The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Folks these days are scared. Can’t say I really blame em. The fear mongers pump the worst case scenarios on X and Facebook, Newsmax and MSNBC. The liberals are grooming their kids, the conservatives will be policing their bedrooms. We’ve divided into two warring sides and the other side is definitely Evil.

No one is left in the wide chasm that once was the middle. The center couldn’t hold. Covid taught us to fear the coming bird flu already in cattle and milk. Half of us are afraid of any potential vaccine. Might be a transmitting device. Might be poison. We don’t trust scientists, our school teachers are undermining our kids’ patriotism, the courts are witch hunts, the elections are rigged. Who ya gonna call?

Artificial Intelligence should kick the last of the foundations out. Nothing can be taken at face value, all news, all information is suspect. The internet, that promise of democratizing information, will be riddled with worms, lies, propaganda, craziness, conspiracies, bots and phony baloney as far as the eyes and ears can see and hear.

Scared? Angry? Hell yes!! The old reality is dissolving every day! The world is shape-shifting every mouse click. Nothing is as it seems and definitely not as it seemed only yesterday. We live by gizmo. Cellphone addiction, TikTok entertainment, Facebook popularity, memes, video games, internet ‘influencers’, distractions distractions and more distractions. Our attention spans have atrophied to bits and bytes, click baited, concentration rendered impossible.

From my perch on the porch of the South End, the mainland is drifting further away on tides of grievance and anxiety, almost another country no longer tethered to the rhythms here of tide and moon, seasons and song. Walking the beach today, no one else for miles, the wind blew warm and a lone whale spouted offshore. The two of us traveled together to the Head, keeping pace with each other, maybe keeping faith, definitely sharing the same world. I’m no Ahab, don’t call me when you realize reality has come unmoored. I’m staying put.

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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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