Adaptive Curmudgeon

I’d wandered into a sushi joint. The place had sushi (which is Japanese or possibly Californian) but was named “Shanghai something or other”. What the fuck? Isn’t Shanghai in China? Do they not have a map? The inability to differentiate between two ancient and long time competitors and enemies is how Americans got an international reputation for being morons. It was like walking into “Hockey palace” and instead of Canadians selling poutine finding an Italian guy making spaghetti.

The place was mostly empty. I sat at the bar and pondered the menu. I love sushi but vapor lock when choosing among odd combinations of whatever Japan traditionally scoops out of the ocean. It’s delicious but sounds gross. I still can’t quite grok why I love an ingredient called “eel sauce”. I do not want to know where eel sauce comes from! If you know, don’t tell me. Eels are gross! If they make sauce out of them I just can’t even imagine…

Yet I love sushi; even if I’d never wrap anything in seaweed of my own volition.

I ordered and the bartender keyed my order into a terminal. I downed the first beer like it was trying to escape. The second beer went pretty fast. It might have been hotter than I’d thought. I might have worked harder than I’d registered. He handed me the third beer but I set it at arms length. I had to pace myself!

The bartender laughed, “Hot out today?”

I smiled “Yep, please pour me an ice water before I get sloppy drunk.”

He was a good guy. It turns out he ran the place. He was obviously overworked. He started talking about his business. He’d almost gone broke but had been doing OK since the covid thing ended. Unfortunately, getting food shipped to East Bumfuck Nowhere was a constant challenge.

I was enjoying the conversation. I’m the kind of nerd that likes hearing details about supply chains that deliver octopus to middle America.

He’d shifted gears to personnel issues. Apparently, the one thing harder than sourcing exotic seafood was finding workers to be waitstaff. (He and I are not the only ones to witness this systemic development.)

I glanced at the sushi cook in the back. He looked like he might be a samurai. How does one hire a sushi cook from the land of the rising sun? Don’t tell me he advertised on Craigslist! What pay must you offer to lure someone from Tokyo to flyover country? The dude making sushi came from God knows where but there wasn’t a local college student to wait tables?

A dude came in and sat down. He was doing some sort of food delivery service. They’re all the same to me; Uber food, or just eats, or doordash, or whatever. The bartender / owner gave him a friendly nod. Neither one discussed food orders. I gathered the food order had been electronically transferred directly from the hungry consumer to the hard working sushi chef in the back. A system that seems pretty efficient to me.

This was another variable in the equation. Nobody wanted a job inside the restaurant but someone was willing to be a “sub-contractor” delivering from it. Is the role of waitress slowly evolving into cell phone software and a delivery guy? I’ve no opinion. I’m merely interested in the larger pattern.

This meant that the local pool of college students and residents too lazy to work as waitstaff were simultaneously rich enough to pay delivery fees. How the heck does any part of our economy actually work these days?

Then shit got weird. A robot went trundling by!

I had to ask. “You have a robot?”

“Yes!” The owner / bartender enthused. “I was afraid it would be a novelty but it’s really working out.”

Aside from the bar there were tables. Every table had tablets on which to place an order. The information went to the chef and the food was delivered by robot. The robot was a hit with customers. Soon I was listening to a discussion on the pros and cons of automated food delivery. Clearly the owner / bartender was smarter than the average bear!

As with all things automated, the robot handles grunt work like a champ. The downside was that it required the owner / bartender to take on additional “mindwork” duties. He was the robot maintenance guy. He said it wasn’t much; three hours a week or so. I mentally compared three hours charging batteries and cleaning wheels versus the hassle of hiring waitstaff that might flake out, screw up, or not exist at any price. Sounded like a good balance but it requires a secret ingredient. It depends on an owner / bartender clever enough to manage robot software AND do all of the other jobs.

Meanwhile we have delivery sub-contractors and robots in the same restaurant where there are no waitresses. All this depends on an owner who can both program robots and tend bar.

The interaction between jobs not done and automation is fascinating. I sense a mountain within the fog; a world that has already changed in ways we don’t quite fathom. Perhaps it’s neither good nor bad; it simply is. Waitresses were a job for millennia but nobody wants to do it in 2022. Pizza delivery is 50 years old or less. Covid made pizza delivery level up to “anything delivery”. Many consumers are more or less shut-ins. Apparently shut-ins still have money. How do the pieces of the puzzle fit?

