I thought I told you to pay the bill before we left. Well, if you did, why the hell is it sitting here on the counter? Riddle me that, Batman! WHAT? Well, of course you can’t see it. The lights aren’t on … BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T PAY THE BILL.
Man god damn, now I have to give lessons on household finance. I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do one thing, ONE THING, before we set off on our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, and he screwed it up. I put the electric bill in front of him, hooked a pen into his prehensile claw, and told him to cut a check to National Grid, post haste. Nothing. And now we’ve come home from our less than triumphant interstellar tour to a dark hammer mill with a leaky roof and a family of turtles living in our studio. And no, they’re not subletting.
Yes, friends, we are back on terra firma, and none too soon. No, we didn’t get to the Small Magellanic Cloud. We kept flying towards it, hoping it would get a little bigger in our forward view screen, but no luck. Saturday came and went – that was the date of our gig – and so we chose to turn around. I asked Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist, to send off some kind of automated vehicle in our stead, with a letter of apology sealed in its nosecone. Well, he sent some kind of missile out towards the Small Magellanic Cloud, but I’m not certain what it was, exactly. I guess they’ll find out in a couple of hundred thousand years. (Sometimes surprises are pleasant … and sometimes … )
Back here on earth, everything went to hell, as you might expect. The hammer mill is in a shambles – exactly how we left it. Aside from the lack of electricity, the air seems a little thin in here, like it’s been on a hunger strike since we left. I was hoping the mansizedtuber would have looked after the place a bit in our absence, but damn it, you can’t get good help around here, even if you grow it in a planter. Speaking of planters, we almost went nuts cooped up in that tiny flying saucer. That SOB made the lunar module seem spacious. It also made the LEM’s computer system seem sophisticated. (It wasn’t.)
I would like to be able to say that we made a pile of quatloos on this tour and that we now have the means to make this place habitable. Yes, that would be a nice thing to be able to say … I just can’t bring myself to do it.
