The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Don’t ask me why, but every year or so I get this sudden impulse to get my hair cut. I hate getting my hair cut so about any excuse in the world not to get it cut works to dissuade me from the scissors and comb torture. My last trim was so poorly done that even after a mere six months it was driving me crazy. I avoided the bathroom mirror, I kept my hat on more than usual, I thought about taking a whack at it myself. So when I was picking up a plaque I’d ordered at Mr. T’s Trophy Shop in Mt. Vernon yesterday, I noticed a shabby building next door with the barber pole outside and walked on over. One chair. One barber. Old school before the SuperCuts and Hairmaster chains rolled in.

My new barber, a fellow named George was sitting in the half dark and I asked if he maybe had time for a haircut and he said sure, come on in, Bro, take a seat. We bantered a bit and then we got down to it, how much off, how short, behind the ears, all that barber lingo and I said I wanted a lot off, behind the ears, trimmed any way he thought worked, I didn’t much care. And I didn’t. It’s a new day in America and maybe a skinhead look would be appropriate in the Trump regime. Can’t beat em, join em. My barber George looked like he already had.

But we didn’t talk politics. Instead he launched into a story about a buddy his age, about 50, I’d guess, who had met a woman, “a ‘fine’ woman, Bro, about 30, who had a fantasy of making it with my friend in a barber chair.” The very chair I was now parked in. He said it was okay with him so long as he kept everything clean afterwards, but he had one request, he wanted the girlfriend’s panties left behind when they were finished acting out their little barberchair bucket list item.

I know, I know, you might’ve considered leaving about then, but I had made my mind up about getting my hair cut and that urge might not come again for many months, best to get this thing done right now, sex story or no sex story. “So next morning I come in,” George is saying, snipping like Trump tweeting at my locks, “and sure enough, the place is spic and span and there (he points at the table in front of us) is a pair of pink panties. My wife never comes in the shop here in the morning, but of course that morning she does and first thing she sees is that pair of panties on a bottle of hair tonic and she asks who do those belong to? I tell her they’re not hers so mind her own damn business.”

I know, I know, but it’s kind of late to be quitting mid-trim. And anyway, maybe you didn’t notice, but this is a new age in America. No more political correctness.
Those days are relegated to the same place my shorn hair will soon be deposited, the wastebasket. George snips and cuts and says, “I saw the video they made. She was fine, Bro, fine.” I said, “They filmed it?” “Oh, yeah, the whole thing. It was something. Something, Bro. I watched it twice. But later things went bad, you know, like that movie, you know the one? Where the woman won’t let go and things turn ugly? What’s that called? Fatal attraction, yeah, that’s it, fatal attraction. Turned ugly, Bro.” George shook his head sadly, handed me a mirror and asked what I thought. “Works for me,” I said, too nearsighted to see the back of my head and in no mood to care anyway.

You don’t get this kind of banter in Great Clips, let me assure you. This is barbering when barbering was a man’s world, not a salon, not a styling studio. Hunting magazines on the table, not People and Us. Playboys, not Women’s World or Good Housekeeping. Hell if I know whether I’ll ever go back, but I know this: if Donald’s making America great again, George will do just fine. Know what I mean, Bro?

Back before Global Warming became Global Climate Change and the South End became a tropical paradise, we sometimes had early winters. Real ones. The kind with windstorms and snowstorms. Days without power! Without TV!! Without the internet!!! I know what you’re thinking and yes, suicide rates went ballistic. Those were primitive times and only the tough survived. And the terminally dumb. If nothing else, it kept the population down. WAY down.

Many a Thanksgiving was spent in the cold and dark. Us Old Timers cooked our feasts on the woodstove and dined by candlelight. I know what you’re thinking and yes, pregnancy rates skyrocketed.

There was one particular Thanksgiving we had a major blizzard, over a foot of snow, traffic in Seattle and Gomorrah stopped cold and the interstate became an icy parking lot. Stanwoodopolis seemed as remote as the North Pole to those of us who hadn’t bought Thanksgiving groceries ahead of time. Turkey Day promised to be a day of fasting, judging by the grim weather reports before the power finally failed.

But … our next door neighbors took pity and they gave us a snow goose from their freezer’s larder they’d hunted a few weeks earlier. If you want to know how the Pilgrims felt when the natives brought them a feast offering, we can tell you. That goose tasted like steak to us. That meal, with the oil lamps glowing and the world white with newfallen snow, was the one Thanksgiving we remember best.

I’m not advocating we all hunt snow goose to give to the South End Food Bank. But I do think we should all count our blessings. And even though the Hard Winters are a thing of the past for most of us, down here there are folks who still go hungry, not just on Thanksgiving, but all year long. Set a place at your heart’s table. And if you can, give more than just thanks this season.

Back home here at Blog Central the wailing and gnashing of teeth continues non-stop, the phone keeps ringing, the e-mails are shrill and frightened, the news cycle runs its usual 24/7 with stories ramping up the national anxiety. The scare tactics of the media certainly paint a chilly winter here. Deportations, climate warming denials, deregulation, rescinding trade agreements, tossing out Roe v. Wade, Rudy Giuliani as Sec. of State??, the list goes on and on, the empire is crumbling, the center cannot hold and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There are marches in the streets of our major cities. Even the high school kids are pouring out to protest. The Trumpsters are taunting the minorities, figuring, apparently, that the country is now back in white Christian control. The Democrats are in full route, the Republicans in full battle cry. No one has told them Donald is no more a Republican than he is a Christian or a pal of the blue collar worker.

