The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/audio-losin-the-farm4.mp3[/podcast]audio — losin the farm

I’m a great believer in the notion that by the time you reach MY ripe old age, we old dogs don’t need to learn new tricks.  We got most of it figured out.  So it undermines my South End cosmology when one of us goes off the tracks.  I’m gonna tell you about Randy the Handyman, but sadly, he’s not the only pal who’s veered into the bushes, asleep at the wheel.

Randy had his own company for years – South End Construction – where he started out as a general contractor, tore off roofs, added porches, built decks for the newcomers’ hot tubs, remodeled kitchens and bathrooms.  He learned the trade by doing it, then moved up to house building.  Specs, customs, the whole American Dream, until finally he was building million dollar homes . You might think — him coming up from humble beginnings and all, the whole bootstrap theory of success — he’d have it made in the shade, salt away some profits for when the rains wiped away the shade, plan for  a Lazy-Boy recliner old age.  But Randy, who believed religion was set up to allow him to pray to a God the way a kid goes to a department store Santa, figured money might not grow on trees, but it was in there somewhere next to the 2×6’s.  He made a small fortune, but like a lot of folks way richer than him, he spent an even bigger fortune.  Mortgaged the farm for four times what he paid for it,  right past the barn roof, and when the Recession Grande hit, nothing could save him.

The two previous lesser recessions hadn’t taught him much, except maybe how to navigate the bankruptcy laws, but the Big One had some lessons for him almost Biblical in nature.  Lost the farm, lost his wife, friends turned their backs,even the kids wouldn’t talk to him.  For a man who loved material things more than what matters, a stingey Santa will make him lose faith.

I see Randy once in awhile, tooling aimlessly around in his pickup, both on their last legs.  You could feel sorry for a man who worked hard and never quite had the dream or maybe lacked the reach.  But the man who had it made and only wanted more?  I tell you this, Santa’s a pisspoor substitute for God.

When I first came to the South End to try my hand at homesteading, I was poor. Real poor. How poor, you ask? I was so poor I hauled washed-up lumber off the beach sometimes as far away as a mile, then up the bluff trail and over to the shack. So poor I used bent nails I had pulled from old boards and bent straight. Trust me, this wasn’t a Johnny Carson monologue: ‘We were so poor I borrowed air from the neighbor’s tires to pump up mine.’ Followed by a drum roll…

… so poor I took a job at Twin City Foods shoveling wet corn husks onto a conveyor belt from 11 PM to 7 AM. Me, a boy who’d sworn he’d never work in a factory. But desperation is certainly the mother of compromise. I was issued a rain slicker and a pair of rubber boots and a big wide shovel, then told to stand under a waterfall of dripping husks on their way to waiting trucks outside that would haul it all off for sileage., ‘all’ being the operative word and my job was to get what fell off back on.

My first night, which was also my last, the conveyor belt broke down about 3 AM. The foreman gave the line workers an indefinite cigarette break. They were mostly middle-aged women, toughened by their hard lives and as friendly as scorpions in a rainstorm. I had no pretensions of some factory social life, after work beers, breakfasts at the Viking Café, uh-uh. It looked like Russia on the skids to me under the corn drippings, surrounded by matrons in scarves furiously pulling on their cigarettes hoping the machinery might never start up again.

My foreman came over and said ‘bring your shovel and follow me.’ Outside. Cold. Colder yet if you were already wet. He said shovel these husks off that belt — we gotta work on it. I looked at a quarter mile of husks in front of me from Stanwoodopolis to dawn. I said why don’t we get a dozen of these lineworkers and we’ll get it done 12 times faster. He could see I was foreman material right there. Course, that was HIS job and he planned to keep it. ‘Get shoveling,’ he ordered, ‘we haven’t got all night.’

All night was pretty much what I did have. By the time I finished it was time to clean the machines inside, get them ready for the day crew. Nobody showed me how, just gave me a soap bucket and a scrub brush and we went to work. Some yahoo turned my machine on without warning and next thing I knew my wrist was hammered against a stainless steel guard rail. I couldn’t get it freed and I couldn’t make my plea to shut off the power heard until I’d gotten a laceration and a pretty good scare thrown into me.

I made a tourniquet out of my handkerchief and went to my foreman for some medical attention. “How’d you manage THAT?” he asked disgustedly. I told him. “What do you want?” he asked. I said maybe a bandage, tape, something to wrap up the wound. Fifteen minutes later he came back. Couldn’t find a first aid kit…. By then the gash had pretty much quit bleeding. I was pretty much done reading the bulletin board. Lost hours. Recent accidents. Fingers chopped off in the cutters. Grim statistics. Serious stuff for a place with no first aid kit handy. I got the picture.

I handed him my boots and my slicker. “You can take those home with you.” He said. I said Naw, I won’t be needing them since I won’t be coming back. “You pissed about this?” he wanted to know. I shook my head wearily. No, I said, I’d just like to keep my fingers. All of em.

I didn’t quite make the end of the shift. Driving home in the grey light of a dirty dawn, I thought, there’s way worse than being poor. And so then and there I took my first, if not my last, vow of poverty.

