Glad that’s over. Anything I hate, it’s packing over a holiday weekend. But we’re under way at last, back into the welcoming arms of deep, deep space. GJ 1132b, here we come!
I suppose I should spare you the details of the last week – the rush job of putting this expeditionary gig together, the foibles regarding our interplanetary transportation, etc. (Just try booking a four-engine ion drive spacecraft on the weekend before Thanksgiving. Freaking impossible!) As you may recall from last week’s post (particularly if you have nothing better to do with your life than to read this useless blog), Big Green has decided to pay a call on our newest neighbor in space – the recently discovered dwarf planet GJ 1132b – and see if we can discover some gainful employment there; namely, a one night stand for a terrestrial band.
Okay, so we dubbed this BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT), which is literally true, as GJ 1132b is out there, man, really out there. We had to name the gig in order to get some support from our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (whose indie imprint is named Hegephonic), still run by Indonesian military thugs. They’ve got deep pockets, though, and they and our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee go way back, so he was able to connive … I mean, convince them into ponying up some of their ill gotten gains to fund this reckless foray into parts unknown. Mitch is just that good.
The transport was a major problem, though. All of our previous rides were unavailable. Mitch had inadvertently vaporized our last spacecraft during the course of an experiment (one he was conducting on behalf of those same Generals from Jakarta he was conniving this past week). GJ 1132b is 39 light years away, so we needed something with a little heft. It couldn’t be one of those sub-compact crafts you take to Mars and back, right? There was a good deal of head scratching over that issue, until finally Mitch remembered an old colleague who had built an interstellar spacecraft for his own amusement at some point, then just parked it in his garage next to his Land Rover. Hobbyists!
Anywho, Mitch sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) over to pick it up. Big mistake – Marvin got lost on the way home, so we lost a couple of solar days, delaying our launch until Thanksgiving. Let them eat space! See you on GJ 1132b!
There is one slight wrinkle, of course. Planet GJ 1132b 
Here’s the thing about Big Green. We are not a “normal” band. We are a musical collective, a band of brothers, a loose association of critters, a gaggle of organisms, a … I don’t know, something else that implies more than one of us. And weird. The very suggestion of a “summer tour” brings to mind something quite different from what most people picture. We’re not rolling into Akron or Missoula, playing in a urine-soaked noise cave, and sleeping on someone’s floor. No, sir – typically, we’re sleeping in the urine-soaked cave. That cave? It’s called the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home.
Sorry. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m hip deep in finishing the script for our next episode of Ned Trek, as featured on the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. And though I write for a living, writing has always been a teeth-pulling process for me, resulting in sleepless nights, even more sleepless days, and other trepidations too numerous to … to enumerate. Am I making sense? (Possibly not.)
Oh, hi. Yep, I left my hand-carved walking stick at the bakery again. Second time this month. Last time, some old guy walked off with it … and yes, he was older than ME. Not exactly an heirloom, you understand. It’s actually just a branch that fell off the poplar tree in back of the Cheney Hammer Mill, by the canal. I cut some bits off of it, peeled back some of the bark, and voila! Cheap crutch.
Man, it’s so hot in here. Marvin, can you turn up the air conditioning? Oh, right … our air conditioning is a broken skylight. Sigh. Okay … break another skylight, then. Use my forty-foot pole … the one I use to keep my distance from things (and people) I don’t like.
his signature turnip and spare-tire consumme – a staple on our interstellar extended tours – and we offered it to the nuts occupying our adopted home. They couldn’t resist, flocking out to the courtyard to partake of that rare delicacy. While those hayseeds were choking it down, we slipped passed them and locked the front door behind us.
Who would have guessed that we would have made it to the 17th episode of this monthly audio mash-up of classic Star Trek, Mr. Edd, and the 2012 Republican National Convention? Not I. Even so, this episode (introduced as always by Lee Majors) is a riff on the classic series episode, the Paradise Syndrome – Captain Romney bumps his head in a stone outhouse on an alien world, loses his memory, and goes all native CEO on the cigar-store Native American stereotypes who inhabit this television paradise. Oh, and the Nixon android has a zero-gravity tryst with an automated mining vessel. (You … kind of have to listen to it. )