The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It seems another lifetime ago when we heard phrases like ‘compassionate conservative’, doesn’t it? The new conservatives, definitely gone MAGA, briefly flirted with a kinder, gentler campaign after their chosen one (and possibly God’s) had his life spared in an assassination attempt. That lasted about a week, but now we’re back to all-out war, incessant name-calling and the usual bullying. So why would we expect less of the veep pick?

Right out of the box we have J.D. Vance decrying his opponent as a childless cat lady, what, it seems, is a woman who doesn’t want children and therefore is an enemy of parents and family values. He even proposes a tax system that penalizes such people and rewards those with more kids, figuring, apparently, that when the immigration ‘problem’ is solved and the borders shut down, we’ll be needing those kids for the jobs that go unfilled. Now, full disclosure, I don’t have kids. I know, un-American. Selfish. Probably unnatural. Definitely worthy of higher taxation. I have friends who tried to have children but couldn’t. And friends who are gay who never felt the need to adopt kids. They should pay for turning their backs on providing for our workforce. Tax them! Tax the traitors!

So okay, maybe I’m being a bit sensitive. And besides, what a great way to reduce the national deficit. You could even cut the taxes of the corporations and the rich by raising mine. I mean, I want to help. I’m patriotic. I love my country. I can see now what a thoughtcrime it was to not have children. Too late for me but we could certainly force the child-bearing age couples to have a few. Might even legislate that. The Chinese had the right idea, just backwards, by limiting the number to One. We could learn from that mistake. And if the rich are still paying too much, we should consider taxing people who don’t own pets. Save us all that money for animal shelters and cut the deficit. So many possibilities. And after all, isn’t that compassionate and still conservative??

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Biker Bob rides with an odd assortment of outlaws. He’s got a Honda he’s tricked out to sound like a Harley, meaning he’s got a glasspack muffler you can hear from Tyee Store to my shack, a ferocious rumble that belies the pussycat bike he can barely keep running. I had a bike once, a beat up 350 ready for the scrap heap but scary enough to give me nightmares of highway wrecks, skidding sideways down on gravel and blacktop, legs scraped to raw meat, my football helmet exploding plastic into my brainpan.

You want to ride, Biker Bob will tell you, you need a death wish. I didn’t have one so shortly after I got my street license, I sold it. $100. Cheap life insurance is how I figured it even if I paid someone to take the suicide ride off my hands. That was 40 years ago and I’m still alive with two legs and semi-functioning brain.

Bob’s a good guy, at least when you’re one on one with him. You get around his outlaw pals, his loyalty is with the Pack. If things go bad — and they invariably do with this crowd – he doesn’t recognize friendship when the dogs go hunting the weak and infirm. This is not good news when you realize you’ve become the prey. I try very hard not to antagonize the pack, but there are lines you cross without recognizing them until it’s too late.

I don’t see Bob much these days. He had a cabin I helped build up in the foothills, sold his Harley to help his ‘lady’ out, a woman who was a schoolbus driving friend of mine from the city days. Bob kept a little dirt bike at the time for off road fun, but one night he took it down to the local watering hole off Highway 9, stayed a few too long, then hit the highway late, no lights or license, just a dark run for home. The county sheriff did a U-turn when they passed each other at 50 miles an hour, hit the bubbles, but Bob didn’t see much sense in pulling over and as he explained later, thought maybe he could outrun the deputy. Yah, he said, I was pretty drunk.

A mile before the road to Bob’s cabin the deputy could see he wasn’t going to pull over so he did what most county cops would do under the circumstances: he rode up alongside the little dirt bike and came into Bob’s lane. Bob hit the shoulder, lost control and sailed over a ditch and into a field where he crashed and burned. Being drunk as a skunk, he survived without much damage, spent a night in the Bellingham jail and came home a couple days later. For a few weeks, anyway, Biker Bob was bikeless. Too bad he couldn’t stay that way….

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Money talks, buddy, and bullshit walks…. We all know that. But now, in the 21st Century, we got Big Money and Big Money doesn’t just talk, it yells, it screams, it commands. You want to understand politics or the economy or the world, start listening to that hollering. Go down to your local grocery store, it’s one of about 3 or 4 chains, not much competition. Fly the friendly skies, take your pick from 3 or 4, prices pretty much the same, all high. Listen to your favorite AM radio station, right, owned by one mega company probably, mostly right wing hot talk. Looking for something, anything, on your computer, that search engine probably is Google, maybe a couple others. Ordering something you want, sure, chances are you used Prime. Get your news from X or Facebook? Hearing the Roar yet?

