Tag Archives: gravity

Usual Rubbish

Taking Thanks.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Everyone assembled? Good. What’s that? Marvin, you’re not assembled yet? Okay, hold everything, people. Where’s Marvin’s quick-start manual?

Oh, hello, everyone. Well, the holidays are upon us once again – a very special time in the world of Big Green, I can tell you. It has been said that we know how to celebrate Christmas like no other alt-rock band in history. Now, I don’t know who said that exactly and how they would know, but that’s what I’ve been told, and I’m sticking to my story. In any case, it’s undeniably true that few rock bands have started their recording careers with ostensible Christmas albums, and that we are among that very intimate club of unfortunates. What we haven’t done, of course, is release a Thanksgiving collection, but I don’t think we’re alone there. And I’m not counting albums that were released around Thanksgiving … not the same damn thing at all!

Okay, well … not sure where I was going with that. Let’s just say that, here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’re all thankful for a number of enumerated blessings, including many that don’t often receive the thanks they deserve, such as:

Our Roof – Often underrated and unappreciated, our roof keeps the rain off of us for the most part, particularly the parts that don’t have gaping holes in them. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would be a rusting hulk fit for naught if it weren’t for the remarkable weather-defeating properties of this amazing human invention. Indispensable!

Our Floor – Constantly overlooked (largely due to its location relative to our normal line of sight as humans), the floor of the Cheney Hammer Mill is an important part of the supporting infrastructure beneath us that keeps us from falling through the Earth’s crust into the hot, chewy center of our planet. Trust me – after surviving a subterranean tour or two, we fully understand the danger!

Hold on, Granny! Here's what you can be thankful for ...

The Air – Hey, it’s easy to forget the stuff you get for free, right? Corporate capitalism has yet to put a price tag on the air we breathe, and so, for the time being, it is still part of what remains of the commons, in the wake of capitalist enclosure. Sure, they may stick it in bottles and sell it to you by the foot-pound while you’re lying in a hospital bed, but short of that, open your windows wide and help yourself to an endless supply of life-giving gasses. You’re welcome!

Gravity – Who says science has to have a satisfactory answer for everything before we can fully appreciate it? Let’s hear it for freaking gravity – that mysterious magnetic power that keeps us from flying off into space and exploding into a cloud of atomized protoplasm. I know it has its problematic aspects, as those who have hung from a cliff or two may attest, but by and large, it’s a lifesaver, and for that we can’t thank gravity enough. (Don’t forget – without gravity, air, floors, and ceilings are basically useless.)

I could go on, but then you’d hate me for keeping you from your holiday dinners. So let me end by saying THANK YOU for listening. Now, start gorging … and remember – no gravity, no feast.

Usual Rubbish

Fighting gravity.

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Shore it up, boys. Let’s keep the roof on this thing. Sure, it used to be the floor, but when something’s keeping the rain off your head, it’s a roof. Unless it’s a hood … or an umbrella. Never mind.

Hey, well, here we are again, man. Trying to keep a broken home together. I don’t mean that daddy left and ain’t coming back (even though that’s roughly true); I mean we’re fixing a hole where the rain came in … and it’s the size of the freaking roof. We’re borrowing wood from the floor to shore up the roof. We’re borrowing planks from the south wall to block up the gaping hole in the north wall. This is like the fabled Ship of Theseus. This isn’t a home … it’s a philosophical paradox! Is it the same potting shed as when we moved here? Only your logic professor can say for certain.

Sure, sometimes the demands of home ownership (or home occupancy) keep us from our real work, the work we were put here to do. And that’s a good thing. I don’t feel like filling potholes today. And when the hell is this town going to invest in a pothole killer, for crying out loud? What do I refrain from paying my taxes for, eh? I mean, what is my lack of money buying? (Perhaps Lincoln can tell me.) Well, as you can see, this is distracting, and it is keeping us from the important job of producing more Big Green songs and sending them out into the cybersphere, where they can begin lives of their own and toil in silent obscurity.

See what I mean, Lincoln? We need this.

That’s not to say that we haven’t been writing songs. No, that’s still happening with some regularity. It’s the part about fixing the songs in some moderately sophisticated way to an electronic medium that will allow them to be conveyed to other people’s ears at a time of their choosing. That thing we haven’t been doing a lot of. Hell, we’re just getting to the point of mixing the group of songs we started at the beginning of the year. Now if that isn’t slow, I don’t know what slow is. Though I do know it’s not as fast as fast. That’s just logic, my friends. Ship of Theseus stuff. Look it up.

Anyway, back to the hammer and nails. (We took those out of the floorboards, too.)

Usual Rubbish

Money tree.

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I don’t know, man. My pressure suit is a little frayed around the elbows. I don’t even know where I left my magnetic boots. We’re probably not ready for that, but … if you insist. Jesus.

