The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A few weeks ago some Silicon Valley bazillionaire announced he thought it was highly possible this little reality we live in is some sort of computer simulation. Yesterday I read where two physicists were theorizing the universe is actually two dimensional, not three or four, but similar to a holographic image. I guess they’ve all been watching too many reruns of The Matrix.

It’s a discouraging notion, this idea that the Creator is a computer programmer, at least to me, a boy with nary a binary bone in his body. The tech boyz must think God was created in their own image, but I suppose if I’d invented the silicon world and made a fortune, I might see it their way too. Life, as the Bard once said, is but a dream and maybe it’s a cyborg dream after all, some simulation by an artificial intelligence where we all live in a fractal virtual world.

I’ve never been much interested in this kind of speculation, the stuff that religions are based on and faith revolves around. The universe is way too large for me to get my mind around and I only get to live an incredibly brief lifespan in the big scheme of things. I just figure there must be better ways to spend my time than dream up explanations that aren’t provable, then try to convince others they’re true and maybe have them worship at the font of this ersatz wisdom. Maybe even have them give me money. Maybe fight wars with the infidels who refuse to see the Light and the Way.

I know it’s appealing to create a world in our head. We probably do it all the time, every day, year in and year out. At least I do. Reality is pretty slippery and if you don’t believe it, you haven’t done psychedelic drugs or you don’t have friends who have lost their moorings. Reality is pretty much a misnomer, something I hate to admit in this newspeak world of ‘alternative facts.’ The truth is (if I can still use that word), if reality is relative, we haven’t got any solid ground to stand on. But I can still walk the beach, hike the woods, till the garden. One day I may wake up and find it’s all gone. More likely, someday I just won’t wake up. Then, maybe, we should reprogram, check for updates, add some apps, reboot. Hopefully then things will revert to normal. You know, if you believe in normality.

dabbling-made-easy

While I was cutting glass in the shack for a stained glass project, I was listening to a woman who won the McArthur ‘genius’ award for her theory on ‘grit. I think maybe by that she means stick-to-it-ness, what we South Enders call stubborn as a mule. If mules and jackasses are ever considered smart, we South Enders may yet win Nobels and Pulitzers, although maybe not the McArthur award.

This Grit Theory, though, caught my interest. Awhile back a fellow named Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book that postulated that successful people put in 10,000 hours of work before they reached competency enough to be considered successful. Masters of their Chosen Field. I guess it takes true grit to put in 10,000 hours of anything so maybe they’re saying the same thing.

Me, I consider myself a Dabbler. A dabbler, if you look it up in those old dictionaries nobody uses anymore, is a person who refuses to take himself seriously. Probably drinks, sleeps in, doesn’t read directions or take instruction, would rather cut off his right arm at the elbow than shoot for perfection, can’t be bothered with too many details, probably wanders the garden rather than finish an honest day’s work ….

I’m happy to be a Dabbler. I always intended to be a Bum, but dabbling saved me from the vicissitudes of bumhood. I found this old shack when shacks cost what shacks should cost. Then I stumbled into glass art and managed to dabble myself into gigs that kept me from working. I’d tell you I have 10,000 hours logged, but hell, I’m not going to waste time doing the math, all that multiplication, and anyway, I don’t punch a timeclock. Plus, then I’d want to do some long division, figure out my hourly wage and send myself spiraling into a deep depression.

Always dabble, that’s my preference, that’s my motto. Although, I will admit, I’m pretty gritty about it.

I listened to a guy the other day on the radio postulating how, in a few decades or so, robots will be so ubiquitous in our lives that we’ll actually marry them. I know, I know, it sounds whacked. Until you take a step back and watch your friends with their ‘devices’. I know people who sleep with their cellphones. I don’t ask them questions, I don’t pry, I don’t pass judgement. But it does get you to wondering. Me anyway.

I called up a credit card company yesterday and got the automated voice operator. Except now, instead of the usual 4 options to ‘her’ questions, my robotic friend could understand what I asked outside the parameters of her options when I asked to speak to a homo sapien, nothing that would surprise you folks with smartphones used to chatting it up with Siri.

I watch with no small dismay the frantic and pervasive text messaging of kids these days (and now my own friends) who prefer digital communication over the messy face to face of human contact. They have pretty much abandoned phone conversations too, once the preferred domain of the shy, and now correspond with thumbs and 140 character maximum messages. We are bonding with our machines. The Flatheads, our local vintage car guyz, probably could explain this in 20th century terms, this love of their Buick 88’s and ’56 BelAirs, all that waxing and rubbing, but so far they haven’t entered into matrimony. Although … Fairlane Freddy sleeps in his a night or two a month when the mizzus is fed up with his drinking. If it could talk reassuringly to him, god only knows where things might lead.

