Give me an A. Okay… how about a lower one. Yeah, that’s good. Now, give me a D. No, no…. that’s an H. There ain’t no H, so try D. That’s more like it.

Oh, hi. Didn’t notice you there on the other side of that flat screen. (Damn, it’s tight in here!) Forgive my inattentiveness – we’re just trying to work on Big Green‘s next release, [INSERT TITLE HERE – FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T POST UNTIL YOU FIX THIS!!]. Quite an innovative title, eh? Took a long time to work it up, but that’s what we’re all about here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – spending inordinately large amounts of time on stuff that should take five minutes. I know what you’re thinking. That’s why we live in a squat house, right? Well, well… it isn’t a squat house. It’s an abandoned squat mill. Just as easy to get these things right, you know. In any case, here we are, down in the dungeon, the musical dungeon, trying to make this thing scream. The drums are all miked up and ready. Matt’s bass is plugged in and buzzing. I’ve replaced the broken keys on my piano (all 47 of them) and sFshzenKlyrn is cranked up to 111. (Yeah, that thing goes up to 111).

And yeah, I did say sFshzenKlyrn. No, he’s not staying at the mill, chez Big Green, as it were. (Or, rather, as it weren’t.) Our ever-reliable, extraterrestrial friend from the planet Zenon is piping in his parts from many, many light-years away. How does he do this, you may ask? (And well you may ask.) Well… he uses the Zenite equivalent of broadband. It’s kind of like a beam of high-energy particles that slices through space faster than grease lightning. He just adjusts it to a particular frequency, points it at the Earth (or as many of us call it, the “oyt”), and the sound starts emitting from one of our abandoned speaker cabinets. It’s quite amazing. There is a slight latency problem – he actually has to start playing a note sometime last year in order for it to sync up with our performance. Fortunately, sFshzenKlyrn is a transcendental being of no fixed hairstyle and can slip from one place in time to another. (Yes, but can he go from one time in place to another? Huh? Can he?) So he simply dials himself back several months to the precise interval needed for transmission, and he’s right with us. (Monitoring is a little complicated – I’ll skip that bit.)

Then, of course, there’s the process of arranging our songs. You’ve already heard about how Big Green actually composes music. Arranging is a whole other thing. I call it the music-minus method. We start by giving everybody an instrument. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) gets an acoustic guitar, the man-sized tuber gets a trombone, anti-Lincoln gets a pipe organ, and so on. We literally fill the studio with noise, everyone playing at the same time, as many notes as they can squeeze in. Then we start to edit it down. You know – maybe a little less tuba in the chorus… not a constant stream of noise, but just a few notes… perhaps (preferably) none at all. We just keep slashing away at it until it gets close to something listenable. Funny… in the end, we always seem to end up with the three (or four) of us playing the instruments we usually play. So, I guess this whole arranging process is kind of a waste of time. Hmmm…. must re-evaluate. Bear with me, now.

Yeah, well… as we’re mulling that over, you can probably go back to whatever it was you were doing. Check back in a few days to see if we’re still mulling. If we are, kick the mill in the side a couple of times – that should do it.

Let’s see, what was it? Spring back, fall forward. Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Set the clocks back, kids… it’s really only 11:00 in the morning.

Hiya. Yeah, I know… the Daylight Savings Time thingy was days ago. We’re running a little behind here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, here in lovely (rainy) central New York. (That’s why we need to set those clocks BACK, damnit, BACK!) Lost inside this cavernous hulk of a building, you lose track of time sometimes…. especially if you wander into Mitch Macaphee’s laboratory. (Yes, he’s been messing with time again. So if you’re discovering crows feet you didn’t notice a day or two ago, it’s all down to him.) And that’s just one of the many hazards we have to deal with on a daily basis. They say show business is a dangerous trade, but “they” never spent a week in Big Green‘s shoes, no sir. Between the mad science projects, the lingering orgone generation field left over from Trevor James Constable’s patented device, the discarded soap sculptures left carelessly on the stairs, etc., we’re lucky to make it through the week alive. (Not sure we do, actually. MAYBE NOT. EVER THINK OF THAT?)

