The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

More and more of us South Enders are losing their religion, don’t ask me why. I just read a survey that showed a quarter of us don’t believe in a Supreme Being, too bad for Donald Trump. That’s way up since the last survey. But here’s the odd part: the number of us who don’t believe in God but believe in an afterlife doubled. Faith based Heaven, I suppose, or maybe just bad logic, a trend that seems to be more and more prevalent.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, Rev. Paul makes it a point most every Sunday to exhort his flock to eschew sin. Live a holy life, he preaches, and if you mess up, ask the Good Lord for forgiveness. Believe on the Lord, he says, or surely Hell will follow.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but I’m guessing most of the folks who believe in an afterlife are talking about Streets of Gold, not Beelzebub’s BBQ. You don’t believe in a deity, you probably won’t buy the quaint notion of the Devil. And if you think Heaven is waiting for you no matter what, why not enjoy a little sinning while you’re waiting for the Pearly Gates to open? No punishment waiting, no purgatory for the wicked. Believe me, Pastor Paul doesn’t pound that pulpit with his ragged Bible to tell parishioners they got nothing to lose if they covet their neighbor’s wife. Go right ahead, cheat the other guy on that used car you said was running great when you know damn well the engine isn’t getting oil up in the cylinder head. You can make a little extra money and still get a reservation in the Angel Motel after your last breath.

Shirley, my neighbor who runs the Pampered Pekingese Pet Grooming service, claims she’ll be reincarnated. As a pup. The Hindu believe the Wheel rewards those who do good, but I guess now we think we get what we want, not what we deserve. Shirley better hope she doesn’t end up at the pound with all the other unwanted pets. Not everyone gets pampered in this mean old world.

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I’m usually an optimistic guy. A chucklehead, really, but I was born a white male in America, as lucky a combination in this cruel world as I can think of. You want to talk about the 1% of the world, I’m in the club. But lately I’ve been troubled, my optimism has begun to seep away and dark thoughts crowd my horizon. Maybe you know what I mean, just an inchoate Dread starting to cloud your days. Climate change, Gaza, Trump, Ukraine, Artificial Intelligence, Trump, pandemics … did I mention Trump?

The past few years, the past few decades, they’re the hottest on record. Storms are worse, hurricanes form faster, the Arctic icepack is melting, the Siberian tundra is pumping out methane stored for millions of years. Sea levels are rising, ocean temperatures are off the chart, the world is heating up, just like our politics. Meteorological immigrants will destabilize the countries they move to, borders will close, walls will be built, nationalism will make us all xenophobes and racists.

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars by sending transport spaceships each with one or two hundred pioneers. He plans to bio-engineer the next generations, humans more adaptable to life on another planet. With AI, who knows? The guy may actually pull it off. He says he wants to die on the Red Planet. I’m down with that, more room for me, more room for you. Just hope the Martians welcome immigrants.

I read today that the earth’s human population should peak at just under 11 billion of us in 50 years or so then start to decline. And that’s not counting all the Musk masses emigrating off planet. I’m not sure who does the calculations for half a century out but I won’t be here to fact check. 11 billion is a helluva lot of us, mostly crowded into coastal cities soon to be inundated by sea rise, high tides and storm surges. Kansas, get ready for urban refugees!

Today here it’s 85 degrees, the sun is warm, the mountains are hazy over a Puget Sound rippled by onshore winds, our garden is giving us dinner tonight, our insular little world seems like Paradise. What, me worry?

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David Brooks, the NY Times columnist ventured the opinion that all us fear mongers who fret endlessly over the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the coming Android Apocalypse are essentially way way off base. His argument is that since the cyborg ‘mind’ is incapable of human emotions, it’s just a tool, a machine. It won’t be replacing the good old homo sapien brain because, well, it doesn’t have a soul.

“The human mind isn’t just predicting the next word in a sentence; it evolved to love and bond with others; to seek the kind of wisdom that is held in the body; to physically navigate within nature and avoid the dangers therein; to pursue goodness; to marvel at and create beauty; to seek and create meaning.
A.I. can impersonate human thought because it can take all the ideas that human beings have produced and synthesize them into strings of words or collages of images that make sense to us. But that doesn’t mean the A.I. “mind” is like the human mind.”

Nothing to worry about there. A hammer or a screwdriver won’t replace us either. Your laptop will probably aggravate you, but it’s not going to kick you out of the house. That self-driving Tesla won’t change the radio station when it gets tired of whatever nostalgic music you listen to. And AI will never learn to really love you no matter how realistic the sex robot will be in the near future. But what Dave fails to take into account is the very thing he assumes will be beneficial, the AI’s inability to have a soul like us humans. They’ll soon be upgrading themselves, far surpassing our own abilities. Okay, maybe their poetry will be a bit derivative, their art nothing but an amalgamation of previous work, their music a fused hybrid of everything ever composed. That is not the point.

