That spot. I dropped acid there over a year ago. No, no – not L.S.D. … hydrochloric acid, and I wasn’t using “dropped” as a euphemism for “ingested,” I literally dropped it. Didn’t the man-sized tuber clean it up? Strange….
Oh, there you are. Thank you for joining us once again at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – ground zero for the Big Green experience in all of its glorious cognitive dissonance. So good of you to drop by every week for the latest installment in our little notebook of horrors. Pretty mundane horrors, I will allow, this being the world we all know it is, but horrors none the less, and very much our own. Last week, as you may recall, we were at the point of being waterboarded into a binding contract regarding the distribution of our upcoming CD release (still in the mixing/mastering stage), the working title of which is WORKING TITLE. Big Green‘s current corporate label, Loathsome Prick records, had grown a little impatient with our interminable production delays and, well, decided to apply a little pressure in the shape of a gang of kidnapping goons.
Did it do the trick? Well, let me tell you – those suits at Loathsome Prick are obviously not real familiar with the history of this band. Those of your who’ve been with us since back in the day know that we’ve faced down intimidation by 
hired thugs, mongooses, extraterrestrials, morlocks, mutant space aliens, hostile Neptunian metal fans, and a host of other nasties. Big Green laughs in the face of death, sneers at danger, and gives blackmail the finger. That’s the long answer. The short answer is, well, yes… it did work. Hey – I couldn’t let Marvin (my personal robot assistant) suffer! They insisted on waterboarding him first and, well, he hasn’t been detailed in a few weeks, so his water resistance is less than what it should be. I won’t draw you a picture, but the proceedings were quite unsavory. So we signed. What the fuck, right?
Well, anyway…. once the paper was signed, we at least had the opportunity to settle back into our digs, restoring some order (or familiar disorder) to the hovel we had been forced to abandon some weeks back by a cadre of lawn-obsessed extraterrestrial invaders. The man-sized tuber made his way back to his climate-controlled terrarium; the two Lincolns 
took up residence in opposite wings of the mill; John returned to his virtual aviation console; Matt to his anvil collection… and so on. I retired to the kitchen for a swipe at the cooking sherry, taking that opportunity to thumb through the document we had just signed. (No easy task, since my thumbs were still sore from the interrogation sessions. There ought to be a law against that sort of thing.) As Trevor James Constable always told me, it’s a good idea to read documents you sign because, well, they may have something written on them. Sound advice.
That’s when I noticed that the date for our next CD was moved up to November 14. Those mothers at Loathsome Prick! (They sounded like such a nice bunch of folks…) Crikey, we’re only in our fifth year of production on this thing. You can’t put inspiration on an assembly line! (Or can you….?)
