Was there a ‘splosion? Kind of hard to tell around this place. If Bin Laden dropped by here, he’d probably say, “What the hell do they need me for? They’re kicking their own ass.” (Apologies to Richard Pryor.)
Just keeping it real here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, as you might expect. During these hard times, it’s the same story everywhere, right? Making the ends meet in the middle. We’ve got the ends, but frankly… no middle. And if the ends justify the means, which they almost NEVER do, well then… um…. okay, I lost my train of thought. But no matter. We are doing what we do, and being what we be. That’s what Big Green is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her. RISK… RISK IS OUR BUSINESS. (Oh, Jesus… now I’m quoting Star Trek lines. Someone call the doctor! And make sure he IS a doctor, and not a mechanic. D’oh!)
So much for Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his experiment with industriousness. Turns out he’s lazy and shiftless… just like all those OTHER robots. [Ed. note: Mr. Perry’s opinions are his alone and do not represent the views of the administrators of HammermillDays.com, its parent company, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., or anyone even tangentially associated with Perry who may be afraid, 
very afraid of robots.] Actually, Marvin has decided to hang up the bomb-sniffing robot gig, which is just as well. I think he’s focusing more on show business now. I saw him trying a “Renegade Robot from Mars” outfit on the other day. (Circus is in town, I hear.)
That’s not the only experiment in money making going on here at the mill. Aside from yours truly, everyone in this dump is trying to turn an easy buck. Probably the most worrysome is the mansized tuber, who has decided to try his hand at being a music promoter. He can credit his experience with us as having built up some expertise in those fibrous mental tissues of his, credibly or not. I understand his first client is a band called “Logo and the Positioning Statement”. Hardly a challenging first try, frankly. Sounds like the kind of group that markets itself.
Hey – I just found a quarter in the sofa. Probably many more where that came from. Or not. (So much for optimism.)
Oh, hi. Just having a word with Big Green’s mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, professor of interstellar astro-geology ….and explosives, apparently. (He’s got tenure at the school of hard knocks.) It’s endearing to see a proud father try to help his son. In saying so, I don’t mean to suggest that what Mitch is engaged in right now in any way resembles that wholesome impulse. No, no… that would require some modicum of sanity. I’m afraid Mitch is both attempting to help his creation, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and blow his ass to kingdom come. Unintentionally, perhaps, but nevertheless… this is what he is attempting.
Anyway, Mitch thinks Marvin should be moving a bit faster in his training. So he’s begun to devise little problems for him to solve right here at home. One such problem – an explosive device of frightening magnitude – was planted in a broom closet just downstairs from my bedroom. Marvin defused it, fortunately… though I think it was a lucky break, frankly. (He stepped on it while sweeping out the hall and apparently pulled the ignition wire loose.) Next it was dynamite in the oven – enough to blow a massive hole in the side of our beloved abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. This is what prompted Mitch’s reverie about the Coliseum. (He thinks we could turn the mill into a tourist destination if it looked more like ruins.)
See, here’s the problem with trying something new – you just don’t know how the hell to do it. I keep telling my colleagues this all of the time, but do they listen? No. Oh no, Joe, they tell me, I know just what I’m doing. And besides, bungee jumping off the Eiger doesn’t seem all that challenging to me, at least from the comfort of my easy chair. You try to help a brother out, and that’s what you get – a load of attitude, special delivery. I am depressed.
constabulary. Such an honor. NOT!
Have to resort to non-banjo alternatives, I guess. That’s the way things go here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. You got complaints? Stand in line for the pluck string instrument. You may call it annoying mountain music. We call it aural psychotherapy. (Of course, when Marvin’s doing it, I don’t know quite what to call it. ) Be that as it may, you need some kind of relief in these troubled times, when money is as rare as …. well … rare earths. We’ve got lots of common earths. My point is… we’re freaking broke again. Join the select club of 90% of Americans, eh? Busted!
turnip truck. (Not to mention the offense that enterprise gave to our companion, the man-sized tuber.)
It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green, being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket… and some oxygen.) It’s a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire… but not TOO close. It’s a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you.
How am I wasting my time? Well… usually it’s my job to waste OTHER people’s time. But this week, bored, I opted to do a little video New Year’s greeting for all you folks out there. Just a brief tour of the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, a little look inside our “creative process” – what it looks like when we’re making the sausage we call “music” – and so on. I have posted same for your edification on our YouTube site and other internet haunts bearing our likenesses. Marvin was of some help, though…. his attention was divided, as per usual.
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…)