The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Every year I say the same thing: next year I’ll downsize our garden, maybe grow one tomato plant and a row of peas, toss in a row of greens for salads and call it Good. And every year, as sure as the plums blossom and the nettles rise up from the dead, I haul out the old rototiller and start planting two months too early. The pea seeds are gonna rot and the lettuce won’t come up, but I’ll plant again in a couple of weeks, about when the cherries bloom. Same as last year, same as the year before, same as every year since I moved here 37 years ago.

Who’s kidding who? I can buy vegetables WAY cheaper than most of what I grow. They practically give you potatoes by the time I’m digging ours. They even taste better than my scabby ones. Corn? I did quit corn last year. But I’m thinking maybe one token row would be tasty come fall. I can grow mutant squashes here to Stanwoodopolis, but I’m not real big on squash although maybe I should reconsider seeing’s how easy they are, sort of a fruiting kudzu.

And of course it’s a battle with slugs and snails, cabbage moths and cutworms, scabs and aphids, deer and rabbits, weeds and crows. We all want to eat, I guess. When they vote me in as God, I’ll do it different. Maybe just do it like the plants, grow on sun and air and water and dirt. Us animals turned Paradise into a Jungle. Tastes good, but kind of brutal at times.

It’s a lot of work, this gardening. But then, so is shopping. Bump cars with folks in a hurry, the parking lot mayhem, self serve registers trying to find the bin number for organic cauliflower not the Monsanto cauliflower, the bag choices, the plastic store card they swipe to track your buying habits, coupons and sales gimmicks. It’s a jungle in Safeway too.

And anyway, I didn’t move to the country to watch bad TV, I hope. I don’t kid myself — I’m not growing food here so much as I’m trying to get back to some Roots. I’ll have to share it with the vermin and the predators, the pests and the worms. Like always, I’ll have to learn to live with the neighbors, two legged, four legged, no legged or practically invisible. After all, we’re all in this thing together.

This week there’s a viral video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on top of a building, fists flying, feet kicking, punches given and punches taken. What this is is an AI creation. One you or me or the other countless viewers could never, in the past we once inhabited, tell was not real. If seeing is believing — and it probably still is — we’re in trouble. A brave new world of trouble.

Because now the virtual world will look every bit as real as the one you once knew. For awhile the gullible will take every photo, video and political interview as gospel, those are the actual people, they saw it with their own two eyes, same as they did with every clickbait ‘news’ story. But eventually it will dawn on them — and us too — that none of this is certain. Everything will be suspect. You won’t necessarily believe your own eyes. Or your ears. That song that sounds like Dylan, maybe not….

The actors and screenwriters who watched Tom and Brad duke it out on an urban highrise rooftop are just the canaries in the deep hole where reality dropped below the ground. Their jobs will be the first casualties but not the last. AI can duplicate anyone’s voice, now it can generate anyone’s doppleganger. That phone call you got from your best friend? That message on Instagram from the President? Maybe it’s not him.

If you distrusted mainstream media before, hoo boy, you’re going to love the next wave. No need to believe anything but what you want to believe. The rest is bogus B.S., fake news, propaganda, no point even trying to sort fact from fiction. For the people or the countries who want to sow misinformation, what a godsend! Welcome to the anarchy of ideas. By the way, neither Brad or Tom won the fight. AI did.

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?

Two days ago we emerged from an accidental banishment from civilization as you know it. Two weeks with no internet, no streaming services from Prime or Netflix, no emails, virtually cut off from the Outside World, an electronic Black Hole where no messages came in and none went out, truly a dystopian glimpse into a dark future, post-apocalyptic. Sure, it was a nightmare, a stark reminder of life without constant bombardment of newsfeeds, sports scores, crummy movies, Epstein files, kitty videos, advertisements for new pharmaceuticals and unwanted spam. Okay, a nightmare the first day or so, but … once the withdrawal symptoms settled down and the methadone of walks on the beach or time spent with a banjo in my hands supplanted the previous addiction, ya know, time slowed down, books got read, the doomscrolling stopped and life seemed a tad more, for want of a better, if cliched, word, Real.

Try to imagine life before TV. Life before radio. Life before electricity even, which we also lost for four days after the windstorm blew out phones and internet and power. No podcasts, no Instagram, no Facebook, no Netflix bingeing, none of the usual stimuli that we amuse ourselves to avoid boredom. Just the bare minimum of entertainments. Hobbies, dinners with friends, walks in the woods, playing music. I know, why go on living?

If you want to fall into dangerous nostalgia, lose the internet for a few days. It wasn’t so long ago, really, before home computers, cellphones, I-pads and a plethora of electronic digital devices crowded out our old routines and replaced them with constant clickbait. Time-saving, we all thought when these toys arrived, little imagining they would gobble our hours and days. Who has time anymore to read a book? Our concentration wouldn’t allow for much more than a paragraph or two now. The thought for most of us of having a long conversation with our spouse, well, isn’t that why they invented TV?

Most of us wouldn’t want to return to those idyllic days when we had to fill the boredom in our lives with something of our own making. Too damn hard and getting harder by the nano-second. But if the time ever arrives when you too lose your umbilical to the digital world, you might just find that it isn’t the hell you imagine. Look back at your life pre-computer. It wasn’t that hell either….

When I was just out of college — we’re talking the early ‘70’s here — I wanted to join a commune and be a hippie. I know, a little late for the show, but better late than never, I figured. And anyway, I didn’t want to work so that narrowed my options down to very few. Bum, artist or hippie — or, in my case, all of the above. So a few of us went up to an abandoned farm in Northern Wisconsin and set up shop in an old Polish farmhouse, no indoor plumbing, a couple of electric outlets, a handpump out in the yard and a falling down outhouse.

Rick and I were the two males in the encampment so we he-men took it on ourselves to construct a state of the art outhouse. We found some lumber in the barn — which we learned later, much to our embarrassment, belonged to Ernie, the son-in-law of Felix, the farmer across the road — and armed with hammer and hand saw, we set to work. Now maybe you know how to go about outhouse construction, but Rick and me didn’t have Clue One. We were like Cro-Magnons who’d heard rumor of wheels but had never seen one in action. We knew you needed walls, roof would be good, a seat with one or two holes and of course one in the ground. That last one we figured out okay, but the rest, they were real headscratchers.

Somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd day we’d nailed together some boards, hoping, I guess, inspiration would carry the day. Eddie, our other next door neighbor, who’d probably been laughing himself sick watching from across the field, finally took mercy on us wanna-be hippies and brought over his extension cord, a skilsaw and his cousin Tony who lived in Chicago but had the house down the dirt road we all lived on. Rick and I managed to do just enough to make nuisances of ourselves while Eddie and Tony slapped up our new shithouse in no time flat.

We all sat around afterwards, all us men, drinking cheap beer, warming ourselves in manly companionship and camaraderie, pleased as punch like all masculine carpenters at our ability to erect cathedrals and skyscrapers with our own two hands. So okay, civilization rests on shaky assumptions. Nevertheless, you’d have been pleased too to have an outhouse, not the woods.