First there was day of the triffiids. Then there was night of the living dead. Now there’s week of the homeless virtual rock band. And what do they all have in common? Space people. Mother-fucking space people.

Hello again from sleepy upstate New York (formerly known as Sri Lanka). Last week as you recall, your friends in Big Green had made the fearful discovery that our local city hall was under foreign occupation. No, it hadn’t been overrun by stormtroopers from a distant power – this was a far more congenial takeover. Space people, armed with sacks of cash and buckets of Miracle Grow bribed their way into the building and have taken the place of our entire city council. This could be a problem, folks. Got a tax dispute? Tell it to the space man. Need the street sweepers to do a once-over on your block? Better learn to speak Betelgeusean real quick. (And take it from me – it is not an easy language to learn. No vowels. Nada.) Someone set your house on fire? Contact the mother ship… pronto. (Little bit of extra response time, you understand.)

I suppose you’re wondering how in the world our elected officials could possibly have been coaxed away from their posts by large amounts of cash… how proffered piles of filthy lucre could convince them to abandon their constituents to other worlders… how the promise of permanent paid vacation could somehow outweigh their dedication to public service. Well, stop it. Of course they took the money and ran – that’s their job. Damnit, if our public officials weren’t corruptible, we would never have been able to remain in our adopted squat house for lo these many years. Our corporate label – Loathsome Prick Records – understood this very well. It’s thanks to them, in part, that we were able to keep Marvin (my personal robot assistant) under our leaky roof. Apparently there’s a local ordinance against harboring mechanical men. (You’d be surprised what kinds of Byzantine laws lurk in the dusty volumes stacked down at your local codes department.) Nothing a little palm grease couldn’t finesse.

No more. See, this is where our problem lies. Not only are these space people total-ass lawn freaks, they’re also straight as the proverbial arrow. Incorruptible, at least by any terrestrial standard of graft. And now that they have taken over our local government, they appear determined to follow the letter of every law on the books, dating back to… well… the civil war, perhaps. Not a good thing at all. Just the other morning, there was a loud knock on the door. It was some of Marvin’s old colleagues from the local constabulary, only they weren’t collecting quarters for the annual charity cotillion. They were putting us out on the street, in effect – a 10-day eviction notice, signed by someone named Gizmadiyar (apparently the acting mayor… and between you and me, I don’t think he’s acting). Even Marvin’s timely intervention seemed to have no effect – the constables seemed quite happy in their work…. almost… TOO… happy….

Now, those of you who’ve been reading this blog for the last seven years know. We of Big Green have seen the elephant and heard the owl… or is it heard the elephant and seen the owl…? (Can you herd elephants?) Either way, we’ve been through far too much in our time to allow ourselves to be made homeless by some interstellar freak named Gizmandiar. Not to worry… though if you do happen to send a package our way, be sure to address it:

Big Green

Open garbage can

Corner of Sherman Street and Bolton Place

Colombo, NY

… and be sure it’s waterproof. (And trash-proof.)

Spacemen to the left of me. Spacemen to the right of me. Spacemen above my head. And beneath my soles? Astroturf. That’s right… astroturf.

Welcome back, Big Green-ites, to a world turned upside-down. Well, not upside-down exactly… probably more like 180 degrees clockwise, with a slight southward dip on the “y” axis. Either way, things are not what they used to be. This neighborhood has gone downhill fast. Jeebus christmas – just three weeks after the first spaceship arrived and we’re practically the only people in this village who were born on the planet Earth. (All except Big Zamboola, of course, who was born on… on… well, on himself, because he is, in fact, himself a planet… or planetoid.) Those strange, lawn-obsessed space people have brought their interstellar modular homes to our sleepy little town and set up their own community superimposed over ours. WTF!

