Never mind, Lincoln, I’ll get it. Hello? Yes, this is the Cheney Hammer Mill. Who is this? Hello? HELLO? IT’S COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

Actually, that’s probably not true. I just like to get the pot boiling a little bit before I start typing in earnest. Yes, like so many of you, we at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill get an unending stream of fundraising and advertising scam calls, each and every day. I’ll tell you, it’s hard to get about the work of an unemployed pop band if you’re getting interrupted every twenty-five minutes by a furiously ringing telephone. There are things that Big Green must not do to remain Big Green – these telemarketers are trying to take that away from us, and I won’t have it, do you understand?

I know what some of you are thinking right now. “Joe,” you’re thinking (and by the way, thank you for calling me by my given name) “Why don’t you just get an answering machine?” Good question, nameless interloper. The fact is, we already have an answering machine …. it’s called Marvin (my personal robot assistant). We just place the handset on his left shoulder and punch a few buttons, and our callers will be greeted by a tinny, stilted voice that sounds like an audio ransom note – words cut from different magazine articles and pasted together. Marvin then records their comments and plays them back to us while standing on one wheel. Sure, he squeaks and rusts more than your typical telephone answering machine, but hell … he’s here and willing to do the work, right?

Okay, so … now you’re thinking, “But, wait a minute, Joe. How come you guys have so much time on your hands that you can spend a pile of it worrying about stupid shit like this?” That’s an even better question, which is a short hand way of saying that I have no idea. The simple fact is, we can’t play in public spaces, we don’t have broadband so we can’t play remotely, and we’re in the midst of our Summer music production doldrums, which is to say that none of us feels like doing anything other than sleeping through September. But then every time I try to get a few extra winks, that phone starts ringing again. So, it turns out that your implied statement above is absolutely correct – we have done fuck-all this summer, and we’re getting antsy.

Somewhere, a phone was ringing. Sounds like a bad novel from the 70s.