[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-zen-and-the-art-of-tweeting.mp3[/podcast]audio — zen and the art of tweeting
I can’t figure out whether we were bored BEFORE the internet and smart phones …. or whether they MADE us bored. Ruined our concentration, shot our attention spans full of holes, filled every waking minute with text messages, snippets of celebrity gossip, news flashes and crawler messages on the bottom of our brains’ screens.
We check our phone messages every 3 minutes (if we’re older than 40) or every 15 seconds (if we’re under 40). The older crowd checks e-mail 20 times a day. If you still get a newspaper, you got most of the articles from newsfeeds on your computer anywhere from a few hours ago to a full day. It isn’t ‘news’ you get in a newspaper these days. Everyone’s got a cellphone now and by god, they paid for it and they plan to use it — as often as humanly possible, whether they’re driving in the freeway passing lane or taking a whiz in the airport urinal. They’re connected, linked up, every waking hour of every day, I guess forever until the day they die or their phone plan expires.
It’s hard to believe this has happened, not just in our lifetime, but in the last decade. If we thought the Rat Race was hard, well, the digital rats are on steroids, cranked on meth and just a little too busy to slow down to consider what’s happened in the last few years. Too busy for sure to read a book or write a letter or just disconnect from the Hive half an hour. Watch a 15 year old and see the Future — it’s here! 30 minutes ago. 17 tweets.
Even on the South End there’s no escaping the tsunami of this incessant incoming information. At least until the winter storms. For those 6 of us who refuse to own a cellphone. Or buy a generator. Or even go down to the Diner to keep abreast of the breaking gossip. In a few days we’ll try to catch back up. Course, by then the world will have accelerated another few miles per second. And we’ll be those objects in your rearview that aren’t anywhere near as close as they appear. Best of luck when you get where you’re in such a hurry to get. You got a second or two, send us a postcard. We still get mail….
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-teaching-kids-to-take-candy-from-strangers.mp3[/podcast]audio —- teaching kids to take candy from strangers
With Halloween cranking up full volume in stores right after Labor Day, Pastor Paul down at the Little Church in the Ravine made it his mission to warn the South End about a holiday devoted to Devil Worship and the celebration of Evil Spirits. He’s been pounding the pulpit three Sundays in a row now and we still got three more before Fright Night actually arrives. No doubt he’ll need chiropractic work on that right hammering hand.
Most of the congregation is my age, meaning they remember when Halloween really was a spooky affair. Outhouses got moved a few crucial feet back, wagons got disassembled then reassembled on the shed roof, burning bags of dog poop were set on fire in the driveway. Trick or Treat was no idle threat. Now, of course, the only Trick is the one played on us by the candy industry. Like most every holiday, holy or not, Halloween’s been popularized, commercialized and sanitized. Now they’re profit industries. Economic engines. Job creators.
I haven’t seen a kid in a skeleton outfit come knocking on the shack door in decades. Pastor Paul is maybe a bit overwrought about the flock’s grandkids serving as Spawn of Satan when maybe we ought to worry more about the little tykes dressing up in $50 Star Wars outfits, becoming subjugated Slaves to Obesity. The poor little high fructose sugar beggars haven’t got the foggiest clue what Pastor Paul is worried about. And their parents, who’ve driven them to the lucrative candy-rich suburbs of Stanwoodopolis, mostly worry about child predators and sewing needles stuck in apples.
Nowadays Halloween ends before dark and the security lights come on. Hardly matters with Mom and Dad sitting shotgun in their SUV idling by the curb…. Now, I’m not advocating we go back to the days of cruel tricks. But it did encourage some creative thinking. Although maybe this is what Pastor Paul is railing about. He’s got a steep hill to climb down here on the South End, is all I know. That, or he should look into Exorcism as a second profession. Be a cash crop down here. And not just around Halloween.