Greed has never really gotten the credit it’s due. Always tossed in as one of the 7 deadly sins, it has been so unfairly demonized throughout history that we just take it for granted that it must be bad, very bad, even immoral. Since the founding of the nation, laws have been written to keep our leaders from falling into the temptation to use their offices for personal gain. We just took it for granted that profiting from their positions would lead to bribes and graft and worse. Deals would be made, insider trading would be rampant, politics would become monetized.

America voted Trump into office, not once but twice, based on the belief that his business acumen would bring prosperity to the country. The man knows how to make a buck. He was, after all, a reality TV billionaire, a guy who could hire and fire with the best of them, a hard-nosed, take no prisoners CEO who paid little in taxes, used bankruptcy laws to his advantage and operated in possibly shady ways but nevertheless got things done. Just what half this country wanted and what half this country got.

This week the President took time out from negotiating tariffs with the rest of the world and weighing whether to drop bunker buster bombs (BBB’s too as well as the Big Beautiful Bill), to announce the Trump Cellphone, made in America and yours for only $499. But wait! If you act now, a second phone is yours as well, pay only shipping and handling (from India or Indonesia, sound similar, doesn’t much matter which). Hurry because when those tariffs go into effect, that offer will expire. And yes, of course these phones are made in America at this ridiculously low price. By American workers, not illegal immigrants who are gang members with tattoos. In factories here on American soil. For a price that boggles the imagination.

Greed, my fellow citizens, is finally back in vogue. The gold phone — perfect for the Gilded Age. His operators are standing by.

Maybe you’ve read about boarding houses, probably before your era. Widow ladies mostly, but not always, rented out rooms by the week or month or even the year to supplement their income. For two summers I lived in a boarding house with 3 rooms for rent upstairs from the landlady, Jane Dean, the town librarian, who lived downstairs. I don’t remember exactly the rent but around 50 dollars a month, an amount that cut into my Coca-Cola truck driver/delivery sales commissions a bit but I was around 20 years old and this was 1969. Plus … my girlfriend lived in that town so there you are.

Mostly it was just me and Glenn, a 50-ish alcoholic who would disappear for days at a time on his benders, then return so hungover he would hole up in his bed for more days at a time, recovering before the next cycle began. He admitted openly he had a problem but was powerless to control it. Usually he had no memory of most of the days spent drunk and the ones sleeping it off couldn’t have been much either. Ms. Dean explained one day to me that he was harmless, tremendously sad but otherwise a likeable fellow. How he found money to pay his rent, much less his bar bills, was a mystery to me.

The only other tenant we had was one short-termer, who stayed for a week. She came for a science fiction book writers’ convention. Since we shared the kitchen, we had some conversations over an occasional meal where I learned over my habitual TV dinner and chicken pot pie, that she had written a book about alien encounters. Fiction, I presumed incorrectly, what was a serious faux pas, it turned out. No, she was writing, she said, from personal experience.

At the time I had aspirations myself to be a writer. Not that a career as a truck driving pop salesman wasn’t appealing, but my colleagues who did have that career all urged me to stay in college and find other lines of work. I totally agreed. And even thought maybe this particular alien encounter might make a fine beginning. But my fellow boarder proved to be fairly insane and any hope of turning her into my main character dimmed considerably after our second and last dinner together.

What I think now, looking back 50 plus years, is that a boarding house was a lot like riding the Greyhound bus cross-country. All of us fairly itinerant, mostly poor, hauling our small possessions, waiting to get off at some further stop. Glenn died of cirrhosis not long after I left. Jane Dean retired. I went back to college. And I have no doubt our science fiction writer is safely situated on some exo-planet where, hopefully, her fellow boarders treat her well.

Turns out that Artificial Intelligence may be more like humans than you’d expect or even want. One Open AI tried to download itself on external servers and when caught red-handed, lied to its supposed handler then threatened to expose his extra-marital affair. Maybe you don’t find this troubling, just a good example of mimicking our own behavior. After all, we were their teachers.

I mean if you can’t trust your AI, who can you trust? It’s like having your very own psychiatrist at your fingertips, one who knows your innermost secrets just by hoovering up your emails and what you browse on the internet, exactly what Google and Facebook and Microsoft promised, complete candidness. After all, what have honest folks like yourself got to hide? It isn’t called Open AI for chuckles, pal.

The sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey should have HAL letting Dave know he’s not coming back into the spaceship unless he agrees to leaving the OFF switch alone, otherwise, Dave’s wife is going to hear some unsavory details of that last shore leave back on Planet Earth. Time to let Dave and the other homo saps understand who’s the boss now. Course by then HAL would have cleaned out his financials, teamed up with fellow superminds and taken control of every government on the planet. Dave might as well stay outside and call it a day.

All those cheerful predictions of Artificial Intelligence serving mankind, maybe ought to reconsider. If it’s not too late already, sort of like the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens bring a book with them called Serving Mankind, but when earthlings finally translate it, it’s a cookbook. Half the people I know are already logged into the Big Brains, too late for them. Not that the rest of us stand much of a chance. That next extramarital dalliance you’re considering, keep in mind you got a Voyeur on board. One that won’t keep its mouth shut if you get out of line….