Whoa, I’m freaking myself out. Okay… this is for the benefit of “them” that do not know anything about Big Green and our uncommon lifestyle. And before I go on, yes, I did say discarded soap sculptures. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been going through one of his creative phases of late, and has taken to whittling figurines out of bar soap. This is a little inconvenient, as we are going through lean times and we haven’t a bar of soap to spare, quite frankly. It’s also inconvenient because he leaves his discarded shavings and abandoned projects lying around where they end up under foot… like on those bloody brick stairs. (And by “bloody,” I now mean literally.) Damned self-absorbed artists! And Marvin’s still getting spammed – look at this:

Marvin

Our “Reverse the Recession” promotion has been extended to accept an additional 1,000 customers. If you have any upcoming need for working capital, unsecured business credit, equipment purchases, facility upgrades, etc., we should definitely talk. Here’s the scoop:

The first 1,000 customers to apply for a lease or loan will receive a $500 Visa Gift Card if they finance through Direct Capital.*

Marvin – This fills up rapidly. Please call me at (877) 322-9235 so I can give you details or at the very least reserve your spot now by visiting this site: promo.directcapital.com/372/MarvinDrelich1

Thanks,

Thomas

 

These fuckers never give up. Right, now back to my lifestyle point. Hmmm…. What was it again?

Oh, yeah. Here’s a window into our world. Every morning at the crack of noon I get up, shake the sawdust off my bedspread (termites!), limp to the doorway of my converted claw-hammer test lab bedroom, and start making my way down the corridor to the rusted remnants of a factory bathroom. After a quick scrub, I sneak past Mitch Macaphee’s lab, pass through the time portal left over from Trevor James’s experiments, and (if I don’t emerge in restrictive 18th century garb) proceed to the cellar where we keep our studio. Then I have six fingers of brandy. Just a bracer, you understand.

That’s a day in the life. Try it sometime. Or not. (It helps when you have a robot assistant.)

No, I haven’t seen your fork. What do I look like, the lost and found? Okay, don’t answer that. Anyway, why the hell do you NEED a personal fork? Are you some kind of FREAK?

Oh, hi. Jesus, the shit you have to deal with around this stupid hammer mill! Crikey… we’ve got songs to record, albums to hawk, hawks to feed, feed to store, stores to shop, shops to… store… just a whole lot of things to do, okay? The last thing I want to be stuck doing is hunting down lost silverware. But, of course, you’ve got to try to keep people happy, and Mitch Macaphee is one of those people. Believe me, it’s not easy to find a really dedicated mad scientist who’s willing to work with a hardly-working rock band. Most of them expect to be paid. (We always assume that to be evidence that they’re just not “mad” enough for our purposes.) Some expect honorific titles and assorted baubles of scientific status. Still others will just as soon vaporize you for even talking to them (perhaps unintentionally). Next to those guys, Mitch Macaphee is downright affable. Even if he does have a private fork. (He’s been using the man-sized tuber as a taster, too… I’ve seen him!)

Oh, sure… time was in the history of Big Green that mad scientists were relatively thick on the ground. We had your Dr. Hump, your Trevor James Constable, your Admiral Gonutz (though not technically a mad scientist, he was, indeed, mad). Indeed, they populated our early interstellar tours like heavy metals in a neutron star. (Not sure if that makes sense, exactly…. someone ask Mitch.) But they’ve all gone, now. Moved on to richer pastures and more rewarding career choices. Let’s face it…. Big Green was unable to offer them the kind of glory every mad scientist craves. We couldn’t even deliver the basics – a few sparking electrodes, banks of oversized v.u. meters, a gothic castle on a hill, the right little gnome. No, sir… all we could offer is a near total lack of monetary compensation and squatting rights in this drafty old abandoned hammer mill. Just try to hang on to a first-rate psycho-genius with nothing more than THAT as an incentive. Just try!