If there was a legit self driving car, wouldn’t the car and table delivery robot merge? It could go either way. The Doordash guy could wind up broke. Or he could get rich. Right now he can drive one shitty car at a time. What if he could dispatch six self driving vehicles at once? What happened to the pre-covid experimental Amazon drones?

The hard working Samurai in the kitchen dispatched food on a self piloting electronic gadget for a rural American who wonders if his truck is becoming irreplaceable. Gas is $5. Container ships still float in the Pacific. I’d ordered fresh seafood delivered from God knows where. The beer was cold and the power grid is still up. What does it all mean?

The robot approached gently and beeped. Oh for fuck’s sake. Really?

“Did that robot just make sounds like R2D2?” I grumped.

“Yeah,” the owner / bartender chuckled “it needs to make a sound so people notice it. The sound people like is R2D2.”

I pushed my chair back to blocked its way. It burbled R2D2 robot gibberish at me and carefully piloted around the chair.

“A real robot mimics the sounds of a fictional robot from a movie in 1977?”

“Yep!”

“Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

“No, why?”

“It’s a real robot. It can make any sound. Human voices, opera, heavy metal, it could have a Japanese accent, or meow like a kitten. Why make a real thing mimic a fake version of itself that never actually existed?”

“It’s what people want I guess.”

“Everyone here except us,” I waved around, “wasn’t alive in 1977. Shouldn’t it sound like Ultron, or Jarvis, or Alexa?”

“Speak for yourself, I wasn’t born in 1977.”

Great! Now I felt old AND disconcerted.

“Well if you ever program it to talk like HAL9000 give me a call. I’ll give it a big tip.” I chuckled and left it at that. I complimented the bartender / owner on the best sushi I’ve ever had and prepared to leave. Meanwhile, the robot wandered away and came back with paper bags for the Doordash guy. He patted the robot like a dog.

As I walked out the empty robot passed by. I stepped into it’s path. It stopped and beeped at me. “All your base are belong to us.” I snarked. Patiently, it routed around me and went back to work..

The hotel’s website said “ample truck parking”. They lied!

I pulled into a dead end parking lot and, for want of better options, blocked everything. The world would have to wait while I checked in. Don’t blame me, blame the marketing genius who lured my huge truck to this citified lot.

If you live in what I call “reality America” things are pretty normal. You can almost forget the other half crawled up its own ass and still hasn’t come back out. The hotel was a reminder; the nutters are still nuts. The dread of covid hung in the air like an unvented fart. Cities get off on impending doom. We’re all human. We have roughly equal physical resilience, but cities cling desperately to the idea that citizens (subjects?) are fragile hothouse flowers; one step from the fainting couch and two from the grave. The rest of us figured it out literally years ago. If covid was going to be the black death it would have done the job by now. Rural folks in every state quit cosplaying Armageddon and went back to our lives. The cities shot society in the head and now sit in corners praying for death.

The hotel front desk was “protected” by a frame of thin wood slats. To this, someone had stapled clear plastic film. This Kindergarten arts and crafts project was supposed to protect the brave frontlines worker. They might as well have glued macaroni to construction paper. Yet a virus prowls the other side of 4 mm vinyl like a lion behind bars; or so they pretend.

Behind the irrelevant film was a college student. I know this because no living being can be as pretentious and annoying as a college student. I’ll go out on a limb and say he was a graduate student and he majored in “you want fries with that”. He oozed “I’m better than you” with a side of “you’re different than me so in the name of diversity I reflexinvely hate you”. Universities train the ignorant to be snobbish while holding monkey’s job.

He passed me my keycard as if I were a dog that might bite. He didn’t actually hand it to me though, he slid it through a slit cut in the bottom of the film. I suppose this kept the double vaxxed effete twit within safe from the air breathing deplorable on the other side.

“Where’s the truck parking?” I asked.

He waved at the inadequate parking area. Syllables are too much like interacting with your equals. I nodded.

Back out in the parking lot I found an entirely different world. It was nearly sunset and a work crew had wheeled out a BBQ. They were grilling brats and standing around drinking beer. Several were playing a makeshift game of horseshoes (with non metallic throwing shoes). A few were lounging in lawnchairs. A radio played shitty three chord country pop. One guy, off to the side, was having an intense discussion with his cell phone.

I was so happy to see them. People who work in the real world were enjoying a well earned break. I’m a loner. I haven’t been on a work crew in years. I still remember the comradery and sometimes I miss it.

