The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Amazon, those pesky little dudes whose only dream is to control the entire world, submitted an idea to the Patent Office for a cage that sits atop their robot factory assemblers that can carry a human being. Now, in all fairness, the idea is to protect us homo sapiens from being run over on the warehouse floor by these scurrying machines intent on rounding up our orders. They can send a flesh and blood being into the maw of the warehouse on top of one of these gizmos safely encased in a wire cage where, presumably they won’t be roadkill for the robots. The office will decide if this is a unique enough invention that it can be patented to Amazon.

I suspect the humans who work in the distribution centers of Amazon already feel like they’re caged. But the patent office may find this new wire pen distinct and patentable. Maybe you’re like me, the idea of a cage-carrying robot with one of our species penned like a monkey to its headless shoulder is, well, disconcerting. I know, it’s for our protection. But that’s what the automated voice on our phones says when they inform us we’re being recorded. It’s for our own good. And you believe that, right? Even chickens are getting freed from their cages these days of touchy-feely. But Amazon wants to haul us around the warehouse in one.

We’re all so busy mistrusting the government in this fact-free world we’ve tunneled into that we maybe missed the bigger threat. Amazon, Google, Facebook, all these tech-types rushing toward the future fast as their algorithms and artificial intelligences can take us. Somewhere along their digital highway, humans seem to have been bumped to the back seat of their self-driving vehicles. Most of us are happy enough, kind of like kids with their x-boxes in the back of the SUV, so long as we have our pacifiers. Give us an I-pad and a DVD player, leave the driving to Them.

I just worry the day will come when the door of the vehicle doesn’t open. Or worse, we won’t really care….

Some of us layabouts at the Poker Parlor were trying to think up something special for an upcoming 4^th of July celebration.  We figured we got so many Vets down this way the Diner might as well declare itself a VFW South End Auxilliary.  And since most of them are vintage car guyz too, they could hold their own annual Independence Day Parade from Camano Head to the Elger Bay Store.  I, of course, wanted to just use these militiamen as an excuse to secede from the Island, but cooler heads prevailed.  As usual.

Two Toke Tom served in Viet Nam and now is pretty much anti- every war.  Jimmy Z, who’s old enough to be Tom’s old man, fought the Japanese in WW2.  Tom thinks Jimmy’s still fighting em and maybe so, but I notice Jimmy driving a Toyota pickup now even though he swore for 60 years he’d never buy a ‘Jap Car’.  Baghdad Bill fought in the second Iraq War and Big Larry just got back two years ago from Afghanistan.  Jerry spent a year in Korea and frostbit a couple of fingers he wishes he had back, but he still can play a mean guitar.  We even got Crazy Eddie who ‘liberated’ Grenada.  We’re missing Somalia and Panama and Bosnia, but with all the newcomers rolling in, we may cover those too eventually.

Sometimes the boyz argue among themselves about those wars and sacrifice and what patriotism really means at the Friday night poker game we’ve been running since 1986 down at the Marina and Bait Shop.  Two dollar limit on bets, no limit on alcohol.  The pots don’t do much damage, but single nettle Daddle Distillery moonshine sometimes does.  I sit in with these war-hardened patriots most Fridays and serve as their patsy and their sometime referee, the one who never served even in peacetime.  Or what Two Toke calls a draft dodging, student deferred, flag burning, Summer of Love hippie protester.  He takes great joy in telling me I would’ve loved the smell of napalm in the morning over there on the Delta.  Jimmy Z chimes in how his platoon could’ve won Viet Nam single-handed although Jimmy never once has told us one iota the hell that must have been Iwo Jima.  But he’s the one who puts a liver spotted hand on Bill’s arm whenever Bill gets overwhelmed by memories of buddies lost in the HumVee he was driving when it was blown off the road to the airport in Baghdad.

We’ve fought too many wars, I think, before realizing I’ve said it out loud.  I see by their pinched lips and averted eyes I won’t get an argument tonight.  Patriotism comes in all uniforms, even no uniform at all.  Big Larry finally breaks the swelling silence, pushes a handful of quarters into the pot and says, real quiet, “I’m willing to spend a couple bucks, Skeeter, to see if you got more than bluff in this hand.”  Grateful to change the subject, I say, “Name of the game, Big.  Read em and weep.”