A few friends are considering emigration. For some reason not clear to me, New Zealand seems to be the favorite landing spot. Why not Canada? They’re a stone’s throw away with the added attraction of a liberal leader. Too cold maybe? I have friends who are certain their jobs will be destroyed, friends who have decided to delay having children, friends who predict the stock market will crash and a world wide Depression will follow. Last night was a Super Moon. Who knows what malevolence will follow such a portent. Who knows what a right wing Supreme Court will do. Who knows who this Donald Trump really is.

Jeez, take a pill. Take a deep breath. Take a long walk. The world as we know it is not going to end. Remember that line about shrinking government to a size we could drown in a bathtub? Well, trust me, easier to say than do. America is a big fat cruise liner. Turning it in a different direction takes awhile. Stopping it, even longer. But c’mon, we lived through Richard Nixon, the Viet Nam War, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and the Cheney mob and the Great Recession, the Iraq War and its weapons of mass destruction. And now you think it looks worse? Maybe we thought the Obama Years offered hope. Same sex marriage and gay rights. A black president. The possibility of immigration reform. Carbon footprint reduction. No more foreign wars.

Ho ho, ha ha. Presidents come and go. The real power brokers stay in town. Money talks, as a buddy told me long ago, and bullshit walks. We got a billionaire as president. Maybe we should’ve seen him coming. He says he’s not beholden to Wall Street. We believed him, I guess. Now we all get to take a walk.
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There was a time, long long ago, when we could debate an issue and support our arguments with facts. A time when we based our beliefs on data or the opinions of experts. Now, of course, in the laughing gas atmosphere of the internet and Facebook, we’re all experts and our opinions and our ‘friends’ opinions matter at least as much, if not more so, as facts. This is a wonderful freedom for most of us, to be untethered from the nuisance of truthfulness and allowed to believe in absolutely anything we want. If most of our friends believe the Pope supported Donald Trump for President, we can too.

I remember, vaguely of course, when the internet was touted as the most democratizing force on earth, a place where each of us could turn to its vast aggregation of facts and data and with a few strokes of the keyboard, find the answers to almost any question. The encyclopedic range of its information, the speed of its algorithms, well, no one need live in ignorance any more. The future, my friends, looked to be enlightened.

I get e-mails daily from my dad who dutifully forwards most everything he receives to his small address list, one of whom is, unfortunately, me. Most are political diatribes, most are what I once, generously, referred to as misinformation, what I now label as outright lies and propaganda. My father believes most everything he reads. Why would his friends lie? He gets most of his information there and the rest he gets from the commentators on Fox News. He doesn’t like PBS, too biased, he sez.

Donald Trump, our president-in-waiting, declared that the New York Times is biased. Most Americans now think the media is suspect. Obviously, some of it is. But the question has to be asked: if we don’t believe the media, where do we go for the truth? And the answer, my friend, ain’t blowin in the wind. The answer is that we find it in social media. The algorithms dictate what we looked at previously and feed it back in an ever tightening self-generating completely closed loop. Information becomes a black hole where no light escapes the gravitational pull of our own biases. In the end, it’s little surprise Trump won. The real surprise is Kim Kardashian wasn’t elected. At least for now.

The pundits and political scientists, the sociologists and the couch philosophers, plus half us yahoos will parse this last election til the cows come back to the barn that’s leaning into yesteryear. We’ll find bigotry, blame the Latino turnout, fault the woman candidate’s presumed expectation of presumptive victory, dig into Alt-Right and Fox News and Breitbart. We’ll find plenty of fodder to explain a Trump victory.

Jobs are going away, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between rich and poor — once a leapable ditch — is now a Grand Canyon. The white majority is gone and the immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Terrorism rocks the Middle East and Europe and now here. A college education costs six figures and may not translate to anything but a lifetime of tuition debt. And to top off everything, monthly cable costs for a citizenry desperate for digital opioids, keeps going through the roof. What’s a poor white boy to do? Well, vote for the carnival barker selling snake oil, a panacea for all our ills, that’s what.

I know this, if nothing else: there’s a Disquiet on the land, an Unease out there in the Starbucked suburbs, a Dread covering the wired cities. Change is coming, scary as a Terminator who keeps getting up after being killed time and time again. The Terminator, of course, is the computer we brought into the livingroom, carry on our belt or in our purse, wired our house to, runs our car, plays our music, knows our habits and buying preferences, watches us constantly.

Future Shock. It’s here. It’s been here a few decades now, accelerating like a car we’ve lost the steering on. Half of us can’t program a Blu-Ray much less comprehend Implications. We just see the landscape blurring at breakneck speed. The Industrial Age isn’t closer than it appears in the rearview, it’s gone, nothing now but nostalgic longing for a past that ain’t comin back.

The social fabric is being torn apart. We are Borg now, getting our news exclusively from Facebook. Only 15 percent of the Facebook news feed folks look somewhere else. You read it on Facebook, it’s got to be True. So what if it’s just pablum and paid pandering? It’s all we need, right? We are morphing into the Hive and we know the relationships aren’t quite … what? Real? Deep? Meaningful? We don’t know, we can’t predict, we’re afraid of what’s coming next. Wait?! What’s that signpost up ahead? Naw, it’s not Rod Serling. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Big Brother.