You know, it wouldn’t be so bad to have all of these new neighbors if they had taken up residence the normal way: the way we got here… find an empty house and squat. No, that wasn’t good enough for them. They had to bring their own houses. And before you say anything, no, I don’t have a “problem” with space people. In fact, some of my best friends are from far beyond the confines of our little solar system. Did I mention Big Zamboola? I did. Okay. Well, there’s also sFshzenKlyrn, our perpetual sit-in guitarist. He, of course, is from the planet Zenon in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy far, far, away. sFshzenKlyrn and I go way back, so you can’t say I don’t like space people, even if they do keep me up all night with their smelly lawn mowers and their noisy stellar infrarometers running incessantly over the same measurements. (Ooooooh, I hate them, I hate them!) Don’t listen to Mr. Subliminal. I love those dang space people, I really do. (RRRRrrrrrr)

Not that there aren’t remedies open to us. Sure, I know – we’ve been squatters here at the Cheney Hammer Mill for more than six years. And yes, we have run afoul of the law one, two, or perhaps a dozen or more times. But we do have some items in the plus column. For instance, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) did serve with distinction in the local constabulary. And we have, in fact, generated a little bit of economic activity in the area with the occasional payout we receive from our new corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, which has been willing to advance us a bit on our upcoming release (still in the mixing stage – arrrrrghhh). Yeah, we help keep the pizza joint and the pub in business, so that’s probably worth an ordinance or two from city hall about unauthorized extraterrestrial housing and landscaping. (Turns out, it isn’t even real grass. It’s like a freaking lawn toupee, man!) So one would expect a little cooperation from the authorities, eh?

Well, if one were to expect that… one would most certainly be mistaken. When we made our way over to city hall, we couldn’t help but notice the flawless green carpet of newly installed lawn on either side of the walkway. And the mayor has a strange unearthly glow about him. Don’t know about you, but I think the fix is in.

Whoa – that didn’t take long. Is it Saturday already? Guess those orgone energy waves have an affect on your sense of time. As Dylan once sang, now things just keep getting uglier, and I have no sense of tiiiiiime…..

Well, now, those gall-dang other-worlders who came here to steal our land, take our jobs (they took our jobs!) and plant genuine Kentucky bluegrass turf all over our courtyard just couldn’t take the heat from Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine. What happened? Well, I’m gon’ tell yuh. That unearthly contraption started shakin’ and shakin’. Then it began to hop around like a Mexican jumping bean. I could hear little yips emanating from inside, and I could swear I saw someone waving a small, sucker-ended middle finger at me from one of the portholes (it may have been an optical illusion – no one else saw it but me, I guess….). Well, now, the hops got higher and higher, and at one point it just hopped clear out of sight. Damnedest thing. The way that fucker was pummeling that courtyard you’d think even god’d be a-feared of it.

Next thing I knew, something hit me square on the back of the head. Youch! Everything went black (actually, it was kind of a midnight blue, really, with orange and yellow sparkles – very nice). Not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, I had a headache and something Mitch Macaphee calls “frontier accent syndrome” – a dreaded disorder that people in the mad scientist community have been grappling with for nigh onto a hundred ‘yar. Dag nabbed syndrome makes yuh talk like a gall dorn character actor at least every other sentence that festers outa’ yer gob. (I have a particularly strange variant that appears to incorporate some elements of archaic British slang… most curious… dash it all….) Mitch and others tell me that I was struck by the hull of the bouncing ship driven by our turf-obsessed space invaders – apparently the fucker busted through the roof and into my private study… and dang near knocked my fool head off. (Haw…)

Let me tell you, friends – it was pandemonium around here for a stretch of minutes, right up until that highly agitated space vehicle bounced off the property entirely. Someone called upon Trevor James to pull the plug on his orgone generator before it burned a hole in the courtyard and cracked through the arches below into the drainage system of this quiet little upstate village. (Quiet though it may be, there is a lot of sewage that runs through this place – just ask the DEC… if you can catch them not hunting…) Though my head was, well, a bit more dented than before (dag nab it!), our little experiment appeared to be a success. But as you know… appearances can be deceiving. Within the next couple of days, similar mysterious space ships had appeared in the courtyards of many of our neighbors. Lawns were soon sprouting up all around us…. green, carpet-like landscaping. It was terrifying!