I hated to interrupt but I needed them to move a few of their pickups “Sorry fellas, the manbun in the saran-wrap told me to park here.”

They weren’t even remotely offended. Two pickups were moved in a flash. They had seen me pull in and knew it was inevitable. I laboriously backed my truck around a curve to get a better line. Then I rolled it forward at an angle to “parallel park” my truck and heavy trailer. In order to fit, I had to inch very close to a battered SUV. Seeing my problem, one of the men held up a hand. He trotted over to the man who was practically melded with his phone.

I could see the whole story playing out. The cell phone man had the exact look of a worker who’s out on the road earning money and has just been dumped by someone back home. It’s a tale as old as time. The fellow helping me gesticulated to the cell phone man who responded with an angry finger. Someone else just grabbed a jacket from a nearby fence and rifled through it for keys. Soon the cell phone guy’s vehicle was moved without the cell phone guy’s permission, cooperation, or awareness. Poor fella’ looked pretty wrung out.

I did a good job “parallel parking” 40’ of machine with all of 14 wheels on 4 axles. Good thing too because I’d have been fatally embarrassed to fuck up in front of the whole crew!

I shut down and climbed out. “Thanks guys.”

They’d gathered round the trailer examining what I was hauling.

“Is that an Edsel?” One of the younger guys asked.

“No, it’s a Studebaker.” I responded.

(Note: it wasn’t an Edsel or a Studebaker. Please accept these placeholders in lieu of OPSEC violating facts.)

“It sure looks like an Edsel.” He insisted.

SMACK! A hand shot out from the guy to his left and administered a friendly but firm dope slap. “If the man had an Edsel he’d fucking know it was an Edsel wouldn’t he?” His elder explained. Quite reasonable logic I’d say.

“Yeah, that’s right. Sorry.” The younger guy stammered.

I was pleased to see such fine mentoring. Common sense and a quick correction. Someday the youngster would be a well rounded and competent man. Well done!

We stood around shooting the shit for a while and I felt like one of the group. It feels nice to fit in! As we talked about the pros and cons of Edsels and Studebakers we got an earful of the cell phone man’s drama. Everyone agreed the sooner he was done with “that slut” the better. There was a consensus that him getting dumped was, whether he knew it or not, a blessing in disguise. The phrases “dodging a bullet” and “crazy bitch” were bandied about. I wonder if the younger guy was picking up on this. It’s surely one of life’s most important lessons.

I could have scammed a bratwurst from their BBQ but I wanted to sit in air conditioning. I wished them all well and hiked across the road to the only restaurant nearby.

It turned out the restaurant was quite interesting.

(To be continued.)

[This is the story of when I had to hauled a thing I’ll not describe from a place I’m not going to specify to a location that’s none of your business. Enjoy!]

Usually my Dodge is ridiculous. Its massive drivetrain, including an expensive transmission and an engine that would eat a Subaru for breakfast, is overkill. This day overkill was just the right amount of power. The payload was well within spec but still hefty.

As I hauled ass and payload I thought about the lizard people pummeling our formerly prosperous and stable society. A horde of irrelevant screaming eco-dweebs and stern sounding authority figures would like to cram my ass into an electric car. (They’d like to do it to you too!) There’s no room in their glorious theories for real-life variation. There isn’t an electric vehicle on earth that can do what my truck was doing that day. I was using all the horsepower. Bitchy rants by autistic Swedish teenagers mean nothing to a person trying to move tonnage up a hill. Money Obama threw at the Chevy Volt did me no good. Trump and Biden’s subsidies of Tesla were equally irrelevant. I needed horsepower and was bleeding hard from paying Bidenverse prices to fuel the machine to do it.

Electric puddle jumpers will eventually trundle handfuls of urban commuters to the fabric cubicles which have been abandoned in droves since covid. EVs might fill the ranks of the harpies at the HR department downtown but they’ll never drive civilization itself. Nothing in the real world is battery powered and yet strong enough to work a farm.

Such is the irony of an over-regulated world’s inevitable decline. I was doing legal and socially beneficial work. The work depends on tools which “elites” lust to ban. A Soviet peasant in 1975 could tell you all about it.

They’ve more or less tried to eliminate my truck already. For decades it has been a morass of engineering weirdness to get anything running and on the actual road. One side demands unreasonable fuel efficiency. The other slathers each and every vehicle with tons of expensive and heavy safety mandates. None of this is free. Every highly specific fuel injection mapping routine and delicate six speed transmission is funded by someone. It’s a huge (but invisible) pile of dollars extracted from the hands of men who might have spent it productively elsewhere.