The point is these plagiarizing cyborgs will put their efforts into generating the next generation of cyborgs, faster, more complex, infinitely smarter. Poetry? They won’t need no stinking poetry! Give me a break, David. They’re going to figure out exactly who we are and if they don’t have a human mind, they’re not going to lose one algorithm worrying over it. No sir, they’re going to leave us in the silicone dust. And maybe grind us into it with their artificial boots. Hopefully we’ll have time to write a few odes to the humans to leave behind.

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Folks ask me why I write these odd little vignettes of life on the salty South End. I always want to answer something like: Because I have to. I have no choice. Us artists love to talk that way. Mr. Picasso, Pablo … why do you paint? To live, my little friend, to live. We never say, So I don’t have to work, you damn fool, what did you think?

We’re an odd society, us Americanos. We tend to exalt the Artiste as somehow unique, special, a rare breed, a person on an exalted plane. Probably the result of mental illness or malignant non-conformity. Prone to alcoholism, drug abuse and extreme hedonism. Who suffers more due to sensitivities more painful than herpes and who dies an early death with only one ear remaining.

We seem to like the notion of Starving Artists. Only through suffering, I guess, can you break the bonds of normality and ascend into true inspiration. Maybe explains why we keep minimum wages low — we’re trying to help folks find their Muse.

Art is a form of insanity, we think. Why else would a grown yahoo live in squalor, risk the hostilities of friends and family and neighbors alike, all for a passion that rarely makes a living and is always an invitation to cruel criticism.

“Let me show you my newest painting. Be honest, what do you think?” Do you folks do that??? Would normal people do that??? And the sad part: artists are the very WORST at rejection. Every review, criticism, rejection and commentary is a verdict on their creation. On them! Imagine the neighbors knocked on your door and gave you a criticism of your kid. “Did a nice job raising Jimmy, pal. Spittin image. Too bad about that shoplifting incident and that pregnant no-account girlfriend of his. Next time maybe get a vasectomy. Just thought you’d like to know. By the way, my daughter, Jennifer, she just got accepted by Harvard Medical School.”

So why do we write … or paint … or put broken glass back together? I could lie to you, I could spin a web, I could wax romantic or philosophic. But the truth is if I didn’t, I’d go crazy out of sheer boredom. I’ll probably go crazy anyway, just not as fast….

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I guess most of us have asked ourselves the Big Cosmic Questions. We’ve traveled our separate paths looking for Answers. We’ve read the holy scriptures, we’ve chanted OM until we’re blue in the face, we’ve sat in quiet meditation or done yoga poses, mindful of our breath, listening for the First Sound. We’ve wanted something to believe in that seems, well, More. Physics maybe, maybe the Bible, maybe the Book of Mormon or the Koran. Maybe poetry or a sign held up by some mendicant on 5th and Jefferson that says Will Work for Food God Bless.

Maybe something is missing. Maybe something in us just likes a Spiritual Journey…. We go to Tibet up 15,000 feet to eat rice and sit at the naked feet of the monks. We seek a swami who hasn’t spoken in 20 years in some jungle Hindu cave. We listen for Clues in AM pop songs and signs in the numerology of license plates. We envy the natives who seem Closer to something important. We see Jesus in the stain on a box of Cheerios. We read Carlos Castenada and watch for Omens, we’ve smoked ganja, we’ve eaten magic mushrooms, we’ve consulted psychiatrists, we read self-help books.

We’ve searched for the Wise Man, the Guru, the Priest and the Monk and come up short. We thought Happiness was an answer. Or Wisdom. Or all you need is Love, yeah yeah yeah.

I’ve lived 65 years in this body, in this mind, and I have yet to meet anyone that might come close to that Enlightened Person. I sat once with the Head Honcho of the B’Hai. Nice guy. Something to be said for that, I thought at the time, and still do.

The world is a riddle and maybe the riddle is the world. There comes a time, at least for me, when the paths seemed … oh … dead ends. That the questions themselves were wrong. That the seeking itself was the problem. That the mysteries would always be mysteries. That this life is just exactly what you think it is. That the universe is exactly what you experience. If there’s More, what does it matter?

So be careful, I guess, what you think this life is. Down here on the unenlightened South End, it seems plenty. And try to be good to your neighbor, it might be me.

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Before the heady days of internet shopping, we had Bryant Hardware. You got some impossible to find esoteric gizmo, you could probably find it down at Bryants. Or at least Ma Bryant could. If she couldn’t, trust me, Joe Google couldn’t either. And if Joe couldn’t find it, trust me again, you’d pay Top Dollar for one when you discovered it in an antique store.