And me, well….. my frontier accent syndrome has calmed down a bit. But that extra dent in my skull seems to have affected my balance, so I’m typing this column face down on my bedroom floor. Yes, I type that well in the prone position… especially with Marvin (my personal robot assistant) at the keys. (Handy little critter.)

Got a bead on it yet, Trevor James? Try 16 degrees azimuth something-the-fuck… you know what I’m trying to say. Ready? Steady…. Fire rockets! No rockets? Well, then, let’s just settle for etheric energy waves.

Hello again. Yes, who would’ve thought it would come to this? Big Green fighting for the very ground we stand on. (We’re standing our ground!) That’s right – Big Green, the pacifist band; least rowdy motherfuckers on this rowdy motherfucking street we call music. Us… fighting over a broken down mill that isn’t even ours. Oh, the shame of it all. (Somebody hand me a bar rag – there’s a good chap.) But you know what they say – possession is nine-tenths of the law. (That’s why exorcists do such a cracking good business ’round these parts.) What’s that? No, we don’t count the Cheney Hammer Mill amongst our possessions, strictly speaking, in as much as we don’t “own” it. (Like that guy said on Kung Fu – “You can smell hell, but you don’t own it.”) However, you’re forgetting that remaining tenth of the law that isn’t possession: murder. (Or, as they say in Brooklyn, moy-duh.)

Well… not moy-duh, er, murder, exactly. Repulsion is more the word. Let me back up a bit. As you may recall (by simply scrolling down a little further on this page), some strange other-worldly aliens landed in our courtyard last week. We began to get the distinct impression that they were planning to stay a while when they somehow generated a rich carpet of suburban lawn in the area immediately surrounding their vessel. Now, we’re not fond of grass, okay? Marvin (my personal robot assistant) particularly loathes the stuff, and he’s not alone. (I think it’s the sound of lawnmowers and sprinklers – reminds him of the primordial shop floor from which his ancestors emerged, their brass knuckles scraping the cobblestones as they slouched toward the homes of their new owners. Just a guess.) I’ll tell you, these fuckers must be from a whole planet of lawn freaks – they never stop working on that thing.

Funny thing is, we haven’t actually seen the space people. I mean, they fire up their robo mowers, roll out their crawling sprinklers, occasionally call in the Chem Lawn guys to putrefy the neighborhood with their toxins… but they never actually come out of that ship. Even so, it was clear that they had to go before our entire squat house was converted to suburban domestic sprawl – a nightmare in ubiquitous green. Matt, resourceful fellow that he is, thought to ask Trevor James Constable to train his patented orgone generating device on their craft. Matt’s theory (totally unencumbered by scientific validity) was that the etheric energy would excite the atoms of the unearthly metal in their hull, generating an uncomfortable temperature within. (Hot? Cold? Not sure about that part….) That was good enough for Trevor James (or T.J., as I call him) – he duly positioned the array and flipped the “on” switch.

What happened then? Well…. not much. At least, not yet. We’re patient over here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. What the hell – it might have taken them decades to make the trip from their home planet, for all we know. This could take time. Hey, T.J. – can’t you crank that thing up a bit? Mister Chem-Lawn’s coming up the street again…

What the….? Marvin (my personal robot assistant), is that you? No, wait… you’re over there. Well then, what the fuck is causing that glow if not your power-on indicator? Why it’s… well… unearthly.

This started to be just another week here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Giving rudimentary philosophy lessons to the man-sized tuber. Producing anvil-shaped holograms with Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine. Playing Stratego with Lincoln and his evil anti-matter counterpart, anti-Lincoln. Mixing (at a snail’s pace) our sophomore album. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then, out of nowhere, an unanticipated wrinkle in our otherwise smooth existence. It happened early yesterday morning, in fact. Matt heard it first – something that sounded like a laundromat dryer winding down. The power went out… and there was this… strange…. glow….. emanating…. from…. the… courtyard……

