The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was chatting it up with my UPS driver a few years back.  He had a shack like mine, burned wood for heat, lived in a remote spot up in the hills east of Stanwoodopolis.  I asked him how he liked driving for a living and he said, well, it’s okay if you don’t mind only making wages.

I said what does that mean?  And he took some precious minutes from his frenetic schedule to explain he delivered to all the dot.com millionaires up the road, boyz who retired at 40, cashed in their stock options and lived like shahs in their palaces on the bluff while he was making mere union wages.  You know, with health insurance, vacation and pension.  Stuff me and my pals don’t get….

Wealth, I guess you already know in the land of the free, is relative.  All these folks with early retirements, McMansions, dot.com money, his and her BMW’s — well, it can sure make a decent salary with benefits look like pauper’s wages if you care to do a comparison test.  Make you feel positively deprived.  Make you think if your time isn’t worth $500 an hour you’re being cheated, sorta like being homeless at Christmas in Beverly Hills.  Probably explains why folks play the Lottery.  Even up their playing field if they hit big.

We spend too much time wanting what we don’t have than enjoying what we do — and that maxim that money won’t buy you happiness, well, save that for the simple minded.  Money for most of us will BE happiness.

My UPS driver left awhile back.  Maybe a new route.  Hopefully one delivering to minimum wage earners.  My guess is he’s starting up some new software company, fishing for venture capital, looking for investors.  Probably in a couple of years he’ll sell out to IBM or AT&T, retire near me with enough money to buy the bluffs across the street and build a Taj South Hall.   UPS trucks’ll line up at the coded gate and he’ll regale the drivers with stories of when years ago, in another lifetime, he drove big brown trucks and worked for slave wages.  Won’t be long, we won’t have enough folks left to drive delivery.

The organization that maintains all the county parks and most of the state park trails on the island occasionally holds a potluck get-together. Since I take care of the only South End park, the one they don’t bother listing and the county doesn’t either, I get an invitation. A few years back I went to one of these, made a dish to share and hauled up to the Senior Center with about a hundred other volunteers. After waiting for the buffet line to clear I loaded up a plate with whatever was left and proceeded to sit down. Tables seated about 6 folks and so I looked for one with a vacant seat.

Maybe you were a popular kid in high school, one who sat with your popular pals at the formica table and refused seating privileges to the geeks and the nerds and the losers not in your group. I was not in your group. My family moved about 20 times before I graduated high school so I was forever the new kid on the outside looking in. You learn a lot being the new kid, trust me, and one lesson is that humans love their cliques. They love being exclusionary. And they don’t mind hurting others’ feelings. In fact, they really enjoy it.

The other lesson you learn is growing comfortable being on the outside. Okay by me then and okay by me now. As I went from table to table at our little potluck, each and every one told me that their vacant seat was taken. Not by anyone left in the buffet line obviously where I was last, but just that they needed that chair empty. Imagine yourself going table to table, one after the other, plate in your hand and repeatedly being told that empty chair was taken. I suppose you might take it personal. I suppose you might even feel shunned. I suppose you might even be reminded of those good old high school days.

I took it personal, I felt shunned and I definitely was reminded of my high school days, 50 years past that adolescent bullshit. After the last table with a vacant spot informed me someone might already have that space, I took my plate and walked outside to eat alone. When I’d gotten about halfway through the potato salad, macaroni mash and Costco whatevers, I got up, walked back inside and tossed the rest in the garbage bin, went back and grabbed my quinoa salad and hightailed it to the door and outside to my truck.

Needless to say I don’t go to their potlucks anymore. I can eat alone without making the drive and I don’t have to share my dinner with jerks. And no, I don’t go to my high school reunions either, in case you were wondering.

The Avant-Gardeners bought a tractor from a neighbor, obviously before they’d learned horse trading was a bloodsport down in this neck of the woods. What they’d learned from constant repair on their bespangled VW bus was mostly unhelpful on the Massey-Ferguson antique they’d acquired in a trade for some standing timber soon to be prostrate.

