Hammer Mill Days

Lift the needle. Right about ... there. That's good. Now let's do the next one. Excellent. We will soon have my entire LP collection transferred to 8-track cartridges, at long last. Oh, hello. Just catching up on some housekeeping. You know how it is, especially when you're living the dream here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Time gets away from you, and you end up neglecting all that stuff you meant to do, had to do, were legally obligated to do, etc. I'm only just now getting around to filing my tax returns for 1983. I think my extension may have run out, but I'm not sure. There's a stack of letters from the IRS I've yet to open.... Right, so I'm falling behind. I think we all are here in Big Green land. Fact is, cousin Rick Perry has a song by that name on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. It goes something like this.... I'm fallin' behind, I'm fallin' behind T'ain't never lost before ...

I suppose I'm old enough to grumble about stuff I can't control. And right now I'm irritated enough to take a personal swipe at some of the old white men running the country from their comfy chairs in the United States Congress. But rather than sound like John McCain, I'm going to limit myself to saying that the Senate confirmation hearing for Chuck Hagel was pretty disgraceful for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the simple fact that the man was being criticized for the high points in his career - the stuff he got right, for chrissake. The Republicans on the panel hate their old colleague because he's not bug-fuck nuts enough. See, this is what happens when you don't hold people accountable. If someone had paid some kind of price for driving us into the Iraq war, maybe John McCain and others wouldn't feel so confident about grilling Hagel on a marginal point like the "surge" strategy. Even by their reading of it as being an indisputab...