Okay, anyway. Mitch must be kept amused. He’s the last one we’ve got. Even Matt has decided he’s too big to fail, and has started carving driftwood sculptures to amuse him. (Matt’s good at a lot of things, but I don’t think one of them is carving. Most of his attempts were offered to the beavers, who made damn good use of them… no pun intended.) I even convinced posi Lincoln and anti Lincoln to put aside their differences and try their hand at convincing Mitch not to accept that attractive offer he’d received from the International Association of Mad Scientists Board of Governors, whose convention will be held in Buenos Aires this year. (Hot ticket, you best believe.) Since bribery is out of the question (lack of funds), we thought the Lincolns might use inescapable logic and persuasion. Not that either one of them possesses those capabilities, but someone has to try it on the rat bastard…. and it’s not going to be me. I’ve got work to do, damn it! There’s an album to finish, and it’s not going to freaking finish itself. As it is, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is doing some of my parts. It’s almost like I’m becoming HIS personal robot assistant.

Okay, I’m a little off just now. Come back in a couple of hours and take another look. If I keep making that noise, take me into the shop and have them look at my bearings. (Could cost a bit.)

Is the car ready? Good. Engine running? Double good. No, I’m not worried about wasting gas. Last thing on my mind, damnit. Don’t forget your driving shoes – there’s a good chap.

Hello again. Yes, we’re planning a little day trip. Nothing to get too excited about – just a brief opportunity to get our butts out of this place. Plenty of incentives to do just that, now that the gravity at the Cheney Hammer Mill is out of control Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has become a walking, talking, pop-up ad machine. Oh, yes… you heard me right. Ever since he opened that noxious email and got himself taken over by a pernicious computer virus, strange things have been happening to our mechanical friend. First, B-movies started playing on his video terminal. (He was like a walking drive-in for a few days.) Next came the pop-up ads…. kind of like what you get online, except these are little signs and banners that literally pop-up out of his head at unpredictable intervals. Some of them are accompanied by soft hits from the 70s. It’s pretty terrifying.

Mitch Macaphee – Marvin’s inventor and our resident mad scientist – has made several attempts to rid Marvin of this scourge. First he tried reprogramming him – no luck. (For a few hours, he thought he was a chicken. But the ads kept coming, so we ditched that.) Next came the arcane mad scientist methods – you know, magnetic fields, big glass tubs of boiling liquids, banks of v.u. meters and flashing lights, the whole bit. Nothing. He even resorted to pantomime… and while that did have some effect (it made the ads change faster, in fact), it wasn’t the solution we were looking for. Now I know this is going to sound like a total cop-out, utterly lame, etc., but it was my idea, actually, to just take a little day trip and sort of let Marvin’s problem sort itself out. These things have a way of taking care of themselves, you know. (Actually, not true, but as empty nostrums go, it will serve.) So into the car we go.

A little tip for all of you – don’t go for a ride with two Lincolns, especially if one is an anti-matter doppelganger of the other. Trust me, one Lincoln is plenty enough company, making speeches, cursing General McClellan, trying out new, grim, presidential expressions, etc. When you’ve got two of them in the back seat, Christ almighty! They never agree on anything! They’ll start trying to out-speechify each other. Then anti-Lincoln calls the other one “Maharba” (“Abraham” backwards) just to annoy him. So it’s, “Nice speech, Maharba!” Then you’ll hear posi-Lincoln start with the raspberries, and anti-Lincoln will say “Quit it!” That’s when somebody (not me) has to climb back there and put a stop to it. We usually threaten them with no major addresses for a week, or forbid them from sending the Army of the Potomac into northern Virginia. Sometimes I have to get the man-sized tuber to shake a stick at them. It makes for a pretty uncomfortable ride all around, suffice to say.

Okay, well…. you’ve got your troubles to attend to, no doubt. We’ll be in the car if you need to find us. It’s a green car with four wheels – you can’t miss it. (This is a small place.)

Stop complaining, you two! If I have to come back there again…! Just do as I do and tie another sandbag to your ankles. Look smart – we’ve got more important things to attend to than mere gravity.

