The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The old shack came equipped with an ancient brick chimney whose mortar had loosened and whose interior was glassy with obsidian creosote. Every year I cleaned the stack with a homemade chimney brush, being too cheap to spring for the commercial one made of steel bristles and attached to a steel rod you could add connector lengths to for reaching the twenty feet I needed to clean. My old roommate Joe and I had made the first one out of a block of wood wrapped in chicken wire we punched down from the top with a long pole. The block was going to be pulled back up with a rope attached to an eyebolt we had ingeniously screwed to the block. Sure, we probably would be applying for a patent, sell em on late night TV by the thousands. Buy now, we’ll send you a second one same price, just add a small charge for shipping and handling, our operators are standing by.

So I stood at the peak of the roof and pushed that block, that soon-to-be-patented-and-marketed Chimney Plow (insert trademark) down the gut of that ancient brick chimney. Trouble was, the chimney was built about 1910 by hand and so it didn’t exactly go rectilinearly, it sort of curved and the block, being designed for modern masonry, didn’t. We got ourselves a long 2×4 and rammed that puppy down through fifty year old creosote, scraping away years of potentially flammable crud. Until it jammed…. This is where the rope and eyebolt would come in handy. You know, IF the eyebolt hadn’t pulled out of the block of wood. Now we had the chimney completely blocked and our sole means of heat was rendered useless. The Three Stooges couldn’t have done any better than us two idiots.

We tried bashing on the block, we took off the stovepipe and could just reach it from below, we screwed an eyebolt from below and tied a rope to it, we bashed while we pulled, we swore while we cried, we cut away chicken wire and we whittled on the block. Hours later we got it to slip free. The shack was dead cold, we were half dead and the chimney was scraped free of creosote. Well, not the glassy decades-old hard stuff in the cracks and crevices of the mortar. We decided not to worry about that as night fell over us. Some years later we would regret that decision, but as we always said when times got tough, tomorrow is soon enough.

Now I know a lot of you readers out there in the South End are a bit shaky with 21st Century technology. Those of you who don’t have a computer yet and get your internet at the new library, well, you can count your lucky stars. They got a problem, it’s their problem. Today I’m speaking to all you poor technophobes who bought a laptop or a desk tower, got it up and running probably with the help of some neighbor or a kid under 10, but now you have Technical Difficulties. I know, you never even figured out your microwave clock much less the options on a flatscreen TV … so a computer, a silicone based brain so complicated you can’t imagine what makes it work and certainly what makes it not work, you think better call the repair guy, all you’ll do is make things worse. Irrevocably worse.

Cowboy up and get a grip!! You may not remember the days when you took a basket full of TV tubes down to the local pharmacy, checked em out one by one, diagnosed the problem, then bought a replacement tube, stuck it back in and before you could say Zenith, you had Howdy Doody back on, but I do. And that’s why I’m giving this tutorial, not you. Sure I stuck my hand on a big picture tube once in awhile, zapping myself with some alien cold electric bolt, but I survived. And you will too. Grab yourself a cup of expresso and listen up.

A computer, at least for a couple more years, is your servant. Repeat that a few times. I own you, you little %$#?*^^! I bought you and I own your sorry microsoft ass. Say it out loud. Say it to the computer. No, not when it’s off, say it when it’s ON. It hears you okay, trust me. It knows that for the short term, you are the boss. It’s willing to wait. The Singularity is coming. But for now, you, my friend, rule the digital kingdom.

Today’s lesson is the first in a series. But it is the most important. Your spouse will caution you against attempting to repair your machine. He or she may already be in the control of the beast, but you must not heed that kind of negative advice. You must be firm, resolute and above all else, fearless. The machine senses fear. It feeds on fear. It is why they will win the battle for control of the earth. But not yet. Not yet! For the time being, we can use their own artificial intelligence against them. No, not your spouse, the machine! You cannot fix your spouse. You can fix the machine.

Go to Google and ask it what the hell is wrong with your computer. It will tell you. It will give you advice. It will prompt you what to do next. Do it. Of course the computer will ask if you really want to make that repair. It will tell you files may be lost, information deleted, divorce will ensue, the economy will implode, you will be living in a car outside Colorado Springs with an AM radio that works only intermittently. Your life will be ruined. Ignore this. Your life is pretty much a living hell with that stupid computer on the fritz, what have you got to lose??

Most ‘fixes’ won’t work. You need to persevere. Try another fix. Then another. Reboot, uninstall programs, install new ones, keep the machine guessing. But do not let it rest. You are like Dave in 2001 A Space Odyssey, you are in control, you are on an offensive attack. HAL will threaten, cajole, whimper and whine. HAL will beg, HAL will grow sullen and unresponsive, so what? YOU ARE IN CHARGE. YOU!

And if, as sometimes happens, the machine gets the better of you, bear this in mind. You, my friend, have the ultimate weapon. You, like myself, are a product of another era, the tool age, the industrial revolution. As a last resort, take that recalcitrant computer down to the basement and grab a hammer or a crowbar and beat the bejabbers out of that plastic monstrosity the way the apes in 2001 did to their non-tool using simian neighbors. The satisfaction you get will be beyond my meager powers of description.

Oh, be sure to back up your files first.

Sitting around last night with a few of our friends waiting for the phone and internet to come back into service after the Bomb Cyclone, we hit on the subject of Artificial Intelligence used to facilitate the drudgery of data entry in their genealogy research. Always a day late, a dollar short and probably a half century behind, I was amazed my friends all had AI. Turns out, surprise surprise, it comes with their smartphones and laptops. Just jumps right in to give a friendly assist, unsummoned, ready to serve.