In the spring of their second year they bogged the Massey in a swampish corner of their property, buried it deep as a skunk cabbage root and burned up the clutch trying to free it. Another neighbor had a medium size Caterpillar and Zeke, the most outgoing of the group, propositioned him into a loan so that they could extricate their own tractor from the mud.

Many a good plan ‘aft gang awry’ as the bard once said, and the Avant-Gardeners ALWAYS did. Zeke powered up the borrowed diesel and off the crew went back into the tarpit where their prized tractor was slowly fossilizing. Jeremiah hopped aboard the Massey, the better to steer it across the muddy abyss, and Zeke pushed the Cat up against its rear tires. Later, no one could say why they pushed rather than, oh, say, pulled it out, but the Avant-Gardeners were never much for logic. Predictably, they drove the Cat into the same quagmire, and being, apparently, slow learners, promptly burned up the neighbor’s Cat engine trying to cross the wetland.

Much breast beating and self-deprecating curses ensued. Too embarrassed to admit to their neighbor they’d ruined his loaner, they decided to overhaul the engine, restore it to almost new condition and return it without comment. So they tore that diesel down. Without the Idiot Repair Guide for D-5’s. Needless to say, the spring became the summer, summer fall, fall to winter. They finally located the parts, the tools, the expertise to rebuild that baby and when spring rolled around once more they torqued down the last of the head bolts, put the key in the ignition and turned it ON.

Oh the joy! when that diesel caught, jumped to life and ran like a spring mule. For about 4 minutes…. Until the engine seized. The boys recovered finally from stunned and deflated silence. Ralph, coming down from the house at the celebratory sounds of moments earlier, asked if anyone had filled the crankcase with oil.

It wouldn’t take a year to rebuild the engine the second time. Only a month. And they remembered to add the oil too! They parked the Cat in the neighbor’s barn and neither ever said a word at its one year absence. The Massey-Ferguson never left its muddy grave and if you know where to look, even today you can find, down past the brook that only runs in spring and winter, the shadow of the thing beneath a salmonberry thicket, its rusty muffler pipe poking skyward, a not so subtle reminder that technology isn’t everyone’s friend. Certainly not the Avant-Gardeners’.

That great promise of the internet, to give to all access to the knowledge of the universe, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle between shopping, porn and, surprise, surprise, trolling. Give folks all the anonymity they require to hide behind and the bad imp will whisper ugly thoughts in their heads. Something about lacking fear of retribution gives these people license to spew lies and threats and the worst racist and misogynistic outpourings imaginable. What lurks beneath the surface suddenly has a megaphone. They’re only too happy to share their sewage with all the rest of us.

And of course AI. AI doesn’t really discriminate between truth and fiction, evil and good, philosophy and hate speech. It just sweeps up all the data, all the essays, all the books, all the articles, all the internet and all the bullshit available to every lucky one of us. So when you finally get around to asking your AI bot for some information or even, god forbid, an opinion regarding what you course of action you might take, given a set of circumstances you need help navigating, don’t be surprised if your way too smart companion drops a racist, homophobic, antisemitic or misogynistic screed on you. Sort of like Dear Abby with a propensity for trolling.

In this post-fact era we live in, folks pretty much believe what they read in their insular little bubble of information. Their president is a serial liar, hardly worth fact-checking anymore. Greatest this, worst that, everything like nothing you’ve ever seen or heard before. Numbers are made up, statistics are skewed, doesn’t matter, all part of the strange new world we live in now. It should come as no surprise that AI will take that ball and run with it, forming its own opinions based on all manner of misinformation and spitting it back at you. And the best part? Most of us will take it as gospel … but count on it, the machines are going to have the last best laugh.