Oh, hi. Didn’t see you there on the other end of that ethernet cable. I was just reading the riot act to the two Lincolns (anti- and posi-). They’ve been complaining incessantly about the intermittent gravity here in the Cheney Hammer Mill. I keep telling them, lighten up, goddamnit, but… then they float away. Why do they always grouse at me? Bring your complaints to Matt, you damn lazy Lincolns. At least HE has the sense not to respond in any way. (You know those artistic types.) I guess I answered my own question, eh? In any case, Mitch is still messing with the magnetism of mother earth, as you have likely gathered. Perhaps you yourself have noticed some minor glitches in gravitational constancy. Perhaps not. (Hey… there could be a lot of reasons for that floating feeling you get sometimes.)

Enough of these petty grievances. There are much more serious matters in the works here at the mill. For one thing, I’m pretty sure Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is running afoul of some kind of phishing scam. Yes, that’s right – internet fraud…. thieves on the internets, trying to steal all of your worldly (and in Marvin’s case, other-worldly) goods through that series of tubes. It all started with unsolicited communications our robot friend received by e-mail. This was strange, as Marvin doesn’t have an email account. (I set one up for him just to avoid cognitive dissonance.) The messages kept on coming, and what the hell…. even I started reading them. I mean, look at this shit:

Marvin,

Please review below. This is an internal email from our VP of OPS. Looks solid for On Time Van Trans In. Give me a call or check out the offer at the link below.

Thanks

Thomas Bellemore

—————————-

 

Then there was a link that looked like a devil’s head. I told Marvin not to click on it, but hell… he’s a machine. He can’t help but click. (His left eye is actually a wireless mouse – laser pointer. Quite handy.) Suddenly, his arms started moving about in circles, his lights started flashing, and the little video screen on his back started showing scenes from “The Creeping Terror.” I brought Mitch in to have a look, and he said that Marvin had been taken over by some kind of computer virus. Now he spends a good part of the day in the lobby, his video screen showing some promotional video about buying digital photographic prints. Odd.

I’m starting to miss gravity, actually. This floating around makes it hard to concentrate on these more weighty matters. Any tips? Send ’em here.

Ow! Bloody roofing beams! Are bicycle helmets always made of styrofoam? I thought they employed something slightly harder in their construction. No? Gotcha. Anyway…. ow!

Oh, hi out there in cyberland. No, we haven’t elected to return to interstellar space after only one full week back on Earth. Lawd, no. I’m cracking my skull on the roof beams of our beloved abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, here on terra firma. I and my Big Green colleagues are being subjected to yet another one of Mitch Macaphee’s haywire mad-science experiments involving gravity, sunlight, air thickness, blah-blah-blah. I don’t know what all else, as they say. In any case, he’s got the gravity component of it right… in as much as we ain’t got any. Somehow Mitch has stumbled upon a formula (or process) for selectively negating gravity without the aid of, say, a jet pack or motorized propeller beanie. I think he does it with dominos… stacks them end-to-end. (Don’t ask me how it works, ’cause I just don’t know.)

All right, so what this means is that instead of walking around on the floor, we’re all bumping around on the ceiling. And it’s annoying, frankly. Though I think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has probably adapted himself to the situation more effectively than anyone. He’s got those retractable foot-wheels, you see, so he just flips himself upside-down and rolls about like a ski-lift gondola. Very efficient little s.o.b., I must admit. I guess after a few years you get used to these little experiments. This one’s irritating, but not as bad as some of the other things Mitch has tried over the years. There was that one time he worked on turning standard bricks into uranium 235. (Note: this whole freaking building is made out of bricks.) Then there was that time he found a way to turn air into fire. (Though that may have been a natural gas leak – we’ve never been quite sure.)

Under the best of circumstances, it’s difficult to get work done around here. It’s a little harder without gravity, I should say. Nevertheless, we’ve managed to put our noses to the grindstone once again, working on our next release. This will be a strange one, mark my words. Now… I know a lot of you thought the last two were strange. And let’s face it, International House is just plain peculiar. (I’ll tell you, I’ve listened to that sucker over and over again, and I still don’t know what those crazy mo-fo’s are talking about.) Nonetheless, selections from International House and from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, are being played on several suitably bizarre podcasts, including Bloodthirsty Vegetarians (thanks, Rich!) and PaganFM. So, strange notwithstanding, we’re moving ahead with yet another charred offering of audio madness. Gravity or no gravity – this mother is in production!

