The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This past fall my 74 year old body let me down, succumbed to the entropy of old age and geezer mechanics, went beyond the usual aches and pains and finally threw in the white flag of surrender. My left knee, the one I’d injured as a 16 year old kid falling on skis the only time he ever went skiing and the boot didn’t release so that the knee bent to the point of breaking. But not quite. Hello future arthritis.

When, after jerking a recalcitrant outboard motor trying to make it start for nearly an hour, that old knee flared its outrage and walking was suddenly a challenge, I reluctantly went to the clinic for an evaluation where the x-rays and subsequent scans came back with multiple issues, ranging from spurs to chips to misaligned meniscus to bone on bone and even sprained ACL’s. The prognosis for an active old age had greatly diminished in no time flat.

I had a fairly straight forward choice. I could gimp around the rest of my days, two stepping up stairs, hobbling in pain, accepting my fate. Or … I could opt for a new bionic knee. After which I could leap tall buildings in a single bound, no doubt with the assistance of a chip implanted in my brain to control the new titanium gizmo. Part man, part machine, everything I’ve feared most of my adult life. Why wait for the Artificial Intelligence Apocalypse? If you can’t beat em, join em. Resistance, needless to say, is futile.

Three weeks ago I had the surgery performed by a robot bone-cutter programmed for exact slicing and dicing. Post-op, I had a semi-human leg the size of a small elephant’s and an incision running from above the titanium knee to below, a throbbing gash that has kept me from full sleep all this time. I had sincerely hoped the controlling chip implant would also handle the pain as well as the bionic instructions but no, the android apparently hasn’t concerned itself with pain management, not feeling any itself.

Suffice it to say, I’m not leaping even small sheds, much less tall buildings. Folks tell me it’s going to take more time than my overly and unrealistic optimism had led me to believe. Soon, I hope, the pathetically weak human component of me will yield to the inevitable union with the machine masters. Meanwhile, I still have to oil the damn joint.

We take so much for granted, us Moderns. Oh, I don’t mean you, of course. Me, maybe. But the truth is we live in a predictable world, electricity always on, water in the taps, thermostat at our fingertips. Get our food when we’re hungry, get our entertainment at the touch of a button or a mouse. Life’s easy for us Americans. Complacency is our middle name.

So why is it we whine so much?? Are we spoiled brats in the Garden of Eden, always wanting more, never satisfied with what we have? Have we become soft and lazy sitting at our computers, goofing with our ‘devices’? Two Toke Tom thinks it’s something else the night we’re parked on his rickety porch waiting for the full moon to rise out across Port Susan about where Mt. Pilchuck has turned the last of its snow golden as if God Herself had poured butterscotch topping on its ice cream peak.

“You and me, Skeeter, we’re the last of our kind.” Tom had been living up to his nick name while I’d been working on a beer or three. “We’re outliers.”

“Outlaws, you mean?” I asked, not sure what he was driving at.

“We’re outside looking in. We want heat, we cut wood. We want water, it comes from our well. Food’s out in the garden, down at the beach. We’d rather build something than buy something. You built a house and I did too. You build boats, I build furniture.”

“What’s your point, Tom?” I cut in, knowing he could go on past midnight with this. We’d done it many a moon, full or not.

“I mean, we live in the world.” When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “We all live in the world,” but he shook his head. “Naw, not the natural world. They live in offices, they live in fluorescent light, they live inside their entertainment center, they think nature is the weeds out by their sidewalk. They’ve gotten themselves stranded, man, and they don’t get what they’re missing anymore. They got their social media bullshit and that’s their reality, talking to people they don’t know or can’t see or who the hell cares? It’s all two dimensional. It’s all disconnected from this.” He swept his arm out into some galaxy he was apparently Seeing. “People have lost touch, that’s what I’m saying. They’d rather live in the Digital World. Pretty soon they’ll have little automatons living with them. Bots, man, doing their bidding. And when the robots decide to take over, people won’t even notice. Because they’ll be robots too, man.”

“Cut back on the weed, Tom,” I said, popping my next beer. “We got our own issues.”

Fortunately the moon began to show over by Three Finger Jack, just a glow at first, then quicker than you might think, a fat pumpkin of a moon orbiting the globe while we sat lost in our own thoughts on a porch on an island where the world kept spinning whether we noticed or not.

“Just like in the movies,” I said.

“Pretty as a hologram,” Tom cracked back.

One of the hazards of scribbling nonsense in these 21st Century blog sites along with about one billion other yahoos is that there are folks out there who really – and I don’t mean maybe – REALLY don’t like what they read in Skeeter’s pantheon of purpled prose.  Maybe some search engine sends em by mistake, hooks on a key word, next thing you know, instead of a self-help forum, they got some chucklenut waxing profane about a subject they couldn’t care less about.  And now, instead of Helpful Tips from Tom on how to turn their unhappy life into something swallowable, they got precious time wasted scrolling down South End Babble and boy howdy, somebody needs to reimburse them!

