The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When Sheila’s husband got laid off a month ago from the outfit that supplies thingamajigs for Boeing, she hired on at the IGA up north as checkout clerk. “I haven’t rung up groceries,” she said, “since I was 17 and still in high school. Back then we didn’t have scanners, we had to ring every item up on the register. What a difference!”

The other difference, she says, is how much less friendly the shoppers are in our “Friendly Hometown Store”, not like the A&P back in her small Ohio town in 1966. “I guess everybody knew everybody. These days half the customers don’t say hello, they’re busy talking on their phones. I might as well be a robot.”

“You will be soon,” I offer over a cup of coffee while Earl watches TV in the livingroom, probably glad of an early retirement and a wife willing to go back to work. “Hon!” she yells, “can you turn that down a little?” From where I sit at the kitchen nook counter, Earl fiddles with the remote, but instead of turning his game show volume down, he changes channels. Sheila shakes her head and rolls her eyes. Earl takes a hit off his Budweiser and settles into a talk show.

It’s 9:30 in the morning. In a few minutes she’ll leave for her 10 o’clock shift, work until 6, then drive home to cook dinner for Mr. Wonderful. “I don’t mind going back to work,” she tells me. “Good to get out of the house.”

I bet. We used to drive school buses together, Sheila and me, back in the good old days when we were both single and poor and new to the South End. Sheila married Earl and that finished our friendship until recently when I met her, where else, in the checkout line. We have an occasional coffee, but pretty obviously this won’t work for long, not judging by the volume blaring from the livingroom, a loud hint.

“Good to see you, Skeeter,” she says at the door. The TV noise follows us outside. “Thanks for the coffee,” I say and she says, “No problem,” when we both know there is.

It was a sunny day yesterday so I decided to take a stroll through the neighborhood, maybe see if any crocuses had poked up into the sunlight early this year. Call me an optimist, but I’m forever hoping to quit my hibernative tendencies of these dark winters. Daryl and his mizzus Claudia were out by their garage when I waltzed by so they asked me in for a cup of coffee. I said sure even though I wanted to stay out in the sunshine as much as possible, not sit in their dark kitchen where half the time the curtains remained drawn.

Before I could say ‘cream’, Claudia was off on the election, so heated up she could’ve boiled the water for our coffee on her nose. “You believe that egomaniac?” she started out and by the time I’d gotten my java she was ranting about the cuts coming to Planned Parenthood, the next Supreme Court nominee, the pipeline in North Dakota and the undisclosed tax returns of the newly minted President of the Free World. Daryl smiled at each verbal fusillade and sipped his black coffee, occasionally offering up fresh meat for Claudia to gut and dress.

Claudia and Daryl pretty much stick to their god’s little quarter acre. Like a lot of us down here on the xenophobic South End. But unlike most of us, they see storm clouds on the horizon, tempests coming onshore, pestilence creeping in from the woods. The glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, the earthquake is around the corner and the bird flu will kill half the world. Sinkholes will take their car, the government will ruin the global economy, tomorrow is something to be dreaded. I don’t usually take sweetener in my coffee, but given the extra bite of bitter, I spooned in a little honey. This launched a tirade about killer sugar and the food conglomerates’ greed, high fructose sugar, transfats, GMO’s, additives, diabetes on the rise and the end of Obamacare. I could feel my stomach starting to roil.

By the time I got back outside dark coastal clouds had rolled in and the sun was pretty much blotted out. I knew I wouldn’t find a crocus trying to reach for spring; instead, I’d see the nettles poking up back on the trail in my woods. The groundhog wouldn’t see his shadow this year, he’d be dead of groundhog flu. An ill wind blew through the firs and I wondered if rain wasn’t far behind. Rain and toads, hail and misery. I hurried up, hoping I could make it back to the house before the sky fell in. Darkness seemed to come early. The house seemed miles away. And even if I made it back, it probably would’ve burned down by the time I got there. I thought I heard wolves howling. No, I was sure I heard wolves.

