The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Gee, I don’t know. Imagine calling Donald Trump and his gang of goofballs weird. What, them? Elon Musk and his X platform of misinformation? C’mon, we all know he’s as normal as you and me and the potted plant in the room with us. So what if he plans to colonize Mars in our lifetime, probably not a bad plan at all, maybe start with Don and JD? Matt Goetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene? How about Lauren Boebert? Rudy, America’s mayor? Nothing strange about those nice people, right?

So what if most of Trump’s cabinet and advisors resigned after spending a little too much time in small rooms with the man. Doesn’t make him weird, does it? Okay, maybe a bit hard to deal with. His Sec. of State called him a f#@%! moron and some of the others claim he has the attention span of a gnat … but hey, that would apply to a lot of us, not necessarily bizarre at all. I got plenty of friends who don’t read much of anything. Like Donald, we got TV we can watch all day long. Plenty of information on TV! Who needs briefing reports?

Is it weird that the Evangelicals support a man who is a convicted felon, a man who states publicly it’s okay to grab women by their genitals, who cheated on his wives, who paid porn stars to stay silent over their sexual trysts? The guy who said maybe Mike Pence deserved to be lynched by those tourists at the Capitol? Seriously, you think that’s weird?

Or is it odd and bizzarro to enrich yourself while in office? Wouldn’t show you his taxes so you think maybe he’s got something to hide. Plenty before him have done the same thing, probably what some would call good bizness practice. What about praising dictators, strongmen who never believed in democracy and rule with an iron fist? So he likes Putin and Kim Jong-Un? Maybe the North Koreans and Russians like them too, doesn’t make him an oddball. Okay, makes you wonder, though… Might be he just wants a Trump Tower in Moscow and Pyongyang.

How about the fact his wife sleeps on the other side of the White House, you ask? Or they never seem to be seen together, holding hands or smooching? Lots of folks have marital problems. Lots of guyz commit adultery, they just don’t get to commit it with porn queens. Maybe this isn’t weird, just jealousy. Give the stud a break.

If the Donald was weird, why would most of the Republican Party follow him in lockstep? You saying they’re ALL bonkers? They refused to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and you have to admit, they knew he did what he was impeached for, they had to know he was guilty of all those indictments he has coming up in various trials. They listened to the phone calls to have states change the results of the election and they heard him tell his MAGA followers to stand by and be ready to take back the White House when he lost the election. They were in the Capitol building when the rioters howled for their heads, smashing windows, searching for Pence and Pelosi so they could hang them outside on gallows already erected. Surely you don’t think it odd they would forget that harrowing afternoon. Okay, maybe a little, but not weird, not bizarre.

Okay, maybe it’s a tad peculiar the man tells more lies than he does truths. Reality is in the eyes of the beholder, correct? Like his advisor, Kellyanne Conway, famously said, these are alternative facts. Doesn’t make them weird, just amusingly whacky. The other day he mentioned how no one died at that January 6 tourist event. Maybe he forgot the capitol police deaths or that woman killed trying to break into the chamber room — bad memory, sure, but weird? C’mon, cut him some slack.

If these folks live in a slightly different reality than most Americans, maybe it’s because they have acute visions for the country the rest of us mere mortals cannot comprehend. Genius, not weirdness. When the new Republican Party regains power, you may have to make a few adjustments. The Christians may never have to vote again, the new dictator will only be a dictator that first day in office, 1984 by George Orwell will be the new New Testament, doublethink and newspeak will make everything clear. Weird? Not anymore…. Welcome to the new reality.

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Well, they just discovered the oldest known art on the planet, some zig zag scratches on a clamshell from 500 thousand years ago. This is about 300,000 years earlier than the next oldest masterpiece from the prehistoric era. I guess that zig zag abstract set us artists back, oh, not quite half a million years. Presumably the philistines of the Neanderthal caves weren’t ready for avant-garde minimalist renderings at their clam barbecues, a lesson us contemporary aesthetes ought to take to heart. Sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for another Dark Ages. And … I notice the Neanderthals have mostly died out. Okay, maybe not died out so much as just kept denouncing art and Western culture. Okay, actually they seem to be making a comeback in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and all of the American South. Kind of a heavy price for a couple lousy scratches on some bi-valve shell left in a midden, you ask me. Course there will be a boatload of theories why art languished from then until the French cave drawings. Everything from comets hitting the salons of the shell carvers’ showings to Obama’s predecessors over-reaching their political positions.

Art, not for everybody. The cave renderings in France awhile later were a little better received. Realistic animals the Cro-Magnon boyz hunted, probably used for target practice with slingshots. Practical art. The mizzus probably complained but they didn’t have wallpaper yet and even some animal scribbles probably Martha Stewarted up the damp cave walls. That happily-received realism held sway for, well, pretty much into the 20th century. For you art historians that adds up to about 300,000 years… or pretty much 99.999% of human existence. That’s a lot of painting and sculptures of horses, cute kids, sunsets and nature scenes. I mean, I can’t really get enough either. And so, apparently, can’t the South End judging by the tourist art cramming up the galleries and boutiques . As the gentleman who sent me a hate letter when we built the decidedly abstract Visitor Center two or more decades ago stated vehemently, Modern Art was dead and relegated to the ash heap of history according to his fellow art professors … and pretty much my so-called career was too … or so he hoped. Why, he asked, couldn’t I have done a mural of a mountain or a stream, something equally as beautiful as nature? Why too couldn’t I just go away and spare the island my blighted vision of the world?

