Well, Mitch’s idea went bust, and now he’s amongst the legions of unemployed. Turns out the Cheney Hammer Mill doesn’t meet the standards necessary to be designated a medical waste repository. This place doesn’t even make an adequate garbage can. Cheese and crackers.

So, here we are. Always wondered what it was like to be a band back in the Great Depression. Now it’s starting to look like the good old days. Anti-Lincoln, of course, remembers the panic of 1857, when he lost all that money he had dumped into railroad stocks. (His posi-tronic doppelganger, the actual Lincoln, came up as a railroad lawyer, which is why the two never saw eye to eye.) Then there was the post-war recession of 1865-67, when Anti-Lincoln lost his shirt again. (He found it in 1870. Turns out it was dropped into his neighbor’s laundry bin by mistake. He always blames the Jacobins for that, but then … he blames them for everything.)

With the social distancing requirements in place, we obviously can’t make money busking. I’ve been sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to do errands for people on the reckless assumption that COVID-19 doesn’t like the taste of brass and tin. He did a couple of grocery runs for our elderly neighbor, Peg, but he kept getting her order wrong, mostly because, at ninety-seven, she doesn’t speak very distinctly. Even with his hypersonic hearing, Marvin kept mistaking “cantelope” for “antelope”, and coming back with some nameless cuts of brawn that he would claim was antelope but which was probably beef or mutton. When he handed her a box of Cheerios instead of a bottle of Cheer, that was the last straw.

Well, times being what they are, we’ve all decided to pool our resources and conserve provisions to the greatest extent possible. Turns out Mitch Macaphee has been holding out on us – he’s got a veritable Aladdin’s cave of canned vegetables. Mostly wax beans, sadly, but that’s better than beets. We’re not super particular, as you know. The only thing Anti-Lincoln refuses to eat is Chicken Fricassee, which was President Lincoln’s favorite dish. (Again, those two just didn’t get along.) Hey, once you’ve sampled the fare on Aldebaran, you’ll be glad for whatever terrestrial food you can get your hands on. Those fuckers literally eat molten rocks. For breakfast! (Lunch, maybe. But only with a nice chardonnay.) Some think we’re not tough enough for hardships like this, and well, maybe they’re right, but – and this is important – it’s not nice to say things like that. You can hurt people’s feelings.

Hey, stay home, folks, and listen to some music … like, I don’t know … how about Big Green?