Hammer Mill Days

That putty’s too dry. You can’t do anything with it now. What’d you do, leave it out in the sun? Well, that’s your problem right there. Sun, hot. Sun HOT. Oh, hi. Just another summer’s day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, Big Green’s longtime adopted home (squat house). Truth be known, we don’t always squat here – sometimes we stand bolt upright. I know that breaks with protocol for squat houses, but hell … we’ve got a lot of head room in this mill. Those old nineteenth century hammer-meisters must have been pretty tall; either that or they all worked on horseback. (I seem to remember one promoter we had once who wanted us to play our music on horseback. He also wanted me to change my name to Tex Piadro. Don’t remember why we let him go, but …. we let him go.) Well, as anyone who has ever lived in an old apartment building knows, when it comes to structural flaws or things that leak, you’re basically on your own. If you’re a legit r

A snapshot from the day’s news – MSNBC is obsessing over Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s announcement that we’re withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany. The various former Republicans that populate its talk show panels are lamenting Trump’s undermining of the NATO alliance. In real time, we are seeing the Biden foreign policy take shape. I won’t say it’s a more aggressive posture, as Trump is aggressively pursuing conflict with Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China, and others. There is, however, a somewhat nostalgic turn to the emerging centrist doctrine Biden will no doubt pursue. It appears we may be in for a slight return of the cold war model, the east-west divide, the Russian menace. If that’s the case, it would be a bitter trade in exchange for the crap show we’re living through now. I am tentative about this observation because it’s hard to be certain what a Biden foreign policy will be when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has consistently avoided po