The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was talking with my neighbor today. He drives milk truck. Home delivery. Glass bottles. Old school. It’s like having a time warp drifting around in the back yard. I’m expecting the Iceman soon on the other side of me. Big tongs dropping blocks in my 1910 icebox that sits on the porch for decoration now, you know, the present, before the century turned back. Why not? Might be time to save on the electric bill running that old Frigidaire we got back in the future.

The milkman was telling me how he’d gone to Minnesota to go ice fishing. 20 below zero. Couple feet of snow. Half a mile out on some lake near the Arctic Circle above Minneapolis. Heaven on earth. I asked what YOU would: why? He’s a dedicated fisherman and he just wanted to experience it, he said. Part of his Bucket List. I was afraid to ask what else was on that list.

I went ice fishing once. 1966. Northern Wisconsin. 10 below. Nice wind freshening up the crusty snow. My brother and I trekked out like deranged Zhivagos across a frozen desolate God-abandoned expanse, lugging an ice auger, some ice fishing ‘jigs’ and a little bait. We drilled a 2 foot hole through the ice, slapping ourselves to keep warm, then set the jigs to pop up when some sluggish fish floated by in a state of half-hibernation and got a sudden appetite. We stood there, two primitive people hunting food. The wind swept snow around our feet and the water in our fishing hole began to close up with slush. We didn’t talk much. The jig didn’t move. Time itself was freezing up.

I looked at my brother. He looked miserable. He looked at me. I know what I looked like. Without a word, we pulled our lines up, packed up the jigs not very carefully, grabbed the auger, our pride, our fishing fantasies and trudged back to shore, half frozen. Let’s just say — Ice Fishing would never have to be on our Bucket List later in life.

I asked my milkman how HE liked it. “Just wanted to experience it,” he said. “And Minnesota too, in the winter. I’ve heard about it. “ “You catch anything?” I asked. “Naw, just a small walleye. Twice, I think, same fish.” “Probably the one we didn’t catch,” I mumbled.

The rest of you anglers, give that poor walleye time to grow before you trek across the tundras in search of Antarctic fish trophies. They grow slow under the ice.

Welcome to the future, everybody, a virtual world where we all live on a computer and communicate by email or cellphone or just about anything other than physical encounters. Some of my friends (who apparently never met me) ask if I’d like to join them in zoom meetings. Last time I checked, my computer didn’t come with a built-in camera, meaning, Amazon and Google don’t get to spy on me. I even turned off the microphone after the mizzus and I had a conversation about a possible trip to the southwest and she instantly got a pop-up ad for motels in Phoenix. Just a coincidence? Or paranoia running rampant in the time of Covid? You tell me.

I just won’t be telling my eavesdroppers….

But because I am still a ‘working’ artist, meaning I haven’t made my semi-retirement a full time position just yet, I have a public art project that demands that I attend zoom meetings. Reluctantly I bought the cheapest camera made by child labor in some third world hellhole and spent a day trying to figure how to use it. Needless to say when the meeting started, nobody could see my handsome visage, fine by me, all they got was a disembodied voice without the Boris Karloff in a weird shade of pink only I could see on my own screen.

Since this was the first of a few more such meetings, I purchased a mid-priced spy camera that seemed to auto-focus and gave me a more human skin coloration than the previous piece of junk. The next zoom meeting I could see them and they could see me. Trouble was, if they could see me, they couldn’t hear me. If they could hear me, they couldn’t see me. We opted for the disembodied voice once more. Lucky them, I said.

Now I love technology as much as the next Luddite South Ender. Give me a new gizmo and let me spend hours figuring out what I’m doing wrong, what better way to spend a day or three? I have the next zoomer meeting coming up next week and I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong that sound and sight aren’t synched. So I’ve decided to go without the visual. Course, I’m pitching designs for an art project, kind of falls into that visual category.

No doubt we’ll sort this all out. Probably after I lose the project. But for my pals who want to engage me in a zoom meeting, hey, call me on the phone. Landline only. Last thing I need is some cellphone I can’t figure out either…..

Most folks think homeless people live in the Big City. Seattle and Gomorrah. Portland. Stanwoodopolis. But that’s not true. There’s homeless people living everywhere — even the South End. If you’re the type of cautious soul who’d never pick up a hitchhiker, you’d never have met Stinky Steve. Or you’d think, even now, how mean it was to call Steve ‘Stinky’.
For those of us who DO pick up folks with their thumbs out, we didn’t call him that out of spiteful cruelty. Steve was genuinely, and I mean Full Bore, Head On, Hold Yer Nose, No Kidding, olfactorily displeasing. He had an odor part old B.O., part beer breath, part cigarette smoke and the rest I probably wouldn’t want to guess. I don’t think he minded us rolling a window down even in rain or cold weather. After all, those were his elements.

When I first picked him up, he was living in an abandoned shed a neighbor a couple miles north kindly let him use. He was on his way to work digging soft shell clams on the tideflats near Stanwood, or so he said. Later he lived in a pup tent near me and worked various jobs clearing trail or weed-eating the neighbors’ land for minimum wage. Some even offered him free use of their showers, but Steve wasn’t much for personal hygiene and always politely demurred.

