The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Google cars came out with some statistics recently. Driverless cars don’t have accidents really … and the few they do have are cars with drivers running into them. Some of the boyz in the Flatheads, our vintage car club, were flabbergasted. They’re old school, guyz who revel in memories of souped up engines, backroad drag races, cue ball shifter knobs and dangling furry dice on the rearview. They love their rods, they love their memories and they go apoplectic to imagine a future of robot automobiles they can sit in the backseat and read a paper. They have fond memories of other uses for that backseat.

“The Age of the Automobile is coming to an end,” I made the mistake of saying to Two Toke Tom at the Diner where it was overheard by half the Flatheads at the breakfast pow-wow where they’d pushed half the tables together to make room for about a dozen car enthusiasts. Their Packards and Chargers and 88’s were lined up outside the plate glass like an outdoor Museum for Testosterone, right next to Tom’s beater with the cracked windshield and the missing front quarter panel, all gleaming with fresh wax and loving care. I might have been wiser announcing we ought to confiscate guns in an NRA meeting.

Freddie, the head honcho Flathead, jerked his head in the direction of my blasphemy. “What are you drinking, man???” he practically shouted. Brenda spilled coffee on Harry’s hand, missing his cup by a quarter mile. “Yeoww!” he hollered in pain. The whole café was now on Alert. “I only mean the day is coming when cars will drive themselves. They don’t have accidents, Fred, and if they don’t have accidents, guess what the insurance companies are going to demand? You want to drive your big Dodge, fine, but guess what they’ll charge your Charger for the privilege?”

“Over my dead fender, Skeeter.” Two Toke raised his cup. “Amen, brother Fred, Amen.”

“All I’m saying, Fred, is half the folks out there on the road these days aren’t driving anyway. They’re text messaging, they’re talking on the phone, they’re wobbling over the center line and they’re drifting onto the shoulder. They go from 60 mph to 30 mph. I don’t know what all they’re doing behind the wheel, but it sure isn’t driving. Might be okay with me if they let the computer do that for em so they can pay attention to their smartphone.”

Fred snorted and the assembled Flatheads snorted in agreement. Brenda mopped up Harry’s table and dried his hand. Harry would live, Two Toke would get a good laugh on me later and the Flatheads would all drive down Memory Lane with rumbling mufflers, KaHooga horns, mohaired upholstery, big fins and whitewall tires like mastodons crossing back over the Bering Strait to a garage somewhere in the Pleistocene.

This last week Dutch Shell moored their gigantic oil rig down at Seattle and Gomorrah’s waterfront. A flotilla of kayakers — kayactivists — slapped their paddles in the harbor like angry beavers slapping tails at Godzilla. With similar success at scaring away intruders. The Raging Grannies shackled their rockers to the gated entrance at the wharf and were politely arrested. Tech Town, polite but not much interested in politics.

Some of the boyz in the Band at our last drinking session, I mean, practice session, suggested a solution to Seattle’s escalating ecological confrontation: bring that drilling rig up here! The South End has a legal port, the Port of Mabana. Three port commissioners are required to fill out 65 pages of paperwork for the state, same as Tacoma or Seattle. They’re volunteers, definitely part time, and they don’t want a full time clerical position so they’ve been considering dismantling the old landing of the Mosquito Fleet that docked there almost a hundred years ago with supplies and immigrants. The old dock was blown down long ago and the Port has pretty much existed as a historic relic ever since.

“Why not kill a couple of seagulls with one stone?” Mando Mike wondered aloud over his rotgut wine at our last practice. Don lifted his beer glass in accordance and I had to admit once again the South End String Band, marching to a demented drummer, was once again ahead of the curve. Not to mention the beat….

“What about protestors?” Monika asked and Erich mused that what we got around here are Tea Party protestors mostly, more worried about the heavy hand of Island County government than some transient oil rig destined for the Arctic Sea. I figured maybe WE could protest. Give us some free advertisement. The Raging String Slingers! We already sing stuff about the coal cars and coal mining. Got our very own War on Coal, I guess, why not weigh in on oil drilling? Paddle out in our dugouts and slap banjos on the water, why not? Great photo for the Stanwoodopolis Gazette and the New York Times, all those liberal commie media outlets!

