Cold snap.

Are you broke in Hoboken? Skint in Flint? Empty in Tempe? Down on your luck in Keokuk? Well, let me tell you friend, I’ve been there. I’ve BEEN there.

Hope you’re well. Things are okay here… about as okay as things can be. Actually, right at this moment, my knees are a little cold, but aside from that, all is well. (Bloody winter! It’s miserable even when it’s not here yet.) I suppose I should get our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to look at the thermostat one more time. Seems like no matter how many times I turn that dial clockwise, the old Hammer Mill stays cold as a New England clam. And now that we’re on the subject, I notice that there are icicles hanging from Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Great Scott… it’s not just a little glitch in the temp control. This place is a block of freaking ice. What the hell – didn’t I bribe the oil man this month? Oh, right…. not suppose to say that on the Internets. (Please don’t let that get around, okay? There’s a good chap.)

As you might imagine, it’s hard to heat a big old barn of a place like the Cheney Hammer Mill through these upstate New York winters. When that cold air blows in from Canada, this place is like an ice chest, what with all the nooks and crannies and outright gaps between the bricks. (Then there are the broken windows. Six or seven… dozen…) Fact is, even when we can fill the fuel tank, most of the heat goes straight outside. And fixing the windows would take effort … effort better spent on the things that only Big Green can do. Like wasting whole decades in a state of near somnambulant immobilization. (Ask our guitarist friend sFshzenKlyrn about that. Once he ate a barrel full of desiccated herring – a favorite delicacy on his home planet of Zenon – and fell into a deep stupor that lasted 12.5 million years.) I guess my point is that we need our innovators, our problem-solvers to get us out of this hole. All we can do is make music-like sounds with our various instruments. That won’t keep anyone warm.

I’ll share a brief anecdote with you. Our old cohort Trevor James Constable spent part of one winter with us, some years back. One night he left his patented orgone generating machine plugged in and running, with its fearsome array pointed at the wall between his quarters and mine. When I awoke the next morning, my bedroom wall was glowing orange and white, like a creamsicle (except less awesomely delicious). Heat was just wafting off of that sucker. At first I thought the place was on fire, and when I realized it was the O.G.M., I thought it had somehow irradiated the wall, turning it into a molten mass of hell fire. Curiously, what had actually taken place was that Trevor James’s infernal contraption had created a space/time warp to somewhere in the tropics – it may have been Honduras, because I smelled cigar smoke. It was such a hot day on the other side of the warp that the heat was rolling into my bedroom in waves. Astounding phenomenon!