Well, then, where the hell is it? I left it right here. Jesus mother of pearl, everything grows legs around here, the moment you turn your back. I’m living in a den of thieves! An abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill full of thieves!
Oh, hi. Just getting down to our yearly inventory of band equipment; a kind of rejuvenating exercise that keeps us prepped for any performance or recording opportunities that may come our way at random. Are we getting offers? Well …. not as such. in fact, big fat nothing. That phone hasn’t rung in weeks. Sure, that may be down to the fact that I unplugged it from the wall, but hell …. all that was calling us was creditors, looking for cash. Stupid creditors! They should have known better than to lend money to us. We’re just not trustworthy. (Especially that man-sized tuber. He has deep roots in the Genovese crime family. Um … actually, we’re only certain that he has deep roots – it was our assumption that they at some point touch something associated with the Genovese crime family.)
Anyway, our inventory turned up some missing items. Somebody walked off with my stomp-box phaser, for instance. If I still played a Fender Rhodes and needed a cheap organ sound, I would be using that thing. Of course, there are several missing cords and at least one mic stand. Also, our DA-88 8-track digital tape recorder apparently had its insides hollowed out and is now a mere shell of itself. If you stick a Hi-8 tape into its tape-hole, the only sound you will hear will be that of the cassette dropping uselessly to the floor plate inside the unit. You’ve heard of people breaking into houses and stealing all of the copper pipes and wires? Yeah … I think they broke into our 8-track machine. And they stole all eight tracks.
See, here’s the thing about living in a squat house: you’ve got zero security and absolutely no right to complain. I mean, what are we going to do … call the cops? They’ll just laugh at us, then take us down to the station where they can laugh at their own convenience. Now, I would like to think that these actions demonstrate the authorities’ well-concealed determination to house the houseless – a jail cell is, in a certain sense, a roof over your head, right? But that’s Panglossian nonsense. In any case (and I recognize that I’ve wandered a bit), every November we discover that things have gone missing, grown little legs and walked away. What can I say? We haven’t had a steady guitar player for many years, and yet stuff still continues to walk out of here. (Yeah, that was an unfair slam on guitar players. Mea culpa.)
Word to our readers: if you go to a garage sale in this area and you see deeply discounted used band equipment (including my goddamn guitar tuner), call our dumb asses.
Yeah, big things are happening here at the Hammer Mill. Really big things. Like the giant garage sale Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has talked us all into participating in (and contributing to). That’s bigger than we really want it to be, frankly. For one thing, we don’t HAVE a garage. And if we DID have one, we wouldn’t sell it (we just got it in my imaginary world, for chrissake – what’s the matter with you, man?) Seriously, though, I think Marvin is selling everything we own, including all of our instruments. That’s like being up shit creek and selling your paddle in a garage sale. (In fact, it IS being up shit creek and selling the paddle… assuming some fool wants to buy it.)
Oh, damn. Didn’t mean to give you an inside look at our dissention in the ranks. Yeah, things are pretty rough around the edges in Big Green ville these days. Tempers are wearing thin… thin as the knees of our jeans. Ragged as the cuffs of our shirts. Threadbare as the ascot Lincoln still wears to dinner (even though we don’t do the ascot thing at dinner anymore – I’ve told him a dozen times!) Why, we may even resort to WORKING for a living. That may seem drastic to you, but it’s a real possibility. Don’t think we don’t have offers. (We don’t, but that’s another matter entirely.) There’s a little thing called opportunity … and a little thing called luck. One or the other of those little things may just get close enough to be considered a big thing here in the Cheney Hammer Mill.