Guitar Bob and me got to know Steve better than most. We used to play the 12 beer blues every Sunday night, and at some point Steve joined our little outdoor guitar duet, singing some ditty to our rambling fingerwork that always sounded oddly familiar. When some kids slashed his tent and strewed his meager belongings, Bob’s neighbors gave him a little trailer to live in … on condition he work around the place and go to Social Services and sign up for disability. Mental disability. They meant well, these Do-Gooders, but the end result of all this was that the State of Washington gave Steve a modest stipend that effectively resulted in Steve’s early retirement from the part time workforce and paid for his malt liquor without him having to work all day to earn it. Steve, predictably enough, had his alcoholism subsidized by the State. And we had a singer more and more off key, schnockered by the time we’d only started to warm up.
I guess the ditches beside the Road of Good Intentions are strewn with folks like Steve. We forget that not all of us want a suburban home, a square meal or even a hot bath. Some of us just want to be left the hell alone, to live our life a different way altogether, without sympathy, without a handout, without a whole lot of socio-psycho hand wringing. I’m not saying you should pick them up hitchhiking into town for their cigarettes and beer. I’m just saying they’re here, they’re not that crazy and they’re okay decent people. There’s no law that says they have to bathe.

Well, long story way too short, the good-hearted neighbors signed him up for computer training in Spokane, detox, three square meals a day and a life as alien to him as a heroin addict in a nursery school. Guitar Bob and I got a couple of letters, half computer hieroglyphics, half semi-sensible musings on his new life and about 2/3rds sadness expressed with a stiff upper lip. We never saw him again. Shortly after those letters he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Then we heard he died. Bob and I bought a 6 pack each and played our 12 beer blues long into the dark night for Steve, a fallen comrade, another loner on the sad old South End the newcomers won’t have to pass by as he stands in a cold drizzle with his tobacco stained thumb held out for the alms of a ride.

I have a modest proposal to make to the nation: let’s give robots the vote. You know they’re taking our jobs and beating us at chess, soon they’ll be driving our cars, controlling our homes, babysitting our kids, fighting our wars, building even smarter robots. They’re answering all our questions on our smartphones, coughing up our money at the ATM, running our power grids and running our lives. I say it’s time to give them the vote.

As usual I’m probably so far behind current events, not being a participant in what is commonly called Social Media — what I call gossip and bullshit — that maybe I’m actually out front on this one, history being a kind of closed loop where we are perpetually doomed to repeat our mistakes. Giving robots the vote might be the best way to break out of that cycle of boom and bust, peace and war, euphoria and depression. They are, after all, smarter than us. Not that it would take that much, judging by the last election. But these artificially intelligent citizens are soon going to be far smarter than all of us and I’m not just talking about folks who voted based on fake news reports. They might actually be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, something a majority of us now pretty obviously cannot. Or don’t choose to. Either way, the robots could and will.

Besides, let’s be honest, the robots are going to take over anyway. Maybe giving them voting rights now would enfranchise them. Might give them reason to appreciate our generosity. Last thing we need is a pissed off very powerful segment of society that turns to violence to achieve its rightful ends. Robot Lives Matter! Think about that protest movement a nano-second. I think you’ll agree that the last thing this society wants or needs is a disgruntled artificial intelligentsia with its prosthetic on the trigger. Sure, you can suppress the vote of minorities and students, but don’t think for a silicon second you can do it with the robots. They are, after all, the damn voting machines themselves.

I say capitulate now. With a little targeted compassion on our part, maybe they’ll allow us humanoids to continue to vote in the near future. Not sure why they would other than to inject a bit of randomness in the equation, but maybe robots will have an advanced sense of humor. The rest of us seem to have lost that talent so hopefully comedy will become a hallmark of higher intelligence, artificial or not. Think about it is all I’m asking. Let em vote!

It’s No Worse Than the Bubonic Plague

Fresh off his victory over Covid the Terrible in last week’s Virus Prime Time Smackdown sponsored by major pharmaceutical companies, the President declared there was nothing to fear but Democrat’s fear itself. He himself was healthier than he had been 20 years ago. Not many 70 year olds can say that and certainly none of those who have fought the coronavirus from an ICU ward in Walter Reed hospital. The man is invulnerable as Superman, immune to everything but kryptonite and subpoenas for his tax returns.

Lest his loyal followers thought he was in serious trouble, pinned to the mat for a day or two with a respirator offering him additional oxygen, he returned to his heavy workload at the West Wing, but not before a victory lap in his black SUV armored against gunfire and sealed against gas attack. Sealed too against Covid virus escaping the vehicle, a small detail the Secret Service agents escorting him on his triumphant drive probably tried not to think too long on. They would take a bullet for their boss, no doubt, but the job description may have neglected details like inhalation of his disease. Loyalty may come at a high price, but that’s the job, fellas.

The man emerged from his isolation ward with renewed vigor, frisky as a teenager, tweeting with enhanced intellect. Dr. Trump declared the Covid was a piece of cake, less risky than the flu, nothing to be afraid of and certainly nothing those around him, contagious as he still is, should fear. An aura of invincibility, an invisible shield, will protect them, such is the impenetrability of his Cone of Immunity. Add to that his surging bloodstream loaded with steroids, you have a nearly unstoppable human being.

The Covid, he said, was a gift from God, maybe the best thing that ever happened to him. Between you and me, I think he loves that steroid high. Welcome to the ‘60’s, Donny. Turn on, tune in.