Two guys walk into a bar, see? Okay… and one of these guys, well… he’s not really a guy, exactly, okay? Follow me so far? Right, so this one guy who’s NOT a guy, he’s got like five heads. And he breathes not so much air as, well, liquid nitrogen. Stick with me, now, it gets better…
Oh, Crikey! I had no idea you were standing right behind me (virtually speaking, of course). And here I am right in the middle of blowing a fairly salty spaceman joke. Stand-up is not my long suit. (Actually, I don’t have a long suit. Kept tripping over the excess pant-legs, quite frankly, so I cuffed the bastards.) Actually, that last aside is kind of how this joke is supposed to go, so now I’ve really blown it. No matter. I’d really much rather talk to you than this impromptu crowd of acolytes that has materialized around me. And when I say “materialized,” that is precisely what I mean. Here on the planet Omicron Rigbox, the natives move by molecular dissolution and refabrication, so they’re always appearing and disappearing at unpredictable intervals. Damned unnerving, if you ask me.
Anyway, we played kind of a small club here – not the usual stadium or theater routine, to be quite frank. I would say this is the Omicronian equivalent of CBGB – kind of rough looking and smelling of cheap beer and urine, mostly. Only Marvin (my personal robot assistant) didn’t seem to be bothered by it. (Even sFzshenKlyrn looked green… and I mean more green than is normal for him.) There was this one spaceman at the bar, dressed in a 1950s-vintage sci-fi astronaut suit, with the fish bowl helmet, the oxygen tanks, the whole nine yards. He was hitting the sauce pretty hard (his fish bowl was half-full of high-balls). Then some party of 
Andromedans kept requesting David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes”, and we did a kind of cobbed together version of the song just to shut them up. Before we got to the end of the number, old captain fishbowl had gotten hold of one of the Andromedans and was attempting to choke the fucker to death. (In vain, luckily, since Andromedans have three necks. Though, strangely, only two heads.) Punches were thrown. Mayhem ensued. When bottles started landing on stage, we took our leave.
Apparently, mister spaceman had objected to these lines in the chorus of said Bowie song:
Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
You know Major Tom’s a junkie
…and like many a cartoon spaceman from the 1970s, he closely identified with the fictional astronaut from Space Oddity. Touch S.O.B. … touchy crowd, too. Wouldn’t want you to think that we are at all squeamish about rowdy listeners, but you should know that the beer bottles on Omicron are the size of bowling pins, and just about as heavy. (The whole bleeding planet is made of glass, so there’s no shortage of the stuff.) You get hit by one of those suckers, and man… you stay hit. With the help of some of Marvin’s cyborg groupies, we loaded the equipment back on to the ersatz Jupiter 2 space cruiser and buggered off into the ethers, a fist-full of generally non-negotiable glass coins our only reward for the night’s work.
Not a quality experience, you’ll readily admit. I, for one, had thought we’d moved beyond this sphere of performance venue long ago. Sadly, posi-Lincoln has proven a bit of a disappointment as a tour promoter/booking agent. (He’s beginning to make the man-sized tuber’s cracker cousin look competent by comparison.) The guy is just too ready to say yes when an offer comes his way. He’s got issues, frankly… and I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to work through them with him. (Trevor James Constable is taking a crack at it as we speak, applying some kind of Reichian device I cannot even begin to understand. It reminds me of that glass booth people climb into at a casino where they try to grab $20 bills that are being blown around them by a fan. Disgusting.
Next stop? Don’t know, frankly. I just hope it’s better than the last one. This GET ME THE HELL OUTA HERE Tour 2006 is turning out to be one of the lousiest tours we’ve had since our journey to the center of the earth mis-adventure a few years back. You know — when Marvin and the Morlocks took over the dance floor? Don’t remember? Just as well. Just as well.
