The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The mizzus said to me the other night, fed up and frustrated by folks’ disinterest in History, she was thinking of taking up pottery. She’s invested 40 years down at the Stanwoodopolis Hysterical Society and she feels like she’s swimming against an outgoing tide and no longer seeing shore. I know the feeling, but instead of helpful advice, consoling warbles or another pep talk, I said ‘Pottery? You think art will be any easier??”

I spoze she could make useful items. Make them aesthetically pleasing and add another cultural layer to the nettle farm here. Maybe sell a few downtown when the house and gardens are cluttered, barter with the neighbors, eventually market to the nurseries and galleries, set up the website and the advertising strategies, sell local and then watch Chinese imports undercut her beyond even paying for her clay.

Most folks don’t value what she does or what she might want to do. They don’t value artists or their art, history or historians, writers or literature, musicians or their songs. Folks who hope to make a living that way won’t. Nine times out of ten. Maybe 99 times out of 100. I could bitch and moan — and oh, baby, I do! — but to what avail?

The trick in life is to do what you love. If you need to make money too, good luck to ya. This society values money. Winners. American Idol or the NBA. You love history, you are one of the lucky few, however. Most people never find one damn thing they can be passionate about. That’s why we invented television and You-Tube. They don’t have anything better to do, nothing that fills their void with passion or joy or the sheer love of that thing that possesses them.

But the people who make music, who write poetry, who tell our histories, who make art, who dance and sing and celebrate, ask them if they needed to be paid to do it. Ask them if money was the reason. They do it to sing, to dance, to paint, to tell stories, to remember history. They are, without a doubt, the richest people on the planet. Starving artists? I don’t think so — they breathe the very air for food.

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill. The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers. Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire. She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know. “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots. You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died. The Casino was their whole life. We even provided funeral services. Why not? Half their friends were us casino workers. You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined. Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop. Jill muttered ‘why not?’ and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question. “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought. “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go. She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED. Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought. I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

Rise of the Luddites

News blurb: A Waymo car went up in flames in San Francisco’s Chinatown after a crowd surrounded it, scrawled graffiti, smashed windows and then threw a firework inside the driverless vehicle in the middle of a crowded street Saturday night.

Now, I’m not really certain a driverless taxi cab qualifies as a cyborg or a robot, but it definitely has similarities. But I’m willing to celebrate the good folks of San Francisco for what no doubt will be the opening salvo against the coming Android Apocalypse. Admittedly the cab wasn’t armed with defensive weaponry which will be required gear in the near future. And eventually the robo-cars will outfit with offensive firepower. Start with tasers, tear gas, work up to more lethal strategies if required.

Right now, though, the AI assisted automobile has few defenses, making it a prime target for anti-android citizens. Start with destroying a wheeled droid and move on to whatever iteration the Silicon Tech Boyz inflict on a fairly clueless society whose members mostly trust the puerile billionaires to act in humanity’s best interest. Sure. If you define humanity as themselves….

The Luddites of the early 1800’s battled the industrialization of their weaving guilds by smashing the mechanical looms in burgeoning factories. Didn’t take long to squash that revolt … and it won’t take long to round up these modern technophobes either. But it does strike a blow against the empire, does it not? A small spark that might ignite a revolution. The bots are coming and the android evolution will be like nothing the old Luddites could ever have imagined. First the machines will replace jobs, then they’ll replace us. Probably why the Silicon Valley geniuses are building vast underground bunkers and stocking them with caviar and champagne. They plan to be the last ones standing. Which might be true, but only for a very short time. Their inventions aren’t going to be calling them Daddy when they come calling one last time.

I keep hearing these ads for Artificial Intelligence that promises their ‘product’ will not be hallucinating. This is probably good news for the clients who purchase this software, but it does little to allay my own anxieties about a future with robots who are far brighter than me (yes, I know, my digital clock is probably brighter than me) but who evidently slip into alternate realities without LSD or other circuit altering drugs. I’ve been around humans who do this and trust me, I’m pretty certain I don’t want my android creating fantastic worlds to entice me into too. Pretty obviously AI has some psychotic breaks occasionally, enough that corporations P.R. department feels the need to reassure the public that their androids have normal psyches.

As opposed to their competitors…. Whose whacked out AI’s are slipping into La La Land undetected by you, a possibly normal human user. Buyer beware! No doubt these cheaper imitations use contaminated silicone, save a few bucks and let the hallucinations fall where they may. I’m picturing HAL on 2001: A Spaced Odyssey, having a little fun with Dave outside the spaceship, stoned out of its digital head, giggling like a chimpanzee. But of course, what if your little cyborg is on a bad trip? That hatch door might open up all right, but maybe all the other doors too, let a little air into the servers.

Tell you the truth, I’m already starting to mistrust my computer. It turns itself off, adds new stuff at night, glitches and acts suspicious too many times. Not that I suspect drug usage or a drinking problem. At least on its end. Just has a mind of its own and doesn’t care to ask me for permission of any kind. If it’s hallucinating, I haven’t noticed yet. Then again, I might be the wrong guy to notice.

It seems another lifetime ago when we heard phrases like ‘compassionate conservative’, doesn’t it? The new conservatives, definitely gone MAGA, briefly flirted with a kinder, gentler campaign after their chosen one (and possibly God’s) had his life spared in an assassination attempt. That lasted about a week, but now we’re back to all-out war, incessant name-calling and the usual bullying. So why would we expect less of the veep pick?

Right out of the box we have J.D. Vance decrying his opponent as a childless cat lady, what, it seems, is a woman who doesn’t want children and therefore is an enemy of parents and family values. He even proposes a tax system that penalizes such people and rewards those with more kids, figuring, apparently, that when the immigration ‘problem’ is solved and the borders shut down, we’ll be needing those kids for the jobs that go unfilled. Now, full disclosure, I don’t have kids. I know, un-American. Selfish. Probably unnatural. Definitely worthy of higher taxation. I have friends who tried to have children but couldn’t. And friends who are gay who never felt the need to adopt kids. They should pay for turning their backs on providing for our workforce. Tax them! Tax the traitors!

So okay, maybe I’m being a bit sensitive. And besides, what a great way to reduce the national deficit. You could even cut the taxes of the corporations and the rich by raising mine. I mean, I want to help. I’m patriotic. I love my country. I can see now what a thoughtcrime it was to not have children. Too late for me but we could certainly force the child-bearing age couples to have a few. Might even legislate that. The Chinese had the right idea, just backwards, by limiting the number to One. We could learn from that mistake. And if the rich are still paying too much, we should consider taxing people who don’t own pets. Save us all that money for animal shelters and cut the deficit. So many possibilities. And after all, isn’t that compassionate and still conservative??