Man, it’s hot today. Maybe we should make some tea. Like a whole pot of tea. Perfect day for it. Just fill the pot with water, put it on the counter and watch it come to a boil. No problem – lovely pot of tea.
Well, it’s August, and it’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum in here, as the sages of Monty Python once said (with a cartoonish Aussie accent). It will come as a surprise to no one that there is no air conditioning here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. In fact, the closest thing we have to air conditioning is some holes in the roof – holes that let the air in. Sometimes the air is cool, sometimes not. It’s conditional, on account of the changing weather …. air conditional.
Things my comic books taught me
Summers like this remind me of my misspent youth. I say “me”, because no one else here remembers my misspent youth. Even Matt, who misspent much of it right alongside me, doesn’t care to remember, and who can blame him? If you remember the 1970s, you probably weren’t there. That said, I remember quite a bit of it, particularly around the middle. Like an Oreo or Hydrox cookie, the ’70s had a creamy center, with crunchy wafers on either side. Ask your mother.
We had a roof over our heads and three squares a day, but not a lot of spending money. So we took to entertaining ourselves the cheap way. You know what kids are like – they’ll whittle a canoe out of an old birch tree. I was like that. Hell, I fashioned a bong out of old cardboard paper towel tubes and tape. Got the plans out of the back of a Zap comic book. It might have been Dr. Atomic or something like that. And yes, it was made of combustibles, but it didn’t catch fire …. right away.
Red sales in the sunset
Another summer tradition: we’re in the red. There’s a lot of reasons for this. One is that we’ve never really been a beach band. I think you could count on one hand the times that we’ve collectively been to the beach for something other than bird watching (Matt) or metal detecting (Anti-Lincoln). In other words, our music is not synonymous with summer fun. We’re never likely to write the big hit of the season, despite all the trying. That’s okay. I’m not sure what we would do with riches at this stage. (Tell me more about those riches …)
You know, it’s a pity comic books aren’t as universal as they used to be. If they were, we could move a lot of music through those suckers. I can see a Big Green ad tucked into the back pages, between the Charles Atlas fitness course and the patented Onion Gum. Just clip out the coupon and mail it in with a nickel taped to the little circle. We’ll send you Big Green’s latest album, plus a publicity photo signed by yours truly. The thing practically writes itself.
Get yours someplace else
Hey, while we’re sweating to the oldies, this is probably a good time to mention that we’re now on BandCamp. We’ve uploaded our first two albums there, will add more in the near future. Check it out, friend us, share our page, throw us a bone, hey will you?
It took a couple of years, but at some point we moved up to a Panasonic audio cassette deck, the kind that you would use in a home stereo system. We used that and a couple of mics to record ourselves playing in the living room, etc. (Excerpts of those sessions made it on to Matt’s very early compilation, “The Todd Family Chronicles”.) Matt got a second deck and started bouncing tracks, overdubbing, then around 1985 he bought his first cassette portastudio. That kind of took us to a different place musically, though where that place is, I’m not entirely certain. As we could, we got better gear, but our songwriting and recording process has remained about the same as it was with that first portastudio.
One of my obsessions of late has been rebuilding our YouTube site. That’s my hobby, if you will, until Matt returns from Peregrine Falcon watch. (To catch up with him, see his 
Just the other day (don’t ask me which day) I stumbled upon some old promo shots of Matt and me back in our Big Green duo days, in the late 80s. (I can tell when it was because I was wearing a sports jacket with the arms rolled up. Hey … it was comfortable, like the fuzzy slippers.) I think it was right after Ned Danison left the group and I moved back to the Utica area. In a couple of shots we were consciously trying to lampoon a Rolling Stone magazine spread about U2’s current album at the time, Joshua Tree. (They had a shot of U2’s drummer looking admiringly at Bono from about five paces away. I think there was a cactus in the photo somewhere.)
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.)
Louis? We can’t even get to the moon, for chrissake. Then there’s always the option of telemetry – just flying the ship here by remote control. But with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, in a hammock in Madagascar for the fourth consecutive month, we haven’t the means of contriving such a device.
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 
Big Green will be departing for Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and points east (I believe it’s east) on September 29 for our [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. Not that the date is much of a concern, now that Mitch Macaphee has a tenuous hold on the time-space continuum. If we miss our launch date, what the hell, we just have Mitch send us back a few days. Depending upon what kind of a mood he’s in, that could be easy or hard, very hard. (Actually, Matt thinks that if you run backwards really fast, you will go back in time. Call me a skeptic… though I’ve noticed that when you run forward real fast, time seems to move forward. If this were an elegant universe, the converse would be true. And no, I don’t mean the sneaker.)
Man oh Manischewitz, do I have to do everything myself? (No, I wasn’t asking for a show of hands on THAT.) All I ask is a little cooperation on a deadly dangerous deep-space excursion, and I get nothing. Bunch of layabouts. Looks like I’ll have to do it myself – just me and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yeah, I mean you, Marvin. I know you didn’t put your hand up. What part of “my personal robot assistant” do you not understand, eh? Sheesh. I’m going to have to ask Mitch to program some obedience into that boy…. when he gets back from Mad Science-a-ganza in Sao Paolo. (Doesn’t sound hugely scientific to me, but…. my studies were in the humanities.)
yourself.