Category Archives: Uncategorized

Unmasked at the CHENEY Hammer Mill (again).

April 30, 2021 Joseph

Hey, I heard the regulations have changed. So you can take the damn thing off, now. That’s right, it came down just a few days ago. Some dude in a tie said so. So this is from the suits, man. What do you mean that’s weak sauce? I’m hip, dude, I’m hip!

Oh, man … why does everything have to end up in an argument around this place? Something to do with the atmosphere here inside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. It gets a little stuffy, especially in the warmer months, and that contributes to a kind of contagious psychosis. I’m not a doctor, of course, but I play one on the internet, and where I come from, this is a bad thing!

Old news is good news

Anyway, we get our news a little bit late here in this forgotten corner of the world. We’re only now hearing that the COVID regulations in New York have been relaxed, and we can start dropping the mask when we’ve gotten our vaccinations worked out. (And we did, by the way – the shots were free, so our attitude is basically gimme some of that.) How liberating, right? What a welcome relief … right?

Wrong, apparently. At least according to some of my squat mates. Several are refusing to drop the mask, for a variety of reasons. Now, I tend to discount the claims of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the mansized tuber, as neither one of them needed to wear a mask in the first place. (Not that disputes with them are anything new – see, for example, this post from 2007.) But when it comes to the mammalian members of our entourage, it’s a different story entirely.

You see, the thing is … all of the human members of Big Green, as well as our various hangers-on – I mean, assistants – feel that the masks generally improve our looks. I don’t disagree. We’re getting a little crusty around the edges, and unlike artisan bread, not in a particularly appetizing way. I for one have taken to drawing more attractive facial features on my masks, like a full rack of normal teeth or a mustache that isn’t dominated by gray hair.

The anti-Lincoln project

Take anti-Lincoln (please!). He needs an oversized mask to cover his festering gob. Frankly, it makes him look like an old-time bank robber. Or a railroad industry lawyer, which … well …. the actual Lincoln in fact was. Frankly, I think he and the others just don’t like the smell of the Hammer Mill in Spring. Why they don’t just say so, I don’t know. This place reeks! Say it loud!

Uncategorized

Ascent of Band.

November 6, 2020 Joseph

Hmmmm, that’s weird. Is that really us? Are you sure? Sounds a bit more like Captured By Robots. Of course, we might have recorded during that period when we were captured by robots. Could explain a lot.

Yeah, here we are, folks. Big Green has survived yet another national election here in the United States. You’d hardly know it was happening up here in the sheltering hollow of the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York. Just pull down the shades, pull up the drawbridge, stick a cork in the chimney, and poke your fingers in your ears. That’s how we deal with lots of stuff here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – bill collectors, building inspectors, the people who actually own this property, the local constabulary … just pretend you’re not here. Couldn’t be simpler. (Though more than once, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has given away the game by detonating one of his experimental substances just as the coppers are walking away.)

Holing up in the mill gives us a little extra time to roll back through some old tape. (We’ve got wire recordings as well, but nothing to play them on … so we leave them in the wire-house.) Listening to all of this shit is like looking at a chart representing the “ascent” of man. There’s some folk sounding music that could be the chimp at the start of the line. Our primitive rock combos are like Australopithecus, the earliest “certain hominid” in our long line of musical train wrecks. (Though the first band we tried to do was more like Oreopithecus, largely because we subsisted mainly on a diet of Oreos that whole time.) Our Big Green demos from the 1980s are something like Peking Man, in that we include a raft of covers as well as originals, some of which begin to border on Neanderthal territory.

Where this tortured analogy breaks down is my contention that our current state of development is certainly no farther along than Cro Magnon. That’s not a musical comment exactly – it’s just that the traditional depiction of Cro Magnon in ascent of man illustrations looks just like a modern white dude, except with long locks, more facial hair and a spear over his shoulder. (It might just as easily have been a guitar.) Now I don’t know about you, but that dude looks a hell of a lot more like us than the Modern Man guy at the front of the line, who looks like somebody’s 1950s dad, stepping into the shower. (Though I will say that he looks like the only one of those primates that might have his own personal robot assistant.) When I listen to Ned Trek songs, I can totally picture Cro Magnon belting them out, particularly the Nixon numbers.

One day we will do an anthology like collection, I suspect. We’ll need another step or two in evolution to manage it, but be patient.

Uncategorized

Hidden victims.

April 24, 2020 Joseph

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 illness. When my mom was in an institution, it seemed clear that the expectation was that she would just get ill and die one day, and that there wasn’t much they were going to do about it. The times my mom got seriously ill, we pulled her out and put her in the hospital for proper care, which she got. But other folks with less attentive families who would catch the viruses that regularly rip through those places like the angel of death would just expire in their rooms without fanfare. From what I could see, neither the required skills, nor technologies, nor effort would be put into saving them. One day, they would just be gone.

In the context of that reality, I just can’t imagine how many of these folks are being lost to COVID. Would we even know? Do they differentiate between the Coronavirus and other respiratory illnesses, once an elderly resident is dead? When this started showing up in residential facilities it struck me that there might be a great many silent victims of this pandemic, and thus far I haven’t seen convincing evidence that something like this isn’t happening. We are hearing about documented losses in various communities across the country, but this could be a dramatic under count. As of April 18, 3,400 nursing home residents in New York had died of COVID-19. They are perhaps making an extra effort to track these in certain communities, but I doubt that’s happening everywhere. When I picture my mother’s mean accommodations – a dorm-room size compartment, curtain down the middle to separate two beds, shared bathroom and closet space, very little social distance. That at the cost of $90,000 a year and up.

The cost of this pandemic is enormous. We could have prevented it if we had taken the threat seriously. We didn’t, thanks in large measure to the reality television star in the White House, but also thanks to flaccid protections prior to his tenure that were easily undone by legislators and administration hacks bent on deconstructing the administrative state. Accountability? We shall see.

luv u,

BIG GREEN