All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Listing wildly.

Man, it gets cold out here at night, even in August. This place needs windows. I don’t mean the open kind … I mean the kind that close. You know … with glass and everything.

Yes, I’m still sleeping out here in the shack that stands crookedly in the courtyard of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our lowly squathouse here in upstate New York. This kind of reminds me of the old days, when we had that two-room lean-to in Sri Lanka. What was that like? Well, it was a lot like this. Except warmer. Ah, things were different then. A stiff wind would blow the whole house down, for one thing. And the air was filled with song. (I won’t say which song, but frankly, it wasn’t one of my personal favorites.)

I’ve taken this opportunity to redecorate in here, you know … put up a little wall paper. Very little. Because of our lack of budget, of course, I have to use existing materials. But you make the best of what you have, right? And what I have is old set lists and some second hand school paste. Now the place is plastered in the things, and you can see the clumsily scrawled repertoire of a hundred poor-paying gigs going back decades. So now every time I turn my head, even when I’m doing my neck stretches, I have to ask myself, “Did we REALLY play Neil Young’s Lookout, Joe at the Metro in 1992?” or “Why would we follow Sensory Man with Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner?” Truly questions for the ages.

Now THAT was living rough.Okay, well the wind is kicking up a bit, and my little shack is swaying from side to side, making the set lists flap like little white flags nailed to the wall. It’s almost as if the place is hoping to surrender to our extreme weather. I’m going to pack up my ripped up duffel and scurry back into the relative safety of the Hammer Mill. Hopefully Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is not running one of those land drone experiments of his. Last week he was running some dog-like autonomous robot around the ground floor, programming it to shoot deadly lasers at anything that moved. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t have more company out here in the shack.

Hmmmmm. Good Old Boys Roundup. Haven’t played that one since our Middlebury College gig in ’93. Time to revisit.

Political Rants

Friends and enemies.

Our friends the Saudis are planning to execute a woman for being a dissident. It’s a little hard to imagine how you can be a woman in Saudi Arabia and NOT be considered a dissident, but there you have it. The method will be beheading, which, as I recall, Trump decried furiously during the 2016 campaign as an aberrant ISIS tactic drawn from the middle ages – no one has seen this in centuries! Actually, it’s the preferred method of execution in one of your favorite dictatorships, Mr. Trump. Still, it’s hard to blame the president for this relationship; we’ve been cozy with the Kingdom for decades, regardless of what they do, often bending our own foreign policy to suit their tastes (as long as it remains within the narrow limits of our own imperial policies).

New leaders, same old handshakeWhy? Is it just oil? Well, that’s a complicated issue. Sure, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have been the center of attention for so long if their chief export had been nutmeg. Their ample supply of easy-to-extract, cheap-to-process crude oil was famously described by our policymakers as a source of enormous strategic power and perhaps the greatest material prize in the history of the world. But it’s that “strategic power” that is the key, as I’ve mentioned previously in these pages. We didn’t need Saudi oil in the 1950s and we don’t need it today, but we do need to have influence and a potential veto over it to maintain our leverage over other nations.

So Saudi is our “friend”, despite the fifteen 9/11 hijackers, and Iran is our “enemy”. Iran is Saudi’s enemy for a range of reasons, not least among them the fact that Saudi has a sizable Shia minority which they fear may be emboldened by a strong Iran. So that puts the Kingdom on the side of the U.S. government and the Israelis (another “friend”). Both Israel and Saudi would love to see us send our troops into Iran … because that’s what friends are for? It sounds chaotic to describe in this brief fashion, but there is a cold imperial logic to this framework – one that opposes secular Arab nationalism, opposes Shia resistance in all of its forms, and supports the enrichment of key U.S. based industries; namely fossil fuels and military technologies, both heavily subsidized by American taxpayers.

So it should come as no surprise that Trump supports an extremist state that beheads its citizens and flies planes into our buildings. In this sense, he’s a real traditionalist.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

In the shed.

I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed. Just shut the door on the way out. And turn off the lights. Oh, right … there are no lights. Never mind.

Oh man – just try to get some privacy around this place. You’d think living in a massive old abandoned mill we wouldn’t have this kind of problem, but you’d be surprised at how small this place gets when everybody is home. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, starts rattling his test tubes around and looking for things to detonate. Marvin (my personal assistant) does his exercise routines, rolling around the shop floor on his casters. Matt watches his birds on screens of various sizes. Anti-Lincoln reads the Gettysburg address backwards for the unpteenth time (I think he’s trying to make a point). Even the mansized tuber gets in the way. It’s mayhem!

So, hey, I’ve moved out to the potting shed in the courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill. It was necessary to evict the mansized tuber, since the shed’s only big enough for one of us, but he’s resourceful — I’m sure wherever he lands he’ll put down roots. Some people think I’m wood shedding out here, but it’s nothing that productive. I’m just enjoying the quietude, the solitude, the … I don’t know … darkitude. It’s like taking that vacation that I never take, to that place I’ve never been, with money I’ve never earned. Call it never never land. Or call it anything you want – it’s a freaking shed!

Get lost!Sit out here long enough and your mind starts to light on all kinds of things. Random stuff, like … why didn’t I get some handyman to fix the roof on this shed? It leaks like a sieve! Then there are thoughts of what might have been, the kind that creep around the corner when you’re sitting idle, then climb in through your ear and squat down on your brain. Why didn’t I call that handyman? Finally, you get the occasional flash of inspiration, like you’re seeing the world for the first time. Stuff like, I want to join the Space Force! or I want Marvin to join the Space Force! One or the other of those might be workable.

Right, so … if you’re looking for me, try the shed. Knock twice if I don’t owe you money.