Hammer Mill Days

Well, I wouldn’t call it a hit , exactly. Kind of more like a near hit. You know – the term George Carlin wanted to substitute for “near miss”. Let’s just say, hit-adjacent. That’s a bit more like it. Oh, hi. Just having a little discussion with my chief discography advisor and personal robot assistant, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yes, he’s wearing two hats on his tiny brass head today, largely because we currently have no incumbent in the position of chief discography advisor. I’m told most bands have trouble filling that post. The trade schools just can’t churn them out fast enough, I guess. Oh, well …. couldn’t pay them anyway. Right, well … we were just going over our canon. You know – our body of work. It’s kind of a decrepit body, frankly, hunched over and showing its age in a dozen different ways, but nevertheless, we’re sifting through our output, looking for hidden gems … or at least a fieldstone or two. (Lodestone, perhaps?) Why have we taken on...

I’ll start this post with some overly simplistic observations about human nature – here goes. My first thought is that, in general, modern-day Americans are encouraged to think that the sky’s the limit, but that that sky is about three inches over their heads. It’s a freakish hybrid of the power of positive thinking and terminal pessimism. This comes to mind as I consider what we as Americans are capable of vs. what we’re likely to even try to accomplish over the next few years. We have done enormous things before, no question. While the problems facing us are of an almost unprecedented scale, they are ultimately solvable if we have the political will to act. And yet, because we have been admonished for decades to “think small” when it comes to what we can ask of our government, it feels like we’re frozen in place, like a deer in the headlights. That, it seems to me, is problem number one. My second observation is about Democrats – more specifically, people inclined to v...