Hammer Mill Days

I say let's start rehearsing on Wednesdays. You can't? Why the hell not? That's your LUNCH day? Oh, right. Forgot about that. Just trying to pull together some Big Green rehearsals in advance of our anticipated interstellar tour to promote our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Of course, I'm running into the usual scheduling conflicts. I keep forgetting how people arrange their time. Anti-Lincoln (who sometimes shakes a tambourine backwards for us), for instance, has what can only be described as a singular meal schedule: Instead of the usual three meals a day, he eats breakfast all day Sunday, lunch all day Wednesday, and dinner all day Friday. Hey - I don't judge. If it works for him, that's great. This does get to be like being a traffic cop, though. And what usually ends up happening is that Matt and I get together and just run through some songs, or make up new ones, or record an episode of Ned Trek for our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN ....

Kind of tired, so these will be brief. Cruz Control. Here we go again, lurching from crisis to crisis, the federal government sputtering along on fumes once more, its lifeblood of funding drying up. We haven't had an actual federal budget plan approved in years, just a series of continuing resolutions and last-minute deals. And now, as the federal deficit has shrunk (thanks in part to the blind cuts imposed by sequestration) to nearly half its size one year ago, the party who rules Washington - the tea party-fueled G.O.P. - has decided to drive us over the cliff once again, only this time it's about ideological, not budgetary, complaints. We must kill Obamacare (and fulfill a long list of other reactionary desires), or the economy gets it. Ted Cruz is working the reps in the House, but really ... the reps should know better. How can you call yourself a conservative and support playing chicken with the debt ceiling? Good call. Iranian president Rouhani called our own pres...

Marvin (my personal robot assistant), didn't I tell you to pick those Legos up about three hours ago? Can't you do anything without being told twelve times?! Are you even awake?! MARVIN!! Christ on a bike. Sloth has reached a new level of intensity here at the hammer mill, and it's no surprise. We have been cooped up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of three years (the worse part, too ... I remember those awful days...), not a hand's turn of work. Sure, we produced and released an album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , and have dutifully (and pitilessly) posted our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN every month, on the month (or quite nearly). But gainful employ? Naught, my friend. Goose egg. Arguably, it goes against human nature (and personal robot assistant nature, presumably) to be idle for so long. I've seen signs of restlessness, to be sure. Not from anti-Lincoln, of course, who spends most of his day in the forge room, swilling che...

This will be a quickie - I'm kind of pressed this week, for a variety of reasons. It's always astonishing to me to watch how issues in foreign affairs are reported in our nation's mainstream media. This week there was a major network interview with the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani. This was broadly characterized as part of a "charm offensive" that will include his appearance at the U.N. Any discussion of Iran is couched in the context of what is uncritically reported as their drive toward building nuclear weapons or a "nuclear weapons capability," which the U.S., Israel, and some European allies oppose. We have imposed very punishing economic sanctions, which cause tremendous misery amongst the Iranian population, and we and the Israeli government regularly threaten Iran with military aggression. So the reporting on the "charm offensive" is a bit like trash-talking the victim after kicking them in the gut (and promising worse down th...

You'll have to excuse me. I'm on the phone with Frigidaire. My dehumidifier has been recalled. Oh, the humanity! You know, if I had a pet manatee, I would consider naming him Hugh. Hugh Manatee. How's your day going? It's a little quiet around the Hammer Mill today, now that the dehumidifier has been unplugged. Dank, musty old place. Sometimes I think we're frittering our lives away in this ruin. But then, there are worse ways to go. And I'm rather fond of fritters, myself, particularly apple fritters with a dusting of cinnamon. Mmmmm, boy. What's new in Big Green land? Well, sales of our new album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick are breaking all previous records. What records specifically? Well... it's at the top of all "least popular" top ten lists. Sales are reaching nearly one unit, call it none. Could have something to do with our marketing strategy. I told Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that tossing a copy of the album o...

When people consider themselves exceptional, they make themselves potentially dangerous. That's the gist of what Vladmir Putin had to say in his N.Y.Times op-ed piece, and people of many different political stripes here in the United States seem to have taken exception to this. I happened to be at the dentist the morning of its publication; the flat-screen t.v. above my dental couch was playing Fox & Friends, and they were throwing Stalin in Putin's face. No surprise there. (What else can you expect from a clown parade headed by Michele Malkin?) A lot of t.v. liberals didn't like it either. Frankly, though, for all of his failings as a leader, it's not hard to see what Putin was getting at. We have, under the banner of American Exceptionalism, invaded any number of third-world countries over the past century and a quarter. The results have not been positive. (Just ask them.) Putin and others are approaching us as if conducting an intervention; trying to keep us fr...

What the hell. Is that what we sounded like back then? We still sound like that now! Man freaking god damn. It's like being sealed in amber. Greetings from the Mill of our discontent. Well, it's mild discontent, let's say. Been a long time since the book of love. Wait ... why did I say that? Oh, right - I was listening to tapes from the 70s and 80s, so naturally my mind goes back to my neighbor's Led Zepplin albums. (I didn't have any; just Simon and Garfunkel, Josh White, and Mario Lanza. Oh, and some weird stuff.) We didn't sound anything like them, of course. In fact, we sounded strangely like us in the 2010's. It's as if we've been playing the same tune for forty years. FOR FORTY YEARS...! Why am I listening to old recordings? Simple ... we live in an abandoned hammer mill, we haven't toured in three years, and there's nothing else the fuck to do around this dump. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is discontented. He even forg...