Is that all he’s got? No, wait… there’s another page coming through. Slowly. Somebody got another quarter for the payphone? I don’t want to …. oh, man goddamn!
Oh, hi. Yeah, just grappling with our communications issues, once again. Everything in Big Green’s world is held together with duct tape and baling wire… but then you knew that. What you didn’t know is that we’ve got a mom and pop drugstore up the street from us that has what may be the world’s last coin operated pay phone. That’s right… and it’s bloody handy, now that Verizon has pulled the plug on us. (Damnable message unit charges!) So, yeah… we can call mom, talk to our label, harass our booking agent, order strings, all with a pocket full of change. It’s like freaking magic. Who needs the twenty first century? We’re harnessing the technology of yesteryear. (Or yestercentury.)
Well, as you may remember, our sometimes agent Tiny Montgomery has been trying to fax us from his six-room lean-to in northern Madagascar. We have no fax, ma’am … we are fax-free. But what we do have is a resident mad scientist (Mitch Macaphee) and a rolling pile of spare parts known as Marvin (my personal 
robot assistant). Mitch was able to fashion a primitive fax machine and dial-up modem out of Marvin’s printer module, an operation that, while painless, seems to have left a bit of a deficit in the automaton’s left flank. No matter – with the money we glean from this upcoming tour, we will gladly spring for some new robot stuffing.
That is, if we ever get this tour off the ground. Not going to happen without someone willing to do the hard work of booking the dates, threatening the club owners, and bribing the officials. (Did I say that? Well, someone sure as hell did.) So here I stand, pumping quarters into the maw of an abandoned payphone, its receiver parked on the modem of Mitch’s primitive fax machine. Trouble is, every time more than three inches of page peaks out from the printer, our time runs out and we have to find more change. My guess is that we would probably get Tiny’s tour proposal faster if he folded it into a paper airplane and sailed it across the African mainland towards the Atlantic. But I exaggerate.
I don’t know – I may be the only one of our number who’s truly anxious to get back on the road. Everyone else seems content to hang out in this drugstore, watching bicarbonate of soda fizz. But even that has to get old… eventually.
Oh, hi. Just trying to recall some ancient lyrics from The Band, off the Cahoots album. Not their best work, but still worthy of a listen. I don’t know what brought that to mind aside from this nagging desire to, I don’t know, go out into the park across from my house and take a few swigs of red eye. Why? Just because it’s time for something completely different. Though something completely different might be standing out there with a tray full of cocktail sized vegetable samosas and a big vat of apricot chutney. Hang the whiskey. (Never sat very well with me anyway. That’s more a drummer kind of thing. Fits very nicely just under the drum throne.)
All right. We’ve been out on tour for a while, but not that bloody long. Certainly not long enough to forget where we came from. And yet here we are, trying to work out which abandoned mill belongs to us (and when I say “belong,” I mean that in the broadest sense imaginable… broad enough to encompass loose associations). Trouble is, so many mills have closed down around here even since our departure some weeks ago that it’s hard to sort it all out. Seems a lot of people are getting into the abandoned mill trade. It’s a buyers’ market, so to speak… or a squatters’ market, actually.
rocks and trees, smashing car windows, and so on. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was called into action – we got him to clasp the anchor in his prehensile claws and wheel it along the ground as smoothly as possible while we, one by one, climbed down to safety. (if you can call life on Earth “safe”).
Yes, we’re still bobbing our way home at sub-standard speed in our partially-disabled rent-a-spacewreck. Our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour now shrinking in the rearview mirror, we have managed to limp as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where we are now dodging larger than average planetoids, popcorn-like fragments, and other assorted celestial debris (including some familiar looking stuff I last saw in the crawlspace above my old garage from seventeen rentals ago…. always wondered what became of that).
Why Hammermill Days? Well, when we started this blog back in 1999, it was actually called “Notes from Sri Lanka” – check our deep archive and you’ll see. We changed it to Hammermill Days a few years ago. As you know, every band needs a back story. You know the deal – raised by wolves, dropped by martians, etc. Frankly, we didn’t have an actual personal history, so we invented one, using the old (and now long-since demolished) Cheney Hammer Mill (in Little Falls, NY) as our mythical home. (Because all bands live together, right?) The rest is obvious (or is that oblivious?).
Yes, I know… we should do the decent, right? Be with our families, etc. Alas, technology makes clueless monkeys of us all. This horrible rust-bucket leftover from some forgotten interplanetary invasion we rented as transport during our interstellar tour has blown yet another gasket or some such thing, per our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. He used a lot of big words, none of which I’d ever heard before (though Matt was familiar with several of them… strange…). The upshot is, we’re chugging along at subnormal speed, making our leisurely way back to Earth from the Kuiper Belt – last stop on the ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour.
