Hammer Mill Days

My Martin D-1 needs strings again. So what's new? I always let stringed instruments go to seed - it's how I roll. That's why true guitarists hate me. (Dude, you KNOW it's true.) I just don't play the fucker enough, that's my problem. But then I guess you could say my problem is that I don't do ANYTHING enough, so it's just part of a larger problem. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has volunteered to act as my guitar technician. Only trouble is, his inventor - the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee - gave him prehensile claws for hands, so it's kind of a challenge to restring a guitar in his little tin world. Kind of outside his wheel house. (That's not a metaphor. He actually does have a wheel house.) It's when the sun starts shining and the leaves unfurl in this part of the country that the mind turns more to making music. Maybe that's someone else's music, sure, but music nevertheless. You can hear it wafting out of the abandoned...

I don't think it would be a surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I am substantially to the left of Bernie Sanders on a whole range of issues. That said, I am overjoyed that he has done as well as he has in the contest for the Democratic nomination. It is unprecedented in my lifetime that such a progressive voice could win a string of primaries and caucuses, and that bodes well for the next generation of voters (if they make it a habit to get to the polls). What I have to say about the "Bernie or bust" tendency, however, differs from what a lot of people on the hard left are saying these days. Working to defeat Trump by, among other things, supporting Clinton if she's nominated is simply not that hard a pill to swallow for me - a person for whom a vote for Bernie was a kind of compromise. I want to take a moment to look at some of the main contentions I have heard from Bernie or Busters, none of which (spoiler alert!) I feel has any real merit. Contention #1...