(*whew*) Are you sitting down? Okay, good. Clearly, someone needed to see what was up outside. And just as clearly, that wasn’t going to be me. Or Matt. Now John, maybe, but he was otherwise occupied, so really… not him either. My vote was for Marvin to do the recon, which of course he more or less willingly acceded to, being a soulless machine with no overriding inclination towards self-preservation. Yes, he did need a brisk push out the door, but I attribute that to my laziness about oiling his foot-casters. (The yodeling and frantic arm waving might have been the result of some kind of computer error – I’m having Mitch Macaphee look into that now.) In any case, the intrepid Marvin cantered out into the cobbled courtyard, while we watched on his chest-mounted Web cam. (The view was momentarily obscured by one of his robotic fingers… I think it was the middle one… but pretty soon we had a look at what was happening.)

What did we see? Well…. I’d have to say it looks a bit like a large football. An enormous, glowing football, with windows on the upper flank. Stranger still was the racket it was emitting – sounded like a lawn mower more than anything. We tried to get Marvin to circle around, but there appeared to be something wrong with his audio receiver – he turned on his heel and sprung through one of the mill’s cellar windows. (Definitely a software glitch – gotta be a patch available online somewhere….) Well, it took about an hour and a half to convince him, but we eventually got Big Zamboola to float himself up above the mill and get some pictures. And what we saw… astounded us. (Well… me, anyway. I admit, I’m easily astounded.)

Okay, so let me tell you what those fuckers in the football are up to. They rolled out some turf onto our courtyard, set up a little fence, built a swing-set, and now one of those freaks is mowing the lawn…. in our squat yard! Bad enough we have to fight the locals to live here for free – now people are horning in from other planets. What’s this world coming to?

Listen carefully, tubey. These deer are very small. These deer… are far away. These, very small. These… far away! Get the idea? No? Hoo, boy. Let’s start again…

Ah, it is you, my friend. Welcome to the Cheney Hammer Mill one-room school house, here in the hinterlands (or, more properly speaking, the hinder-lands, since you can do nothing here). Just trying, in my own sorry way, to give the denser among us some semblance of an education. Why? Simple… they’re simple. And they live with creatures of quite enormous intellect. I refer not to myself, of course, nor to brother Matt or Johnny White – we’re all thick as posts compared to Big Green‘s scientific contingent. You know who I mean… your Mitch Macaphees, your Trevor James Constables… your doctors Hump. The brain guys. Stubborn as hell, they may be. One is mean as a snake (Mitch). But intellectually, they outpace us by leagues.

So here I am, trying to explain complex spatial relationships to an overgrown sweet potato. (I can hardly wait to show him two-point perspective!) Like most potatoes, the man-sized tuber has eyes, but he cannot see the difference between a porcelain miniature and an 800-pound buck. That will likely be a problem for him as he moves through the world of men. Sadly, there are other dead spots in his noggin, as well. The whole math thing is a big mystery to tubey. He can count the hairs on his tap-root up to the lower double digits, but that’s about his limit. And even with the full support of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as a teacher’s aide, I can’t get him to recall the six major continents by name. (He calls Australia “Big Zamboola”. I mean, that’s like calling the Chrysler Building “Fred McMurray”.)

Is there anything more depressing than a cruciferous vegetable that will not learn? Of course there is. But that’s not the point here. Think of all that the man-sized tuber is missing as a result of his ignorance. Think of the ridicule and degradation he must endure from his more learned colleagues. And anti-Lincoln – what about him? He’s as dense as the rest of us. Where the hell is he going in this hyper-competitive world of ours? When society demands success, all he can offer is failure. Like the tuber, he’ll be a nothing, a nobody. (Arrogant as he is, of course, he will insist on Mister Nobody.) Hell, don’t even get me started on Big Zamboola. He isn’t even allowed on public buses, let alone elevators. (Though he can defy gravity, so that’s not as much of an issue…)

Back to the books. Damnit, Marvin – what did you do with my third grade primer? Holding up a hot plate? But it’s flammable, you imbecile! That’s it – take that open seat in the third row. Christ on a bike – we’re moving backwards.

