BANG! BANG! BANG! goes the hammer. POP! POP! POP! goes the rivet gun. RING! RING! RING! goes the phone. It’s our neighbors, the antique dealer. He’s telling me to shut the hell up. “Turn it down, the radio!” he shouts over the phone, and I smile quietly to myself.

Why am I amused by this? Hey… when you call a dump like this “home”, you must find amusement wherever it may be lurking. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are always looking for new distractions. Is that because Big Green is not what you would call a “performing” band? Perhaps, perhaps. Fewer reasons to venture out of the mill, particularly now that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes our grocery runs for us. “You trust him with money?” I imagine you’re thinking right now. My imaginary answer would be, “No; we program him to work as a day laborer before he goes to the store. That’s how we roll.”

Well, goddamn-a, why do we need a robot’s money… when a Google search on “Big Green International House” turns up more than five million sites? No man can say. Perhaps it is that vow of poverty. Not that any of us took such a vow, but perhaps someone else took one for us. In any case, we have to keep busy somehow, right? And aside from Googling our own names (and album titles) there must be something productive we can do.

So hell, I’m building a new Big Green web site. It will be big… and green. Perhaps shiny, perhaps not. I’m not super crazy about shiny, to tell the honest truth – it makes things look too much like what’s looking at them. Anyway, that’s what all the hammering is about – that’s the sound of Web development up here in the sticks. That’s what it sounds like when someone is building a Web site you can really sink your teeth into. A site that is chewy, not cakey… just the way you like it.

As you might expect, we’re doing this – as we do our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN – on a shoestring. A little infusion of venture capital wouldn’t go amiss right now, truth be told. Get Bain on the phone. No answer? Hmmmm…. must have closed up shop. Start picking numbers randomly out of the phone book. (I’m addressing Marvin, you people – don’t try this at home.) Someone out there must be looking to drop some cash on an ill-considered venture.

Uh-oh. The phone. It’s my neighbor again. Or it’s Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm. Either way, I’m fucked.