Hammer Mill Days

So what the what? And is that really the way it ends? God damn it. Six bucks down the drain. And in THESE hard times! All right … time for Planet of the Apes.   Oh, hi. We’re just endeavoring to entertain ourselves here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our COVID-19 quarantine site in this time of pestilence and putrid infection. What better way than to make use of Netflix or some other streaming service, eh? Except … well, we don’t have anything like that, as we are as poor as church mice … except that even THEY have the run of the donation basket and the leftover sandwiches from the parish volunteer society luncheons. In other words, we’re poorer than church mice. Just think of us as Mill Rats, scrounging for crusts and little fragments of entertainment. (Call me crazy, but when the mouth sits idle, the eyes need to work overtime.) Well, fortunately, we have our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). I asked him ...

Experiencing the miracle of America’s largely employer-based health care system, so revered by the likes of Joe Biden and others. The bills from my visit to the hospital two weeks ago have started rolling in. The price tag on an ambulance ride provided by our taxpayer-supported fire department? Close to $800. (First time I’ve ever used the service, by the way.) Based on the billing, this service appears to be at least partially outsourced – the bill was accompanied by a form that I had seven days to return if I wanted them to bill my insurance company. Glad I’m fully recovered and able to respond to my mail! Meanwhile, I’m watching in horror as our child-president noodles around with this pandemic as if it were an H.O. scale train set. His recent advocacy for ingesting disinfectants is illustrative of almost everything that is wrong with this particular chief executive. Despite his lame gaslighting attempt at claiming that his comments were meant sarcastically, Trump was...

Well, that’s a start. So, where did you go yesterday evening? Oh, okay. I didn’t know there was a pinball alley in this burg. News to me. Do they have any old Bally machines? Seriously ? Got a quarter? Oh, hi. Well, we were just starting to get back on our feet this week here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, Big Green’s adopted home, in the wake of last week’s medical debacle. Then fate moved its mighty hand, as Bill Conrad used to say in the opening sequence of The Fugitive . Now we’re all at sixes and sevens. In fact, some of us are at eights and nines, and that can’t be good. Pretty soon we’ll be fresh out of numbers. So what’s the beef? Well, it turns out that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was at some point exposed to the COVID-19 virus. We don’t know how or when, but apparently it was someone at the pinball palace down the street … could be the quartermaster (you know, the guy who doles out the quarters to the punters) or the barma...

FYI , I’m currently home and recovering after minor surgery in this time of COVID-19 lockdown. The highlight of yesterday was a call from the hospital telling me that I had been exposed to someone who tested positive with the virus – presumably a staffer who interacted with me the previous week. I had been interacting cautiously with people since my release last Saturday, including a visit to another health care provider, so they needed to be notified. When I was in hospital, I had asked about getting tested, and they put me off. This is not working. They should be testing everybody, and they’re not even testing the most likely carriers. What’s most concerning, though, is the toll this is very likely taking among the most vulnerable, particularly residents of nursing homes. I don’t know about how these homes are run in other communities. What I can say, based on personal experience, is that in my neck of the woods, people in nursing homes die all the time of respiratory ...

Hmmm. Try shift-F7. No good? Okay, wait. Isn’t there a big red button somewhere that gets you out of this shit? No? Huh. I must be thinking of the clothes washer. Oh, yeah … hi. Well, as you might have guessed, your friends in Big Green are struggling to make ends meet, like most bands these days. It’s not easy. Frankly, it’s downright discouraging sometimes. This week, we spent at least three days trying to get the ends to meet, only to discover that the metaphor apparently doesn’t involve bringing ends together into a kind of loop, but, well … something quite different, it seems. There goes another three days! We spend time like company scrip at a Massey coal mine. (Which reminds me …. sixteen tons!) Okay, so, a lot of bands are now doing digital performances in order to comply with social distancing guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are passing the digital hat, and that’s all good … very much like the sound of that. This whole thing has prompted...

Bernie’s out. I guess it’s no surprise. There really wasn’t a reasonable electoral path forward to the Democratic nomination after the crushing defeats on Super Tuesday and in subsequent contests in Michigan, etc. While there are still many voters yet to be heard from, the mainstream Democratic party has coalesced around their preferred standard-bearer, the somewhat limp-minded former vice president, whose halting commentaries from a foot or two in front of an IKEA backdrop are barely making a ripple, even in MSNBC land. I almost never hear from Biden until his watery opinions are being criticized by left commentators. What the hell kind of communication shop are they running there? Is this a presidential campaign or a race for dog catcher? Just this past Tuesday, as Wisconsin voters were queuing up to vote in the midst of a pandemic, thanks to their state Republican party, the most Biden could manage to say about this disaster was that the science should decide whether ...

Well, Mitch’s idea went bust, and now he’s amongst the legions of unemployed. Turns out the Cheney Hammer Mill doesn’t meet the standards necessary to be designated a medical waste repository. This place doesn’t even make an adequate garbage can. Cheese and crackers. So, here we are. Always wondered what it was like to be a band back in the Great Depression. Now it’s starting to look like the good old days. Anti-Lincoln, of course, remembers the panic of 1857, when he lost all that money he had dumped into railroad stocks. (His posi-tronic doppelganger, the actual Lincoln, came up as a railroad lawyer, which is why the two never saw eye to eye.) Then there was the post-war recession of 1865-67, when Anti-Lincoln lost his shirt again. (He found it in 1870. Turns out it was dropped into his neighbor’s laundry bin by mistake. He always blames the Jacobins for that, but then … he blames them for every thing.) With the social distancing requirements in place, we obviousl...