Is this the Boise office? It ain’t? Well then, who the hell is this, anyways? Okay, okay, get me Washington. Huh? Since when? Never mind, then… get me Lincoln. What… him too? Jeezus….

Oh, it’s you. Just try to get somebody on the phone these days! I mean, you’d think with all the portables and the VoIP and all that, it’d be easy… but nooooo. Actually, I’ve been trying to reach our rep over at Loathsome Prick Records – not the annoying PR guy who puts words in my mouth, but the A&R guy who takes money out of our pockets…. that guy. Wired up like a freaking christmas tree, he is. Never seen so many bleeding lights on something that wasn’t a tractor-trailer. (So much for the colorful asides.) Been dialing long distance all morning and so far no luck. It’s almost like they don’t want to talk to us. And no, I’m not using the royal “we”, nor is there a mouse in my pocket. When I call someone, it’s on behalf of all of us. (Particularly the crank calls.)

Why the urgency? Well… couple of things. First off, I’m hoping to extend the grace period on the delivery of our next musical “product” – the long-awaited sophomore Big Green album. We’ve been running into some post production difficulties, as you may have gathered from the last few columns. I know, I know… with Marvin (my personal robot assistant) turning the dials and the man-sized tuber sulking in the corner, how could we miss, right? Friends, it’s not as simple as that. There’s the never-ending battle with entropy, for instance. And as you well know, if the entropy doesn’t get you, then the inertia certainly will. (Maybe both will get you. Ever consider that possibility?)

Then there’s the other thing. See, we were hoping for a little advance on our next release… and everybody thought it made sense to ask for this at the same time I’m informing them that the master won’t be ready on time. Who says we’re not cost conscious? (Actually, Geet O’Reilly, our financial advisor, suggested we cut down on the long distance charges.) Anyway, we thought… well… maybe a couple of grand in small bills might be appropriate, seeing as though we’re living in an abandoned mill and haven’t had a properly cooked meal in several months (since coming off our last interstellar tour, actually). Face it, Big Green is a cheap date. Just ask Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm Inc., our former corporate label. Don’t think they spent much on us, aside from the cost of the goon squads they put on our ass. (And goons were pretty easy to get back in those days. Just ask the Indonesian military.) That was a heap of trouble.

So what the fuck, Loathsome Prick Records – let’s have a little respect, eh? We’re making the bloody album. It’s coming, like Issa’s snail climbing Mount Fuji (slowly… slowly). I’ve got a hungry robot over here, and a couple of impatient Lincolns. Send money!

p>Big Green‘s little ditty, the President’s Brain is Missing, is now at #51 on Neil Young’s Living With War chart. Drop on over and help get us into the top 50. Hey… if we do particularly well with this, we’ll chip in on getting Dubya a new brain. Can’t hoit.

Aw, tubey… what do you want to go and do that for? Put it down, tubey… put it down. Owwww! Not there — that’s my freaking skull, you cruciferous moron!

Ah, yes… there you are. Welcome. As you can see by the banner head (oh, say, can you see the banner head?), your belov’d “Notes from Sri Lanka” has been re-christened (or more properly speaking, re-agnosticized) “Hammer Mill Days” — just one component in our year-long rebranding project. Ahem… did I just say that? Can’t have been me. I must have been channeling our publicist from Loathsome Prick records — the one who keeps insisting that we re-brand ourselves as some kind of contemporary country or aging emo band (yuk!). Fucker put one of those Bluetooth antennae in my head while I was sleeping, so every once in a while I pop out with his latest PR drivel.

Just to keep you straight on who’s saying what, I’ll just put all the publicist’s words in some other color… like maroon, say. Maroon is so last year! Yeah, that will work nicely.

All right, now that I’ve dealt with him, let’s get back to you. You may be wondering, What the fuck are they doing now? Why change the name at this advanced stage of pointlessness? Well, with the help of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man sized tuber (who won’t put that hammer down), your friends in Big Green have prepared the following brief Q&A:

Q: What the fuck are you doing now?

