The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Let’s forget about politics for a nano-second. Not that the future with Donald J. Trump looks so bright you’d hafta wear shades …. But looming in the background beyond all that white noise of collusion and criminality something dark is rearing its monstrous head. You can sense it without actually seeing it, a kind of high pitched whirring drone buzz coming up faster than 5G, and when you glance in the rear-view mirror, the objects you can’t see yet are actually about to pass you, sucking you forward in a wind-draft of sudden acceleration.

The future is here and the speedometer is way over the speed limit of comprehension. Cyber-hacking, drone warfare, artificial intelligence, smart houses with smart appliances, self-driving cars and trucks, crypto currencies, blockchain technology, facial recognition, data tracking, government and corporate surveillance, tech monopolies, genetic engineering, fake news — the Silicon Valley boyz are bending the gravitational field, warping reality, moving us toward an unregulated future our politicians can’t comprehend and the rest of us can scarcely imagine.

This isn’t 1984, this is the Matrix. This is a world running on algorithms and multi-layered programs built by engineers and geeks without regard to implication or consequence. If you feel queasy coming into the New Year, it isn’t the punch. It’s the creeping suspicion that things to come are out of control, that the future isn’t just unpredictable, it’s downright scary. We live in science fiction now and the monsters are coming. The monsters are already among us.

We’re now interconnected, a global hive. The checkout woman at my grocery store was muttering how everyone is in too much of a hurry. Oh, ya think? We’ve been in a hurry for decades. This isn’t that. This is an amorphous unsettled angst, a barely audible shriek in broad daylight, something spinning out of our control. We dial up our devices, we hold back the boredom, we reprogram our reptile brains, we ignore what all this means. But deep down we’re scared. We think it’s the economy maybe, or politics, or the endless wars in the Middle East, or terrorists, or Trump, or the immigrants, or another in an interminable series of mass shootings. It isn’t. They’re distractions.

Binge watch Netflix and update Instagram, but outside that cocoon the world is morphing into something unstable, something gathering form, something menacing and dark. Something we’re creating. Don’t ask what, don’t open the door, don’t look out the window. But it doesn’t matter, it’s inside now, in your smartphone, in your gadgets, in the refrigerator, in the computer, in your head. If you think it’s too late … it is.

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