Hey, Trevor James! Help me get this thing out of my ear, will you? Goddamn, they make these ear buds tiny these days. What the fuck, are insects buying i-Pods now? Wouldn’t surprise me. Trevor James? Hel-looooo?
Greetings, web crawlers of all descriptions. I’m afraid you’ve caught me once again in the midst of a work-related crisis — trying to adapt to new, cheap equipment here in the bowels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill where we maintain our makeshift production studio. This time it’s headphones (I keep breaking the bloody things — damnable nuisance!); before that it was mic stands. We had those old, chrome piping jobs and the twisty friction-grip thingy wore out on them (and I apologize for using technical jargon on you). Ever try to sing into a moving microphone? Not recommended. In any case, we found it necessary to visit our local music recycling yard to see if we could find some adequate replacements. Never been to one? Beats the hell out of internet shopping, I can tell you.
Now that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is in the midst of some ill-defined atmospheric experiment thought up by his creator, local mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, I’m forced to carry out many of these mundane tasks myself. First it’s doing my own mixing. Oh, it may not sound 
like much to you, but trust me — the incessant running back and forth between the “live” room and the control room can get pretty maddening. Then there are all of the Marvin-esque chores I’ve had to commandeer, like sweeping the beds and making the floors (not sure I’ve got that quite right yet), manning the night watch, bribing the local tax collector (for the privilege of paying our taxes — another story entirely), pretzel-bending, and the like. And now this… this is the final indignity. Marvin has always been our runner, our go-fer, our step-and-fetch-it, our get-it-the-fuck-over-here-or-die, etc. And frankly, I’m not the right person to take over that job. I’ve never been any good at telling myself what to do. (Where to go, yeah, but not what to do.)
So until the Big Zamboola-balloon comes down, we’ll all be picking up Marvin’s slack. Lots to do, too. Album to finish. Dinner to start. Tube radios to warm up (a little charity work we do for the old folks up the block). Every man’s hand will be needed in the days ahead, so Matt and I have canceled all leaves and put padlocks on the exits. Fortunately, we will be able to press gang a reluctant Mitch Macaphee into some of the heavy work. He 
has successfully completed his experiment in turning waffles to platinum. That’s right, friends — solid platinum, the metal that used to send Dr. Smith into great greed-soaked reveries. Mitch is truly the master of alchemy. Funny thing is, the device he created that does this miraculous transformation looks like, well, a toaster. You just put the waffles down, wait about a minute, and up pops the precious metal. Fact is, I mistook it for a real toaster a couple of days ago and nearly put my teeth out on a solid bar of platinum. (Platinum’s actually pretty good with a helping of blueberry syrup and a couple of strips of fried cadmium on the side. Mmmmmmm-boy!)
Well, anyway — all this talk of precious metals is making me a bit peckish. Mitch, old boy! You can take over Marvin’s cooking duties for the time being. What’s that you say? No, I can’t, Mitch. That would be a physical impossibility… and tantamount to incest, I might add. Eat shit, you say? Do-able, at least… though not the grade of victuals I had in mind, actually. Stop hitting me!