The Murdochs, the Bezos, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, all those fat cats aren’t just accumulating billions, they’re shrinking the world to fewer and fewer choices. Competition — remember competition, that quaint notion that in a capitalist economic system it would bring prices down for the consumer? — well, it’s vanishing. The corporate boyz bought up the competition. Stock holders are happy, not sure how you feel about it. Need a good doctor? Probably get a choice of one or two clinics or hospitals. Need meds? Big Pharma has made sure you can’t compare prices with what they charge other countries. Price gouging, you ask? Or maybe you don’t, not that it matters.

Artificial Intelligence is coming next. Hell, Artificial Intelligence is here now. Who do you think is running that? Fat Freddie’s Bot Shop? Try again. The Congress hauled in the Tech Giants awhile back, maybe get a handle on what the implications for what’s coming down the pike are, possibly put some guardrails up before it’s too late. Fat chance, Fred. The genie is out of the bottle and you won’t be getting three wishes. You’ll look back at 3 options before too long as the Good Old Days. When competition was limited, but at least you could shop at Krogers instead of Safeway. Cost the same though…

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I’m going up to Stanwoodopolis tonight to listen to our state park folks tell us commoners why they closed down the Cama Beach cabins half a year ago and what their plans for this park’s future are. A lot of folks volunteered time and money for this park and I’m betting they’re coming with questions and pitchforks. The Wooden Boat Foundation closed down its operation there and the ranger, Jeff Wheeler, was unceremoniously booted out too. Jeff was much beloved by us islanders, a hands-on, all around good guy. Maybe tonight they’ll tell us why he was sacked. But I doubt it.

In 1949 we islanders built Camano State Park, about 1000 people who showed up with tractors and dozers, shovels and saws, all volunteers who cleared the road and set up the beginnings of our only state park. Cama Beach was donated by the Hamalaanens and Worthingtons, some 600 acres or more along with the old resort cabins and the boat house. Once again volunteers helped repair the cabins, open up and manage the store, clear trails, make quilts for every cabin, drive the shuttles, a lot of those jobs state parks claims not to have the money for.

So for months state parks has kept mum about why they closed the park. Rumors flew. Indian bones, broken septic, damaged seawall, fire suppression breakdown in the boathouse. Guess they didn’t figure we needed any solid explanations. Now they have this meeting, basically to explain to us peasants why they won’t be reopening our park but of course to get ‘public input’. I suspect they will get plenty of public input tonight. Then they’ll go back to Olympia and do what they wanted in the first place. Always nice to see volunteerism rewarded….

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We were down at the Columbia Gorge trailhead last year, emptying bladders and filling water bottles. A woman emerged from the restroom and whispered to her companion in a conspiratorial voice, “There’s no flush.” Her friend shook her head in incomprehension. “Not working?” she asked. “No, there’s nothing but a hole.” “A hole?” her friend asked incredulously. “Just a hole in the ground and no flush.”

I felt like a Cro Magnon listening in on aliens from some advanced galaxy. How could they possibly understand my dependence on a polluting gas engine? Or something as totally primitive as a cellphone? These two debutantes had missed their exit, apparently, on the way to the Ritz. A pit toilet was incomprehensible and if it weren’t such a sordid subject matter, it would have made for the nucleus of many a future discussion over bridge and tea at the Country Club. “But where, Charlotte? where does it Go???”

Indeed. Not that our two ladies could answer that question in regard to the plumbing matrix from their Beverly Hills manse to the sewer system it connects to. What matters is that it be whisked away, out of sight, out of smell. We don’t know how things work anymore — but so long as they do, we don’t need to care. The world is less and less natural to us; it’s electrons and silicon, computerized and digitized, all packaged in Black Boxes that create the new universe.

The trouble is, Charlotte, we’re still of the natural world. Body functions, pheromones, appetites, all that genetic coding of mammalian evolution in a world that’s more and more alien to us. We’ll fix that eventually. We’ll adapt to the virtual world, the one we make not so much in our own image as a clever cyber image. The natural stuff will be obsolete soon and we’ll replace the old ‘parts’ with new and improved engineered ones. The robots aren’t going to take over us humans. Us humans are going to become cyborgs.

And Charlotte, the best part is you won’t need a flush. Or a toilet either.

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