Trouble is, we’re making these robots smarter than us. Probably make them more beautiful too. If you thought artificial intelligence was frightening, couple it with a movie star body. We’ll be slaves in the time it takes to say pornlove. I suppose we won’t have to worry about children so in one short generation the androids will have won, no doubt part of their master plan. We’ll probably think it’s worth the sacrifice. At least Fairlane Freddy will.

I just got word my TV, a 32 inch Vizio, is spying on us. Evidently it’s capable of sending data back to its central headquarters where our avid interest in all things PBS are collected, collated and analyzed. For all I know these statistics are being sold to the Trump administration and filed under NEVER WATCHED ONE EPISODE OF THE APPRENTICE. ALERT THE FCC IMMEDIATELY!

I blame myself. I brought the cyclops into our house well aware that it was not my friend. It was a time-stealer, an electronic sedative, a babysitter and worse, a mediocre mess of programming. But I never imagined it as a spy. Oh, maybe I had some subliminal fears. Might explain the time when I lived in Seattle and Gomorrah that I tied a dummy to a chair and set the chair in front of a TV set in the living room. The TV had a Thunderbird wine bottle smashed through its picture tube. Guests who came over fell into two categories: those who treated it like an art installation and those who averted their eyes and ignored what to them was a disturbingly unacceptable tableau of deviant behavior.

Deviant behavior was probably the correct answer. Once, in the same year, my roommates and I dragged a TV into the vacant lot next door and proceeded to stone it to death. We hooked it up to an extension cord for maximum spark and implosion. When I moved up here to the island, we continued the tradition, but by then we aimed for peak destruction and tossed the one-eyed beast into a bonfire before smashing its eye. It became a kind of tradition, this television destruction. But like a lot of traditions, it lapsed over time.

Back in about 1982 my parents visited and were seriously alarmed that the only working TV in the shack was an old black and white with something wrong with the volume. At top volume it only whispered. Watching it was like a return to silent movies. Without the piano man. So naturally they decided to give us an early Christmas present in September. Our first color TV. So they could watch it when they visited when we’d exhausted conversations.

And now, 35 years later, we still have a TV. A TV we watch. And a TV that watches us. I suppose we could watch reruns of the Apprentice to give the appearance of compliance to the Donald’s ego. But we don’t have cable and I doubt we could find those reruns. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to return to those old traditions and just burn the bastard.

When I first came to the desolate South End, my first priority was finding a job, sad to say. I tried some dead ends, then got a school bus driving gig, but my boss decided I was probably a long-haired dope smoking leftist radical who needed to find other means of employment. The writing, as they say, was on the wall. So … I picked up a part-time furniture stripping job 35 miles north just in case the ax fell.

I’d finish my morning bus driving shift, then head up north for my dose of ketones and other chemicals known to the State of California as Killers. Trouble was, the repair shop didn’t open til 10 so I would drop into the Freedom Café in downtown Mt. Vernon and have coffee and breakfast, fritter some time and maybe do a little writing while I waited. I still had visions then of becoming a poet. Or a novelist. Who knows? I had a notebook, I had a pen, I had time on my hands. You can write the Great American Novel over coffee and eggs and toast if you keep at it. And if the stripping solvent fumes don’t scramble your brains first.

My waitress, after a month or so, asked what was I writing? They evidently don’t get a lot of would-be Kerouacs in for breakfast specials. The sight of rambling Jack scribbling away over his omelette provoked some serious curiosity. When I told her, she seemed mildly impressed. After all, how many literary furniture strippers had she served?

Well, after some light banter over the next few months, she finally asked me out, maybe shoot some pool, drink some beers, see how the wind blew. I said sure, be fun, but when I came up to find her a week or so later to make it official, this date of ours, she’d quit her job and taken another one up at the Farmhouse, the new café on the highway to Whidbey. So I drove up there, figuring what’s another 10 miles more. Of course when I asked at the restaurant they told me it was her day off.

So I drove home and had some time to wonder what it was about her that was so attractive to me. On the long lonesome drive back to my shack, it hit me. She reminded me of Karen, the woman I’d left back in the Midwest, and so, I resolved to call her up after these intervening years, see if she was married with children, and if not, maybe ask if she would forgive this fool, see if she was footloose and fancy free, see if this cruel universe offers a reprieve occasionally, deserved or not. And just so you know, just to offer some small glimpse of optimism in this otherwise bleak old world we live in, sometimes it does….