A good question, Professor, but since you didn’t give me a return address, it’s one that you apparently weren’t interested in hearing a response to. The Zig Zag Man of half a million years ago might have had a better answer than mine anyway, but since Art beat Literature and Writing to the historical table, we’ll never know, will we? And since I beat the good Professor to the finish line, his criticism was a bit too belated to stop the project. He did, however, write a similar complaint to the Senior Center when he got wind of another contemporary window we’d planned for installation in the entryway, more ‘degenerate’ art he might have called it if Adolph hadn’t sullied the description for future critics. Of course, unlike a lot of artists, I’m a bit tone deaf to criticism. So instead of just a couple of door panels we doubled down and did the entire front entryway to the Center. The Perfesser no doubt was apoplectic, but … it didn’t destroy the building after all. Jump forward a nano-second in the Human Timeline and those abstract shell scribbles are dotting the landscape from the South End to Seattle and Gomorrah and beyond. Someday, no doubt, future art archeologists will pry up remnants of broken glass and marvel that nothing like that has been seen on earth for a quarter million years. And my guess is they’ll probably be thankful. Like my old man always said, You can’t please em all…

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The mizzus said to me the other night, fed up and frustrated by folks’ disinterest in History, she was thinking of taking up pottery. She’s invested 40 years down at the Stanwoodopolis Hysterical Society and she feels like she’s swimming against an outgoing tide and no longer seeing shore. I know the feeling, but instead of helpful advice, consoling warbles or another pep talk, I said ‘Pottery? You think art will be any easier??”

I spoze she could make useful items. Make them aesthetically pleasing and add another cultural layer to the nettle farm here. Maybe sell a few downtown when the house and gardens are cluttered, barter with the neighbors, eventually market to the nurseries and galleries, set up the website and the advertising strategies, sell local and then watch Chinese imports undercut her beyond even paying for her clay.

Most folks don’t value what she does or what she might want to do. They don’t value artists or their art, history or historians, writers or literature, musicians or their songs. Folks who hope to make a living that way won’t. Nine times out of ten. Maybe 99 times out of 100. I could bitch and moan — and oh, baby, I do! — but to what avail?

The trick in life is to do what you love. If you need to make money too, good luck to ya. This society values money. Winners. American Idol or the NBA. You love history, you are one of the lucky few, however. Most people never find one damn thing they can be passionate about. That’s why we invented television and You-Tube. They don’t have anything better to do, nothing that fills their void with passion or joy or the sheer love of that thing that possesses them.

But the people who make music, who write poetry, who tell our histories, who make art, who dance and sing and celebrate, ask them if they needed to be paid to do it. Ask them if money was the reason. They do it to sing, to dance, to paint, to tell stories, to remember history. They are, without a doubt, the richest people on the planet. Starving artists? I don’t think so — they breathe the very air for food.

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My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill. The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers. Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire. She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know. “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots. You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died. The Casino was their whole life. We even provided funeral services. Why not? Half their friends were us casino workers. You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined. Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop. Jill muttered ‘why not?’ and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question. “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought. “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go. She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED. Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought. I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

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Rise of the Luddites

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News blurb: A Waymo car went up in flames in San Francisco’s Chinatown after a crowd surrounded it, scrawled graffiti, smashed windows and then threw a firework inside the driverless vehicle in the middle of a crowded street Saturday night.

Now, I’m not really certain a driverless taxi cab qualifies as a cyborg or a robot, but it definitely has similarities. But I’m willing to celebrate the good folks of San Francisco for what no doubt will be the opening salvo against the coming Android Apocalypse. Admittedly the cab wasn’t armed with defensive weaponry which will be required gear in the near future. And eventually the robo-cars will outfit with offensive firepower. Start with tasers, tear gas, work up to more lethal strategies if required.

Right now, though, the AI assisted automobile has few defenses, making it a prime target for anti-android citizens. Start with destroying a wheeled droid and move on to whatever iteration the Silicon Tech Boyz inflict on a fairly clueless society whose members mostly trust the puerile billionaires to act in humanity’s best interest. Sure. If you define humanity as themselves….

The Luddites of the early 1800’s battled the industrialization of their weaving guilds by smashing the mechanical looms in burgeoning factories. Didn’t take long to squash that revolt … and it won’t take long to round up these modern technophobes either. But it does strike a blow against the empire, does it not? A small spark that might ignite a revolution. The bots are coming and the android evolution will be like nothing the old Luddites could ever have imagined. First the machines will replace jobs, then they’ll replace us. Probably why the Silicon Valley geniuses are building vast underground bunkers and stocking them with caviar and champagne. They plan to be the last ones standing. Which might be true, but only for a very short time. Their inventions aren’t going to be calling them Daddy when they come calling one last time.

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