I forget what I’m doing here. Do I live in this dump? What is the purpose of my presence here? WHO IS GOD, ANYWAY??
Oh, sorry, you all. (What, am I southern now?) I was just having one of my difficult moments. That’s a new pastime here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. We each get all dramatic and difficult at least half a dozen times a day, preferably taking turns at it so that the ambient noise doesn’t upset the mongooses trying to sleep on the roof when the sun is hottest around midday. (Are you getting all this down?) Why would we take on such an endeavor? Well, as you know (and this is perhaps the reason why you love us), we are not tremendously successful as a band. No heap big contract. No honking piles of ready cash. No adoring fans dogging our every step. And times being what they are, we thought, well…. if we act like assholes, these things will come our way.
Well… we’ve been doing for a few weeks now, and so far… big fat nothing. Not a sausage. Maybe the magic doesn’t work after all. We had it on pretty good authority. Our cohort Anti-Lincoln hangs with some of the biggest names in the antimatter world entertainment industry – people like Anti-Frank Sinatra and Anti-Melvyn Douglas. (I meant to ask him about Anti-Ed Wood… is he … *gasp* … normal??) They apparently have mad temper tantrums all the time, and it only seems to increase their aura of 
stardom. It kind of creates a penumbra of mystery around the umbra of famousness. That’s the shit we need, friend – to be sure.
I’ve asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to man the parapet and watch for the moment when throngs of admirers begin approaching the gates of the Hammer Mill. He has been dispatching this duty with the usual mixture of doggedness and incompetence. Got to give him credit. With all the hassle those mongooses give him, he keeps up his vigil, no fear. Good man. Good cyborg.
Good grief, is that the time? I’ve got to get all melodramatic again. (I can hear the echoes of the man-sized tuber’s last tirade dying down, and I always go after him.) MITCH?! MITCH MACAPHEE?! WHERE’S MY GOAT CHEESE?!!
What’s been happening around these parts? Let’s see, now. A thing or two. We’ve got a crack in the earth going, as you know. Straight down to the chewy center. Less said about that the better, frankly. After all, we’re still officially squatters here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and if the actual owners of this renowned property had any idea of the shape it’s in (let alone the fact that there is a major crack in the Earth’s crust contained within), they would see us evicted, convicted, etc. Then there’s those mongooses again – you remember them, don’t you? We had some problems with mongooses some years back, taking over our beloved lean-to, then invading the mill and trying on our galoshes while we were gone. Very pesky fellows indeed. Well, they’re back. C’est la vie. (I think it’s all the greasy cooking the man-sized tuber has been doing. More on that later.)
What about the man-sized tuber? Well, he’s given up politics. (It’s just too damn cynical for him.) He relinquished his post at the head of the town board and has decided to do cooking lessons out the back door of the mill. At first, he tried to keep us out of the loop on this, thinking we would want a cut of the profits. But you can’t keep us in the dark for more than a month or two, particularly when something is happening right under our noses. And I mean literally. The tuber has but one cooking implement, and that’s a frying pan. So whatever he’s showing people, it usually involves open flame, the pan, a gob of butter, and a whole lot of smoke. If he burns it to a crisp, he just cracks an egg over it and calls it done.
Oh, hi. You caught me haggling over the incalculable bounty of a bunch of bananas. Somehow, twenty years ago, I never pictured myself spending any serious time trying to convince a rogue mongoose that a twice-discarded piece of fruit belonged to me, not him. (I had no vision, no foresight.) And yet here I am, on the cobblestone street outside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, engaged in this literally fruitless enterprise. No, my friends, I am not hungry. We of Big Green are not wanting for sustenance. We have our art to feed us, our music to fill our bellies, our powerpoint slides to use as sandwich slices, our amplifier heads to employ as toaster ovens, our… our… man, I’m hungry! 
Pavlovian response for me. Still, I don’t want the banana for snacks. We are working on concepts for the next Big Green album, and one of the many, many useless ideas involves bananas. (Only one? you may ask.) Not sure – I think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have come up with that one. Hire an old phonograph somewhere, he says. Get a banana, he says. Put the banana on the phonograph turntable, he says. So what do I do? I go and listen to him, that’s what. Who’s the fool here, eh? The fool robot or the fool who listens to him? Oh, well. We grab ideas wherever we can find them.
spiritual/artistic food? In truth, it’s not very satisfying. And bananas are better than what I can usually wrestle away from the local mongooses. (Mongeese?) Typically that’s a breadfruit rind or coconut shells. I mean, if I’m going to have a spartan dinner, I would prefer it not be something that has to be eaten with vise-grips. Hard times indeed. We’ve been trying to put our meager minds together on how to yank ourselves out of this pit of poverty and obscurity. (Leave us face it – we have a following like the fictional band played by Flight of the Conchords.) I don’t know. Hootenannies? Open rehearsals? Slide shows? Bake sales? 
Yeah, that’s me… and yes, I’m doing a cover by The Contours, circa 1962. Got to keep the lights on somehow. If it takes encouraging a bunch of over-swilled woodchucks to do the “Mashed Potato”, so be it. And in case some of you feel as though I’m being less than charitable or disrespecting my fellow upstate New Yorkers, think (or feel) again – I am playing for actual woodchucks, and they’ve been drinking hard cider all night. Tell you something right now – if you think human beings have a corner on inebriation, you’ve never played the Chuck House (seven blocks south of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill). I sincerely encourage you not to. You know how human drunks have a tendency to throw bottles? Well, here at the Chuck House, hard cider is served in little wooden kegs. That’s probably all I need to tell you about that. (INCOMING!)
got to scrape a few semolians together somehow, right? And these days, between Big Green interstellar (or even terrestrial) tours, I’ll take what I can get. Can you blame me? I’m tired of eating out of discarded pizza boxes and running my finger around the inside of empty soup cans. No more fighting the mongooses for bits of breadfruit (those bits that they don’t want) or pulling the bark off of baobab trees to see if there are any tender grubs to be had. (Not that I would EAT them, you understand. No, no… I train them to hunt for vegetables. Painstaking work.)
hard, hard times. We’re all finding ways to make a little extra on the side. Matt, for instance, is giving bird and wildlife tours. How can he stand all those grandmothers and boy scouts, you ask? Well…. he doesn’t run into any. The fact is, he’s bringing wild birds and animals around on tours, showing them the local points of interest. They can’t pay very much, it’s true – a desiccated pine cone is all he made yesterday – but it’s a job, and someone has to do it. The two Lincolns are doing a mutt and jeff routine down in the village square in hopes of garnering a few tips. So far, no luck… though some passers-by have offered unsolicited advice to the two… valuable tips like “Get a life!” and “Where did you losers come from?” and, of course, “Come back here! You’re supposed to pay for those kaiser rolls!” (I get that last one a lot.)