Hammer Mill Days

Is that all he's got? No, wait... there's another page coming through. Slowly. Somebody got another quarter for the payphone? I don't want to .... oh, man goddamn! Oh, hi. Yeah, just grappling with our communications issues, once again. Everything in Big Green's world is held together with duct tape and baling wire... but then you knew that. What you didn't know is that we've got a mom and pop drugstore up the street from us that has what may be the world's last coin operated pay phone. That's right... and it's bloody handy, now that Verizon has pulled the plug on us. (Damnable message unit charges!) So, yeah... we can call mom, talk to our label, harass our booking agent, order strings, all with a pocket full of change. It's like freaking magic. Who needs the twenty first century? We're harnessing the technology of yesteryear. (Or yestercentury.) Well, as you may remember, our sometimes agent Tiny Montgomery has been trying to fax us from ...

I didn't watch the whole cattle-call Republican presidential debate, but I have seen and heard some extended excerpts. So without too much fanfare, here are some random thoughts from a worker bee whose hive is quite a bit smaller than Mitt Romney's son's basement. Santorum (a.k.a. Mr. Google): "The reason we're seeing this second dip is because of energy prices, and this president has put a stop sign ... against oil drilling, against any kind of exploration offshore or in Alaska, and that is depressing. We need to drill. We need to create energy jobs, just like we're doing, by the way, in Pennsylvania, where we're drilling 3,000 wells this year for gas, and ... natural gas prices are down as a result." Not a surprise that he's a big fan of hydrofracking. What he's got wrong is the part about Obama stopping off-shore drilling - That's beyond ludicrous. (God knows, I wish it were true after that BP spill. ) Pawlenty: "We're proposing...

We went up to Griffith Park ... with a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red ... and smashed in on a rock, and wept ... while the old couple looked on into the dark... Oh, hi. Just trying to recall some ancient lyrics from The Band, off the Cahoots album. Not their best work, but still worthy of a listen. I don't know what brought that to mind aside from this nagging desire to, I don't know, go out into the park across from my house and take a few swigs of red eye. Why? Just because it's time for something completely different. Though something completely different might be standing out there with a tray full of cocktail sized vegetable samosas and a big vat of apricot chutney. Hang the whiskey. (Never sat very well with me anyway. That's more a drummer kind of thing. Fits very nicely just under the drum throne.) Summer at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill sets the mind a-wandering, I must admit. Much like winter does. Fall and spring too, for that matter. Everything about this ...

Okay, I'll admit to being a bit disappointed in the guy. He went on a lying tour, and that was dead wrong as well as impossibly stupid. Didn't think Weiner had that kind of stupidity in him, but I guess a certain amount resides within us all, eh? Though I'm not particularly given to admiring politicians, it's always encouraging to see one that's combative and unapologetically in favor of things like single-payer health insurance. Still, the basis of that is a willingness to speak often unpopular truths, so if you undermine your credibility, you lose your voice. That is the worst of what a guy like Weiner is facing. One wishes he had thought of that before taking chances like a drunken fourteen-year-old. I think, personally, that he missed an opportunity to make a point here: namely, that we all have private lives - that we all do things that are not illegal but that we prefer not to make known to the entire world. What Weiner was confessing in front of the ubiquito...

Calling all cars. One Adam Twelve. C-Q, C-Q. What the... - this thing is faulty as hell, Mitch! You call this emergency communications? I call it trash. Well, as you might imagine, we're trying to prepare for the worst here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Hurricane season is just starting, after all, and this has been the worst year for tornadoes for as long as anyone can remember. So we're getting all of our ducks in a row. (Kind of an ongoing project, as they keep waddling away and we have to keep having to chase them and carry them back.) We found some old tent stakes in the basement just in case anything... needs staking... down. Not sure when that's likely to come up, but if it does, we'll be ready. Then, of course, I've got some old tarps from my barnstorming days. Yeah, they're moldy and motheaten, but we're talking about emergency readiness here, not aesthetics. Get with the program! Mitch Macaphee came up with some walkie talkies that we can c...

Our entire political class is on fire to cut costs. Got a suggestion: shut down these useless wars. Yet another guy from my area has been killed in Afghanistan, fighting a war no one can justify. He's got a wife and two kids, with a third on the way. Just one of the thousands. I see the procession of portraits every week on the PBS News Hour, as do many of my fellow Americans, sitting safe and dry in our living rooms, shaking our heads and muttering as we switch the channel to, I don't know, Jersey Shore or some other shit. I know it's hard to care when you don't have any blood on the front line, but seriously - this war is simply wasting people... good people. I don't get choked up very often listening to NPR, but I heard a story on Memorial Day weekend that did it - about the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, talking about how he'd planted sunflowers near his son's gravestone because the young man liked them so much, and how the father went to Iraq and s...

Things are heating up around here. Not surprising. I left the mansized tuber in charge of the thermostats. Bugger was born in a greenhouse, what the hell was I thinking? Well, summer is upon us, friends. No, not summer by the calendar, but rather summer by the sweat of the brow. Or so it goes in the northern climes of the northern hemisphere, on that land mass known as "North America", just below the mighty lake Ontario, maker of much snow in the darker months - a kind of ice goddess, if you will. (Hell, even if you won't .) It doesn't take much to raise the temperature in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill - all that brick, you know, baking in the direct sunlight, no trees to protect us. It's like spending a night in the box. Sure wish you stop trying to help me, Captain. Okay, so... what's my summer project going to be? Could be any of a number of things. As Big Green has no interstellar tour booked, I may play a few gigs with my old cover band, Putting On Th...