What the hell. You mean I can’t just stack the bricks like building blocks? I have to cement them together … with real cement? Jesus, this is harder than I thought. Maybe I’ll do the ditch-digging instead. That sounds easy.
Oh, hi. Just having a little tête-a-tête with my vocational guidance counselor. Sure, I know what you’re thinking – I’m a little long in the tooth to start a new trade, right? Well, if tooth length had anything to do with it, I might try dentistry. No, this is just another of those exercises Big Green runs through from time to time when we’re trying to find our asses with both hands. It’s kind of an experiment in anarcho-syndicalism, but don’t tell the magistrate – it’s only the 10th and we’ve got a dozen demerits already this month.
As you know, Big Green is not a company, not a partnership, not a corporation … not even a non-profit (though we certainly have the financial means to be a non-profit … meaning we don’t make any profit). We are a musical collective, all for one and one for all. So by necessity, we have to share the burden of work that no one particularly likes to do. You know, work that SHOULD be done by a ROBOT if we HAD such a convenience …. MARVIN. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) decided to take a week in the Seychelles. I didn’t know he had the shekels for that little junket, but apparently he’s been saving up.
Okay, so we live in this crumbling hammer mill, see? And it’s mostly made out of bricks and mortar, see? In fact its hey-day was in the 1930s and 40s, when people ended most of their sentences with “see”, see? Nyah. Well, it needs some patching done here and there, and well … I was last pick, just like with the basketball teams in gym class. So it was off to the brickyard to get some of their wares, then back here to start patching, only to return to the brickyard because I forgot to buy cement, then got all the way back before realizing that the bags of concrete I bought were dry powder, not some kind of play-dough like substance. THAT’s when I started thinking about digging those ditches.
Well, there’ s a lot a man like me can do. But most of it involves sleeping. Zzzzzzzzz…..
As part of our 
Put The Phone Down – Matt and I sit down for our usual rangy discussion of whatever floats into either of our tiny brains. This month’s random topics include a recap of the Ned Trek episode you just heard; a brief riff on a local meat market and its longstanding sausage-based slogan; Matt’s recollection of a backstage fight between actors playing Buffalo Bill and Jesus Christ in a locally-produced musical back in 1978 or so; Our thoughts on the unusual, perhaps singular, playing style of our late friend and one-time guitarist Tim Walsh; Some news of beavers and sweet potatoes …. and so on.
was cooking up a new kind of super glue and, well, inadvertently glued himself to the television set). I may be going out on a limb, but I think the thing that is sticking in his craw is the notion that another private rocket launch would be so successful. He also has a strange fixation on the Elon Musk space car. I think he wants to hijack that ride and take it to Pluto.
How do you sniff out a list? Not sure. He took a look around the courtyard. No luck. He did turn up some promising papers in the forge room, but alas, they were forgeries. Another twelve hours of exhaustive search and I will resort to recreating the list from scratch. That part’s easy. Just start from “Sweet Treason” and work your way forward. (That original recording of Sweet Treason is a little scratchy, come to think of it.)
This won’t surprise you, but this group has very little imagination. How little? Well … glad you asked. Basically, their ideas for a Big Green logo consist of different colored circles with a picture of each of them in the center. So tubey has one with tubey’s picture, Anti-Lincoln with his, and so on. Never mind what these items say about their concept of this band … this band that NONE OF THEM RECORDS WITH … these logos are an atrocity. And now they’re talking to me about slogans. What a freaking waste of time!
that sounds odd coming out of a confirmed collectivist, just bear in mind – Marvin doesn’t have any material or animal wants or needs. He runs off of a little breeder reactor in his chest cavity. I think it looks like a cake frosting pipe with some arteries painted on the outside – it bobs up and down and makes a noise that recalls to mind a beating heart. (Oh no, wait … that’s an episode of Lost in Space.)
Okay, so … when you’re on vacation, you end up doing a bunch of stuff you don’t ordinarily have time for. For me, that usually involves surfing the web, and in my idle wanderings a stumbled across another Big Green. No, I don’t mean another BAND called Big Green – lord knows, there are at least one or two of those. This is a nutrition advocacy organization that works out of Detroit. Which means they are actually doing something USEFUL with our name, which is more than I can say for us. They’re helping to feed people; we’re wasting time with stuff like this. Case closed.
contacts. (Yes, that’s right, lady robots – he wears contacts.) So it’s not stage fright. More like existential angst.
Plastic Head – This song is a slight redo of a number Matt did for his 1988 Christmas tape, this version sung by Ned. All about a vehicular encounter with a roadside Christmas miracle coupled with metaphysical transposition. Just listen – you’ll get it.