Hammer Mill Days

Sometimes if you're up early enough in the morning, you can see the first rays of the sun breaking over the ruins of the abandoned mill next door. I think they made broom handles there or something. Now it's just some disheveled wreck that the sun rises over. Hey .... been there. Yes, friends, it's been many, many suns and even more moons since I started this blog about Big Green. We now have posts that stretch back nearly as far as those rays of sunlight. A rich body of balderdash, and it's getting balder all the time. Sometimes you forget where this all began - in some crappy dive on the west end of the city, the walls smelling of beer, dog crap on the stage, and a bartender who hates your ass. A lot of music careers start that way. Ours, on the other hand, was never anything else. (Yes, we are like most bands - spectacularly unsuccessful and damn proud of it.) So we took to the hammer mill and started hammering out recordings. That was in the nineties. Since then...

The polls are tightening, and it's no surprise. The Clinton campaign has spent the summer on the sidelines, courting centrist republicans and waiting for Trump to collapse under the sheer weight of his contradictions and xenophobic rhetoric. That strategy has been a dismal failure. Young people and the left are drifting away to third-party dead-end candidates or to simply sitting on their hands, mostly because the Clintons have done virtually nothing to attract them and plenty to piss them off, like naming fracking advocate Ken Salazar as transition chief and courting the approval of the likes of John Negroponte. When you see Trump ahead in Ohio, that's down to the fact that fewer left-leaning members of the Obama coalition are self-identifying as likely voters. That's a recipe for disaster. What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there...