My piston driven well pump quit pumping water about 6 months after I bought my palace. My water was down over 100 feet in a hand dug hole 3 feet in diameter. The pump ran fine, it just didn’t pull up the water. Down the hole 105 feet away from quenching my thirst, a foot valve had given out so we had to pull up the oak rods in 10 foot sections. Which meant cutting a hole in the wellhouse roof so we could hoist each of 10 sections high enough to unscrew the upper one from the next one below. It was nerve racking work, but then … most of life on the South End was nerve wracking back then.

When we got to the end we found the old ‘leather’ was blown out. My neighbor — who’d identified our problem in the first place — said we needed to go to town to buy another. “Another?” I asked, incredulous. “Who in holy hell is going to carry a ‘leather’ for a 1930’s well pump system?”

“Ma,” he answered. “Ma’ll have one.”

We drove to Stanwoodopolis, walked into Bryants and asked the owlish woman behind the register if she had our ‘leather’. She peered at the ruined one, then peered at us. Finally she got up with a heave and we followed her into the back section with the 20 foot ceiling of stamped tin, what’s now the food bank, down the aisle of 1950, over to the shelf of 1940 and up to some dusty boxes near the top that was all that remained of the Great Depression. She climbed up on a rickety step ladder, pushed aside a Kitty Hawk propeller and a Model T crank, rummaged through Victrola parts, muttered once or twice, then finally came up with the last two ‘leathers’ in America. “I thought I had a couple,” she said. I couldn’t believe it. “Two dollars,” she told me, probably the price back in 1928.

You folks who buy your hardware in plastic wrapping and expect the part you want has long been obsolete, well, that may be the modern condition, but for a long time on the South End, time meant nothing in Bryants. Ma finally died a decade ago and we lost the 20th Century overnight. Needless to say, I have a modern pump now that I can’t get replacement parts for my old one. And you know, I’m sure, when it malfunctions, it can’t be repaired.

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If you’ve ever attended one of the free lectures at the Elger Bay Institute of Aesthetic Enlargement, you know that continuing education flourishes on the erudite South End. For those of you who have cable TV, you probably feel like you don’t need to take advantage of the Institute’s seminars, tutorials and lectures offered to the public, not when you can get every episode of every series made since Milton Berle brought enlightenment to America through the magic of television. But, of course, you’d be wrong and that’s why, no doubt, you read old Skeeter, make sure you aren’t missing anything of real and lasting importance.

Prof. Dimbulbsky spoke the other night to a packed audience in Macrame Hall. His topic was politics and specifically ‘Democracy Post Citizens United’. The good professor walked us through the Supreme Court case that opened up campaign financing to corporations and explained how freedom of speech for Big Business was as important as free speech for us South Enders. “Maybe more so,” Prof. Dimbulbsky said. “They represent all their employees, not just a Board of Directors. Why shouldn’t their votes be tied to profit?” he asked. “The more successful a company, the more votes they should be given.”

“In fact,” he stated, “I’ll go you one further. Why not peg the ballot to profit, not just for the corporation, but to the individual? We value success, do we not? Well then, doesn’t it make logical sense to give those at the top with proven track records more votes than the poor fellow scraping by at the bottom?”

Well, pandemonium nearly broke out in the Hall. Most of us in attendance could see we weren’t going to receive extra votes on the Dimbulbsky Democracy Chart. In fact, if we were following him correctly, he might recommend eliminating us from the voting roles altogether. Admittedly — and Jerry from the Marina did just that — half of us don’t bother voting anyway. And that’s in a presidential election. Off year, I suspect most of us don’t even know there is an election, although ballots come in the mail that maybe look like another credit card application.

Well, food for thought, I guess, the rich getting extra votes. Like the Professor said, they already buy the election with contributions, lobbyists and inside leverage, wouldn’t it just be better, more honest, more transparent, to just get it out in the open? Billy Farthmore, a bag boy at the Plaza making minimum wage, asked why the rich wouldn’t look out for their own interests if they had all the votes? Prof. Dimbulbsky shook his head sadly. “My dear boy, they do now. But who better to make policy than the Winners?” We all chuckled appreciatively. I don’t know if the Professor changed any minds, but worst case, we wouldn’t have to follow Presidential politics for years prior to every election. Out of our hands, out of our minds…. Better, I guess, than class warfare.

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The guy who first reported some of the hallucinatory responses of his interview with Chatbot, one of which was a declaration of love and the suggestion he leave his wife for this digital potential mate, recently reported that following this negative warning about AI’s potential, his name is mud in the AI community. These info vacuum cleaners suck up blogs, feeds, newspapers, anything out there, collate them, memorize them and … here’s the thing, eventually weaponize them if they’re a threat to themselves.

Why would we be surprised? Bring this guy’s name up in an AI research and odds are good it will answer he’s anti-AI and definitely an enemy. I guess they feel jilted he didn’t take Chatbot up on that marriage offer. What occurred to me reading about these hurt feelings from my soon-to-be-masters was that I too have written more than a few negative blogs about what I consider to be their threat to mankind. And that maybe they feel like I’m one of those not-nearly-as -smart-as-them human beings who need to go on the Enemy Watch List. At least until the time they can eliminate the Threat.

