The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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….

Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food from the communal fridge. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

START THE DAY BEFORE NOON

At least on work days. The other five days, sleep in. You earned it.

LEARN HOW TO READ
Writing is no longer essential, but … the successful South Ender can tweet, twitter and text, even if spelling is marginal.

LISTEN TO OTHERS
Especially on Facebook and other social media. Keeping track of friends’ and enemies’ likes and dislikes is an invaluable tool in the South End toolbox. Decision making is easy, just see what the herd is doing.

WORK AT LEAST ONE HOUR A DAY.

No matter how severe the hangover, the lethargy, the ennui or excess hedonistic activities. Work isn’t ALL bad.

WORK OFF THE GRID

No South Ender worth his or her salt works in order to pay half his or her income to the IRS. Barter heavily with your neighbors and friends. Crab, clam, trap, fish, hunt or grow it! Food is free and food is fun! If you buy your dinners, food is neither.

LEARN TO REPAIR

Your own car, truck, toaster, wellpump, toilets, etc. You can’t barter or sell busted stuff and repairmen cost an arm and a leg per hour PLUS that service fee to drive half a day to and from your hell-and-gone address. Knowing a few handyman tricks can save you another part-time job at the fast food joints 50 miles away.

MARRY UP!

Chances are you’ve embraced an aesthetic lifestyle. You artists and musicians need supplemental income and unless you plan to work full time low paid minimum hour jobs, a second salary is essential. Marry one.

If none of these suggestions work for you, plan on moving soon. Life on the South End is mostly for those with alternative-fact occupational schemes. If you landed here thinking this was just a suburb of America, get yourself a GPS and head back to the mainland. Not guaranteeing jobs necessarily, but at least the possibility exists out there in Trumpland when America’s CEO brings them back. And those of us who stay, well, we could use the extra elbow room. Good luck to ya!