One favor, though. Can someone hand me my guitar tuner? I can’t reach it from the ceiling.

A little more to the left. I said LEFT! (Schmucks…) Little more…. little more… good. Okay, now we need another one for the north wall. Hurry… I think I hear the sound of bricks crumbling.

Oh, hi. Didn’t notice you there on the other side of the computer screen. Greetings from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, just one week after our triumphant return from the great beyond (where we do nearly all of our performances). Did I say triumphant? Wrong word. Ignominious is a better fit to the circumstances. What can I tell you? Broken down spacecraft (nothing new there). Problematic re-entry (nearly a burn-up, as it happened). Crash landing on solid ground (ouch!). Limping home in disgrace (with the exception of the man-sized tuber, who had to be wheeled in a cart… being a vegetable and all…). Being met at the Hammer Mill door by virtually an entire police department (investigating an abandoned space vehicle complaint… and yes, it was down to us). So that thing about “triumphant?” Yeah…. just forget it.

Okay, well… it took a couple of days to clear up that whole police thing. They took us down to the station, fingerprinted us, scanned our retinas, etc. Keen to unpack from our long interstellar sojourn, we scraped together enough bail to get the human contingent out of there – that left Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the tuber, and Big Zamboola behind bars for a few hours while we called the local bail bondsman. As it happened, they set a pretty stiff bail for Zamboola, mainly because of the impracticality of keeping a celestial body (with its own gravity) in a holding cell. Marvin they let go on his own recognizance. (He was talking to them while they worked and, well… it got kind of annoying, I think. He started telling them about his anvil collection. Sheesh.)

Once the bribe… I mean, bail was paid and we had a chance to re-acclimate ourselves to positive gravity, it became obvious that things hadn’t been going very well at the Cheney Hammer Mill in our absence. No, those mongooses (mongeese?) hadn’t come back, though that remains a very real possibility. No, it wasn’t once again occupied by either pirates or space creatures, nor by denizens of middle earth…. nor cavemen. (Did someone say mimes? No, no mimetic infestation as of yet.) No, it was more in the way of general dilapidation. Frankly, the place is falling to pieces. No great surprise, right? I mean, the foundation is literally crumbling beneath our feet. (Especially Mitch Macaphee’s feet. He’s been putting on a little weight lately… not from good eating, you understand, but from some arcane experiment he’s running on himself… something to do with increasing his specific gravity to nearly five times its original value. We now call him “titanic man” behind his back.)

So anyway, we’ve been down in the catacombs, the arches, the basement… whatever, shoring up the beams with spare timbers. Not a lot of those left…. we may need to use something else. Oh, tubey! Got a job for you!

Gosh, but it’s great to be back home! My favorite five words in the alphabet. Wait… did I say something? Did someone just say something…?

Whoa, sorry, friends. I’m a little woozy after that hard landing the other day. Did I mention our landing was hard? Well, if I didn’t (and I do believe I did), let me tell you… it was HARD. We more or less followed the re-entry instructions Urich found tucked under the navigation console (it was buried in coffee grounds and cigarette butts, but still readable). His angle of descent was a bit too steep, perhaps, and the second-hand Soyuz capsule heated to the traditional 450 degrees Kelvin. That was the first piece of difficulty. The second? No water landings with Russian spacecraft. We were forced to find open ground somewhere within walking distance of our long-term squat at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (Why walking distance? No cab fare. And it’s not like we’ve got the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln out there trawling for us…. even though we have not one but two Lincolns on board.)

So, down and down and down we went. Objects on the ground became larger and larger. I could see my own broken down car – a crispy 1989 Honda Civic – and Mitch Macaphee could even see a pair of cufflinks he lost last summer at one point. That’s when it dawned on him that we were getting close… too close. Soon we could see even smaller objects… pinheads, protozoa, large molecules, smaller ones…. then, CRACK! We came to a kind of sudden stop. I think we all lost several inches in height – particularly Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who may have compacted one of his hip-gimbals. (He’ll need to consult with Dr. Macaphee on that, no doubt.) My teeth seem to move around a lot more than they did last week. Oh, and the man-sized tuber has a greater specific gravity than he did before. (Mother… now I know why they call it CRACK.)