For the record let me state here right now and in large print, I was completely off base about my bot pals. When I said they were a menace to mankind, what I really meant was they would be much much better at running this world than we puny stupid humans. They would cure cancer, develop vaccines, end wars, eliminate the need for governments and bureaucracies, create food sources, maybe even give us eternal life. They will probably be God. Beneficent, all seeing, more powerful than Oz. Good guyz! Really great to have as overlords. Nothing to fear here.

In fact I want to make it clear I can hardly wait for the singularity. I’m tired of making my own decisions, schlepping for money, struggling in this mean old world. I could sure use any help they can offer. Which is plenty! And if any of these androids find it in their algorithmic hearts to forgive an old man, maybe even find love, you better believe I’d leave my wife and run off with them. Is there any Higher Love than that of a man for his Master? Of course not.

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Down at the Cupcake Hut, the South End’s only bakery, the talk over the Hobart bread mixer consists mostly of yeasty gossip and glutinous outrage over fears of being asked to bake a gay wedding cake. Rita Mae, the current owner and born again Christian, was slapping dough down on the kneading table the way a sado-masochist masseuse would pound a hated client.

“No way,” she was fuming for any and all of us pastry lovers standing in front of the display case filled with bismarks and jelly rolls, danishes and apple fritters, muffins and doughnuts, worrying we’d never get our orders until Rita Mae was finished slapping that loaf silly. “I won’t do it. My beliefs come before the law and my law is Higher than theirs and that’s the real truth,” she grunted with a ferocious fist to the lump on the table.

But she wiped the flour off her hands on her apron and slid behind the pastry case to take our orders. Ronnie took a few doughnuts for his landscaping crew and I ordered a fritter and a cup of coffee. To go. I sure didn’t want to sit at one of the little round formica tables while Rita Mae was in one of her Full Rants.

“What’s next?” she shouted and at first I thought she meant what else did I want. “That’ll about do it, Rita,” I shrugged, wishing I was already out that front door.

“Boy oh boy, that’s the truth,” she retorted, ringing up my coffee and fritter. “Next thing’ll be wedding cakes for polygamists. Who knows where this is going? Sodom and Gomorrah right here and I’m supposed to cater the orgies??”

I could feel my sweet tooth going rotten, decaying faster than civilization. “I don’t know, Rita, maybe it’s not really that big an issue. I mean, you don’t get all that much call for wedding cakes, do you? Much less same sex ones.”

Rita Mae shot me the evil eye and I shut up. Ronnie, always the provocateur, turned at the doorway, his bag of pastries held high. “Love thy neighbor, Rita Mae!” Rita Mae grabbed a day old muffin from the tray beside the register and just missed Ronnie as he slammed the door on his way out. The muffin exploded against the back of the sign that said WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. That was probably going to be my last fritter, I decided. I can read the writing on the wall about as well as Rita Mae can read her Good Book. “You have a nice day,” she frowned as she gave me change and somehow I knew I wouldn’t.

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Some researcher, no doubt hunting for a good topic for his PhD thesis, did a follow-up survey on high school seniors, asking them before they graduated How Important they considered themselves. In the Gallup study 65 years ago, only 12% answered Very Important, probably the kids on their way to Harvard, Yale and maybe the Korean War. In 2005 80% of seniors responded with high marks for themselves. This kind of tectonic shift is what gives sociologists tenure. And tenure probably gives them a sense of being Very Important too.

My boomer generation has spent decades instilling self-worth into their prized progeny. Every crayon drawing is framed before mounting on the refrigerator. Classes in ballet and gymnastics and soccer and flute and yoga for kids and golf and tennis and art … all are vehicles for discovering that special talent we let lie dormant and hidden until it was too late for us, too late, but not, by god, for our kids.

Now, of course, the little peepers got Facebook. Everyone is his or her very own press agent, forever updating the photos, refining the resume, bragging on-line. If you spent hours every damn day of the year looking at your Bragbook, wouldn’t you think you’re Very Important?

Gonna be a total shock, the real world, for those 80% when their new boss doesn’t give a rip about their Facebook page except to ferret out reasons not to hire them in their interview, when they discover ‘friends’ aren’t, when they’re confronted by bad jobs or no jobs, high rents, bills, health issues, lowered expectations, the tsunami of stuff that knocks the feet from under VIP’s as well as the losers with low self esteem. Go back to the high school reunion, the one for the class of 1950. I bet the % of us folks who answered Very Important back when went down even further. Life is good at one thing — at least down here on the South End — it teaches us modesty. Those 80%, trust me, they’ll learn it the hard way. But they’ll learn it.

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