Hammer Mill Days

They say that Pluto is a big surprise. That may be true for most people, even rocket scientists, but not for the interstellar collective known as Big Green. Ha, ha! I mean, that stuff about surface features suggesting frozen bodies of methane - um, we knew that. What the hell, you don't even have to GO to Pluto to know that much. All you need is Mitch Macaphee's trans-dimensional light-enhancement planetometer. He showed me the gizmo just this past weekend. It looks strangely like that old oscillator we picked up at a garage sale. I guess he probably hollowed it out and filled it with some of that mad science technology. Now it flashes on and off like a ... uh ... like a flashy thing. Well, Mitch can tell a lot about distant, frozen planets just by looking at those little lights go on and off. When I tell him about NASA's revelations, he just rolls his eyes, then mouths the word "NASA" while he makes a face. I know, you probably think he's still sore over...

Yeah, so I did get around to writing. Partly because I'm in a ghastly New Jersey hotel room at 6:30 a.m. with nothing to do for the next two hours, and partly because I've got the usual head-full of notions. I'll be the first to admit that I don't travel a lot these days. My wife Kory and I take day trips on occasion, but that's about it. That's a big change from back in the day, to be sure. Kory traveled all over the country for her film work and lived in Manhattan for about 15 years. Of course, I did the same in pursuit of a meager living as an itinerant musician and as a low-rent roadie, tag-along in my very very early years. Living in a tiny little burg in upstate New York as we do, you tend to intellectualize big problems like climate change. Nothing makes it more concrete than an afternoon on the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike. Millions of vehicles in a mad crush, turning the road into a massive parking lot around the major exits, ever...