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-walden-lost.mp3[/podcast]audio — walden lost
Here’s a newsflash: most of us are addicts now. To our TV’s, to our cellphones, to our computer, to social networks, to everything Digital. If the medium is the message, here’s the message — we got a syringe in our heads with a permanent IV drip.
My mom used to catch us kids laying around, doing pretty much nothing, complaining how we were bored. Nothing to do, we’d whine. She wasn’t buying it, no way, no sir. She’d shoo our sorry butts off the couch and out the door, where, presumably, the world was waiting for us to get busy, make something of a new day, summon up the neighborhood cronies, go bike riding or play whiffleball.
Watch a friend who’s visiting and notice how frequently they check their phone for a text message. These are people OUR age. The kids never stop checking. It’s like having video games and Netflix and the high school prom and phone gossip and Google all wrapped up in a candy wrapper. The heroin isn’t listed as an ingredient but believe me, it’s there. We’ve hooked the kids, we’ve hooked ourselves. Our attention spans are shorter than a commercial now. And everything in America is a commercial. Don’t ask me what the answer is. There’s no methadone for this, no 12 step program, no Going Back. Every 30 seconds we need a Google fix, a text message, a Facebook update, a digital affirmation that we’re still on-line, still worthy, still connected.
Walden Pond now isn’t some remote back-to-the-land escape from the oppression of the Industrial Age, it’s a wilderness where cellphone towers are spotty and cable doesn’t reach and high-speed internet isn’t available. It’s a place where Hi-Fi exists, but Wi-Fi doesn’t. It’s a primitive world where the pace of life is measured, not in Twitters, but in the entire day, in the seasons, in lives moving slowly with time to pause and contemplate. It’s a world that, sadly, no longer exists. Not even down here on the halcyon South End. You don’t believe me, Google it…..
[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-the-house-that-jack-built.mp3[/podcast]audio — the house that jack built
Our chalet was one of the last houses built under the county’s ‘owner-builder’ permit, just before they outlawed notions like a citizen building his own home without meeting every Uniform Building Code that applies equally to a house in Maine winters or hurricane-prone Miami. The county folks said I’d be stupid to build a house that way. When I sold it, I’d have to admit, or confess, or ask forgiveness, to any and all potential buyers. Probably couldn’t sell it to anybody that hadn’t just fallen off a turnip truck and hit their head. Which, undoubtedly, the county thought I’d done.
The truth was, I still had to meet all the codes, the square footage for window openings, the R-factors for insulation, beam calculations, perc tests and septic requirements, plus meet the state electrical codes. About all I ‘got away with’ was reduced permit fee and the right to take as long as I wanted to finish the house.
I took two years. The pioneers didn’t take two years using ax and ox. I was 42 years old, prime of my life, cocky as Bantam rooster, figured I could learn as I went. Study up on concrete, then pour a foundation. Read up on framing, then build a wall. Study plumbing, then install an indoor toilet. Bone up on electric, then wire up the main panel box without running 220 volts through my eyeballs. This is what we South Enders call Trial and Error in the School of Hard Knocks. It isn’t rocket science, but …. mistakes can be costly. I nearly lost the house removing studs in the main bearing wall in order to frame up for a Russian fireplace we hadn’t planned originally. Studs bent like a row of archers’ bows and the second story and the roof obviously were coming down around me. Could’ve planned this better if I’d been experienced…
I could bore you with all the details of all my mistakes —- there were plenty. But in the end, we moved in two years to the week after pouring the foundation. Doors are all homemade. Cabinets are hand fashioned. Most of the furniture we designed and built. Even the toilet seats are custom fit curly maple. It’s a shame, I think, we don’t allow, much less encourage, folks to build their own home, the way they want it, as simple or as fancy as they choose. I know for a fact it’s the most ambitious, the hardest, the most satisfying thing I ever did. Although I’m real glad it didn’t kill me that day when it almost collapsed on top of me. And I admit, during winter storms, I sometimes wonder if I got enough nails and screws in the old place to hold things together. So far, so good…..
