The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A new Gallup poll found that Americans who actually have confidence in science fell from 70% in 1975 to 64% today. In other words, over a third of us don’t really buy into that science crap. Republicans used to believe the earth rotated around the sun, something on the order of 72% of them, but in this Age of Enlightenment we live in now, the era that finds conspiracies in everything from presidential elections to microwave implants in their toilet paper, the Grand Old Party folks who believe in rationality dropped below half to 45%. What, you’re surprised?

Maybe you don’t believe Q exists, that Qanon is just a bunch of crackpots who eat magic mushrooms on their breakfast toast, that evolution is real and that the universe operates on the laws of physics. Most Republicans don’t and more than 1/3rd of all of us don’t. So okay, you probably got bored in class when quantum physics sailed over your head and calculus just made your head hurt. Egghead stuff, no doubt just weirdo formulas and hard to understand folderol. Easier to wrap your mind around Bigfoot and watch documentaries about aliens building the pyramids, right? And forget about the Big Bang theory of the universe when you can just watch Big Bang the sitcom.

The way things are trending we’ll be having the Monkey Trials again before very long and the Catholic Church can bring back the Inquisition for the apostates who refuse to believe the earth is the absolute center of the cosmos. 40% of Republicans already have declared they will not, no way, put a vaccine in their arm or the arms of their kids. Some think the Covid is a hoax, that 600,000 deaths are really from underlying conditions, that the vaccine contains micro –transmitters so the government or Bill Gates can track them 24/7, that old Doc Fauci is really the devil incarnate. If you can believe Democrats are kidnapping children, storing them in a D.C. pizza parlor for their sexual and gastronomical appetites, well, it’s pretty hard to imagine what is beyond their imagination.

I suppose if the modern world is moving so fast into a strange future, the folks who feel most threatened by the coming changes might hang on to magical thinking. If they think their white privilege is under assault, well, why not turn the channel back to Ozzie and Harriet, spend half the day scrolling Facebook for posts with similar fears and keep on listening to the talking heads on cable who monetize paranoia and dread? Gravity? Just bunk. Evolution? Don’t make me laugh! Climate change? Who ya kidding?? E=mc squared? Huh??? Take two supplements and call me in the morning. You’re gonna be just fine.

Me and my neighbors gear up for crabbing season the way my old ones in Wisconsin did for deer hunting season. Well, we don’t put out salt licks and no, we don’t jump in a boat to ‘shine’ our prey with headlights, but we do start talking about the hunt and we do gather up all the regalia and make sure the lines are good, the bait is ready and the boat motors start. In my case I check to see if my oars are rotted or the oarlocks rusted. Crab fever is an annual pandemic around here. Covids come and go, but crab fever, it’s like the common cold, it comes every year.

The past couple of seasons we’ve had trouble with poaching. You can expect some of that, maybe a kid just checking your traps, seeing if he could catch an easy dinner, or guys like Poacher Paul who poach deer and crab both, no license necessary. But I’m not talking about the casual poacher here, I’m talking about organized crime. Up and down the Camano coast the crabpots are hauled up and the crabs stolen. Just out front of me, we’re talking hundreds of crabs every day or night, and if you add in the rest of the island, think thousands. Multiply that by over ten bucks a pound, and no, we’re not figuring this guy or these guys are eating all these crustaceans themselves, we’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars, probably more like six figures every season. This is grand theft crab! This is a major felony.

But … no one in fish and game seems to be too interested in catching our poacher. One of the neighbors called in the boat license of a suspect rifling his pots to the Washington Fish and Wildlife folks only to be told they would need to see the theft themselves. Nevertheless, the nice man on the phone said they would send an agent down to the Everett boat launch and see if the suspect put out there. Oh, right, like he might just have his own dock or he might be launching just about anywhere in Puget Sound? Couldn’t go to the trouble to look up the owner of said boat, maybe wait in his driveway, see what was in those multiple coolers? Nah, that would be police work. That would be, I guess, work.

