The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This week the Hot News is this: The Government Is Spying On Us!! Turns out they can check with the phone companies, get a few billion of our numbers we called and using algorithms, figure out who’s been calling Bin Laden. Or their mom in Keokuk. Folks are up in arms. My neighbors are afraid to use their cellphones. Down at the Diner, there’s talk of Big Brother and the necessity to maybe get MORE firepower in their arsenals. GTE Johnny, who used to work in telecommunications, said we ain’t seen nothing yet. “The government knows when you were born, when you got divorced and probably when you’ll die,” he pronounced ominously over his newspaper headline that read: White House Defends Spy Activity. His veggie omelette coagulated while he warned us poor victims what was coming, everything from cyber surveillance to space cameras so powerful they could read the Diner menu from the Hubble.

“There’s no more hiding,” he whispered, although we all knew the hidden microphones in the salt shakers were picking him up Loud and Clear, transmitting his seditious comments to a Cray Super Computer a mile deep under the Rocky Mountains where it was being transcribed, collated and filed in the vast data banks the National Security Agency maintains. Even as Johnny finished, we could imagine storm troopers loading up the black helicopters, GPS set on Camano’s South End, instructions given to breach no resistance, possibly take no prisoners.

“The damn government!” a few soon-to-be-gulag residents shouted over their biscuits and gravy. “Intruding in our private lives. What’s next?!”

Oh, I don’t know. Credit card monitoring? Facebook statistics? Google info gathering? Grocery store scan cards to track our grocery preferences? Yahoo monitoring of our internet so they can customize our ads to maximize profits? Rental car companies using GPS to check our speeds and locations? Cellphone interceptions by crooks and hackers? Security cameras in every store, mall, streetcorner, bar and restaurant? Corporations mining our meta-data to tailor their sales pitch. Phone companies that record every tweet, twitter and text?

If the boyz at the Diner want privacy, well, they should throw away their credit cards, ditch their cellphones, soak their computers in the bathtub, don’t drive, don’t go to town, don’t talk out loud. Do like the Barefoot Bandit — only don’t steal the planes. You think government is spying, welcome to corporate and social networking. You gave Facebook everything you got.  Whadja think??? The damn government, as always, would be the last to get this stuff. The NSA shoulda maybe joined Facebook a long time ago. Or YOU shouldn’t have….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/audio-stanwood-and-gomorrah.mp3[/podcast]audio — stanwood and gomorrah

Down at Sheila’s Shear Salon, the place is abuzz with talk of the new strip joint coming to downtown Stanwood. “Male strippers! It’s about time,” Candy, the new stylist at the end chair exulted. “Bring those bad boys up on stage and let us treat them like sex objects. I say if they could open a Bikini Barista in Stanwood, we can have our own pleasure palace too.”

Jenny Wilson, deputy Carl’s wife, looked up from her People magazine article on Jennifer Anniston’s latest beau so swiftly Sheila nearly snipped off an earlobe. “That puritan crowd up there in the floodflats isn’t going to let a sex club open up, not in your lifetime, not in their Uff-Da town.” “Well,” Candy said in mid-curler twirl, “I can dream, can’t I?”

“Half that town is empty storefronts,” Cheryl Walters mused from under the dryer hood. “You’d think they’d welcome about any business opening up before it becomes a ghost town. Jack Gunter has half a dozen galleries up there, probably the only thing keeping them solvent.” “And he’s got nudes in a lot of those paintings so who’s kidding who about dictating morality,” Candy shot back. “Bring on the naked men, I say.”

Sheila weighed in from over by the cash register. “Be careful what you wish for, Ladies. They got heroin, they have cock fighting. There’s meth and every drug known to Eli Lily sold down at the high school. Medical marijuana and pot stores are gonna be on every corner, you watch. They have big city crime now, home invasions, break-ins while people are watching Wheel of Fortune. It isn’t Mayberry any more, that’s for sure, and now they want men parading their ya-ya’s up on stage. Don’t know about you girls, but I’ve had enough ya-ya’s to last me two lifetimes.”

