Sound off.

Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. What can I tell you? You’ve got to roll with the … hey…. put the gun down. Put it DOWN!

Oh, hi. No worries, my friends, no worries. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have a trigger finger, but it’s not supple enough to squeeze off anything like an accurate shot. Sometimes he gets worked up enough to wave that old revolver our militant former neighbor Gung-Ho left lying around the mill so many years back. (He dropped it in mid-stride during some imagined emergency, if I recall correctly. It was his side-arm, and he was firing his principal weapon randomly at the time. Those were the days!) I know, I know… I shouldn’t lecture my mechanical companion, but sometimes it’s hard to resist. The fucker gets so disappointed sometimes, you’d think he was, well… human, or something capable of even greater whiny-ness. I guess attendance at his opening night performance of the Wizard of Oz (in three acts) was less than expected. In fact, I think the only people there were some of the school’s nighttime janitorial staff and some of our local downtowners who were trying to get in out of the cold. (Poor tin man.)

Can’t believe this is his first taste of rejection! What a sheltered life these automatons lead. Even root vegetables like the man-sized tuber have experienced the dusty flavor of defeat. (Or perhaps that is just dirt from the garden from which he was plucked.) Yes, his fortunes have turned since his salad days, if you will, but tubey’s life has been far from a bed of roses prior his election to the local municipal mayoralty. (We bear some responsibility for that, of course. Yet another mea culpa. I’m thinking of changing our band’s name to mea culpa. What do you think? Hmmmmm?) And we human members of the Big Green complement have taken a few lumps over the years. Hell, just look at the two Lincolns. Are you looking? Well, if you are, then you know… they look like HELL. Just like it, I tell you! But I digress…

Of course, Marvin is a machine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But let us face it, his problems should not be thought of as permanent. Why, with the right kind of attention and the requisite skills, his disappointment may be programmed away and replaced with joy. A talented machinist could give him an extra arm with the power to throw a javelin at escape velocity so that it sails through deep space and pierces the moon (or “the” Mars). His inventor Mitch Macaphee could power him down and set him on a nuclear timer of some kind so that he would restart in 1,000 or even 10,000 years – he would know the future! (Lord knows, he has already seen the past. As have we all….. right?) The sad fact is, though, that Mitch could have saved him even this childish disappointment he has encountered of late. He could have given Marvin a new set of pipes, or more terpsichorean robot legs, so that his Wizard of Oz (in three acts) performance would have brought the house down and dragged audiences in from distant cities and even the microscopic hillside hamlets that dot our countryside.