The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Crab season just closed after being open for two whole months, what used to be open pretty much year round but now has shrunk to 5 days a week for those two measly months. Which, if you’re a pot crabber, means you have to pull your traps Monday night and reset Wednesday morning and start all over. I guess the Fish and Game folks want to give the Dungeness a fighting chance against a weeklong onslaught.

Personally I’m a great believer in equalizing the odds too. So much so, in fact, that I wade into their eelgrass domain barefoot, mano y mano and toe to toe with the crustacean monsters. No sissy traps for me, fancy rigs baited with Trader Joe yuppie blends of smoked salmon and brie, dropped from party boats, passing yachts, high end fishing boats and vacationing sailboats. Factor in the gear, the gas, the bait, the GPS fish finder, license and trailer, those Dungeness run about two bitcoins apiece for these folks.

4th of July I was wading into the Dungeness jungles, unarmed except for my rusty potato rake, a bucket and my wits, okay, not much of a match, bare feet crunching on clam shells and the occasional crab, just me and 18 herding herons for as far as the eye could see, about a 3 mile stretch from Pebble Beach to Mabana. Mt. Rainier was perfectly framed in the straits, the Olympics were jutting up beyond Whidbey Island, the tide flowing out through the eelgrass looked like mermaid hair. Sand dollar colonies had expanded another year and moon snails had showed up too, big goopy bodies in giant shells eating god only knows what. Flounders, sole, rays and passing fish, all of us working the tideflats. With the gulls and the crows and the eagles waiting for scraps.

Oh … and of course, the crabs. Some folks crab for food and some crab to justify the expense of their boats. But me, I’m after the adventure. And even if I come home empty handed without dinner, those couple of hours out in the water, putting toes in another world out by the drop-off, four football fields distant from shore, I think is plenty enough. Course, it’s even better when I bring back a few specimens to study. And hopefully to eat….

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Love on the South End was never a bowl of cherries. You try to woo a prospective mate after she’s set eyes on 8 foot tall killer nettles menacing the front door, you’ll see what I mean. Course, the Rottweiler barking all night from its pen next to the neighbor’s travel trailer which no longer travels, the one Mr. Dog Lover lives in with the hound chained close by for affection or protection, that doesn’t endear new girlfriends to the neighborhood either.

Most of my single friends have about given up on the local scene. They’ve dated every yahoo, unemployed or otherwise, down at the Hotel Watering Hole and Dating Service, and those memories they’d like to forget. Or at least suppress. I know. I had to mail order my bride. She probably sensed the muted desperation in my throb-filled love letters, but she took pity, I guess, on an old hermit. I sure didn’t mention the banjos. Or the ivy holding up the shack walls. Or the well on its last legs with an ancient piston pump wheezing and gasping just to haul up a glass of water. Love, I knew, would overcome all those drawbacks.

Course we were younger then, still ‘marketable’. My friends, my single friends, have grown a bit longer in the tooth. Some are missing teeth. More than a few have turned to internet dating to meet future partners, figuring, I guess, the ‘pool’ around here has grown shallow with mostly only geezers fossilizing in the puddles. Now they got a pool of millions of prospective mates to choose from. Just sort through the criterion, run the data and preferences, make allowance for some creative exaggeration, then set up a date. “Non-smoker, loves to walk the beach at sunset, enjoys good literature, would rather snuggle than watch TV, loves puppies and quiet conversations.” True translation: psychopath, possible killer. “Fit, but could lose 5 pounds, enjoys an occasional glass of merlot, young at heart.” Translation: obese nursing home escapee.

Fat chance of finding an honest person in the era of Facebook selfies. The mizzus is counting her lucky stars, but our friends — Mr. Right is fudging the facts. He’s balding, morbidly obese, 15 years too old, drinks until he blacks out, watches any sporting even on TV day or night, eats exclusively Doritos and beer nuts and has the conversational equivalency of Cheetah the ape and a literary proficiency that stalled with Archie and Jughead. He wants mostly to get laid, then left in peace with his TV show. He is, if you haven’t guessed, 6 farts shy of being a heart throb.

Love is an elusive realm. It takes a lot of compromise to share a life, a whole entire life. With a person who has faults and idiosyncracies that have to mesh somehow with your own. And on top of that there’s the cultural overlay of physical beauty and … well, physical beauty mostly. And sex. Let’s not even go there, the rest is hard enough. Although for the guys, the rest is sort of superfluous.

