Hammer Mill Days

Okay, listen up in there! By order of the local constabulary, you've got FIVE minutes to vacate the premises. FIVE minutes before we come in through the front door. You can bring your personal belongings. And I know you have to pack, so ... if you take a little longer than FIVE minutes, that's ... uh .... okay. Oh, shit - I'm no good at this, am I? Far too conciliatory. And I even forgot to turn the damn bullhorn on, so those shifty no-good upstairs neighbors probably didn't even hear me. Damn it, I asked Mitch Macaphee for some device that might shift these objectionable squatters from their perch on the third floor of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I was picturing some kind of rocket or drone-like device, tipped with high explosives. Then he handed me a bullhorn, a used one at that, with some semi-embarrassing decal stuck on the side of it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) thinks they're Grateful Dead-style dancing bears, but I think they're just dum...

If you're as obsessive about politics as I am, you probably watched the "CNN Democratic Debates" this week, brought to you by CNN, hosted by CNN, and did I mention CNN was somehow involved? What the hell ever happened to the League of Women Voters, anyway? This notion of presidential debates being treated like commercial media properties is beyond ridiculous. Debates should not be some pre-packaged product served up by powerful corporations who benefit from the free-for-all media environment our bought politicians have built for them over the years. As if that wasn't bad enough, the three purported journalists moderating the event were hell-bent on getting the various candidates to mix it up, posing questions that were, at worst, the equivalent of "Are you just going to stand there and let her say that about you?" and, at best, cheap rehashes of Republican party talking points. (Jake Tapper is such a freaking waste of space.) Night one had the two progress...

Jesus. You can READ by it, for crying out loud. When the hell are they going to run out of bottle rockets? Where the hell are the cops? Oh, right ... we're off the books. Never mind. Another late night here at the previously abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, our adopted squathouse of longstanding and that of a pack of crazy people with a fondness for pyrotechnic displays. Our upstairs neighbors appear to be celebrating some obscure personal holiday this week, marking the occasion with obscene displays of fireworks over the mill every night and raucous drinking, dancing, fist-fights, etc., in the afternoons. At least they're quiet for a few hours in the morning, when they are apparently sleeping off the previous night's bender, but that's short-lived. And here we are again, at 2 in the morning, blinded by the rockets' red glare, deafened by bombs bursting in air. (And strangely, the flag was still there ... their family flag, with some strange runi...

He did it again. Trump flapped his jaw and violated the UN charter without even blinking. This past week, he was sitting in the White House with the Pakistani leader, chatting with reporters, and out came this: "We're not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don't want to kill 10 million people. I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone. It would be over in, literally, in 10 days. And I don't want to do that—I don't want to go that route." I don't have a lot of Afghan friends or acquaintances, but the one I have any regular contact with was appalled by this, and rightfully so. This, of course, isn't the first time Trump has casually tossed out the notion of blowing some country sky-high, whether it was North Korea or Iran or Venezuela. But I believe this is the first time he has made ...

I thought the light was on your side of the stable. Jesus ... just reach over and click it on, will you? What? No electricity? I paid the light bill, damn it. Oh ... I see. No wiring in the barn. Got it. Well, friends, you know what they say - if you're planning on spending years in a squathouse, it's a good idea to spend the night there before you sign the paperwork. (Yes, even squathouses require paperwork. Look it up.) That's what we elected to do, since our nasty third-floor neighbors in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill started driving us out of our longtime squat with their loathsome habits and noisy weekending. It's not easy to contemplate giving up the home you've known for nigh onto twenty years. But if nothing else, we of Big Green are practical. That's why we only tour venues that are deep in interstellar space - it keeps the competition down. Anyway, we got a tip on an old horse barn a couple of minutes from the hammer mill; apparently no one has ...

We all knew he would get an early start, and true to form, sixteen months before the general election, Donald Trump has completely poured himself into being Drunk Uncle Twitter Troll, spewing overtly racist attacks on duly elected members of the House of Representatives while his Republican colleagues lamely play rhetorical defense, desperate to hold onto their party's precious rubber-stamp chief executive who is giving them all they ever wanted and more. Pretty amazing to hear the likes of GOP congressman Tom Cole on NPR gaslighting us all on the issue of whether or not Trump is race-baiting (clue: Cole says "no"), then engaging in some truly ridiculous what-about-ism (speaking to NPR correspondent Noel King): KING: You just don't think it was racist. COLE: No, I don't. KING: OK. COLE: And frankly, I also think that if you - you have to remember here, too, there's - we've had colleagues that are routinely called down by presiding officers for using i...

No, man - that's just not acceptable. We have a budget, remember? A very tight budget. We just can't afford something that ostentatious. Perhaps a step or two down from that, like ... like maybe a pole barn. Or a shed. Oh, hi. Yeah, you've caught us in the midst of the sort of dilemma all bands face at some point in their careers - finding another place to live because the squat-house you've been occupying for twenty years has been taken over by ne'er-do-wells. Don't you just HATE when that happens? It's kind of what we went through back in the late nineties, when we were evicted from our beloved lean-to in Sri Lanka. Oh, the memories. Sad was the day when that thing collapsed. (As a famous cartoonist once put it, it leaned fro. Or perhaps closer to the mark, it leaned-too much.) So, once again, we are in search of lodgings. Our upstairs neighbors are simply insufferable. And honestly - we're not super picky people. We didn't get our hair in knot...