You can see how it happens. A room full of college graduates who’ve never hauled a horse trailer in a mudpit gather together. They sit in an air conditioned room on the Potomac to write lists of demands. They hammer on the system day after day, year after year; all the way until the lights go out. (Which they say might happen in fits and starts this summer in Texas, parts of Nevada, and possibly southern California… but who’s worried about that right?)

Another few cranks to the regulatory ratchet and there will be no consumer grade vehicles with balls. No point in wishing it otherwise. The end result for me is a fork in the road. Either I’ll quit or I’ll keep the friggin’ Dodge running forever!

I’ve seen this elsewhere. As a kid growing up in cold war America, I loved articles about embargoed Cuba. I was enamored with the photos of the antique cars. Havana was filled with cars that had been pushed beyond their lifespan long before I even got my license. They were pretty to look at but it was also poignant. The people of Havana were reduced to exhibits in a time zoo. I felt sympathy for the poor bastards. A restored classic for a Sunday cruise is fun but who wants to limp around in a worn out Chevy every day? I peer at the horizon and sense our version of Cuba’s path. Are you ready for AM radio and hand operated windows… forever?

What a pain in the ass it must be? I’d love to own a classic car but if it’s your daily driver wouldn’t you gladly ditch a classic Bel Aire for an eight year old Honda Civic? What if gas was $5 a gallon? At least back then (I don’t know about now) such things weren’t in the cards. The Cuban people were chained down by people who’re comfortable drawing lines around other people’s life options.

We’re not entirely immune to Cuba’s fate. American cars built in the 1970’s ran like anemic shit. They suffered under new regulations until everyone was shoehorned into an expensive fuel injection system with wheels under it. So many Americans switched to Toyotas and Datsuns that Detroit was gutted. The city never recovered. Now we drive around in SUVs which are a loophole in the noose on passenger cars.

We’re much better off than Cuba but it’s a spectrum not a cliff. Where on the wide plains between an East German Trabant and “anything goes” do I really live?

Has the same happened with personal aircraft? It’s said that a logbook is sometimes worth more than the plane itself. A regular person who wants to own a plane tends to wind up with a very carefully maintained antique. It’s hard to build a plane but not that hard. If I could buy a new plane for the cost of a new Subaru, I’d probably be working on my license. Since that’s more or less impossible, I ride motorcycles.

Cubans can’t buy an Ford F-150. Americans can’t buy a Cessna without breaking the bank. Farmers run old tractors because the new ones are fussy and restrictive to repair. (The prices on a 25 year old farm tractor are shocking. In part because John Deere is the Apple product of the fields and nobody’s got time or money for that shit.)

We build the cage in which we lock ourselves.

The media squawks about electric cars and self driving vaporware as if there’s a tidal wave of demand. There isn’t. In real world America, the most popular vehicles are trucks and SUVs. No matter what Biden’s $5 gas forces on us, it isn’t going to make us enjoy an egg shaped 50MPH citybound e-turd.

In general, regulatorily limited cars make sense only in limited situations which correlate with limited lifestyles. For one thing, the baseline is a rock solid electric grid (so nobody sees the coal being burned to make the Tesla go). After that, small opportunities appear. If a retired geezer wants to trundle around The Villages in his boomerific golf cart, more power to him. If Mindy has no plans to go further than the coffee shop and Mandy only goes to her office cubicle they can cost share half a smart car. But if any of them spread their wings it collapses instantly. People that want to take the kids across the state to a little league game, haul a bale of hay, or keep rolling in a snowstorm need more than batteries can give. The smaller and weaker the machine, the more they become ridiculous beyond the walled enclaves of Panem.

Am I in another time zoo? Am I the generation that will see the end of the line for machines like my very powerful and useful Dodge? I think perhaps we’re already on the Cuba track; chained down by the American Government’s incremental embargo against Americans buying what Americans want.

My truck is approaching a quarter million miles. It’s almost old enough to vote. How different is that from my younger self marveling at the tailfins on a Cadillac in Havana? I’ll keep my truck running it as long as I can. It’s necessary. A replacement is unspeakably expensive and each year it becomes more unreachable.

Well that’s all very depressing eh? What can I say, driving gives you time to think.

After a long but productive day for man and machine, I bailed off the road. I considered trying to subsist in a tent somewhere but I crowbarred open my wallet and paid for a hotel.

(To be continued.)