Hey, what can I tell you? I didn’t intend to piss him off, guys. Not my intention at all. Nor was it my intention to destroy the planet Jupiter. Furthest thing from my mind.
Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a little band meeting. (Bret? Here. Jermaine? Here. Murray? Here.) I’m being raked over the coals by my fellow Big Green members and our various hangers on – Mitch Macaphee (our mad science adviser), Lincoln, anti-Lincoln, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man-sized tuber… even Big Zamboola has chimed in. What’s the “issue”, as they say? Oh, hell… it’s about our perennial sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. He’s been a house guest here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the past week or so. That is to say, he was our guest, up until he departed yesterday in a bit of a Zenite huff. (How do I know? His radioactive vapor trail was tinged orange around the edges. Sure sign.)
So, why the hurried departure? Was he on his way to, I don’t know, Joseph A. Bank to get two free suits after buying one overpriced suit? No, no, nothing like that. It’s down to me, I’m afraid. One of those obscure cultural faux pas you run into when dealing with the denizens of another galaxy – kind of like showing the soles of your feet to an Iraqi. I insulted sFshzenKlyrn in some way, apparently, when I turned down his generous offer of Zenite snuff. I believe that, combined with a hand gesture I made involuntarily, is the equivalent of telling a Zenite that his specific gravity is roughly equivalent to that of Yak dung. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Zenite etiquette, that is considered a particularly grave insult.)
sFshzenKlyrn left in a cloud of radioactive dust. I imagined he was going straight home, using his typical method of traveling between the dimensional layers of the wobbly thing we call reality. Not so. I guess he was a little madder than he looked, because he felt the need to act out his anger. And he did this by driving straight into the planet Jupiter, causing a bit of a disturbance. (I’m told he did that one time before, some few years back. Left a bit of a red spot, as I recall.) What this has meant to the inhabitants of Jupiter I do not know, though I suspect we will hear about it the next time we go on interstellar tour. (Late this summer, I believe. Stay tuned!) It did, however, cause quite a stir back home here, with people calling it a dramatic collision, a missile, an asteroid, and so on.
Nah. Just a pissed off Zenite guitarist, that’s all. And from the ‘splosion he created, I guess his specific gravity must be quite a bit greater than that of Yak dung after all. Whoops! Sorry, sFshzenKlyrn!
Another hot one here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Global warming at work, no doubt. Whatever the cause, it’s sweltering in here. I spent the morning hanging my head into the primitive air shaft at the center of this unused pile of industrial masonry – it seemed strangely airless. That’s why I’m asking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to break out the fans. It’s times like this when any performer turns to his/her biggest fans. (Boom-crash!) How are ya, how are ya, how are ya! Anybody from Detroit in the audience tonight? Anybody? You in the back? There you are. Gotta’ love the motor city!
I have an excuse, though not a very good one. Just the night before, our beloved sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon 
If it sounds like I’ve been reduced in rank to roadie status, that’s because it’s true. Just call me Spike or Lenny – you know, one of those roadie names. I’ve considered investing in a carton of muscle shirts, but I don’t have any muscles, so… what’s the point, right? (How do I lift those heavy bass cabinets? Tendons only, my friend.) There are worse things to do for a living, only up to now I haven’t had to do any of them, so… this is rock bottom. The things we do for friends! And by “friends” I mean robot friends.
Turns out I’m the “how”. Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t be wasting my time on this shit. Only.. he’s the only robot I’ve ever had, and when those brass eyes start to tear up, I relent. Mind you, I’m the only member of Big Green involved in this enterprise. Matt and John both flat-out refused to carry water for a bunch of mindless robots. None of our other household denizens and assorted hangers on at the Cheney Hammer Mill would agree to lug Marvin’s gear around either (I thought I could at least get the Lincolns interested, but they REFUSED, insisting they had something else going – some kind of debating society, I believe.) As for the man-sized tuber, he’s running the sound board, and… well, those little twig-like arms of his are even less suited to a roady’s tasks than mine.
Oh, hi. Sorry… I was reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Not that he needs to be reminded of its contents – It’s been posted on a spike inside his memory banks for a good many years now. Nevertheless, I felt he needed reminding because he’s been unusually disruptive of late. Sure, there have been times when Marvin’s programming has gone south or when he’s unduly under the influence of nefarious telemetry from alien planets (don’t think it doesn’t happen, because it does!). Only recently he’s been trying his hand (or robotic claw, more properly speaking) at a number of different small enterprises, hoping to make a marginal living in these hard times. (What exactly he needs money for, I don’t know. Perhaps some kind of automatonic inebriants.)
Okay, so I’m in the studio, pounding on the keys, trying to make something that sounds vaguely like music. I hit the playback button, and I hear this grinding sound that bears no resemblance to the one emitted by my aging Oberheim rack unit. It was, in fact, motor noises being picked up by an ambient mic. So I go upstairs and see Marvin mustering a small army of robots – I don’t mean five or six normal robots, but about 40 to 50 toy-sized automatons, all with little purring lawn mowers. He apparently crimped the little suckers into being the muscle behind his new landscaping business, and they were practicing on the Hammer Mill courtyard. Which is made of cobblestones. Genius!
