Oh, Jesus …. I think I’m going to sleep over at the neighbor’s house for a few nights, guys. At least until the radioactivity dies down a bit after Mitch’s head explodes like an atom bomb.
Yes, you guessed it – it’s another one of those weeks, folks. Started out just fine. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was vacuuming the drapes. Anti-Lincoln was out walking his imaginary dog and insulting the mail carrier. Matt and I were cloistered in the studio, digging through mountains of unpublished material. Everything was going just swimmingly … and then NASA has to go an discover seven new Earth-like planets around a sun named Trappist-1. And no, not just any seven Earth-like planets, but the same freaking seven planets Mitch has been secreting away for the last decade. And he is going to bum, people.
This planetary search has simply got to stop. Not because it isn’t highly productive and stimulating from a scientific point of view – quite the opposite! I speak entirely from the perspective of narrow self-interest. Every time NASA finds new planets, it puts Mitch Macaphee into a funk. Often times they are worlds he has previously discovered – and even visited, in some cases. A true capitalist inventor, he has a decidedly proprietary approach to space exploration. Whatever he finds, he keeps. “Finders/Keepers” kind of cuts against the grain of NASA’s philosophy, so there’s bound to be conflicts. And it’s not such a good thing when both sides of a conflict have rockets at their disposal.
Now before you get alarmed, let me qualify this. Mitch is not … repeat, NOT … at the point of launching any rockets. He is principally an electrical engineer, so he’s always cooking up gadgets that bend time/space or generate black holes – that along with a lot of buzzing, whirring, and flashing. (Remember that he invented Marvin, who does a fair bit of buzzing, whirring, and flashing of his own.) In fact, I’m not convinced that Mitch hasn’t found a non-spacecraft method for traveling to other planets. And I am not talking about soul travel here, brother (though that would be an excellent name for a travel agency). There’s the time he hooked up that surplus department store revolving door to Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device. That’s how we got Antimatter Lincoln. That was awesome.
So, hey …. seven new planets, seven new problems. That’s the story here at the mill.
We’re thinking about stopping over to Pluto for a brief engagement, maybe four or five shows, back to back. Which sounds shorter than it is. See, if we play consecutive days, it will take something like a month, because each Plutonian day is worth more than 6 Earth days. (See … Mitch told me that, too. HE knows all aBOUT Pluto.) We’re going to try out a few of our Ned Trek songs and see if the Plutonians start throwing frozen methane at us. (Not much more to put your hands on out there, frankly.)
I wouldn’t say this news was received with a total lack of enthusiasm. Anti-Lincoln was just dying to get out there and take a dip in one of the nearby liquid methane pools. And for sFshzenKlyrn, the guitarist from Zenon, this sounds like a tropical paradise. There are some issues, however, should we be asked to do an outdoor concert. First, my Kork SV-1 would probably melt at 104C. Second, the helium in the atmosphere would make us all sing like those munchkin dudes from the lollipop gym. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) And if we are contracted to play again next year, that’s just 23 days from now.
Well, space travel has just gotten a lot more confusing, people. Much, much more complicated than even a few weeks ago when we left planet Earth to embark on this ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour. It seems that normal (i.e. not mad) scientists back on Earth have discovered the existence of literally millions…. perhaps BILLIONS of Earth-sized planets circling stars throughout our galaxy. As we’re bobbing around out here, trying to find our next destination (Kaztropharius 137b), we’ve been scratching our heads, trying to figure out where all of these freaking planets came from. None of them are on the charts. Lots of them look alike. This is bloody ridiculous.
As you can tell, we weren’t getting a lot of help from him. A little later on, he sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into my quarters (an empty storage bin, actually) with a recorded message. “Use the laser cannon,” Mitch said on the recording. “If a planet splits straight down the middle, it can’t be Kaztopharius 137b. That thing is made of solid quintilium. The best you can get is a clean hole, no split. Just keep shooting til you find it.”