Hammer Mill Days

  Man, it’s hot today. Maybe we should make some tea. Like a whole pot of tea. Perfect day for it. Just fill the pot with water, put it on the counter and watch it come to a boil. No problem – lovely pot of tea. Well, it’s August, and it’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum in here, as the sages of Monty Python once said (with a cartoonish Aussie accent). It will come as a surprise to no one that there is no air conditioning here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. In fact, the closest thing we have to air conditioning is some holes in the roof – holes that let the air in. Sometimes the air is cool, sometimes not. It’s conditional, on account of the changing weather …. air conditional. Things my comic books taught me Summers like this remind me of my misspent youth. I say “me”, because no one else here remembers my misspent youth. Even Matt, who misspent much of it right alongside me, doesn’t care to remember, and who can blame him? If you remember the ...

I should start out by saying that I have never been unhoused. There’s a good reason for that – I am a CIS-gender white male who grew up in a middle class / upper working class family. (In other words, dad didn’t have any college but made a decent living during a time when white men with no degree could do okay, not great.) The American economy is set up for people like me , and I benefited from my place of advantage. That means that, even when I was broke, there was a home I could go to. That home had equity, and when my parents passed away, some of that equity was passed along to me. Poor Americans, Americans of color, non CIS gender American largely do not enjoy this level of privilege. When they run into money trouble, it’s for real, and a lot of them go without food, medicine, or a roof over their heads as a result. In a country as wealthy as this one, that’s worse than a scandal; that’s a crime. What can we do about this? If it works in Austria, why not here? ...