The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old landlord was building a plane in his basement. We were renting the walk-up 2nd floor apartment above Sky Pilot Phil and his long suffering mizzus. I don’t know what Phil did for a living, but I’m fairly certain he wasn’t an airline pilot. When we first moved in, he took me down in the cellar to see his pride and joy. His pride and joy wasn’t his wife, I could tell that right off the bat. He treated her not much better than his cocker spaniel that filled the backyard with landmines we tried to avoid without much luck.

Maybe you’ve never built a small airplane. I sure hadn’t. But I can tell you, it wasn’t small crammed into that basement of his with all the stuff you usually find in a basement. Plus all the stuff Phil needed to assemble this contraption. “Wow!” I said. “How long you been AT this?” He told me he’d been working on this five years. It had a fuselage and I guess he had the motor or engine or whatever aviators call it, mounted on the front, but no propeller yet.

“Wow,” I said again, a little at a loss for words. All I could think was you couldn’t pay me enough to crawl in that flimsy mess, sit in the cockpit and take off to a certain death by gravity. “How much more you got to go, Phil?”

He was close. Real close. I thought of Icarus, maybe too close. “It’s really something,” I said lamely. Like a lot of places I lived during my roaring 20’s, I felt like I needed to move on. Phil’s family life was a wreck and I didn’t care to share it through the heating vents so the day came when I gave notice. “Sure hate to leave before you take her up,” I said, like I really wanted to be a witness to another Hindenburg.

Phil shook his head sadly. “I don’t know if I can get it out.” “Up, you mean….” I asked. “No, out. I didn’t think about getting it through the basement door. It’s a little too big, even disassembled. I may have to cut through a wall.”

We all have our dreams, I suppose. Some realize those dreams and some … well, some are like Phil. Just lucky. My suspicion is he’s still taking renters down in the cellar and still imagines a day, not too distant, of his own personal Kitty Hawk. I’ll give him this: he built a plane. And he lived to tell about it. His wife, I’m betting, probably has a better story.

Zorba, a buddy of mine, stopped in today. I asked what’s new? and he opened up the tailgate to his truck and pulled out a metal attache case, snapped open the fancy clasps and lifted out a spidery looking gizmo with four propellers at each corner. Nestled beneath its insect body was a gimbaled camera. I was looking at my first real life drone.

Roll over H.G. Wells, give Beethoven the news. Zorba, whose real name is Mike, ran me through all the sci fi protocol, then showed me photos of where we were on the South End from hundreds of feet up, photos where I could see Port Susan lapping shore on the east and Saratoga Straits on the west. He ran this aerodynamic spy plane with his laptop. He said it could go up 500 feet and fly as far away as a mile and a half. I thought I heard a Time Machine land in my backyard.

This is indeed an age of miracles and wonders, a future we barely have to wait for. Zorba and I shook our heads, laughing. At least until he asked, “If we can buy this, what do you suppose the government has? How much more sophisticated is theirs?” We’ll all have one these before long. $300 now, they’ll put em in cereal boxes as prizes in a couple of years.

Well, I haven’t given enough thought to how I’d like to use mine yet. Course, I’d have to get a laptop first, maybe even a cellphone first, something to control the little hummer. Doesn’t seem likely. Once again I’ll be the last yahoo on the South End, miles behind the curve, watching the aerial acrobatics in the neighborhood, everybody taking photos from outer space while I’m earthbound. I know it’ll seem like techno-envy, but I may have to set up a No-Fly Zone over the shack, enforced not by laser beams maybe, but I still got Gramp’s old shotgun.

In this corner we have the Wildman of Tech, the Silicon Kid, the Tesla Terror: Elon the Elephant Musk. In the other corner we got the Bizness Brawler, the Texas Trampler, the Mad Maverick: Mark the Venture Gorilla Cuban. Ladies and Gentlemen, this will be a 15 round battle of the billionaires, no holds barred, no Marquis of Queensberrry bullshit rules, everything goes, may the best and richest man win!

This is, after all, America. Home of the Wealthy, Land of Unlimited Spending. The Supreme Court has made it possible for political contributions that have virtually no ceiling. If you thought the rich got richer before, hang onto your Social Security checks, the ride just got rougher … if you’re poor. Meaning, not a millionaire yourself. All men, so says the Declaration of Independence, are created equal. Not sure how equal women are. But created equal doesn’t mean squat immediately following birth. The rich run the world, boys, get used to it. So reads the law, so says the Supreme Court.

Might as well just accept that and embrace the Battle of the Billionaires. At least it’s up front and out in the open. Most of the dark money rolling into the election cycles is hidden from view. Give Mark and Elon some credit — they’re taking off the gloves and turning on the cameras. Why not? It’s Entertainment, folks! And trust me on this, a hungry America is starving for more reality TV, can’t really get enough, and hey, let’s skip the detailed proposals, why don’t we. A lot more gratifying to wallow in the escapism of Haitian immigrants eating your pets or graphic tales of rapists run amok from across the porous borders. Foreign policy briefs? We don’t need no stinking foreign policy briefs!

This election is coming down to the wire, folks. Anybody’s ballgame. If we had our heads screwed on straight, we’d skip the vote counts, drop the Electoral College in the garbage and go right to Like or Dislike. Course, you know and I do too, the rich would have no limit on the number of their Likes.

Mermaid Jim used to live south of me, the closest person to the island’s Head, its southernmost inhabitant. I only encountered him infrequently and so he never remembered meeting before which meant I heard his stories numerous times. Invariably he would recount his mermaid story, and invariably I’d wait to find discrepancies from the previous tellings.

“I was scuba diving in the Bahamas,” he’d start in, apropos of nothing in our conversation and only moments from new introductions, how do ya do’s, where ya live? “I was down maybe 30 feet off the reef when she swam right up to me, talked to me like I’m talking to you, bubbles coming out of her mouth while she held steady with her tail. Her tail, man, her tail!”

“Mermaid?” I’d say after hearing the story the first time. “Right,” Jim would say, grateful I wasn’t rolling my eyes or calling 911 for psychiatric help.

“I saw her the next day and the next, every day I dove down there.”

“Whaddaya talk about?”I’d ask. “Nothing much,” he’d always respond.

I guess if I met a mermaid, I’d have some questions and maybe she would too, but Jim apparently didn’t and his sea princess was similarly uncurious. It made his mermaid story short and sweet but not particularly interesting. Still, he never embellished it. Never altered it. He met a mermaid, they talked, he went home. Simple facts. Extraordinary encounter. Worth telling everyone he met about it — mermaids exist, he’s seen one, he’s even talked to one.

Once I asked him if he thought she had a family, if maybe there was a whole undersea city of mermen and mermaids, if they had a watery civilization, if ….
“How would I know?” Jim answered, annoyed that his one mermaid wasn’t plenty as it obviously was for him. “I met a mermaid,” he said, “and she talked to me.”

Developers built four houses near Jim’s place maybe 10 years ago where there hadn’t been anyone for half a mile either direction. Jim told me, last encounter we had, he’d be leaving for over the mountains, maybe Mazama, where there would be less neighbors to bother him. I nearly asked why he wasn’t headed back toward water, maybe be reunited with his mermaid, but I didn’t.   I figure in a way he’s taking her with him.