Well, we didn’t get much practice in, not music anyway, but I think we got a good gameplan. Which one of us is gonna call Dutch Shell’s rep, I don’t know, but I left an urgent message for Fred at the Port of Mabana. He hasn’t called back yet, but we figure he’s on vacation, hopefully be home soon. Fred better be rested, all I can say, cause there’s serious work coming to the South End. Maybe even jobs, the paying kind. Be a first down here….

Some researcher, no doubt hunting for a good topic for his PhD thesis, did a follow-up survey on high school seniors, asking them before they graduated How Important they considered themselves. In the Gallup study 65 years ago, only 12% answered Very Important, probably the kids on their way to Harvard, Yale and maybe the Korean War. In 2005 80% of seniors responded with high marks for themselves. This kind of tectonic shift is what gives sociologists tenure. And tenure probably gives them a sense of being Very Important too.

My boomer generation has spent decades instilling self-worth into their prized progeny. Every crayon drawing is framed before mounting on the refrigerator. Classes in ballet and gymnastics and soccer and flute and yoga for kids and golf and tennis and art … all are vehicles for discovering that special talent we let lie dormant and hidden until it was too late for us, too late, but not, by god, for our kids.

Now, of course, the little peepers got Facebook. Everyone is his or her very own press agent, forever updating the photos, refining the resume, bragging on-line. If you spent hours every damn day of the year looking at your Bragbook, wouldn’t you think you’re Very Important?

Gonna be a total shock, the real world, for those 80% when their new boss doesn’t give a rip about their Facebook page except to ferret out reasons not to hire them in their interview, when they discover ‘friends’ aren’t, when they’re confronted by bad jobs or no jobs, high rents, bills, health issues, lowered expectations, the tsunami of stuff that knocks the feet from under VIP’s as well as the losers with low self esteem. Go back to the high school reunion, the one for the class of 1950. I bet the % of us folks who answered Very Important back when went down even further. Life is good at one thing — at least down here on the South End — it teaches us modesty. Those 80%, trust me, they’ll learn it the hard way. But they’ll learn it.

I just got off the phone with my airline companies, you know, a couple of the ‘friendly skies’ folks. The flights I’d reserved needed to be canceled, long story I’ll spare you temporarily. I got the computer first which gave me plenty of options to choose from and only took 3 or 4 minutes to listen to first, then answer the multiple test. Five minutes later I was shuffled over to a human. Cindy, her name was, although, given her very indecipherable accent, it was hard to tell. If I thought getting her name right was difficult, understanding her questions was impossible.

I think she understood English. I’m pretty certain she couldn’t speak English. Most of our conversation was me asking if she could repeat what she just said. Finally, totally frustrated, I just guessed. Would I like to cantigate my frist? I said okay. What slingbash was my conflastation? I gave her a flight number. She seemed to accept it as an answer.

I’m assuming, if my airline hired her for customer service, their strategy was to frustrate me to the point of hanging up. Save them any additional bother. But … I wanted a refund, money, moolah, greenback of dollar, whatever Alaska Airline deposits with whatever butchered name they give it. Finally Cindy or Candy or Karla managed to garble the word ‘credit.’ No, I said, I wanted a refund. She repeated ‘credit.’ Gleddit. Or keepit, but I got the message. No refund. I tried 2 or 3 different tacks, but like I said, she understands just fine. It was me who didn’t….

I’m what you call an Infrequent Flyer. Who knows when I’d want to fly Alaska again? And I didn’t want to ask about the expiration date on my gleddit. I asked Cindy if the mizzus — who IS planning a trip — could use that gleddit. I think you know what her answer was even if none of us could understand it clearly. She burbled a few more unintelligible phrases, asked hell if I know what, then paused, obviously waiting for an answer or a dial tone. “Okay,” I said, “we’re done. You, me and that crappy outfit you work for.” Cindy said, “Hap a niece drive” … or something equally inscrutable.

I don’t know about the rest of you in the flying public, but I can’t wait until computers replace some of these jobs completely. I don’t think they’ll be any more empathetic, but at least I’ll be able to understand what they’re saying when they screw me.