You’re making me believe I can do these, after all. Baby steps, baby steps.
Oh. Well, then, carrion. So, I take it “Carry On” would be marked some different way, like (5,2)?
(I don’t see the point of the spoilers, unless someone cares to enlighten me.)
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song sounds like it’s rotting. (7)
I admit I googled CSN&Y’s song list. And I think that, logically, this should be (5, 2).
Friend may eat LP: disgusting. (8)
PLAYMATE (anagram)
I like doing ones that are SDMB-related:
British politician on popular video game: it’s just a way of wasting time on the internet (6)
OK. This is when I start hitting a brick wall when it comes to cryptics. How does one parse this clue in relation to the answer. I see that “friend” is “playmate,” but I don’t see how the rest of the clue fits in.
Well, I would like to pretend that immediately saw “disgusting” as what we in the trade call an anagram indicator. That is, if you take the letters “may eat LP” and arrange them in a “disgusting” fashion, you can make PLAYMATE.
But really, I saw the awkward letters “LP” and immediately thought “hello, anagram ahoy”, and looked for nearby words that could get me up to the necessary eight letters.
Anagram indicators have become so abused that “disgusting” is easily good enough to be one, so at that point I was confident that it was an anagram of “may eat LP”.
This is how cryptic solvers think. 
wuh? double post
OK…so how is “disgusting” an anagram indicator? That was the part of the clue that confused me.
Yep.
I don’t follow. Carrion and Carry On are soundalikes so why does it matter which one is used as the wordplay and which one is the definition as long as the letter count isn’t ambiguous?
Carrion is something that’s rotting. Carry On is a CSNY song.
Anagram indicators are typically either words that are synonyms of disorder or things being in a disheveled state (i.e. sick, disgusting, etc.)
Because the wordplay should be readable as a set of instructions that lead to the answer that is also identified by the definition. In your clue, the wordplay is “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song sounds like”, and the definition is “it’s rotting”. But “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song sounds like” is not a coherent phrase. It doesn’t have your intended meaning of “something that sounds like a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song”.
I think this is why cryptics frustrate me so. I would not think of either “sick” or “disgusting” as indicating something out of order.
You don’t have to – as I intimated above, very often the anagram “fodder” leaps out at you, when the clue has some weird or awkward sequence of letters in it, especially if the sequence of awkward words has the right number of letters for the answer. Anagram indicators are, as you rightly suggest, so vague that it’s not particularly fruitful looking for them first, unless they are cliched ones that you have learned to recognise.
Exterminator, of course
Peter the Hermit, or nobody at all (5)
Noone
Got another:
Monarch of glaze insects is deficient (7)
That was fast! 
Very good.
LA coaster spins, goes up and down. (9)
lacking
escalator
Nah. I wouldn’t do this to you. But thanks for playing.
I just think we don’t want someone to see an answer before they are ready.
Blind Catalan initially loses a resolute determination to cross a river. (4)
[spoiler]Answer: Span
Catalan = Spaniard
Blind = lose an “i”
Initially lose etc = remove a, r and d
A bridge will span / cross a river.
[/spoiler]