That one was mine. Oh yes, absolutely it was. It had that black spot on the left side. No, no… the left-hand side, as one looks at it. Bloody mongoose!

Oh, hi. You caught me haggling over the incalculable bounty of a bunch of bananas. Somehow, twenty years ago, I never pictured myself spending any serious time trying to convince a rogue mongoose that a twice-discarded piece of fruit belonged to me, not him. (I had no vision, no foresight.) And yet here I am, on the cobblestone street outside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, engaged in this literally fruitless enterprise. No, my friends, I am not hungry. We of Big Green are not wanting for sustenance. We have our art to feed us, our music to fill our bellies, our powerpoint slides to use as sandwich slices, our amplifier heads to employ as toaster ovens, our… our… man, I’m hungry! 

All right, to be honest… it is lunchtime at the Mill. (The whistle just blew – crazy thing still works even though there hasn’t been a shift on duty here in probably 50 years.) It’s a Pavlovian response for me. Still, I don’t want the banana for snacks. We are working on concepts for the next Big Green album, and one of the many, many useless ideas involves bananas. (Only one? you may ask.) Not sure – I think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have come up with that one. Hire an old phonograph somewhere, he says. Get a banana, he says. Put the banana on the phonograph turntable, he says. So what do I do? I go and listen to him, that’s what. Who’s the fool here, eh? The fool robot or the fool who listens to him? Oh, well. We grab ideas wherever we can find them.

Not that the bananas wouldn’t come in handy anyway. All that stuff about spiritual/artistic food? In truth, it’s not very satisfying. And bananas are better than what I can usually wrestle away from the local mongooses. (Mongeese?) Typically that’s a breadfruit rind or coconut shells. I mean, if I’m going to have a spartan dinner, I would prefer it not be something that has to be eaten with vise-grips. Hard times indeed. We’ve been trying to put our meager minds together on how to yank ourselves out of this pit of poverty and obscurity. (Leave us face it – we have a following like the fictional band played by Flight of the Conchords.) I don’t know. Hootenannies? Open rehearsals? Slide shows? Bake sales? 

That’s the thing – so many ideas, so little time.