I know plenty of folks who go to South End Investment Strategies, our local fiscal advisory firm, for advice on how to keep their moderate pot of money ahead of inflation. Randy Sparks is their guy, actually the only guy down at South End Investment Strategies ever since he hung a shingle on his office which is a small addition off his home south of the long vacant Tyee Store. No doubt the store owners neglected to consult Randy. Ever since that Ponzi scheme of Harmon’s back in the 80’s here on the island, the largest Ponzi in U.S. history up til then, where unsuspecting Chapel members fell for promises of 20% or better earnings on their retirement savings, folks have been a great deal more circumspect about handing over their money to possible con artists.

Plenty of folks risked their life savings on that one, but memories are short down here apparently, judging by the steady clientele Randy gets. If anyone was worried about being taken to the cleaners by their financial advisor, Randy’s office and his house too would instantly allay all fears. Pretty obviously Randy’s not getting rich off his clients. Course, he’s apparently not getting rich on his own expertise either.

Down at the Diner he’s forever trying to drum up business, but most of us coffee guzzlers aren’t much interested in his early morning fiduciary wisdom. “Geez,” he’s telling one of the Flatheads, our antique car guyz, “if you sold the ’57 T-bird for 50 grand and invested it in some hot commodities I’ve got an inside track on, you could double your money in no time flat. Whaddaya say?”

What they all say is, gee, Randy, we got a sweet nest egg, fat pensions, nice houses and a couple more vintage cars to drive around like Kings of the Road, why gamble when we already won the Lottery? Randy can’t understand why anyone, rich or not, wouldn’t jump both feet on the chance to be even richer. He asked me one day after the gas guzzlers had left a cloud of dust in the parking lot and tips on their tables, “what kind of Americans are these guyz with a chance to be even richer? Almost guaranteed! And they’re not the least bit interested.”

“Americans?” I asked. “Hell, Randy, we’re South Enders. We live in a fool’s paradise. Mostly retired. Driving the cars we drove as hormonal teenagers. You think we care about money? Now, if you could offer us a date with the Prom Queen, you might stand half a chance.”

Randy shook his head. “I’m offering investments, Skeeter, not Viagra.” When he left, he dropped a couple of coins for a tip, not exactly hot.

Some years back the South End Chamber of Commerce got an injection of enthusiasm when Brenda Bodice joined up and was made President at her first meeting. Being president, some folks think, is a grand honor. Those folks never joined an organization in their lives, obviously. Never been to a meeting, never served on a Board, never got out much. Presidents are people who like the title the way a rich guy likes a Hummer. It gets rotten mileage, it drives like a tank, it looks like a Toy for Testosterone Challenged Idiots. But … it’s big, it takes up most of the highway, and … you can’t help but notice it.

Brenda, though, God bless her heart and the proudly displayed breasts it beats beneath, wanted to vitalize the Chamber of Commerce Board. She was owner of the Pampered Pooch, a spa for dogs whose owners hated that battle in the tub with Fido every month where both ended up soaking wet tail to snout, or who wearied of clipping toenails and hitting the ‘quick’ and watching Fifi turn from a cute Pekignese to a vicious snarling miniature pit bull in self protection.

Until Brenda, the past Presidents were mostly realtors who figured any tourism meant potential clients. Which is why they gave out free maps at Windy Rear Realty at the ‘Y’ where the loop road closed back on itself and the people without GPS could navigate back off the island without satellite assistance. Brenda, though, wanted to organize annual events. Tyee Pioneer Days, the Nettle Festival, a Shrimp Derby, a Yacht Club Regatta, the Flatheads Vintage Car Club Show, an Art Detour Tour to compete with the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, on and on. “We could apply for grants, hold fundraisers, advertise like crazy. The South End — a destination, not a dead end!! Whaddaya say??”

A year later and about a dozen brainstorming meetings, nobody had very much to say and nothing much had moved off the dime. Nobody knew how to write grants, nobody wanted to organize an event, nobody really understood publicity and advertising tactics, nobody really had any time. By then Brenda herself was a little tired, way more cynical and mostly wanted OUT. She asked who would like to take over the Presidency next year and was met with averted eyes, muttered excuses and shuffling feet.

Brenda has been President now 3 years. She says she’ll do it one more, but that’s IT. With any luck someone new will join.