The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We used to stand in our garden and look out across the highway with great views of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound.  But, of course, inevitably progress reared its ugly head, the acreage on the bluff side got parceled and houses got built.  The new folks refused to honor some of the commitments the developer had agreed to, cut the green belt between us and closed off our promised access to the beach below.  Our ‘view’ rapidly became a suburb, our neighbors had themselves an Association and we planted evergreens along the road.

Jump ahead a few years and our hedge had grown into a 20 foot green wall, giving us total privacy to replace our view, not a bad trade-off.  Our neighbors on our side of the Green Curtain had also put in hedges so that for a stretch of highway across from the Association nothing could be seen of us pioneers and our less than majestic hovels.  Out of sight, out of mind, so say the philosophers of social inequity.

Eventually I made peace with the suburbanites.  Nice folks mostly, especially the second generation of newcomers.  And so one spring day I pruned the lower limbs of all the evergreen laurels lining the road, opening up views of our shack and gardens and greenhouses.  For days, for weeks, I cut and hauled and burned, slowly revealing what had been hidden for a decade and a half or more, our Shangri-La-La chic chalet and its estate.

One by one every neighbor dropped by to tell me how nice our pruning was, what a great difference, how pleased they were.  Good fences, I concluded, don’t make good neighbors, they screen them out.  The next year I cut those laurels down to the ground, the filberts too.  Even put up artwork along the road as a gesture of more goodwill this past year.  We get along okay, but lately, I don’t know, maybe just the ornery curmudgeon in me, maybe all the fighting going on over there this past year, I sometimes miss that big green wall.

Maybe you’re like me, a little oblivious to the latest trends in fashion.  My last haircut, for instance, was 2019 B.C., Before Covid, but lately I’ve gotten wind of social media sites that allow you — and I use that word hesitantly — allow you to adjust and enhance your profile image.  You want fuller lips, less chin, more nose, wider eyes, they got a program that can do that … and much much more.  You think folks wouldn’t want a virtual facelift, botox without the neurotoxins, breast enhancements or a digital youth serum, hoo boy, stand over here by me, the Nerd Geezer Club.

In the universe of selfies and eternal Facebook updates, what else would you expect?  The computer mirror reflects back our enhanced image, not quite real but then, why do we use make-up, eyeliner, lipstick, mascara and hair coloring?  We’re obsessed with our self-image and now … we can alter that image through the magic of digital plastic surgery.  And if you like that ‘look’, that new and improved you, well, there are real plastic surgeons waiting  to assist you with implants, injections, fat burning, lipo-suction and scalpels.  Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it can be yours for free on the internet or at a price in the doctor’s office.

Sure, I can be disdainful, after all, no touch up or even major surgery is going to help me at this late stage.  Too late for this old fart.  Although … I could use a haircut, maybe a little off the side and a foot off the back, color up those gray hairs, move my ears back a bit, make my eyes look wise — and while we’re at it, how about a hat that wasn’t half beat up?  Okay, how about just the hat.

Some computer programmer recently entered his digital painting in an art competition — and took first prize.  Much to the disdain and outrage of the artists who lost to that computer generated artwork.  Now, to be fair, photoshop has been competing with photography for years and any photo can be turned into a watercolor or a pencil sketch or a poster at the click of a command, then printed on canvas or watercolor paper or poster board.

This particular prize-winning painting was hyper-realistic … but had elements of classic styles that gave it a retro modern artworkiness.  Obviously the judges were impressed, if not the competition.  Get ready for the Future, y’all, it’s already here, suitable for framing.  You don’t think Artificial Intelligence will analyze the entire encyclopedia of poetry, then create a moody amalgam that will stand up to its human created peers, you been spending too much time on Instagram.  These plucky binary bibliophiles will be writing sonnets, rap songs, plays and novels before you can say Billy Shakespeare.  Paintings, music, literature, they’re boning up on styles and techniques, analyzing what we humans prefer, copying this and improving that, next thing you know they got a bestseller, a hit song, a Pulitzer Prize, the next Big Thing.

I’ve been warning my artist cronies since I got my hands on photoshop, you need to up your game, move into the future before they have a chance to copy you.  Course, they may beat us there anyway, but I say give them a run for their circuits.  Sure, it’s a losing fight, but hey, if that wasn’t your goal at the outset, maybe you picked up the wrong profession.  Probably should’ve gone into Coding, program your own computer to do your art.  Just saying …..

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island.  The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack.  I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too.  Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County.  I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages.  Or maybe it was this:  a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours.  The county might’ve done the taX-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue.  Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted.  A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us.  Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!!  The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status.  Boy, he read me like a book.  A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz.  In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins.  We got to build our parents’ suburban homes.  Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?

I love Republicans.  Seriously, who else would run candidates based solely on their complete allegiance to Trump, a con-man, a crook, a liar, a sexual predator and, famously in the words of his then Secretary of State, a f…@$%…g! moron?  Take Dr. Oz.  Please.  What better GOP MAGA candidate but a quack snake oil salesman, literally.  But better yet, take a gander at Herschel Walker running for the Senate in Georgia.  Football star, MAGA man, a poster child for Complete Idiot.  On climate change he speculated how the Chinese had moved their dirty air over here and now we would have to move it somewhere else … or something like that, who knows?  He certainly didn’t.  Addressing the Inflation Reduction Act’s provision to combat climate change by planting more trees, he asked why we would need more, got plenty already.  Why stock fish, I want to ask.  Why worry about reservoirs evaporating or aquifers going dry, got plenty of water already.  Floods in plenty of places, move it to the lowering aquifers.  Along with that dirty Chinese air.  The point is, do we need an IQ test for these candidates?  Some minimal acquaintance with reality, at least.  Sure, Trump lowered the bar pretty close to the ground, but do we have to dig trenches now?

A dumb football star for Senator, why not?  We had a reality TV star as President, a know nothing who wouldn’t bother to read briefing reports, ignorance being bliss, I guess.  Just watch his fawning Fox phony news guys and see what works for them, that’s plenty for his highness.  We’re talking grown men here, a lifetime that might have been spent looking for answers to the questions that might arise if they held the public office they seek.  But no, too much trouble, too many facts … and we know what they think of those.

We’ve grown pretty accustomed to neo-fascist candidates offered up as worthy office seekers, Qanon acolytes, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and science deniers, and yeah, it might be worth testing for neural activity, but lately the pool of political aspirants seems to be a drying puddle of flopping tadpoles hoping to evolve legs and lungs after a primary race to determine who is the whackiest of the whacky.  Alert the executives of Netflix, this is reality TV at its most entertaining. Except, of course, the joke is on us.  Plenty of trees?  Sure, but hey fellas, where’s the forest?