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So the World Health Organization just declared a new psychopathology, Gaming Disorder, the addictive propensity to sit for hour after hour with an X-box, disdaining sleep and food and exercise. Good diagnosis, guyz! But you forgot to include Facebook, You-Tube, computer addictions, porn and cellphone. Maybe, just maybe, they’re really all one disease. Ya think?

I guess the Facebook zombies actually stop to eat. And it could even be argued that this social media is really social. A new social, I guess, no face to face necessary, just tweets and instagrams, nothing too up-close and personal. Tim Cook, the new warden at Apple, recently declared sitting at a computer terminal to be the new cancer. Thanks, Tim, for asking the troops to stand up. How about asking them to go outdoors and exercise? Or quit their carcinogenic jobs? Or get a life?

We’re rewiring our brains, no doubt about it. B.F. Skinner and the Pavlovian dogs, peck a button and the bait, I mean the reward, comes tumbling out, time after time, predictable as an IV of opiods. Try this experiment if you’re a doubter: put away your cellphone, turn off your computer, unplug the TV and peripherals and devices, see how long you can last before the shakes and the fevers start. I bet about an hour. We might be missing important stuff. You know, Trump, Beyonce, Oprah, the photo from a friend you rarely see, Trump, the latest movie star scandal, did I mention Trump? If I did, let me add Trump again anyway.

This is our reality now. We even made a reality show huckster our Leader. We get what we deserve, the old adage goes in regard to a country and its rulers. Times certainly change and now they’re changing in hyper-drive. If anyone thinks, myself included, that there will be a cure for this disorder, we got another think coming. In about two tweets.

Posted in rantings and ravings on August 26th, 2016 by skeeter

It’s easy to come back to the place of your youth and fall into a nostalgic reverie, long flashbacks to the good old days. You know, if they were actually good, not mostly memories of hard struggles and forlorn winter glooms. But looking back from these years future, though bittersweet, reveals a winding road you might not care to travel again, still, you wouldn’t want to have missed that detour.

Old age, so they say, brings wisdom. Youth, I say from experience, was a frenzied search for some kind of meaning, maybe any kind. The monks, and the zen masters, they removed themselves from the distractions of the world to contemplate, to synchronize with the OM, to hear the one hand clapping. When they had reached satori, when their breathing was one with the cosmos, when the koan of a tree falling in the forest without them there to hear was solved, they emerged back into the world, exemplars of purity of thought.

I wonder if they wished they had stayed. I wonder if what they learned in solitude and meditation was that they were one with what they had left, that the sound of the one hand was the same sound as the tree falling as the same sound as the OM as the same sound of their breathing which is the same exact sound of everyone’s breathing and that the journey we take is the journey they took without our distractions but the distractions are actually the one hand clapping after all.

Maybe they know the answer to that and I don’t. But … what I think, looking back from the road I started on, is the answer to that is that the road is never the same. We are never the same. The sound of the one hand clapping, don’t kid yourself, it sounds different the next time. Be glad to be IN the world, don’t try to BE your own hermetically sealed world. And that one hand clap, by the way, it won’t be the sound of applause, more like a sigh of relief. . Visit the Skeeter Diaries Site 

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island. The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack. I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too. Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County. I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages. Or maybe it was this: a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours. The county might’ve done the taX-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue. Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted. A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us. Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!! The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status. Boy, he read me like a book. A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz. In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins. We got to build our parents’ suburban homes. Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?
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