A: Specifically, scratching my left earlobe. But more to the point, we’re changing the name of this blog to better serve you, our valued customers… or not, depending on who you trust. (Jesus, that’s annoying!) Actually, the truth is that we’ve gotten tired of explaining how Sri Lanka is not so much the place where we live (which, of course, it isn’t) as it was a clumsy attempt to make reference to our state of near-total obscurity as a band. Turns out a lot more of our readers/listeners know all about Sri Lanka than we gave them credit for. So we’ve settled on something more suitably obscure — an abandoned hammer mill in the middle of nowhere. That’s the ticket.

Q: Why “Hammer Mill Days” and not “Nut Butter Alley” or “Reflective Blister Times?”

A: Excellent question, Marvin. It’s all about branding, you see. No, no… Don’t listen to that asshole! It’s because the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is the locus of all that is Big Green. And because “Nut Butter Alley” was already taken. (That other one, I’m not even going to comment on.)

Q: Why do you suck so bad?

A: Loaded question, but fair. I guess it’s because you say so, tubey. (He’s just pissed off because I haven’t watered him yet today.)

So anyway… there you have it. Big new name, same poor quality. Everything you expect out of your favorite Big Green blog… and more. We’ve even set up a mirror site at Blogspot so that you can check out our latest exploits without having to surf all the way over to the hammer mill every time you want to hear from us. Isn’t that considerate of us? No, that’s elementary customer service. Arrggh… Loathsome Prick is certainly earning their label this week. Tubey — give me that goddamn hammer so I can knock that pernicious Bluetooth receiver out of my skull. I’ll get the freaking water, okay? Tubey!!

Aw, c’mon Mitch! You’ve got at least three electron microscopes to your name. Can’t we just use one of them for our experiment? One little one?

Damn these scientists and their ethical codes of conduct! Yes, that’s right — I did indeed make reference to ethics and Mitch Macaphee in the same sentence. Far be it from me to ever suggest that our resident mad doctor (or as you say, “daktari“) has constrained himself to purely ethical behavior through the course of his long and spotted career. No, no — I’m referring to this annoying internal code that scientists maintain between one another. It’s kind of like a secret handshake. In fact, with respect to Mitch and Trevor James Constable (another member of the scientific contingent here at the Cheney Hammer Mill), it is a secret handshake. (Honest — they really will not let us watch them shake hands. It’s kind of… unnatural…)

Why do we want to play with the shiny, pretty, candy-like electron microscope? Well, if you’ll recall last week’s episode (and there’s absolutely no reason in the universe why you should), the entire Big Green contingent was on a hunt for water. Potable water has become rather scarce here at the mill, what with the recent drought, earthquakes and sandstorms we’ve been experiencing. And then there’s that other thing… yeah, right. We haven’t paid the water bill in 18 months. That may have had something to do with it, as well. Anyway, there were several plans circulated, some of them involving divining rods (my idea), some involving acts of plant-like ingenuity (the man-sized tuber’s idea), some involving mayhem and hooliganism perpetrated against our unsuspecting neighbors (the evil anti-Lincoln’s brain child) — none of them seemed quite the thing. Then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had one of his notions… and frankly, it was a cracker.

No, no — not that kind of cracker. And not Robbie Coltrane, either, so don’t even go there. I mean kind of a … well… not bad idea. You see, Marvin pulled a tiny fragment of knowledge out of one of his microscopic electronic brain units — it was something he read somewhere about a certain amount of water residing in every object, every cubic inch of air, every club sandwich. It may be an extremely minute amount of water (as in the case of the club sandwiches over at Bolanders’s deli… I swear, they’re made of real clubs!), but because it is everywhere, that water may amount to a significant amount… perhaps enough to fill a pool. If only we could see it. Ergo, electron microscope. Point the sucker at some water-bearing object (Lincoln), and start sponging it up. Simple, right?

Well… maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I’d still like to borrow Mitch’s microscope. No particular reason. Well, there is one. Our neighbor is watching re-runs of Daktari, and we don’t have a telescope, so… you know…