No, no – that is Antares. This is Betelgeuse. And Kaztrofarius 137b is way over here, not here. Jesus christmas, Mitch! I thought you said you could read maps.

Okay, well… that’s great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE – our current interstellar tour – and we’re freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn’t true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like… not at all.

How lost are we? Hard to tell. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) what he thought, and he just blinked his lights on and off for a minute or two, said nothing. A deathly silence from this man of brass. Not a good sign when you’re lost. Though I looked out the portside window and a few of the constellations looked familiar. A little farther away than I’m used to, but familiar none the less. The big dipper actually looked small, and the little dipper was microscopic. I mentioned that to Lincoln, and he went into this long meditation about the infinitely large intersecting with the infinitely small, and how we may all be mere subatomic particles in the vast body of our universe, etc., etc. Pretty esoteric stuff from a man of the 19th Century, wouldn’t you say? (I think he’s been watching my old Cosmos tapes.)

This is taking a bit longer than we thought, and we may be losing our performance “edge”, if you will (or won’t). As you might expect, it’s a little challenging to rehearse in a zero-gravity environment. Sure, the guitars, keys, and drums float away from time to time. But what’s worse is when you play up tempo stuff – we actually start floating in circles around each other, rotating on multiple axes as if we were mounted on gyroscopes. It’s a little unnerving… except for sFshzenKlyrn, who does that sort of thing all the time, gravity or no. It’s kind of his natural state. So… yeah, we’re getting rusty up here.

Damn! I should ask sFshzenKlyrn where the hell we are? What am I thinking? Have to sign off and suit up (he’s out on the hull smoking a Venusian cigar).