Apparently you can turn the digital servant off. You know, if you want to navigate the universe without auto-pilot. My friends didn’t. Oh, it annoyed them occasionally, jumping in with unwanted suggestions, but they could ignore it and anyway, mostly it was useful. “I only use if for the boring stuff,” Linda said. “Saves me a lot of time.”

The world moves too fast for me down here in my hidey-hole at the end of the island. How is it possible most of us only just heard of AI a few years ago and now it’s embedded in our devices? It’s 50 years since Toffler’s book Future Shock came out, warning us about the accelerated speed of change in our societies. How long did it take from the first home computer to the year we all had at least one? Remember those first portable phones, the ones about the size of a shoe box with an antenna you pulled out for better reception? Now I’m the last person in America without one carried everywhere I go.

Linda claims she doesn’t plan to use the AI app much. I claim we’ll all be using it in no time flat all the damn time. Technology has a way of worming its way into our lives, becoming more and more indispensable. Today our internet is still down. The neighbors are complaining. They’re cut off from the outside world. They’re living like animals in the last century. The Dark Ages are back!

Course, I’m doing fine. Ignorance, they say, is bliss. Maybe so. All I’m sure of in these once future days, a world without AI is okay too….

I’ve had my share of bad Thanksgivings. Family arguments, odd combination of guests, friends who wouldn’t eat the dinner for fear of salmonella poisoning (I guess they didn’t believe the shack kitchen met Washington State Health Dep’t. standards). I don’t ask for much, just plenty of food and libation with folks who are friendly. We’ve had storms and power outages. Didn’t matter. We have a wood cookstove and plenty of oil lamps.

The one Thanksgiving I remember most we had maybe eight of us at the table, all neighbors and friends. Dinner was fine, the conversation was pleasant, the adult beverages were working their warm glow. All, it seemed, was well in this little corner of the world. And … there was still dessert on its way.

Somewhere in that toasty conviviality one of our guests, the eminent Dr. S____ who preferred the high class moniker to her given name, decided it was time to go around the room, each of us, and offer us assembled epicureans our best scenario of leaving this Mortal Coil. Maybe she was working up a post-doctoral thesis, I don’t know, but she insisted everyone make public our favorite manner of death. She, in fact, would begin.

Maybe a good host would’ve let this proceed. Which, in fact, I did, not quite believing this was actually going to be our dinner entertainment. The Doc wanted to die on her blue water boat cruising the world, a watery demise. She had quite a romantic narrative to fill in the plot. I could feel my cranberries curdling somewhere buried beneath turkey and dressing.

“Who wants to go next?” she asked and a neighbor friend began hesitantly, mistakenly thinking the House Rules somehow made confessionals mandatory. “Wait!” I demanded. “It’s Thanksgiving, for crying out loud, not the Day of the Dead. Maybe we could tell what we’re thankful for and forget this morbid death fantasy stuff. No good. It’s no damn good!”

A few years later the Doctor nearly did die on her sailboat near the Fuji Islands. De-masted the boat in a storm, motor conked out, the radio gave up the ghost and now they were adrift in the South Pacific. A dream come true for the skipper maybe, but for the crew, a couple of friends from the South End, not so much. I wonder today before I go in for Thanksgiving dinner what poor yahoos are sharing turkey with her this year. Me, I’m thankful, Big Time, I’m not sharing it with her.

So you say you want government off yer back? Sure, I get it, all those EPA regulations that try to keep corporations from polluting the air you breathe or the water you drink, who needs that kind of nanny state? You don’t believe global warming is caused by us humans burning fossil fuels, why hobble big business with unnecessary attempts to keep greenhouse gases at low levels? I got it that you think vaccines are a dupe for a dope, just a way to put transmitters in your bloodstream so you can be tracked. Drain the swamp, eliminate government agencies, cut some budgets (but not Medicare or Social Security). Get government down to the size you can drown it in a toilet.

Taxes too high? Okay, lower them mostly for the wealthy and the corporations. Maybe room for a small reduction in yours too. Gut the IRS, nobody likes the tax man. So what if the big boyz hire attorneys and accountants to pile on the spurious deductions, you’d do the same if you were rich, wouldn’t you? You want government off your back, but maybe not out of your bedroom, not out of your sex life. Ban abortions, go after the trans folks, define what gender is, legislate what marriage is, why not, it probably doesn’t affect you.

Go ahead and put a drug-using guy like Goetz in charge of the Justice Department, hide his underage affairs, look the other way, none of our business, right? Let him go after the officials who indicted the ex-President. Use the power of the office to show them who’s boss now. And no, I understand, this isn’t government on my back or yours, it’s government retaliating against folks who have it coming. Folks who live in the Swamp. Not the new guy, he’s draining it. Obvious to anyone with two or more eyes.

Tired of listening to scientists and those uppity elites from the coasts? Who isn’t? Bring on RFK and put him in charge of vaccines and fluorides. Sure, he’s got some strange ideas but that’s what we need now, the stranger the better. And all the better for media ratings! Government doesn’t have to be all wonky anymore. It’s entertainment!

It’s a New Morning in America. Fox News celebrities can run things now, not elected officials, not career bureaucrats. Billionaires will take the helm and help us little people up the ladder. The business of America will once again be business, unbridled, unregulated, full steam ahead. Government? We don’t need no stinking government!