The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.

The Piranha Brothers, those fly-by-night, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants itinerant carpenters of the South End, hammered their last nail back in 1980 or thereabouts. Cascade Lumber had just opened their new location coming onto the island, and while they knew us by name and reputation, they also knew we flew under the radar of the state business licensing and the county regulations. Permits? Our motto was: We don’t need no stinking permits.

My partner in crime and carpentry was up this 4th of July, so we toured a few of our illegal structures, most still standing, albeit a few are leaning slightly, but then, so are we. Joe had moved to various places before settling down in Seattle and Gomorrah where he bought a 1923 bungalow. Needless to say, he put the Piranha skills to work and doubled the size of his house, now worth about a cool million. He even got permits — or so he claims. In his spare time he built boats, sailboats and kayaks. The Piranha Brothers aren’t just landlubber contractors.

Me, I stayed put on the South End. Built some small buildings, a woodshop, boathouse (yeah, I built kayaks and sailboats too), greenhouses, saunas and finally built our mansion on the hill. With a permit. To save a marriage. Joe’s mizzus really hadn’t heard tell of the Piranha boyz, probably couldn’t imagine us slamming additions together with used lumber and nails we’d pulled and straightened. We were poor and untrained but we didn’t let that stop us. Or the building inspector either.

When Joe drove off, I decided maybe retirement was premature. Got a knee replacement that’s hobbled me physically and spiritually, but it’s time to strap on the tool belt, I figure, and let the Piranha Brothers ride once again. Today I tore off the old deck. Tomorrow I start framing a bigger one. The Piranha Brothers, legends in their own minds….

Gyppo John dropped by today with a block of old growth straight grain fir he’d whacked off a tree he’d felled just north of here.  You see a few old timers left on the bluffs where the loggers of old couldn’t get them down easily.  Gyppo John’s got the know-how, the tools, some equipment and enough cronies to get it down without losing the whole thing down the hill, then sectioning it into 25 foot lengths some 5 feet in diameter, loading it up on a lowboy trailer and dragging it down to a muddy side road south of the Diner while he figures out how to sell it.

It’s been dead on the stump long enough to be completely dried.  It’s vertical grain, tight ringed and beautiful, what goes for $10 a board foot at any good lumber yard.  A board foot, for you city slickers, is the Width x Length x Thickness.  Probably not on the WASL test these days.  Unless you go to high school in Darrington.  A plank 1 inch by 4 inch thick would only need to be 3 feet long to make one board foot if my 6th grade math serves me….  An eight foot 2×4 would be worth a little less than $60.  Gyppo John had 5000 board feet on the hoof and he was trying to figure out who would pay him the most.  He’d tried the mills.  He’d called the specialty hardwood places.  He’d talked to some luthiers and he’d been sniffing around some cabinetmaker shops.  John need the cash and he needed it fast, but he sure didn’t want to give this tree away for someone Else to make the profit.

Such is life on the gentrified South End.  The days of Les Benz’s sawmill down the road are long gone.  Me and my neighbor Pete put poor old Les in the morgue one night, toe tagged and cold storage, when we two orderlies at Everett General Hospital delivered him to the fridge.  His mill is Pete’s now, but the old Chevy 350 h.p. engine and the rusty 3 foot diameter blade scared us boys too much to fire it up for a nostalgic run at pre-OSHA sawmilling.  Naw, those scrappy days are long gone.  Thankfully for those of us who hold dear to things like fingers and limbs….  But the infrastructure to help Gyppo John is gone too, unfortunately.

Still, it warms my heart a little to think of John, gimping now at 50, straddling a chainsaw with a 4 foot blade, almost a ghost sliding into our digital present, winching up a dinosaur for the gawking crowd who never saw the real thing in the wild.  Yah, you betcha, I went down and took a picture of the beast myself, strapped and secured on the trailer, dead as Kong.  John isn’t far behind and most of us won’t know, not really,  what we lost.

Barney, my barber, is about to take down his red white and blue rotating tubular pole for good. He’s been cutting hair since back in the day when South Enders either opted for a butch or let it grow their arses, as Barney puts it. You could tell a man’s politics by his hair back then. Needless to say, I didn’t require Barney’s services back in my radical days. And Barney probably would’ve refused to let me sit in his leather chair. “Go to a stylist, someone who’ll cut a woman’s hair.”

His shop has sat at the same spot for about 45 years, open for business and gossip both behind the mini-storage just north of the Diner. He owns the mini-storage which is why it’s there. In fact, Barney owns a lot of the land around him, mostly good business acumen … and tips from his customers on who’s selling out cheap and moving lock stock and rainbarrel to someplace where the sun shines more than once a month.

Barney himself isn’t much of a talker. He’s mostly a good listener. He isn’t much of a barber either, in most of us customers’ opinion, but he’s reasonable about price and it’s a kick to sit with a few other South Enders in for their 2 week trim on what’s left of their hair and jaw on the politics of the day. Discussions can get pretty lively, especially around election years, but even the weather is open to debate these days.

If anyone asks Barney ‘how’s business?’ he shrugs, grabs a scissor and comb before answering, ‘pretty slow.’ He mentions every time all the funerals, how us customers are dying off faster than replacements roll in. I admit, I only go in every 6 months or so, which doesn’t help his retirement fund. He knows I like to stir the pot when I’m parked, waiting my turn, just rev up the discussion for the hell of it, something I pretty much only do at the barber shop, don’t ask me why.

I’m going to miss Barney’s Barber shop. I can go years without a trim, but I’ll miss that finger on the pulse of what my neighbors really think, no holds barred, no punches pulled. Go down to Super Cuts and see if you can get past banalities about the weather. Although … I could always bring up Global Warming, see where the coiffed crowd stands on that.