d lived in for 17 hardscrabble years. He wanted me to have him build it, you know, go to the bank, get a 30 year mortgage, pay the interest, stay in debt most of my damn life, something I told him I wouldn’t do.

“I get it, Skeeter,” he confided. “I’m going to build my own home some day, same reason.” Yah, two boyz with hammers, limited skill sets, plenty of spit and sass. Took me two years, cost me a total of $43,000 start to finish. Randy, in the meantime, built plenty of houses, the first just remodels, additions, simple affairs, but by the end, mansions for the rich, all the while living in the 1930’s house he’d originally rented but now owned along with 17 acres that adjoined our 7.

We’d pretty much lost touch over the years, mostly after he’d found Jesus and was admonished to avoid us sinners. The church did provide him with plenty of clients and maybe that’s proof enough as to the rewards of faith. But one day I found him under his 4 wheel ATV in a blackberry thicket where he’d been spraying weedkiller along the property line. Jesus wasn’t going to get that half ton vehicle off his chest but he had me to help so maybe it was the same thing. Might have saved his life, nobody nearby to hear him calling for help.

I guess Randy was appreciative, maybe even a bit sheepish about dropping our friendship when, after all, we’d been close for quite a few years. But bygones, as they say, are bygones. To celebrate his survival we went up to the shop next to the barn and he popped a couple of cold ones, religious strictures be damned. Temporarily.

“So you never built your own house,” I said, sitting in the fanciest shop on the South End, arched mahogany doors, stained glass by someone other than me, beveled leaded windows, architectural beams overhead, a Taj Mahal of a workshop. But he still lived in the little house down by the road.

“I keep trying to. But Janie can’t make up her mind what kind of house she wants. First it was a Victorian farmhouse, lots of gingerbread, even had Harold at Puget Architecture draw up plans. Then she changed her mind. Too old fashioned. We went through I couldn’t tell you how many design changes. One story. Two. Modern. Frank Lloyd Wright. Two or three different architects, a couple of designers. Every time I thought we were ready to go, nope, she’d think of something better. Mostly worried that the latest pick wouldn’t be up to snuff. Afraid to pull the trigger.”

“I got clients like that,” I said. “Keep changing their mind, find something wrong with the design or the colors or the weather that day. Some just bag the whole thing, no way they’re going to take a chance and be wrong. They want something that’s perfect. I try to tell em art isn’t about being perfect, maybe just the opposite. I spoze Janie thinks houses are the same way. Plus you got to live in it if you make a mistake.”

Randy muttered something under his breath. We opened another beer. I guess heaven could wait. Why not, heaven might not come even close to our expectations, just a colossal disappointment?

The ‘Population Bomb’ author, Paul Ehrlich, just died. Old age mostly, not starvation brought on by world famines, over populations, water wars or cataclysmic migrations. Probably had clogged arteries from too much over saturated foods. Or … just too much food, period. For awhile back there in the halcyon days of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, Paul was our most famous Doomsayer, the guy who predicted civilizational collapse, major famines, a world breeding itself to death, a planet too small to support billions and billions of us humans. He made a bundle prophesying our demise. The End is Near — not predicted by a cult nut but by a rational guy.

The population of the planet when he wrote the book was 3.5 billion. It’s now 8.3 billion. We could each have gotten a McDonald burger but maybe not fries. Paul was right about one thing — the population exploded! And there were a few famines and still are. What he didn’t factor in was the steep curve out of world poverty. Or the advances in agriculture, medicine, pharmaceuticals and technology. Who’d have guessed, right? Well, not Paul.

The trouble with folks who cried ‘Wolf’ too early is when the wolf shows up, nobody was listening to the alarms anymore. But … the future may prove him right posthumously. We’re fishing out the seas, watching the insect and bird die-offs, polluting our waters then pumping the aquifers dry. All us billions of people are pumping CO2 into our greenhouse and if climate change isn’t a direct result of population, well, kick some dirt on Paul’s grave and whistle through the graveyard.

If you want to be a prophet, all I can say is don’t be too specific about the day of the week Doomsday is coming. The End is Near, Not Tomorrow. Maybe not even next month. We’ll need some time to get ready.

Down at the Kustom Kar Body Shop the latest news of declining life expectancy for us Americans was met with some degree of skepticism at closing time. Fairlane Fred had looked up from reading the article in the newspaper he’d brought to the shop and the assembled hangers-on were smirking and laughing even before he’d finished the last paragraph.

“Gee, Fred you think those statistics apply to us?” Jake asked, lighting up a Marlboro. His empty beer can served as make-do ashtray where it balanced nicely on his beer belly and barely jiggled as he popped his third Bud. Quitting time at the Kustom was early today, it being Friday and all. George, the owner, had sent his crew home already and the Flatheads had assembled for their usual Friday wrap up. A ’62 Malibu two door sat in the paint room, its butterscotch epoxy gleaming behind the makeshift plastic sheet doorway that separated the finish room from the body shop’s clutter and mayhem. Monday George would put the wax to it, seven coats at least. Today he was more interested in putting the finish on the week. He had the fridge loaded with two cases of beer.

“Says here we’re dying faster than we did four years ago. Only going to live to be 78. Hell, Jake, you’re 73 now. The Japs get six more years than us. Time’s running out, buddy.” Freddie tipped his can at Jake. “Here’s to an early grave.”