So we crab hunters are left to fend for ourselves, looks like. A buddy suggested a vigil on the bluff with binoculars and a deer rifle, maybe add a little vigilantism to this year’s crab season. But I reminded him of the guy a few years back who watched from his bluff a guy pull his pots out in the bay, pulled out his 30-30 Winchester and shot a few times in the general vicinity, which, you might have guessed, sent the miscreant fleeing. Course half an hour later the doorbell rang and there was the game warden, plenty pissed at being targeted checking our shooter’s pots for regulation violations.

Just goes to show, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. I’m trying to decide which one I am this season.

The times we live in, this fresh start to the 21st Century, seems, at first glance, to be a cauldron of craziness generated by the internet and the tribalism of every media out there. From politics to pandemic, there’s no shortage of whackiness. Science and logic, who needs em? We got superstition and magic to cure the anxiety and dread of this era. Sometimes it seems as if we’d barely left the caves of the Dark ages, just clung to whatever amulets and spells that gave us comfort against the marauding mastodons or the horror of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The pundits and the talking heads lament the internet, social media, cable TV, consolidated radio and the cynicism of our politicians. Bullshit passes for alternative facts and insanity gets you elected. Oh me, oh my, what’s gonna come of me boys, what’s gonna come of me?

We like to think we live in an Enlightened Age, one where reason and logic reveal the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. The internet ruined that, we think. Social media made a mockery of that, some say. I say the internet and social media probably just pulled back the curtains on all those folks who have always believed more in superstition than science, more who think they might win the lottery despite the statistical odds or that supplements will cure what ails them, more who take comfort in unprovable beliefs than facts that make them squirm, more that find faith in the unknowable more compelling than the angst of the knowable.

The Dark Age denizens never really left, they just didn’t have an internet to give them a microphone. We just under-estimated their numbers. And we over-estimated our own. Age of Enlightenment? Don’t kid yourself.

A friend asked me recently if I was rich. Maybe you get asked that a lot, but trust me, I don’t get inquiries like this too often. Kind of caught me by surprise. My family never talked finances, didn’t announce their bank account balances, really didn’t tell us kids much of anything about how they were doing. And if they never told the family, you better believe it was unwritten gospel they didn’t talk about it in public, with friends or relatives, with anybody. Ever.

So I was caught off balance, checking account and equilibrium both, to be asked point blank if I was rich. You could imagine that the answer, assuming you deigned to reply, would depend on the person asking. If my pal Bill Gates asked me, I’d say, ‘gee, Bill, I’m bumping along, but no, my hedge fund isn’t one of the top 50 or anything, not really even in the top … actually, I don’t even have a hedge fund right now, sort of embarrassed to tell you.’ If one of my pals trying to make ends meet during the Covid shutdown asked, well, I might say ‘Don’t even think of asking me for a loan, you slacker!’ Wealth, you see, is fairly relative.

You ask most folks if they’re rich and they’re going to tell you no. But … if we considered that we’re in America and we’re on the South End to boot, hellfire, by nearly any standards you pick, we’re the 1% of the world. We’re rich. You don’t think so, take a trip to Cambodia, Mexico, Costa Rica, just about any third world country and then tell me you’re not wealthy. You are. Period. Don’t argue with me, I won’t have ears for it.

But my friend wasn’t interested in philosophic fiscal discussion, just wanted to know if I was rich. Asking an artist that question is akin to wondering if I might be vacationing this year with Bezos on his moon rocket, mostly a flight of fancy. I said yes I am, rich. And honestly, I consider myself rich, I really do. We have our house paid for, the one we built ourselves without a loan, without a 30 year mortgage. We pay cash for everything we have, car, truck, you name it. We live in paradise, we live modestly but we want for nothing. We still work, but not because we need the cash but because we like what we do. Even without that money, we feel enriched by working. And we have each other. We lived in a dilapidated shack for 13 years together, scraping by, tending our gardens, learning our trades. We’re growing old together. And that’s just fine too. Are we rich? You’d have to be nuts to ask….