The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This year’s pre-Christmas windstorm, fresh on the heels of the Skagit River’s historic floods, knocked down two of our large hemlocks, tore the top off one of our first live Christmas trees planted in the early ‘80’s and left us with no power or water, phone or internet for four days. After two weeks we still don’t have internet. Zipley says they sent someone and it was fixed but when we got home from New Years, still no connection to the outside world. The Zipsters say they’ll drop by sometime this week, no rush. After all, who requires more Epstein stories, Trump outrages, eco-disasters, news from the war zones or any and all social media??

In other words … Christmas this year may not be white but it most certainly will have no White Noise. Just a return to the way things were when we first arrived on the isolated end of an island not yet discovered by the beachfront-hungry hordes desperate to escape the teeming cities of Seattle or Stanwoodopolis. An era before the internet wrapped its addictive tentacle around our frontal cortex, when time moved more by the ebb and flow of tides than the spaces between Tik Tok videos.

Was it a better era? No need to ask the young folks — it’s like asking an opioid addict if sobriety is preferable, it’s an impossible question at this point. But me? Oh baby, you bet it was! It wasn’t just the economy that globalized. Everything did. We live now in a personal space invaded by constant information from the world outside, news in fragments, images from the electron screen that have absolutely nothing, nada, to do with our real lives, our friends, neighbors or family.

Over the years we’ve let reality slip out of our consciousness, replaced by virtual experience, kitty videos, doomscrolls, snippets from an outside world we imagine is more our world now than the one outside our front door. And we like it. It keeps us constantly engaged, amused and safe from boredom.

I’m two weeks or more into withdrawal. We spent Christmas with traveling friends over on the Olympic Peninsula for our annual bah- humbug getaway for four days, then another week just the mizzus and me driving down into Oregon then over to the Idaho border to visit old friends and celebrate New Years. Were we bored? Don’t kid yourself. This was the real deal….