Ah, hello. Band meeting. Joe’s here, that’s all I can confirm. No one else wants to go on the record, including Marvin (my personal robot assistant), though he has appeared on at least one of our records, truth be told. (Forgive the double-entendre.) We’ve been tossing around ideas for generating a little cash, as the Big Green collective has been struggling a bit of late. The obvious remedy would be another tour, probably of the interstellar variety, but as I was saying earlier, our gear is threadbare as hell and we don’t even have a line on a spaceship rental. God knows what we would cross that trackless void in this time around.

Well, to be sure, the lure of money drives humankind to desperate means. We could probably wrangle a string of marginal gigs between Neptune and Aldebaran, though I’m not clear on how lucrative the exercise would turn out to be. The exchange rate on Quatloos is in the toilet these days. And between the two of us, I’m getting a little long in the tooth for space travel – not sure I could hold my breath long enough to get to Neptune, to say nothing of destinations beyond the Kuiper Belt. Also … we’re short a guitar player. Just saying.

Sounds like a tour

Not that playing gigs is the only way to shake the money tree. Every musician runs into this situation at various points in her/his career. What’s it going to be? Washing dishes? Done it. Carrying boxes and stocking shelves? Done that, too. Driving a cab? Well … I haven’t done that, but I came close once or twice. Then there’s Mitch’s idea. You might recall how he’s been experimenting with gravity. Well, he was musing on how to monetize his new technology, and it struck him that people pay for water, they pay for electricity, they pay for heating fuel … maybe he could get them to pay for gravity. He’s thinking about doing a market test – namely, sending gravity bills to our neighbors. If they don’t pay, he would train his anti-grav ray on their houses and claim that their service had been discontinued. That’s when the simoleons start rolling in.

Okay, well … there may be nicer ways to make a living.  Like … I don’t know … playing music, perhaps.

 

Usual Rubbish

Grounded.

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Hmmm … leaving kind of a big footprint there, aren’t you, Anti-Lincoln? Seems like you’ve been feeding on a pretty good pasture lately, am I right? No? Ah, okay.

Well, the gravity’s back. Isn’t that good new?. And now all of us weigh about twenty pounds more than before. Just a little side benefit of Mitch’s latest project. (YEAH, MITCH … THANKS A LOT. Turn that gravity thing down a little, willya?) Something tells me we will need to replace the floor joists in this crumbling old ruin of a hammer mill … except that I don’t know how to do that and I wouldn’t know a floor joist if it hit me upside of the head.

Mitch has got this whole gravity thing figured out. He describes swarms of little invisible magnet-like  particles he calls “gravitons”. Apparently these little critters swarm around you by the thousands, holding you down as the world spins out of control. Without their persistent intercession, we would all fly off into space, the earth shaking us off as it rotates on its axis. Mitch thinks of them as the quantum mechanical equivalent of guardian angels … which is the reason why he hates them with a mad man’s passion. He went into a bit of a rage last night about gravitons, swiping at the invisible particles like he was shooing away mosquitoes. At one point, he appeared to have caught one between his thumb and forefinger, but his triumph was short-lived – the little specter slipped away, eliciting a yelp from the mad scientist as if he had touched a hot stove.

Here they come again, Mitch.Okay, so …. that guy’s crazy. And, as Mr. Spock once observed, madness has no reason … but it can have a goal. That’s what Mitch’s anti-gravity machine was all about. The device attracts gravitons like a bug zapper, apparently, though it doesn’t zap them … it just keeps them busy so that they can’t hold the rest of us down. (You always thought it was THE MAN that was holding you down, but no, says Mitch, it’s the gravitons!) Anyhow, it kind of worked for about a week, then something went bust. That happens a lot with mad science tinkerers like Mitch. Hell, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has dozens of glitches, but hell … he’s family.

So we’re back on the ground, for the nonce. We’ll see what the weekend brings. I’ve got my bike helmet on, just in case.

 

Usual Rubbish

Pro-gravity.

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We’re fresh out of duct tape, man. All gone. And no,  I don’t have any large magnets. That wouldn’t work anyway – the floors aren’t made of metal, fool. Geez.

Yeah, I’m getting asked a bunch of dumb-ass questions by my house-mates, bandmates, mill-mates, etc. again. Everybody’s all worked up about our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee and his latest raft of experiments. (Why he keeps them on a raft, I cannot say.) Mitch has been working on selectively negating gravitation, which really should be impossible … I mean, we all wish it was impossible, but apparently it’s not. Naturally, his experimental subject was the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s longtime squathouse, and a place where gravity has always reigned supreme … until now.

