Mmmmm, burnt toast. The smell of over-heated coffee. That cool splash of orange juice in your lap, while strips of fakin’ bacon belch greasy black smoke from an unattended frying pan. Yes, breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. (Is that the fire alarm I hear? Seems like the wrong pitch….)
Greetings from the lower deck (galley area) of the reconstituted J-2 space RV, our home-away-from-home planet during this GET ME THE HELL OUTA HERE Big Green Tour 2006. We’re just in the middle of a particularly toxic breakfast, so bear with me. No budget for an on-board chef, unfortunately. We’ve press-ganged the man-sized tuber into doing the job. Probably not the best pick, but we figured that, since this is an all-vegetarian voyage (much to the chagrin on Mitch Macaphee), it might be appropriate to have a certified organic vegetable doing all the cooking for us. Besides, old tubey has to carry his own weight somehow. Can’t spend the whole trip 
sitting in his specially designed space terrarium, keeping himself humid and well-mulched. (Or can he?) So we got him a second-hand chef’s hat and made him watch the Food network in his little glass room for a few hours… and voila. Instant chef.
Still, it’s actually kind of relaxing to just sit here and let an overgrown yam burn our breakfast snausages, especially after the frantic week we’ve had, framming away uselessly on celestial objects no longer considered to be planets. (Mmmmmmm. Burned snausages….) Beats the hell out of me how these hellacious hunks of interplanetary rock and ice ever got themselves in the running to be considered planets in the first place. What the fuck were those rocket scientists thinking? Anyhow, that nightmare is over, and we are drifting lazily through the asteroid belt, meandering our way home, lonely as a cloud of dark matter. Why so nonchalant? Lots of reasons. We’re close to the end of our tour. We’re almost finished with our sophomore album (now in the mixing phase). And … ah yes… we’ve blown our ion-drive engine to kingdom come. Nearly forgot that one. (Details, details!)
How, you ask, could such a thing happen? Well, ahm gon’ tell yuh. As you know, our friend Quality Lincoln was dispatched from his position as official booking agent for this tour, owing to some rather unforgivable oversights on his part (I won’t go into all the ugly details… he knows what he’s done). He has been replaced by the inestimable Big Zamboola (a former planet himself, you know), who was serving as our navigator. That post was taken over by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who had been putting in his duty as our helmsman these past couple of weeks. Since posi-Lincoln was semi-familiar with concepts related to aviation and had personally commanded several observation balloons in his day, we though he might sit in at the helm for the last dog leg of the tour. Big mistake. BIIIGGGG mistake! My guess is that he’s more of a steam locomotive guy than an ion-drive spacecraft guy. He apparently thought he had to get up a good head of steam to pull over the top of Saturn. Then there was a bang. Then a boom. Then another bang, but not the same as the first one. Finally… the sound of a dog barking. (I’m still working on that one.)
And so, here we are. Adrift. Total rupture in the reactor vessel. No forward thrust whatsoever. Auxiliary power only. Bottled oxygen. And a vegetable cooking our meals. Is this any way to end a tour? What sayest thou? I can’t hear you. (Oh, sure…. the transmitter’s out and all. )