Me? I’m telling holiday stories to anyone who will listen. Thing is, no one will listen. Actually, as rock bands go, we’ve got a lot of holiday related material. There’s our first album, 
Oh, hi, friends of Big Green. Glad this is getting out to you. WiFi is a little unreliable out here in the midst of the Kuiper Belt… all these particles and planetoids cause a boatload of interference, as you might well imagine. Yes, we did manage to navigate our way through the black hole that had parked itself next to that annoying Goldilocks Planet our label talked us into playing. (We now know why the Gliesians call the black hole “Papa Bear”). The advice we’d been given took us right into the old vortex. Turns out it’s just a transdimensional expressway back to the Kuiper Belt. Bit of good luck, that.
There are three things you need to know about this Kuiper Belt place. The first is that it’s bloody cold. I think you might have guessed. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has tanked out his battery half a dozen times since we got here. The second is that this place is like the solar system’s lost and found. Apparently everything that gets lost on Earth (and everywhere else in Sol’s neighborhood) ends up here. For instance, there are literally billions of odd socks floating around and between the asteroids. Explains a lot. That stuff they call “dark matter”? Socks. Just socks. I think it’s just centrifugal force, spinning everything out to the rim. Now you know.
imagination, but he always seems to have a self-satisfied smirk when he hooks up with that terminal. Nevertheless…)
Yes, this is Big Green, reporting live from the Goldilocks Planet, recently discovered orbiting the star Gliese 581 – technical name is Gliese 581g, actually, one of six sibling planets (Did Goldilocks have siblings? Don’t know. What an exasperatingly ill-defined folk tale!) After its recent discovery, we decided to make it a stop on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour, but now I’m beginning to have some regrets. It’s just to damned perfect down here. It’s a planet of anal retentive mo-fo’s (though they’re not too obsessive about it … which if anything is even more exasperating).
It gets worse. When they get really, really frustrated (which took us about half an hour to accomplish), they retreat to their beds and pull the covers up over their oddly-misshapen heads. (Strange thing is, they all seem to have three beds, even the ones who live alone…. and they always sleep in the smallest ones.) I’ll tell you, it’s a good goddamn thing we brought our own craft services with us (the mansized tuber is our chef this time out), ’cause all these fuckers eat is porridge. Peas porridge. And they don’t care if it’s hot or cold. (Sometimes they leave the stuff sitting around for days on end… deeeeee-sgusting).
I want to start this week’s “usual rubbish” blog with a thank you to all of those who helped bail us out of the Kaztropharian jail. (You know who you are.) Not sure how everyone worked out how the bail-bond system works on Kaztropharius 137b – must have looked it up on the interwebs. (You have to put up at least three cases of cotton swabs per pound of body weight. It can get costly… so hey, thanks.) Well, as much as I like it on Kaztropharius, we left the moment they opened the cage door, overdue as we were for the next booking on our super-fantastic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour. A little place called…. The “Goldilocks” Planet.
What was our Thanksgiving like? Well, about as good as it can get in deep space. We brought out a couple of days’ rations and squished it all together in the shape of a roasted turkey. Then we buried it, because it was disgusting. Burial in space, you understand… you put the waste in the wasted disposal tubes and order Marvin to hit the eject button. Then we gather around the starboard port, like the little family that we are, and watch the mangled wads of tofu disperse into the void. That’s what we call Thanksgiving.
We’re running this little web-a-thon to raise funds for our bail, frankly. That’s why we’re broadcasting from this cramped little cell in a Kaztropharian jail. Yes, yes… we landed back in the crowbar hotel here on Kaztropharius 137b thanks to the efforts of Mitch, here, who took it upon himself to start playing ducks and drakes with the planet’s gravitational field. Long story short, it ended up more drakes than ducks, and a pound of flour on Kaztropharius 137b now clocks in at about five tons. At 37 drachmas a pound… well, you do the math. No one can afford the stuff. Bread factories are closing down. Bread riots have plagued the capital. And as the last pockets of resistance are vanquished, the emperor gazes ruefully down from his citadel and ponders the fate of his… his…
of a massive technological thumb on the scale of every commodity on the planet. To say nothing of the Kaztropharians’ self-esteem. They all weigh several tons now, and most are too ashamed to go to the beach. (Of course, here on Kaztropharius 137b, the beaches all front pools of liquid methane… so if you were considering this a possible tourist destination, consider again.) So, into the hoosegow we went. Sad but true. Got any good ideas about getting out of here? Seriously, if you ever did time on this planet and found a tunnel to the nearest launch pad, get in touch with us pronto…. like NOW.