So they write to me in the anonymity of the internet.  Which is the digital highway equivalent of road rage on the interstate.  Flip me off, swerve into my lane,  jam the brakes.  They’ll show me who’s who and what’s what.  And the best part: they’re untrackable, anonymous as drive-by shooters.  Splatter my windshield with shotgun pellets and don’t look back, just speed away to the next unlucky target.

These are some very Very ANGRY! people out there with us.  More than you think.  Way more.  I suppose we’re lucky they shoot from the lip, not the hip, but if you ever made the mistake of commenting on a forum or some issue that meant enough to you that you weighed in, then you probably learned firsthand what I’m talking about.  Civility is most definitely not a valued trait in Cyberville.

I’d like to see the volume and vitriol dialed back a bit.  I know, probably won’t happen, probably get ratcheted UP even more if anything,  But personally, I’m weary of the ranting, the hysteria, the apoplexy.  And hey, you, the guy who sells antiques and read the blog by mistake on cleaning out my storage shacks, maybe hoping for bargains:  I’m sorry you thought this offered no insights for living your life.  And I’m doubly sorry if you thought I was so self- centered I used the blog to make myself look attractive.  I guess we won’t be dating.

I don’t have anything to sell, pal.  Not the junk I cleaned out, not the ideas in my head.  And .. .sadly…. it sounds like we’re all a little late to offer you tips on living.  Let’s both just figure it out on our own.

You got a reality TV president, cabinets full of Fox News talking heads, talk show hosts as advisors, why not go whole hog and solve a few of the thorniest problems with reality show solutions? The latest entry from the clown power brokers is for a contest to pit immigrants against one another, the winner receiving U.S. citizenship. Dancing with the Stars meets Queen for a Day, what’s not to love? The losers, presumably, get deported back to the hellhole they tried to escape. Although, from my twisted perspective, the show might very well be the hellhole they needed to escape.

Maybe you’re too young to remember Queen for a Day. The premise was fairly simple. The women candidates were trotted out to the audience and asked to offer up their collective tragedies, everything from crippling diseases to dying children, all heart-wrenching personal misfortunes now displayed for the consumption of a national television audience. The winner, the most tragic of the bunch, would win prizes like washing machines and color TV’s, merchandise that would assuage the mishaps of a life gone terribly wrong. A life that every one in the audience might imagine could happen to them.

Maybe the Citizen for a Day show would offer up similar tragedies, tales of gang killings in El Salvador or rapes by banditos on the long hike through the entirety of Mexico. Murders, mayhem, poverty and atrocity. We could vote on who would be most worthy of American sympathy. The other contestants? Well we don’t have all the room in the world for refugees and we certainly don’t have room in our collective hearts.

The danger, of course, would be humanizing these desperate immigrants, showing how returning them to their countries of origin might actually be a death sentence for them. It’s one thing to deport supposed gang members without legal redress but it might be a bridge too far to send a mother and kids back to the town where the real gangs threatened to kill them, why they left in the first place. Like a lot of plans proposed by the government lately, I suspect this one is dead on arrival. At least I hope so.

It used to be whispered in the locker rooms of an America once great that homophobes and their ilk were actually insecure about their own masculinity. They hated homosexuals because they, deep down, feared for their own sexuality, probably even hated themselves for the same reason. Maybe why closet gay politicians were some of the most virulent when it came to anti-gay legislation. Tough guy bullies like J. Edgar Hoover were rumored to prance around in women’s clothes after a hard day at the office. All things effeminate were considered a threat to us he-men. Drag queens, especially, were a red flag to us bulls. Might just be a sublimated dream of Dionysian dancing to our hidden drummers.

Or … it might be as simple as folks fearing what they don’t understand. Someone of a different race, a different nationality, strange customs, a divergent sexuality. We live in a herd mentality. Outsiders, well, better to distrust them, possibly even shun them, ostracize them, deport them, worst case, kill them.

But I’m no psychiatrist and really no sociologist either, just a guy grown old who moved a lot as a kid, went to new schools and communities in various states, perennially the Outsider. So maybe I just tend to side with them, the banned, the different, the potential threat, possibly the enemy. We give lip service to the idea of a melting pot in this country, that our strength is our diversity, but the truth is, we’re divided into our various tribes, religions and sexual preferences. Add to the soup a little anxiety about the future, season with economic distress, pretty soon you look for someone to blame. The government, the other political party, the immigrants, the trans or the homosexuals, doesn’t much matter. Albinos, the left-handed, hermaphrodites, Muslims, Jews, gypsies and the autistic. Choose your scapegoat. Sharpen your knives.

Age old stuff. Gang allegiances, monkey warfare, clubs and guns, teeth and fangs. Close the borders, wage economic warfare on the rest of the nations, celebrate the ‘American Identity’, the whitewashed version, rated G, airbrushed and highly edited. Forget the melting pot, stop yammering about inclusion. The City on the Hill, that beacon of fair-mindedness, democracy, foreign aid and all the rest, that’s over, Bro! We’re building a Castle and surrounding it with a moat, filling it with crocodiles. Those huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? They’re trapped inside now. At least until we can deport them. The rich boys in the country club locker room, they’re in charge. And they’ve only just begun.