Marvin (my personal robot assistant), didn’t I tell you to pick those Legos up about three hours ago? Can’t you do anything without being told twelve times?! Are you even awake?! MARVIN!!
Christ on a bike. Sloth has reached a new level of intensity here at the hammer mill, and it’s no surprise. We have been cooped up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of three years (the worse part, too … I remember those awful days…), not a hand’s turn of work. Sure, we produced and released an album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and have dutifully (and pitilessly) posted our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN every month, on the month (or quite nearly). But gainful employ? Naught, my friend. Goose egg.
Arguably, it goes against human nature (and personal robot assistant nature, presumably) to be idle for so long. I’ve seen signs of restlessness, to be sure. Not from anti-Lincoln, of course, who spends most of his day in the forge room, swilling cheap rum that he got from god-knows-where. But his positive doppelganger, Lincoln, tries to keep busy in imaginative though annoying ways. (I keep telling him, I can’t afford a big fat car – it’s just not in the game plan. But just try telling Lincoln not to sell you something.)
Marvin is always coming up with pass-times, as well as hair-brained schemes for making money. But I think he’s hit a wall, and it’s understandable. Even his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, has wandered off to richer pastures, taking advantage of some time-share property he invented in Madagascar. (Something about hanging gardens … though I’m not sure about what stage of insanity he was in when he told me about it.) So Marvin sits and rusts a little every day, his battery running down. He needs a change of scene, and so do the rest of us.
That’s why I have started making inquiries about doing an interplanetary tour to support extraterrestrial sales of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. (Spoiler alert: Terrestrial sales have been abysmal.) Stay tuned for details. Big Green out.
Hey howdy. Welcome back to the hammer mill. Who won the Lincoln contest? Still up in the air. My bets are on Anti-Lincoln, but that’s just a hunch. He does have an ace in the hole – namely, Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, the monstrosity of modern engineering that brought him here from the past in the first place. Anti-Lincoln seems to think that by stepping into that thing and turning it up to eleven, he’ll get the full Daniel Day Lewis treatment.
Oh, right…. I’m keying this into the internets, not merely speaking to some disembodied listener. What was I thinking? Right, well…. as busy as things get here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, we never seem to stop finding other things to do with our time. Last week Marvin (my personal robot assistant) discovered numismatics … with a little encouragement from his creator, Mitch Macaphee, who was really attempting to program a penchant for petty larceny into his brass hide. Not one of Mitch’s proudest moments, convincing Marvin that lifting stray coins out of people’s pockets is how coin collecting works. (That mad science grant from the Cato Institute must not have come through.)
Where have all the good tours gone? This one has gone a bit flat, though I will say that we did manage to get the rent-a-ship rolling again, thanks to 
That’s the problem with interstellar tours, my friends. A billion opportunities for misunderstandings. No shortage of those, particularly when you’re traveling with the two Lincolns (posi- and anti-), as we appear to be out here on Big Green’s vaunted [INSERT NAME HERE] INTERSTELLAR TOUR 2011. Anyway, here’s how it went down this week:
Oh, hi. You’re getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present…) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green’s music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn’t even know was there when we were tracking them. That’s part of the Big Green method, man. It’s a bit like found sound; it’s basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment.
Oh, hi. Yeah, we’re working with our legal advisor – a mouthpiece named Anti-Lincoln, esq. And as you can see, he’s helping us out with our recent eviction notice. Not the first time, you understand, that we’ve been asked to vacate the premises. More than once the folks down at city hall have reminded us that this building is SUPPOSED to be vacant. Seems a waste to us, but what do we know? The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is abandoned for a reason, even if we don’t know what that reason is. Freaks! They didn’t even sweeten the deal with a grace period; just “Out, already!”
Okay, there’s this parchment scroll tacked to our door with a dime-store knife. And it’s got some rubbish scribbled across it about how we need to vacate the premises of our adopted home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, by the end of July… “or else”. No signature. But a very distinctive style of penmanship, I must say. South paw. (You can tell by the smudging of the India ink. ) Can just barely read the thing, frankly. (Or even dishonestly.) Clearest thing is the illustration of a shaking fist – kind of threatening.