The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Folks are sometimes surprised to learn I actually went to college. It could be they’re surprised I could get in, much less graduate. But mostly I think they don’t understand why someone would go to four years of advanced education so he could work blue collar jobs half his life. Kids nowadays go to a university, they’re going to come out with a debt that looks mountainous right out of the starting gate. They’re probably not gonna look for a minimum wage job and a cheap apartment above the TV repair shop the way I did. Then again, I didn’t come out of college in the hole. In fact, I rolled out with enough money in the bank from working 30 hour a week jobs while going to school that I figured why work at all for awhile? That, for you ambitious young’uns, was the first mistake.

You can learn to like not working for other people. Or, in my case, you can learn that on top of hating to work for other people. I took summers off, then I took spring and fall off. Mostly I would work for two or three months, give notice and take a long well-deserved vacation traveling around the country. Which is how I found Washington State and the Olympic Peninsula. I vowed to move out, buy a slug farm, cultivate mosses and ferns, make a new life in the foggy temperate rainforests. I didn’t quite make it to the coast, but … close enough for me.

I guess if you graduate with a degree as versatile as an English major – coupled with a second major in Sociology – your options for careers are pretty near exponential. Meaning, you can work most of those jobs folks with MBA’s from Harvard probably aren’t applying for. Nowadays the young student is more likely to take a degree in business or international studies than American Literature given that tuition costs aren’t the 250 dollars a semester I had to dole out back in 1968. 500 bucks a year. 2000 for the whole she-bang. Don’t ask me why I didn’t get a PhD for that kind of money. I should’ve. Except I was itching to see the country and I had a 1962 Rambler and I was fed up with schooling.

Life looked like an open road, let me tell you. And … it was. For awhile. But you quit jobs the way I quit jobs, pretty soon your resume tells any prospective employer you may not stick around real long. Hard to imagine why a young buck like myself wouldn’t want to make a career out of kennel worker at the local dog pound, I know, but oddly, employers value loyalty and longevity, even if it paid $1.75 an hour back then.

And pretty soon even a will-of-the-wisp worker like myself realizes the job market is evaporating faster than the icebergs polar bears are sailing. Combine that with the less than rosy employment opportunities of the South End, you maybe can see why entrepreneurism works for some of us desperate dead end graduates. Which, looking back now from a few decades of a so-called career in art, it did. Sure, it could’ve turned out tragic. It could’ve been a cautionary tale for my friends to tell their kids. ‘You want to turn out like Skeeter, go ahead, keep flunking math in your senior year, see how you like living hand to mouth in some hellhole.” As it turns out they keep their kids away from me about the time when college applications are due. You don’t let them play with a happy artist when what they need is to buckle down and make some serious Life Decisions.

I hear a lot of talk these days that history and literature and the fine arts are a waste of time for a college to offer. Not worth the high tuition when you rank it against potential earnings. I think that kind of thinking is too sad for words. That kind of thinking is right out of the mouths of the folks with no imagination and no use for one. Speaking for those of us with ‘useless’ degrees, I can say my education didn’t end back in 1972 when I missed graduation ceremonies. What I learned was learning is a lifetime endeavor. It didn’t end with a job. It didn’t end at all. You ask me, whatever that cost, it was worth every cent.

Imagine, if you can, living without power for a few days.  No phone.  No daytime TV.  No internet.  No refrigeration.  No connection to the modern world you once knew and took for granted.  Maybe you got some candles.  Maybe some kerosene lanterns.  Hopefully some matches.  All the stores nearby are shuttered.  No gas, no food, no ice, no beer and wine.

We just went five days without electricity.  Windstorm blew down trees, power lines, dreams and all hope.  What is a modern pioneer to do?  I’ll tell you what.  Crank up the generator!  That’s right, mister, keep the house powered up!  Reefer cooling, TV on, lights on too.  Just keep pouring gas into the thing, ignore the noise from yours and the neighbors too, return to your Facebook updates, your Instagram posts, your emails and your newsfeeds.  This past week we listened to the hive in full swarm across the road, generators all buzzing angrily.

Folks ask how we can manage without one.  Since they themselves can’t imagine life worth living beyond the reach of the grid.  Oh, sure, they remember their first power outage here, the one that convinced them to haul down to the hardware store once the roads were passable again and buy that portable 25 kilowatt big boy for the next emergency, at least keep the TV running and the computer, maybe some lights, probably not electric heat.  Some got serious and installed permanent whole house units, propane tanks, inverters, automatic kick-in so they needn’t worry about missing an Oprah interview or the ending to that Netlix movie.