“You believe that crap they put in the paper, go ahead, Fred, but I plan to live a long happy life.” He took a drag on his cigarette, a good pull on the Bud and laughed. “Clean living will do it every time, boys. That and a clear conscience.”

“I don’t know, Jake,” Big Ralph said, one foot on the mangled rear bumper of a Camry the towing company dropped off that morning. “You don’t look like the poster boy for ObamaCare to me. More like the Before picture of erectile dysfunction. And didn’t your doc tell you to quit smoking that last stent?”
“Doctors!” Jake snorted, “what the hell do they know?”

This sent the shop floor into waves of amusement. Half the assembled Flatheads were on doctor’s orders to quit drinking, quit smoking, get some exercise and maybe even eat right. Only Little Billy was thin enough to avoid qualifying as obese and that was barely. Little Billy didn’t really eat much of anything. He was like one of those bromeliads that attach to trees and live only off air and beer. 78 wasn’t likely to be in Billy’s cards. He said, “I haven’t been to a doctor in 40 years. And now they want to force me to buy insurance.”

“Here we go again” Phil growled, “another bitch session about health care. Trump’s gonna get rid of all that, let’s skip the crying for once.” He crumpled his can and tossed it in the industrial sized waste container George filled at least twice weekly. “Who’s ready for another beer?” he cried, rubbing his hands and heading toward the fridge.

And so another weekend got off to a great start at the Kustom Kar. Mercifully, no one would be keeping statistics down there. Or as Jake likes to say, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Words to live by on the South End.

A few weeks ago some Silicon Valley bazillionaire announced he thought it was highly possible this little reality we live in is some sort of computer simulation. Yesterday I read where two physicists were theorizing the universe is actually two dimensional, not three or four, but similar to a holographic image. I guess they’ve all been watching too many reruns of The Matrix.

It’s a discouraging notion, this idea that the Creator is a computer programmer, at least to me, a boy with nary a binary bone in his body. The tech boyz must think God was created in their own image, but I suppose if I’d invented the silicon world and made a fortune, I might see it their way too. Life, as the Bard once said, is but a dream and maybe it’s a cyborg dream after all, some simulation by an artificial intelligence where we all live in a fractal virtual world.

I’ve never been much interested in this kind of speculation, the stuff that religions are based on and faith revolves around. The universe is way too large for me to get my mind around and I only get to live an incredibly brief lifespan in the big scheme of things. I just figure there must be better ways to spend my time than dream up explanations that aren’t provable, then try to convince others they’re true and maybe have them worship at the font of this ersatz wisdom. Maybe even have them give me money. Maybe fight wars with the infidels who refuse to see the Light and the Way.

I know it’s appealing to create a world in our head. We probably do it all the time, every day, year in and year out. At least I do. Reality is pretty slippery and if you don’t believe it, you haven’t done psychedelic drugs or you don’t have friends who have lost their moorings. Reality is pretty much a misnomer, something I hate to admit in this newspeak world of ‘alternative facts.’ The truth is (if I can still use that word), if reality is relative, we haven’t got any solid ground to stand on. But I can still walk the beach, hike the woods, till the garden. One day I may wake up and find it’s all gone. More likely, someday I just won’t wake up. Then, maybe, we should reprogram, check for updates, add some apps, reboot. Hopefully then things will revert to normal. You know, if you believe in normality.

I was chatting it up over the fence with a couple of my neighbors when one of their cellphones set off in a cute and personalized ringtone, actually the same one my brother has, sounds like a flying saucer landing in a 1950’s sci-fi movie. Of course he took the call, I guess figuring the answering machine voicemail function might not work. My guess: it never gets used. The call was from his mizzus wondering where he had got off to now.

“Right here in the backyard with Skeeter and Ralph,” I heard him say. Ralph, both of us waiting for Barry to finish up, pulled out his own cell and fiddled with it, maybe checking to see what our weather was. “I-phone 7,” he said proudly, like I’d done research on what phones are what. “Yours?” he asked.

“My what?” I answered and Barry joined back in now that his whereabouts were no longer the mizzus’ concern.

“Cellphone,” Ralph said. I told him I didn’t have one. “Seriously?” he asked, fairly new to the neighborhood, not yet tuned into the Time Warp across the highway where I lived in the early 20th Century. “How do you talk to anyone?”

“Like we’re doing now,” I told him. He looked at me mistrustfully, the way an urbanite might look at a hayseed, not certain his leg wasn’t being pulled by the local yokel. It’s ten years now since Apple introduced the I-phone. Ten short years and now I’m a hopeless anachronism, a cave man in New York. “When I first came here we had a party line,” I informed Ralph and Barry too.

“My god,” Barry said, “how long have you been here?”

I wanted to say 1915, phones just invented, but I worried they might believe me. Or that I might shock them with tales of outhouses and no TV, horror stories of shack life circa 1977 when I left civilization to come out to this backwash cul-de-sac of the American Dream. But now it was Ralph’s phone ringing. “I gotta take this,” he explained unapologetically, answering it on the first ring.

“And I gotta go,” I replied and drifted back across the highway that separates us into a now distant past, a small figure moving into the fogbanks of a history soon to be forgotten completely, far far from cell range.