I know this isn’t exactly an Advice Column and by now you know any advice I got is seriously suspect anyway, but … for those who still believe the AM radio bubble gum pop song notion of True Love, don’t give up. But DO keep in mind, bad love is worse than no love. I’ve had my vaccination of bad love. Loneliness usually won’t make you miserable. Or cynical. Or suicidal. But love gone south … love on the rocks … love turned sour and rancid and mean? Be choosy is all I’m saying. Be your own b

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“Here we go again!” Jihad Jack shouted at the big screen over the bar at the Pilot Lounge the other night, Ladies Night as it were, a new gimmick by John the new owner to attract more business — or maybe to dilute the testosterone of the usual rowdy crowd. Near as I could see, it wasn’t working, not a lady in sight, just a table of the South End Slammers, our women’s roller derby queens and if anyone called them ladies, god help them. They wee mean mamas, leave it at that.

Jack was on his hind legs at the bar, beer glass clenched in a meaty fist, obviously more angry than usual. “Now it’s a new epidemic. Mpox my monkey ass! It never ends! Covid, measles, AIDS, bird flu, what’s the new one, the fever?” Brenda at the Slammer table said, “Dengue. Dengue Fever. Makes your bones feel like they’re breaking.” She seemed to know this, maybe from the rinks, what that would feel like I was betting. Couple of body blows at the cantilevered turns, she probably knew firsthand.

Jack turned his attention from the TV news report and considered her and her information. “All I know,” he said, maybe to Brenda, maybe to the rest of us swillers, “the government wants you to put on masks again, get more of those weird vaccines, make us damn slaves.” No news to us regulars — we’d had more than a few earfuls of Jihad’s Covid conspiracy theories.

But Brenda apparently hadn’t. “You think this stuff is all made up, fella?” she asked with a slight smirk on her face. “Yer damned right they make it up. All just a master plan to scare the stupid sheep into doing whatever they’re told.”

Brenda took a long slow swig of her beer, burped loudly and said, “That’s the most ignorant BS I’ve seen all week. And I work cleaning stables at the equestrian place north of Stanwood. Bullshit, horse pucks, all the same.”

Jihad could hardly believe his ears. “If you weren’t a woman …” he started. But Brenda was out of her chair and up in his face before he could finish the sentence. Jack’s a big blowhard but he’s not a big man. Brenda had him by four inches and twenty pounds. Every breath in that bar was on hold for the thirty seconds it took Jack to see there was no winning hand here.

“Just stating an opinion,” he finally squeaked out. “Free country, ya know.”

Brenda just grinned and patted him on the shoulder. “Yes it is,” she said, “but sometimes it pays to keep those to yourself. If you don’t mind ….” Jack said he didn’t. Brenda said thank you … and that, I suspect, was the last Ladies Night we’ll see at the Pilot House Lounge. Probably a government plot, but for what nefarious purpose, who knows? Other than Jack, certainly none of the rest of us boyz.

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There was a recent article about the use of Artificial Intelligence in our kids’ classrooms, the thrust of it concerning how easy it is now for us to rely on ChatGPT or Google or you name it to find the math answers, write their essays, compose their short stories, just let the bots do it. Remember when Texas Instruments came out with a hand held calculator? Why learn multiplication tables or long division? Throw away those slide rules, the future was here!

Well, not quite but the digital handwriting was on the wall … or a least a computer screen. The folks who say AI is just a tool, makes life easier, frees us up for our real human potential, c’mon, the machines are more than an assistant, you kidding me? The next generation of homo not very sapien will be more and more reliant on these programs, algorithms, bots and indispensable partners in every endeavor, every workplace, every home and probably every brain on the planet. We’ll implant chips in our heads, count on it! Just a tool ….

And what a tool! Smarter than us, eventually more creative than us, probably be better dancers than us, better musicians, better writers. Let the machine do it. Let AI handle that. Give us humans more time for daytime TV and game shows, more leisure hours at the casino or on vacation. If we still have vacations when the computers take over our jobs. Maybe they’ll figure out a New Economics, what do to with the jobless, the homeless and the hopeless.

The Brave New World is coming — hell, it’s here now. Go and visit our classrooms, the Pied Piper is calling all the children. Where it’s taking them, damned if I know, maybe a brighter future, might even be the answer to prayers on the solution to world problems. But it won’t be the next step in evolution, beyond biology, certainly beyond my comprehension. You think I’m afraid? Damn right I’m afraid! Tool my ass. We’ll be the tools.

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