Turned out it was just the neighbor’s dachshund yapping. I could see the house. It was unburned. The sun had come back out. The Olympics were incandescent across the Sound and a warm breeze greeted me when I came out of the woods. A little cluster of snowdrops were poking up by the woodsheds and the hellebores were blooming. Maybe, just maybe, spring wasn’t far behind.

I was just reading that Amazon has 30,000 non-human employees, what we proletariat call robots. In 2014 Facebook acquired Whatsapp whose worth was 22 billion dollars. The messaging firm had a total of 55 human employees, not that I think they were profit-sharing with them. Google, whose worth is more than most country’s G.D.P., has 60,000 workers compared to GM (worth a tenth of Google) which has 215,000. And you can bet your 401-K GM is on the forefront of automation.

Trump can talk about bringing back the coal mining jobs til the cows come home again, but if anybody thinks employment is going to go up in the land of the digitized, home of the android, they need to adjust their meds. Go ahead and bring those factories back to America’s fruited plain, but don’t expect them to hire us humans. That dream left with the Industrial Age. The discontent from the folks who watched their jobs outsourced to China, Mexico and the robots, well, that resentment is only going to get worse. And the income inequality too.

This is Future Shock rearing its ugly orange head. This is the future roaring up in our rearview way closer than it appears, ready to roar past, curves or not. The folks who think we can close the barn door and wall off the borders, they either need to stop smoking whacky tobaccy or start. Pulling the covers over our heads isn’t really the brightest color in the crayon box. I know, folks are worried about global warming and immigration issues, minimum wage and Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and gun control, abortion restrictions and prayer in the schools. All worthy causes and reasons for concern, granted. But when half the population is thrown out of work, when the 1% who own the wealth become the overlords who wall themselves in armed compounds and patrol the perimeter with drones to protect their largesse from the peasants who suspect injustice is being done to them and their odds of winning the Lottery are actually worse than they ever dreamed, well, all those other issues will take a backseat to the bonfires that light up the purpled mountains majesty.

Like the song sez, the jobs are gone boyz … and they ain’t comin back. And if you think Trump is scary, get ready for what’s coming when people who aren’t stockholders in those companies worth billions with 55 employees can’t feed their families. You might just change your mind about gun control.

A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….

You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.

For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.

“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.

Well, they didn’t like being called Deplorables but I’m not sure they’d have liked being labeled racists either. Or homophobes. Pretty sure they wouldn’t care to be called bigots either. But they’ve elected a guy who feeds their fury and their boundless resentments, a vindictive self-righteous instrument of their revenge. He told them he would be their Retribution and they voted for him to be just that.

Oh yeah, they were sick and tired of the elitists, the East coast yuppies, the Wall Street crowd, the immigrants, the Woke, the trans and the gays and any religion other than theirs. Deplorable? They’ll show you deplorable!

Try this: get rid of foreign aid, eliminate the Department of Education, NOAH, the EPA, half the Department of Agriculture, fire the bureaucrats, deport anyone their Leader takes umbrage to, put totally incompetent sycophants in charge, alienate our allies and suck up to our enemies. How do you like that?

You wanted a Biznessman for Prez, you figured the billionaire who’d gone bankrupt how many times? would be the right fit? Sure, privatize the Post Office, let Musk get rid of his competition for satellites and space travel and EV’s, figure out how some weather company will take the place of NOAA. While you’re at it, ditch the fire and police, just more government, let the private sector sell you protection. Way more efficient, right? Doesn’t take a Harvard professor to figure out government is mostly waste and fraud and incompetence.

And while you’re at it, close the borders, lay tariffs on everything that crosses them, who needs an economist, you got the guy with all the answers. Fortress America! The one true God on the money! Put religion — yours — back in private schools. Get rid of science while you’re downsizing. Vaccines? Who needs em? Scientific research? Don’t make me laugh. Global warming studies? Hell, no, drill, baby, drill!

Slash the IRS too. Why make the rich endure an audit for those bogus exemptions? Social Security must be rampant with abuse, all those 150 year olds collecting your tax dollars. Time to slash and burn, so what if you get your check a little late. If at all….

Deplorables? You tell me. What I think is you’re just ignorant. Time will tell if you’re making America great again … or just breaking its back.