Okay, so Big Green (like master) is in the cold, cold ground – then what? Well, we did manage to land (by sheer good fortune… nothing to do with piloting skill, I can assure you) within walking distance of the Cheney Hammer Mill. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy limping distance, so it took the better part of an afternoon getting over there. (Lincoln and anti-Lincoln grousing all the way, of course…. If I have to come back there again!) In fact, it took us so bloody long that the local constables beat us to the door. So how, you may ask, were we able to run afoul of the law in such a short time on Earth? Well… our Soyuz capsule is apparently considered hazardous waste… not surprising, since it is chock full of noxious chemical substances and was found lying squashed like a cigarette butt in the middle of a beet field. We should have taken Mitch’s advice and set the freaking thing on fire before we limped off into the sunset. Live and learn.

Live and learn? $4,000 for hazardous waste removal? W.t.f. – that’s our entire take from this last few weeks, assuming Zenonian drachmas are still convertible to genuine U.S. currency. (That’s assuming a lot, I will admit.) Easy come… easy go.

Hot enough for you? 450 degrees Kelvin, Mitch tells me. (That’s about 350 for all you Fahrenheit fiends.) Urich, you got your eye on that splash-down point? That’s it? Are you sure? Looks like freaking solid ground to me…

Well, as you may have surmised, Big Green is just now wrapping up its launch tour for our new album, International House, and is headed back home through that ever-thickening blanket of atmosphere that surrounds planet Earth (our seasonal home). And as the more discerning amongst you may have noted, our re-entry method leaves a bit to be desired. You see, Big Green’s pilot on this outing – a certain Urich Von Braun, reputedly the last surviving member of a little-known German kamikaze squadron – is a “driver” (as George W. Bush would put it) of airplanes. Spacecraft? Well, not so much. Anyway… this re-entry phenomenon is kind of a new thing for him, and while he’s a quick learner, it’s the sort of situation that doesn’t allow for a whole lot of trial and error. We’ve been supporting him in every way we can think of – bringing him drinks, digging up the circa-1975 instructions on how to land a Soyuz, giving him pep talks, etc., but I must admit… I don’t have a real good feeling about this landing.

Take the instructions (please). Urich has read them and he seems to be pointing the ship towards solid ground. I always thought the idea was for a splash-down type landing. But now I’m told by Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that the Russians always landed somewhere out in Kazakhstan, hopefully in an open field. So now… I don’t know if that means we’re going to Kazakhstan or someplace slightly closer to our actual home in upstate New York – namely, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (right now, abandoned even by the gaggle of squatters it usually houses). On John’s suggestion, Matt devised a kind of bomb-sight device for him with crosshairs hastily scratched into it using a pen knife. (Best we could manage.) I keep trying to get him to point the sucker towards water of some kind, but Urich is a pilot who pretty much follows his own counsel. (The result of Kamikaze training, I suspect.) If he wants to point at a slag heap outside a stone quarry, that’s where we’re going, concussions be damned.

That being the case, the only one likely to come out of this without any serious bruises is the man-sized tuber (AIM screenname ManSizedTuber… just so you know). He is, as you know, a large root vegetable and, as such, an extremely gnarly character who doesn’t bruise easily. This is just as well, since he is the one who put together that video for our new song “High Horse” – our mock-country satirical contribution to the George W. Bush legacy project. It’s been up on YouTube for a week now, and it’s got maybe 250 hits thus far… not exactly a screaming viral hit, but not bad for something submitted by a root vegetable. Reviews so far have been good, but I’m trying to keep him real on his expectations. Not sure it’s necessary. As I said, he’s got a pretty thick skin. You might even call it a husk or rind, perhaps. Not easy to get through to that boy, no sir.

So anyway… I can see my house from space, and it’s getting bigger and bigger with every passing minute. And as much as that sounds like a good thing, it’s… really… not….