Now, most people have a sense of how gravity works, but for those of you unfamiliar with the ways of this mysterious unseen power, here’s a primer: it holds you down. That’s it. When people talk about being held down in life, they’re talking about gravity. When Bruce Springsteen sings “I’m goin’ down, down, down, down,” he’s singing about gravity. When some politician is making a speech, imploring his audience to understand the gravity of a given situation, that politician is … well … you get where I’m going with that. How does it work? That’s complicated. Einstein had his ideas about this. More recent work has detected gravitational waves. My personal view is that there is a enormous horseshoe magnet buried deep in the earth. Next time we do a subterranean tour, I’m going to check that theory out.

YikesRight, so … Mitch Macaphee has his own theories. And his theories usually lead to some nameless device that looks like a ham radio rig from the 1960s, with dials and meters and knobs and blinking lights. It makes a “woo-woo” sound. Sometimes he puts arms and legs on it and calls it Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sometimes he throws a switch and things disappear … or appear. This time around, he adjusted the right combination of buttons, switches, lanyards, etc., to suspend gravity in the hammer mill. An anti-gravity machine, as it were. And that means more than floating hammers, my friends. Suffice to say, I haven’t had to use the stairs all week. If this keeps up, we may be battling obesity before long.

Thing is, most of us are pro-gravity. Hence the search for duct tape, glue, velcro, etc. Or maybe we should just pull the plug on Mitch’s gizmo. Worth a go, right?

Usual Rubbish

Magnetists.

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Right, so there ARE gravitational waves after all, disturbing the peace of the space-time continuum. Uh … I knew that. No news to me. Next question?

See, here’s the advantage of having a mad science adviser. (Every band should have at least one. Wilco, I believe, retains an entire gaggle of them.) Just casual hallway conversations yield amazing benefits. Turns out there are planets with negative gravity. True story. In fact, our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee claims that he was born on one. The negative gravity of his home planet was so strong that it immediately shot him like a cannon ball straight to Earth. Fortunately, he was wearing a heat shield poncho at the time (his first invention, innovated straight out of his mother’s womb).

Mitch has an idea about how to manipulate gravity waves for casual amusement – kind of like playing with a galactic yo-yo. Only now he’s back in one of his funks, with the announcement of the gravity wave discovery by prominent physicists. “Everybody’s going to want a piece of this!” Mitch shouted upon receiving the news, and stormed off to his quarters. He’s been brooding ever since. Hard to keep a man like that happy. We gave him the best quarters available in this abandoned hammer mill, and at considerable personal sacrifice. (I myself have been forced to make do with dimes.)

That's some yo-yo, Mitch.Not much we can do except continue working on our music. Yes, music comes first around here – ask anybody. We’re currently producing a few more songs for the podcast, a couple of which may make it on to a collection at some point. It’s kind of the same process we’ve been going through for the past few years – write and track about a half dozen songs, throw them up onto the Web, then do it again. That’s how Cowboy Scat got done, for better or for worse. That’s likely how the next album will go, though at some point we’re going to knuckle down and record some of our older songs (at least one album of those), preferably before we punch our one-way ticket to geezerville.

Hold on … I think my applesauce may be warm enough to gum.

Usual Rubbish

Yo mama.

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Okay, so what are we inventing this week? Ten gallon sippy cups? Anti gravity yo-yos? It’s worth asking.

I hate to be the one always checking up on our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee. For one thing, the hazmat suit doesn’t fit me very well. And I can’t speak very clearly through that portable blast shield, particularly with the welder’s mask on. Suffice to say that you enter his lab at your own risk, so we only do it when absolutely necessary. Very often I will send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in with a note clutched in one of his claws.

Not that Marvin is expendable, you understand. It’s just that he has wheels and can roll backwards. If I sent Anti-Lincoln or the mansized tuber in there, they could end up on melba toast with a caper in their eye. (That’s the caper.)

Fact is, the only reason I’m venturing into Mitch’s wing of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our now-permanent squat house, is that the neighbors have been complaining. You know what I’m hearing about, right? Loud noises in the nights. Mad cackling. Subtle but noticeable shifts in gravitation. Midnight sunshine and black skies at noon. All those little things that tend to put the retired plumber next door in a bad humor. We don’t want to hear from the authorities, of course. We might get the Ammon Bundy treatment, after all. That is … they will ignore us until we pull guns on them more than twice or three times. (Since we’re white, we would probably get the Bundy mulligan, so to speak.)

You know what to do, Marvin.Mitch has been in poor humor since they found his coveted dark planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. He had been clinging to the vain hope that it would remain the undiscovered country for another generation, at least … plenty of time to convert it into a black hole or neutron star. In any case, now he’s drowning his sorrows in experimental work, and it’s got all of us on edge. Hard to work on music when the laws of physics are collapsing all around you. Last Monday morning, for instance, he temporarily suspended the third dimension within the immediate boundaries of our hammer mill. It was like being a ColorForms character for the day – very distressing!

Okay, well … I’m going in there. If you don’t hear from me soon, send Marvin in.