One day you’re up, the next you’re down. As true in outer space as it is back on terra firma. Take it from one who knows. (Or from Juan, who knows… because he knows, too.)
Just found our way over to Kaztropharius 137b in hopes of finding some Big Green fans. (Seems like that quest takes us farther and farther with each passing year.) Not a lot of love to be had in the Great Magellanic Cloud, but the Kaztropharians are reasonably congenial … if a bit super-sized. Jesus christmas, what an enormous crowd of revelers we had that first night! It was like being in the outer-space version of Gulliver’s Travels, not the Lilliput journey but that other one. (No, not the horse people. The other, other one… with the big people.) While giants tend to make me a little nervous, most of my colleagues seemed unperturbed. Mitch Macaphee just worked on various science projects, off in a corner some where. The man-sized tuber practiced his saxophone backstage – a bit distracting, but what the hell. Only Marvin (my personal robot assistant) seemed to share my sense of trepidation, and that may have been due to our failure to bring him in for his scheduled maintenance (you know… refit bushings every 10,000 miles).
Hey, what the hell… we’re all creaking a bit at this age, right? Sure, sure. Hey – anyone from Neptune out in the house tonight? Anybody? How about Betelgeuse? Big red ball, 
anybody? Yeah, well… pretty much just a home crowd. We came in a little hard, with “Primitive” – probably one of the closest things to a thrash tune Matt’s ever written. Brother sFshzenKlyrn starts it off with that crunching guitar intro (full disclosure, he’s not technically my “brother”) and the crowd starts churning, stomping their enormous feet. A bit like an earthquake, actually. I believe the tectonic plates of Kaztropharius 137b actually move a bit during the course of the night. In his boredom with our performance schedule, Mitch Macaphee usually occupies himself with measuring this sort of thing…. like, how much mass is displaced by our music; does our song “Surprise Party” have any effect on magnetic field density, all those kinds of questions. (He may be working on a paper… or an album, not sure which.)
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that scientists use Big Green as source material for their work. Hell, we’ve been using them for our songs for many years (“Edward Teller”, “Primitive”, “Why Not Call It George?”, and so on), so turnabout is fair play, as they say in the 
vernacular. Back on our earlier tours, distinguished theorists like the disembodied brain we knew as Dr. Hump used to follow us on our rounds, collect data on our activities, then formulate theories to destroy (or, in their words, “enhance”) entire solar systems. I like to think that we didn’t contribute much to those efforts, but judging by the facial expressions we see at some of our more remote venues, I may… be… mistaken…. (Sure is a lot of space rubble around this planetoid, isn’t there? Damndest thing.) Some may accuse us of having a science-centric worldview, but I disagree. I see it more as an artistic spaceview. (Some see the hole in the donut. I see the donut itself. It’s all about choices.)
Speaking of donuts, they have some GI-NORMOUS crullers on this planet. And “grande” sized coffees that look like Olympic swimming pools. More later… after a brief nosh.
