Hammer Mill Days

  You know, there are better things you could be doing with your time. Like, I don’t know …. mowing the lawn. Oh, right – we don’t have a lawn. How about rearranging the bricks in the courtyard? That’s one task that won’t do itself. Or beating the rugs. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment, but they’ve really crossed a line with me over the past few weeks. Oh, hello, reader(s). You just caught me in the middle of berating Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for not being industrious enough. Yes, I know – he’s an automaton, he only responds to programming, I’m not being fair, etc., etc. The thing is, I don’t know how to program a robot, and his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, is not speaking to anyone this week. All I have left is a dressing down, robot or no. Multi-platform clusterfuck Marvin has a few responsibilities as my personal robot assistant. One is taking charge of Big Green’s social media presence. I should say here that Marvin is in n...

I’ve probably told this story before, but let me repeat it for some of the young people out there. I have never been a sustained political activist, but I’ve been activist-adjacent all of my adult life. During that time, I have attended political meetings (mostly around foreign policy issues), participated in protests, and interacted with more committed activists at various levels. I bloviate – that’s most of what I’ve done. I’ve also worked phone banks for specific candidates a handful of times from 2006 on. Since the mid to late 1990s, I have also taken part in online organizing at a very low level. At the beginning, this involved subscribing to listservs, message boards, that sort of thing. As I mentioned above, I started working on Democratic party campaigns about sixteen years ago, but I never contributed money to a campaign until relatively recently. Nevertheless, around the time of the 2004 election, I started getting fundraising emails from the Democratic party...