The salon fell silent in momentary deference to Sheila’s much discussed divorce two years ago from her Ex, Walter. He’d been laid off at Tri- City Foods at the ripe old age of 51 and promptly retired, drank beer all day with his loser buddies and thought he could rest on his laurels until Social Security kicked in. Well, not if Sheila had anything to say in the matter. Which cost her a few black eyes. And cost him a marriage and the last steady income he’d see in long while. After sufficient pause, Candy resumed setting Cheryl’s curlers. “Stanwood and Gomorrah,” she sighed wistfully. “Uff-Da, ya-ya. Equal rights, crazy nights.”

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/audio-Pilgrims-Progress.mp3[/podcast]audio — Pilgrim’s Progress

You lived on the island as long as I have, you start thinking you either discovered it back when the Spanish cruised through or you must have come over on the Land Bridge from Everett, maybe when the mastodons were heading north on their last exodus.

What memories are still intact are of a place not too populated, logged over long back and growing a new forest. The road down to our homestead was through a continuous woods from Terry’s Corner to the Camano Head, 15 miles  unbroken only by Elger Bay Store and Garrison’s Real Estate office. Since then things have opened up a bit. Price of progress, they tell me. High price, you ask me … and I know you didn’t.

But … things change. Take that to the bank any day of the week. I forget sometimes how really long I’ve lived here. Of course it’s going to change! If we wanted it to stay the same we could move to the desert or over to the peninsula where it rains all the time, some place nobody wants to live. Me, I was hoping to live in Paradise a long way from jobs or work, which, I know, is a paradise almost by definition. I just forgot how many people retire here, folks like myself who wanted the cheap land. Trouble was, they also wanted medical services, fire services, police protection, lots of local shopping and, well, everything Lynnwood has without the congestion and taxes. They never figured out that if they got their wish we would BE Lynnwood.

Still, I’ve been hiding out down here 37 years now and okay, we got a couple of stoplights we never had, two little shopping complexes, a medical clinic, full time firemen, way more deputy sheriffs … but … Tyee Store closed and so did Elger Bay Café, Terry’s Corner Commons ‘ commercial district never caught fire and the road down to the South End still looks like it did my first dark and rainy drive to get a first look at my shack and property. Probably some guy in early Lynnwood thought the same as I did 150 years ago. Ask me what I think in another 100 or so….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/audio-The-Next-Genesis.mp3[/podcast]audio — The Next Genesis

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/audio-South-End-Nursery.mp3[/podcast]audio — South End Nursery

Before half the South End converted their gardens and basements and outbuildings to medical marijuana production, the era of the boutique nurseries flourished. They specialized in everything from stingless nettles to thornless blackberries, figuring the hordes of immigrants new to the area would welcome their hybridized species.

Some folks, like Camano Natives Nursery, sold only what was here already. Oh, the salal was popular, and some folks bought little potted sword ferns, but most of them just let the back forty spread to the lawn if all they wanted was the local horticulture. Island Botanicals went the other direction, marketing everything from blue poppies to swamp cypress. The first hard freeze or month long drought or hurricane force winds usually killed the little transplants, but then a lot of the newcomers had had enough too and moved on to more exotic climes where those plants were already Old Growth.

Avant-Gardens, a co-op run by artists with a chartreuse thumb, more hortichuckle than horticultural, sold an eclectic variety of strange herbs, quasi-hallucinogenic plants, odd garden ornaments and large variety of found objects, weird art and advice for alternative living. In a few years they were broke and discouraged and scattered to the far ends of the known universe — well, mostly scattered down here on the South End.

I guess Avant-Garden was where the 60’s hit the Sound, scarcely a sizzle when their cooling lava reached the beach. Their commune broke up, their greenhouses tilted and fell, their yurts and tipis and geodesic domes finally succumbed to the weight of moss and leaf mulch and the neighbors’ hostile gossip. If you know just where to look, you can find a path that starts near the Head and winds through the nettle forest past a couple of VW vans peeking headlights through the blackberries and finally you’ll arrive at a clearing by the bluff. The ragged polyethylene of the greenhouses wave off their bent PVC poles like Tibetan prayer flags of the insane or hopelessly lost. A few beds of periwinkle have escaped into the woods. Some lilies of the valley made a stand next to the big cedar and in the spring, the native bleeding hearts carpet the clearing, their pink flowers a nostalgic reminder of the dead dreams of so many of us old hippies back then.