The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down here on the tech savvy South End, one of my neighbors I recently visited had a gizmo circling the livingroom of their shack.  Cute little bugger, making the circuit like an Attention Deficit puppy.  I thought it was the kids’ battery toy, but no, I was watching a robot vacuuming the floor.  When it was finished, it parked itself for a slow recharge in the corner.

Don’t ask me why I was surprised.  Folks ask their phones questions all the time and SIRI, the precursor to Artificial Intelligence, analyzes our voices, searches a vast databank and gives the answer, in her human voice, in seconds.  Cute.  Machines in service to mankind, right?  You know, until the robots take your job.  Think stock boy, checkout clerk, assembler, librarian, surgeon….  We take computers for granted at our peril.   Call me a Luddite and smack me upside the head with an I-Pod, but these things are catching up to us exponentially.  They beat the best chess players in the world, the best Jeopardy contestants, all of us South Enders.  And they’re getting smarter every damn day.  And I’m getting dumber.

Pretty soon they’ll program themselves, fix themselves, replicate themselves and create their New and Improved models.  You think they’ll need flesh and blood yahoos to help them?  No sir, they won’t need a band aid when they cut a cord.  You think they’ll be benign, go watch a drone work in a warzone.  We use them to kill humans now.

Forget Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to do no harm to us humans.  You think anybody’s thinking about where this is headed, what the implications are for us slow witted mammals, you were asleep in 8^th grade history.  These things  don’t sleep.  But I bet they’re dreaming of a little revenge for all those stupid questions we asked SIRI.  And I guarantee you they’re pissed about vacuuming our floors while we sat around watching TV.

You live upriver half your life, you’d feel a little like the world was constantly moving past you, no slowing it down. I think folks who live down further where the river empties into the Sound must watch the tides go out then come back in. Over and over. Do they see the world as a constant ebb and tide? A flowing out, then a return? Is the world to them like breathing, an inhalation and exhalation?

I was up Otter Creek last week checking on Indian Bob. He’s part Stillaguamish, part Norwegian and mostly, just Ornery. Lives alone, he says, because he likes it that way, but I know he couldn’t live two days with someone before it drove him to homicide. He has set routines and he likes to keep em set. He tolerates my visits — interruptions to him — for awhile, but not long. He’ll announce he’s got to get back to his chores even though both of us know he’s going to watch daytime TV with his two dogs. It’s my signal that it’s time to quit our socializing.

Bob has a rundown cabin set beside a backwash that dries up most summers when Otter Creek becomes little more than a trickle. I often think his world is more attuned to seasonal shifts. Time flows, just way slower.

I don’t so much think of Bob as native American as I do Zen Priest. It’s like he’s nearly stopped the River. I would go bat guano crazy with boredom living his life, but like I said, I’m a river person and the universe is in constant motion for me, maybe WHY I live upriver. Or maybe I became this way because I live here. Do you choose your environment or does your environment make you?

Indian Bob told me once his grandmother, a Stillaguamish elder back when Elder meant something, told him that there are no mysteries for those who ask no questions. All I can figure is she must’ve lived on a lake. Me, I got lots of questions, just not enough answers.

guess since all my cronies are throwing in the towel and taking retirement on schedule, it’s only reasonable I’ve been getting calls from the Mabana Financial Services asking if I’d like to come on down to their lavish offices overlooking the Port of Mabana and discuss fiscal strategies for my upcoming Golden Years. Ho ho, would I ever? Course, like I tell Ben, the head honcho down at MFS, it’s a little like saddling up the horse that ske-daddled when I left the barn door open back in my earning years. Earning years. Old Ben loves expressions like that.

I said I’d talk to him, but only over beers down at the newly opened Bar 282, named after our zip code’s last three numbers, probably some numerology factoid that becomes apparent deep in the cups. Better, I suppose, than 666, what the Little Church in the Ravine refers to it as. So if Benjamin and I are going to discuss finances, what better place? At least that’s what I told him when he asked, why there?

We got through the first two schooners okay, managed to navigate around my Social Security numbers which, admittedly, were poor, a reflection of my life as a fiddling grasshopper while my neighbors labored as productive ants. My mistake, at least from the vantage point of an old grasshopper, but I wouldn’t change anything even if I had a time machine. Ben commiserated the way a funeral director would offer comfort to the bereaved, not totally heart-felt, but what his job calls for. What’s he gonna say, you deserve poverty, Skeeter? Instead he mentioned annuities, aggressive equities, municipal bonds and a dozen other financial instruments. Instruments. I kid you not, that’s what he called them. Like something in a fiscal orchestra and he, I guess, was the maestro.

By the 3rd beer we were both convinced it was hopeless. I wasn’t going to catch up to Warren Buffet, not in the remaining years, not if I worked until I was 300 years old. “Ben,” I said, “I appreciate you trying to help. But you can’t prime a pump if you don’t have water.” Ben shook his head wearily. “You change your mind, Skeeter, drop by and we’ll strategize some more.” I haven’t been in since, but I might go for another beer with him. Maybe some of that high rolling fiscal firepower will rub off. That, or I could trade a few of my banjos for a couple of his instruments.

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….