Well, then, where the hell is it? I left it right here. Jesus mother of pearl, everything grows legs around here, the moment you turn your back. I’m living in a den of thieves! An abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill full of thieves!
Oh, hi. Just getting down to our yearly inventory of band equipment; a kind of rejuvenating exercise that keeps us prepped for any performance or recording opportunities that may come our way at random. Are we getting offers? Well …. not as such. in fact, big fat nothing. That phone hasn’t rung in weeks. Sure, that may be down to the fact that I unplugged it from the wall, but hell …. all that was calling us was creditors, looking for cash. Stupid creditors! They should have known better than to lend money to us. We’re just not trustworthy. (Especially that man-sized tuber. He has deep roots in the Genovese crime family. Um … actually, we’re only certain that he has deep roots – it was our assumption that they at some point touch something associated with the Genovese crime family.)
Anyway, our inventory turned up some missing items. Somebody walked off with my stomp-box phaser, for instance. If I still played a Fender Rhodes and needed a cheap organ sound, I would be using that thing. Of course, there are several missing cords and at least one mic stand. Also, our DA-88 8-track digital tape recorder apparently had its insides hollowed out and is now a mere shell of itself. If you stick a Hi-8 tape into its tape-hole, the only sound you will hear will be that of the cassette dropping uselessly to the floor plate inside the unit. You’ve heard of people breaking into houses and stealing all of the copper pipes and wires? Yeah … I think they broke into our 8-track machine. And they stole all eight tracks.
See, here’s the thing about living in a squat house: you’ve got zero security and absolutely no right to complain. I mean, what are we going to do … call the cops? They’ll just laugh at us, then take us down to the station where they can laugh at their own convenience. Now, I would like to think that these actions demonstrate the authorities’ well-concealed determination to house the houseless – a jail cell is, in a certain sense, a roof over your head, right? But that’s Panglossian nonsense. In any case (and I recognize that I’ve wandered a bit), every November we discover that things have gone missing, grown little legs and walked away. What can I say? We haven’t had a steady guitar player for many years, and yet stuff still continues to walk out of here. (Yeah, that was an unfair slam on guitar players. Mea culpa.)
Word to our readers: if you go to a garage sale in this area and you see deeply discounted used band equipment (including my goddamn guitar tuner), call our dumb asses.
As part of our 
Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is probably the most sophisticated piece of technology we have at our disposal. In fact, that’s exactly what he is – a re-purposed garbage disposal. I’m told that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, added some arms and legs and popped a refurbished Commodore 64 computer in his noggin, then it was off to the races with him. We could probably use HIM as an audio recorder almost as easily as we manage with our antiquated Roland VS-2480, but it would require some modifications, and damn it, we’re Luddites. We just flip the switch and a light goes on – the rest is magic.
We’ve started to use Cubase a bit over the last two years, just out of necessity, but we’re kind of locked into the thingmaker, despite the fact that it’s got a beastly 486 processor and a primitive proprietary “closed” operating system – and I do mean closed! There’s literally one way to get data out of that thing other than via analog audio outputs, and that’s through the coaxial digital outputs. There is no system that currently supports Roland’s (again) proprietary R-Bus data ports. The only other bus is SCSI, which of course is toast. The CD burner doesn’t work. The optical audio outs don’t appear to work either. Thingmaker.