Hammer Mill Days

It's not use - that guitar string just isn't long enough. We could tie two or three of them together. Or maybe a banjo string.... they're kind of stretchy, aren't they? Yeah, it's us again. Big Green, standing at the rim of another hole to the center of the Earth. Damn, this gets tiresome sometimes. We're not complicated people, you know... aside from that psychology thing. All we want to do is hang out at our abandoned hammer mill, make a little music, watch the stars from the rooftops, bend pretzels on alternate Thursdays, and shoot arrows through the persistent space/time warp in the washroom that Mitch created so many months ago. It's the simple things that give the most pleasure, is it not? (No, really... I want to know. It is the simple things, isn't it?) And yet we are perpetually faced with these complications, these Gordian knots, these Rubic Cubes, these Junior Jumbles, these Uncle Art's Funland spot-the-differences cartoons, these... Okay...

No excuses. This is the best I've got, that's all. It took less than a week following the attempted car bombing in Times Square for us to start tossing our constitutional rights out the window. This is, in some ways, an even more extreme response than the one that followed the catastrophe of 9/11. A failed attempted bombing has got people discussing legislation that would strip citizenship and all of its attendant constitutional rights from U.S. citizens accused of giving material support to terrorist organizations. That's right... accused . No trial by peers. No due process. Just deny people their basic rights as a U.S. citizen on the basis of an accusation or indictment alone. W.t.f. Sounds like a Lieberman idea. Well, it is a Lieberman idea. He and retired male model Scott Brown have put this piece of garbage forward rather proudly, despite the fact that it is a.) almost certainly unconstitutional and b.) such a rabid overreaction to what has occurred that it can only...