Oh, man. Typing in my sleep again. Someone should really take this laptop away from me. I’m liable to post ANYTHING while I’m sleeping, even (dare I say it?) the password to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). That’s all you would need to make him do YOUR bidding, however inaccurately. Actually, (*yawn*) his password is a vegetable that starts with “P” followed by the fifth number up from zero. Do your worst. Don’t forget to oil him regularly, and if he asks you to feed him, just ignore it. He fancies himself some kind of humanoid or cyborg, but that’s pretty far from the truth. For chrissake, Mitch Macaphee made him out of bits and spares. Nothing of value in … HEY! STOP KICKING ME, MARVIN! THAT HURTS!!
Mitch, thankfully, has given up on his idea to build a radical new transportation system circumventing the surface of the Earth entirely in favor of direct routes through its chewy nougat center. However sound that idea may have seemed, it turned out to be surprisingly impractical. Who knew there were so many obstacles deep beneath the Earth’s crust? I always assumed this was one of those relatively inexpensive planets – you know, the ones that are hollow inside? A hollow chocolate world. No, sir… turns out it’s not. The Earth, you see, is like an enormous malted milk ball, except instead of some kind of hydrogenated artificially-flavored wad of sugar and cornstarch, it’s full of rock and dirt and molten lava. Yeah, man… who knew? Guess I should have paid more attention in school. Let that be a lesson to ALL of you kids out there. STOP READING THIS BLOG! SAVE YOURSELVES WHILE THERE’S STILL TIME!
Yeah, it’s us again. Big Green, standing at the rim of another hole to the center of the Earth. Damn, this gets tiresome sometimes. We’re not complicated people, you know… aside from that psychology thing. All we want to do is hang out at our abandoned hammer mill, make a little music, watch the stars from the rooftops, bend pretzels on alternate Thursdays, and shoot arrows through the persistent space/time warp in the washroom that Mitch created so many months ago. It’s the simple things that give the most pleasure, is it not? (No, really… I want to know. It is the simple things, isn’t it?) And yet we are perpetually faced with these complications, these Gordian knots, these Rubic Cubes, these Junior Jumbles, these Uncle Art’s Funland spot-the-differences cartoons, these…
Okay, right… well, this little problem we have may not be as difficult as one Uncle Art can typically dish up, but it’s a poser, that’s for sure. You see, Mitch has been building this complex system of tunnels to various destinations on the globe (some actually on the surface of the globe, but – and this is important – NOT ALL). Of course, a project this ambitious requires rigorous testing to ensure the safety of the patrons Mitch hopes to eventually charge MUCHO DINERO for the privilege of riding his trans-Earth trolley through the planet’s chewy center.
Oh, yeah – he’s done it again. Our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is the “he” I mean, and he’s … well .. cracked like any good mad scientist would be. I told him a dozen times that building underground tunnels to other countries is just not a very good idea. I warned him that there would be perhaps dire consequences to attempting such a project. Why… just tell me, why do mad scientists NEVER LISTEN TO REASON? WHY MUST THEY DESTROY THEMSELVES AND ALL THAT THEY LOVE?
What is his motivation here? The most capitalistic of reasons, Colonel Austin. He wants to set up what he calls an underground “choo choo” and charge people for the privilege of riding down the hole and out the other side of this increasingly raggedy planet. Fantastic scheme, to be sure… except convincing people to ride on the freaking thing will take even more engineering prowess than actually constructing it. (You DON’T want to see the men’s room – it’s …well… substandard.) I know he means well (I think), that he’s trying to bring in some badly needed revenue at this critical juncture when yours truly is about to be ejected from the Cheney Hammer Mill by the department of health. (They take issue with all of the mongooses. What the hell – so do I! Thing is, so do the mongooses.) It’s just the method, Mitch, the method.
Oh, sorry, you all. (What, am I southern now?) I was just having one of my difficult moments. That’s a new pastime here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. We each get all dramatic and difficult at least half a dozen times a day, preferably taking turns at it so that the ambient noise doesn’t upset the mongooses trying to sleep on the roof when the sun is hottest around midday. (Are you getting all this down?) Why would we take on such an endeavor? Well, as you know (and this is perhaps the reason why you love us), we are not tremendously successful as a band. No heap big contract. No honking piles of ready cash. No adoring fans dogging our every step. And times being what they are, we thought, well…. if we act like assholes, these things will come our way.
stardom. It kind of creates a penumbra of mystery around the umbra of famousness. That’s the shit we need, friend – to be sure.
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.
Yeah, I’m losing track of day, time, even planet, solar system. I may even be working in base-12. (That would not be a good development, particularly with my bank balance.) Big Green and friends have been a little busy just lately – too busy, frankly, for the niceties of neighborly chats, friendly asides, opening mail, cooking dinner, and writing blog posts.
Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has zucchini to take to market – yet another one of his hare-brained business ventures. I haven’t seen the man-sized tuber in a couple of days, come to think of it – perhaps he was mistaken for a great bull zucchini. (Marvin is a little unsubtle. A zucchini would have to tell him it wasn’t a zucchini if it wanted to avoid the market stall.)