The pioneer days are over, friend.  Sitting by kerosene lantern, hauling in water, stoking the stove — maybe we think that sounds romantic, a break from the modern world — but not for most of us now.  Inconvenience isn’t in our vocabulary.  I can tell you that you will survive okay without the computer for a day or two.  You can discover what life used to be like before Instagram.  You might even remember what was important before the digital age.  Maybe why you came here in the first place….

Light the candles, haul out the cake, open the presents! The Web is 30 years old. Remember when we all thought this would free the oppressed, topple authoritarian regimes, democratize information and liberate us all? Barely ten years later Google opened up shop and every bit and byte of data was available to anyone who owned a computer at the touch of a keystroke. Nine years after Google the I-phone made computers mobile and Apple rich. This was 2007, a mere 12 years ago. Time flies when you’re revolutionizing the world!

Thirty years. You probably remember the first personal computer you owned. Not that long ago. They were introduced in 1975. The mizzus had one probably about 1985. I got one about turn of the century. The one I’m using now is probably the 4th generation. Karen’s is probably double that. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her and a friend, arguing whether a computer was just a tool or whether it was a revolution. That conversation has morphed into whether the revolution is beneficial or malevolent. Future Shock is behind us now. Future Fear is here.

The Tech magnates rule the world. They own the data for every keystroke you make on the internet, every purchase you make online, every biographical reveal you put up on Facebook, every route you take, every step you make. They analyze it, they use it, they sell it, they watch you day and night. Zuckerberg believes in an open society, one without secrets, one where you cannot hide. He made it so.

The democratization of information turned out to be only half the story. The dissemination of false news is the other half. Turns out we don’t have the wits to check our facts so we’re suckers for every hate monger, political dirty trickster, government intrusion, crooked scammer and the 500 pound kid on the bed in his parents’ basement. We mumble about monitoring Facebook or Google, we pound our chest about loss of privacy, we make speeches in the legislatures about clamping Pandora’s Box partway down. Give me a break.

The genie is out of the box and howling now. Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner. We can no longer imagine the world before the Web any more than we could imagine one before the steam engine. No one pines for the horse drawn carriage, no one wants to be tethered to a land line phone, no one wants to live without their Facebook friends. I had a fire down at my electrical panel box yesterday and my neighbor, the one I’d run across the road to have call the fire department, seemed to gloat when he asked me after the fire had been put out, if I still thought I was smart not owning a cellphone. I told him there was no way I was buying a $#@&^ cellphone. It doesn’t make me smart, but I’m digging some heels against the winds that blow me toward a future I don’t trust any more.

We just got an inquiry from a woman who wanted to rent our little bungalow next door, the 1940’s house we bought that Ruby, our resident stripper from the ‘30’s built with her vaudevillian husband Harry Vine. Nice stage name, Harry! Ruby grew up in our old shack before hitting the circuits but eventually came home to the South End, built her house next to her mom’s and taught dancing in town. Probably not pole dancing, just waltzes and such.

The inquiry wanted to know if we could disconnect wi-fi and if there were power lines around the house. She had recently returned from Nepal and apparently the electronic ‘grid’ was more than she could bear, having become sensitized in her absence to what the rest of us barely notice. We replied that the wi-fi could be turned off but the electricity that flows throughout the house might be an issue. Me, I’d have told her we could shut it off at the breaker panel and she could live in the dark without heat or hot water, might feel like a Tibetan monk in a cave after a few days. But the mizzus told her that maybe Ruby’s wasn’t the dream vacation she envisioned for herself and good luck finding what was.

I suppose if I spent a year in Nepal, coming home would be a shock. Television, internet, commercials, billboards, the constant bombardment of 21st century technologies. Most folks, it’s just the opposite. They can no longer imagine living life if it meant sacrificing those. We got a renter up at Ruby’s this weekend and last night the power went off about 4 in the morning. When he woke up, no lights, no toaster, no coffee maker, no TV, no reason to live. He called his daughter who texted us and said her pop was ‘freaking out’. I had gone down to get the Sunday papers and noticed all his curtains and shades pulled. I guess if you have no lights, why let any from the outside in either? Or … maybe this was an indication that our guest was in full panic attack. As you can well imagine, the situation was Grim. How many more minutes could he manage? How long before suicide seemed the better option? When, oh Lord would help arrive or the power come back on? Was the entire country de-electrified? Had the Russians cyber-struck the Grid? Or aliens? Or … worse?

Well, one minute after the distress call came in, the power company had restored the lines and electricity was flowing normally down to the South End. Yeah, it was a close call. But no life was lost. I did notice, though, the shades are still drawn, probably an indication of lasting scars. Even an hour living in pre-digital America can leave irreparable wounds.