Hammer Mill Days

I think I saw them coming up the road, just past the post office. Did you see them, too? No? Maybe I’m imagining things. Or …. maybe you’re gaslighting me! WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO HIDE! SPEAK! Oh … hello, readers. We were just, um … going over the household accounts. Seems the electric bill is overdue again. Just like last month … and the 120 months before that. (Maybe that’s why the lights are off.) Okay, I will own up to the fact that we are getting a little squirrel-y here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now that we’ve been ordered to shelter in place. Actually, the order doesn’t apply to us because, well … we’re not supposed to be living here, but what the law doesn’t know won’t hurt it. Still, in these plague times, it’s best to heed the warnings of public health officials. We’re masking up, donning the rubber gloves, and eating out of an autoclave. Now, I’m not super fond of hoarders. That said, one of our number, and I’m not saying who ( ahem … anti-Li...

Greetings from my corner of our national COVID-19 quarantine. As someone who is not unaccustomed to a certain amount of social isolation, I can say with confidence that this new normal has even me a bit more than creeped out. When I was in my teens and twenties, I wasn’t a big believer in psychology, but perhaps the only real advantage of advancing age is that it gives you an opportunity to discover the things you were wrong about earlier on – for me, one of those items was the fact that psychology is a thing that affects me. So, while my life is not all that different from the way it was before this crisis, I feel a lot different … and not in a good way. Part of what I find disturbing about this pandemic scare is the degree to which so many people in my community are acting out of fear. I don’t mean to single central New York out in any way – similar effects are being seen all over the country. But when I go to grocery stores now, in particular, the evidence of panic buy...

 Okay, closer. A little closer. I said a little ! Right, so push the tray this way. That’s good enough. Great, thanks. Now get away from me, you scavenging ghoul! Oh, hi. I should have thought someone would be reading this blog today, as there is precious little else to do now that we live in plague times. (I’m sure someone out there is doing something more useful, like writing their own latter-day version of the Decameron .) Frankly, this is when it pays to live in a podunk town. New York’s governor has banned events with audiences of 500 people or more. While that’s a huge problem down in Manhattan, that’s like falling off a log up here. Hell, there aren’t even 500 people within five square miles of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Safe as houses! It pays not … to get paid. Here inside the hammer mill, we’re taking drastic steps to respond to this crisis. Well, maybe “drastic” is too strong a word. Big steps. We’re stepping bigly, particularly when we see someone c...

It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up. As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the preside...

What happened to all the hot water? What the fuck, man. There’s no soap, and the hand towel is missing. This place! Well, friends, like most of America, all members of the Big Green collective are ready for the onslaught of the dreaded Corona virus. That is to say, we’re as ready as anyone else around these parts. That means a lot of hand washing, and nearly as much hand-wringing. Sometimes it’s possible to combine the two, so long as you use liquid soap. It’s a little hard to wring your hands with gusto when there’s a bar of Ivory in the way. Of course, you can never be too careful. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is obsessively dunking his hands in the sink. And when I say “hands”, I mean rudimentary claws. He’s a robot, you see. We’re trying not to obsess about this thing. I know that seems unAmerican, but that’s just the Big Green way. That said, I can tell you that anti-Lincoln is deeply depressed by this whole thing – much more so than anyone else i...

I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed by the “Super Tuesday” results. All night, the thing that kept ringing in my ears was the memory of Tom Brokaw back in 1984 saying, “Looks like another good night for Walter Mondale,” and just how nauseating that moment felt. Tuesday was a similarly nauseating experience, except that, if anything, I have less confidence in Biden as a candidate than I did in Mondale. I should say here that I am no stranger to political disappointment; very, very rarely does my first choice candidate rise to the top. That’s partly a function of my being to the left of the Democratic party, but it’s also due to the fact that I do not have a deep connection to the party as an institution. Like most institutions, the Democratic party favors some people over others for leadership positions within the party. That dynamic pushes forward senior, well-connected, establishment politicians – people like Biden, Hillary Clinton, Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, etc. – re...

On various occasions over the past week or two I’ve felt like I was tele-transported back into the mid-twentieth century. It started with MSNBC host Chris Mathews during a broadcast in New Hampshire spouting some crazy-ass rant about revolutionaries from Castro’s Cuba executing him in Central Park as American leftists – including Bernie Sanders – looked on approvingly. He later went full retrograde pundit, comparing Sanders’ victory in Nevada to the Nazis overrunning French defenses at the start of World War II. Then, this past week, Bernie Sanders’s comments about literacy programs in Cuba somehow became a central issue in the Democratic primary campaign, hoisted high by the “liberal” cable outlet MSNBC as evidence of Bernie’s unelectability and nefarious socialistic tendencies. The crew on Morning Joe jokingly addressed one another as “comrade”, jumping up and down on Sanders for being a Castro apologists, then – practically in the same breath – remembered the late di...