I was wandering through the real estate ads of the Crab Cracker today, gobsmacked as usual by the prices, just this side of Monte Carlo beachfront, when I happened on a listing touting the house and property as located on the ‘coveted NW side of the island’. Now, you and I know this is real estate hyperbole, granted, but c’mon, once you’ve been to the maybe not exactly coveted South End, you can bet your last million dollars that the North West side isn’t on the radar of retiring hedge fund CEO’s. Not unless they have stock in the Whidbey jet manufacturers. God almighty, the decibel level has got to be twice the volume of the Wall Street trading floor from those roaring Prowlers or Growlers or whatever they’re called this current cold war. You can forget about outdoor picnics on the lanai overlooking the smoke hazed island where those jets take off from Ault Field, nobody can hear what anybody says over the roar of that military might.

Windy Rear Realty has to hype its listings, I get that, but lately, it hardly seems necessary. Our neighbor to the south put his hacienda up for sale at a cool two million. The local realtors lowballed them so they went with the heavyweights from Seattle, sharks in the shallows here, pumped the price up to that 2 mil and sold it … get ready … in one day. To the first person who took a gander. Sure, I suspect they realized they could own adjacent to our own Shangri-La-La, the picturesque and slightly leaning shack glistening with stained glass and scattered lawn antiques, a home for those who yearn for the rural ambience lost up on the north end, but yours for the slightly inflated price that South End living offers.

This, my friends, constitutes the moniker ‘much coveted’. From here on out, let’s do a little fact checking before we claim that title for the high decibel north end.

Our fiddler in the South End String Band is a professional luthier. Makes violins, violas, cellos, all in the style of the Master, old Stradivarius from Cremona, Italy back in the 1600’s into the 1700’s. Once I asked if he ever made instruments out of other woods than the ones Stradivarius used, almost all fiddle back maple and spruce top, maybe even dye them blue for an eye catching effect … and I got this look you’d give a kid who had just asked something so incredibly stupid but don’t want to hurt the little fellas feelings too much. “No,” he told me, “I’m trying to sell these things. You think somebody in a large orchestra is going to want a violin made out of plywood or painted orange? They want a Stradivarius. Or one that has the same exact dimensions and hopefully the same sound.”

Now understand, I was just embarking on a quixotic journey into amateur luthiery myself. I started with banjos but eventually I slipped into guitar making. Trouble with me is, number one, I didn’t plan on selling them and number two, being a so-called artist, I didn’t plan on setting up an assembly line to make multiple copies of the same damn instrument. But yeah, I understood what he was telling me, I just couldn’t apply it to myself.

“So you’re telling me every violinist in the world really wants the same violin?” And apparently, with minor variations, this is true. It would be as if every client of mine looking for a stained glass window insisted that the one I made back in the beginning, nice as it might be, was what they wanted for their very own bathroom. Same color, same design, looked good then, looks good now. How soon can I deliver that thing?

This, I think, is the curse of success. It induces imitation, repetition, redundancy and finally a constraint on innovation or creativity. My fiddler isn’t trying to reinvent the instrument, he’s trying to sell the damn thing. My guitars, well, they’re no doubt unsalable. But they are unique. Idiosyncratic, maybe even a little on the insane side. Sound holes on the side, double holes on top, art deco details, different woods on every one. And no, they aren’t Stradivariuses. And no way is our fiddler going to make a blue one….

Yeah, I thought it was a fake news story, some halfwit click bait pitting two giants of the tech industry in a cage match, kickboxing themselves until one or both succumbed to blows to their fat heads. But no, these two are engaged in a back and forth social media chest pounding, no holds barred, your mama’s uglier than my mama throwdown. There’s even talk of a pay-for-view match in Vegas.

These are the people who control your destiny, adolescent testosterone-overdosed schoolboys, punks with too much money and too little maturity, stuck with some sadly huge lack of self-esteem, hoping maybe to impress the prom queen. With bush league deficients like these mapping our digital futures, what’s to worry about? I mean, try to picture Albert Einstein challenging Thomas Edison to a boxing match, see who’s got the biggest swinging dick. But this is the pathetic state of our own local geniuses, two clowns calling each other names, thumping their fists on the ground, grunting like gorillas in tweets and taunts. C’mon, seriously?

Why not a game of chess, maybe? Or a duel on Jeopardy? Not manly enough? Not sufficiently primitive for ya? Real men would use pistols at 20 paces. You boys afraid of mortal injury? Are you cowards? Put your billions where your mouths are, I say. Fight to the death. From where I sit in the pay-for-view stands, any result would be a good start.