That looks like my first pair of Chuck Taylors. Always wondered what happened to them. And there’s that bike that got stolen when I was twelve. And some pocket lint that looks very familiar.
Oh, hi, friends of Big Green. Glad this is getting out to you. WiFi is a little unreliable out here in the midst of the Kuiper Belt… all these particles and planetoids cause a boatload of interference, as you might well imagine. Yes, we did manage to navigate our way through the black hole that had parked itself next to that annoying Goldilocks Planet our label talked us into playing. (We now know why the Gliesians call the black hole “Papa Bear”). The advice we’d been given took us right into the old vortex. Turns out it’s just a transdimensional expressway back to the Kuiper Belt. Bit of good luck, that.
So, yeah… we’re here for the final leg of our somewhat anti-climactic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour 2010. Why anti-climactic? No climax… Why else? We’ve gone something like 60 gazillion miles in the last seven weeks and what the hell do we have to show, eh? No cash, no kudos, no nothing. Bloody flop. Still, we’re indefatigable (except for the man-sized tuber, who hasn’t been out of his terrarium since three stops ago). So we’ve already spent a couple of days on Pluto, the big brass buckle of the Kuiper Belt, jamming out to a frozen house, making the icicles shake, rattle, and crack. (No rolling on Pluto. They have a code, you know.)
There are three things you need to know about this Kuiper Belt place. The first is that it’s bloody cold. I think you might have guessed. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has tanked out his battery half a dozen times since we got here. The second is that this place is like the solar system’s lost and found. Apparently everything that gets lost on Earth (and everywhere else in Sol’s neighborhood) ends up here. For instance, there are literally billions of odd socks floating around and between the asteroids. Explains a lot. That stuff they call “dark matter”? Socks. Just socks. I think it’s just centrifugal force, spinning everything out to the rim. Now you know.
The third thing is that… some of these venues are so small, it’s almost impossible to perform. Right now, I’m straddling two of these Kuiper Belt objects, my keys parked on a third, playing to an audience perched on dozens more within earshot. Keee-razy.
imagination, but he always seems to have a self-satisfied smirk when he hooks up with that terminal. Nevertheless…)
Yes, this is Big Green, reporting live from the Goldilocks Planet, recently discovered orbiting the star Gliese 581 – technical name is Gliese 581g, actually, one of six sibling planets (Did Goldilocks have siblings? Don’t know. What an exasperatingly ill-defined folk tale!) After its recent discovery, we decided to make it a stop on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour, but now I’m beginning to have some regrets. It’s just to damned perfect down here. It’s a planet of anal retentive mo-fo’s (though they’re not too obsessive about it … which if anything is even more exasperating).
It gets worse. When they get really, really frustrated (which took us about half an hour to accomplish), they retreat to their beds and pull the covers up over their oddly-misshapen heads. (Strange thing is, they all seem to have three beds, even the ones who live alone…. and they always sleep in the smallest ones.) I’ll tell you, it’s a good goddamn thing we brought our own craft services with us (the mansized tuber is our chef this time out), ’cause all these fuckers eat is porridge. Peas porridge. And they don’t care if it’s hot or cold. (Sometimes they leave the stuff sitting around for days on end… deeeeee-sgusting).
I want to start this week’s “usual rubbish” blog with a thank you to all of those who helped bail us out of the Kaztropharian jail. (You know who you are.) Not sure how everyone worked out how the bail-bond system works on Kaztropharius 137b – must have looked it up on the interwebs. (You have to put up at least three cases of cotton swabs per pound of body weight. It can get costly… so hey, thanks.) Well, as much as I like it on Kaztropharius, we left the moment they opened the cage door, overdue as we were for the next booking on our super-fantastic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour. A little place called…. The “Goldilocks” Planet.
What was our Thanksgiving like? Well, about as good as it can get in deep space. We brought out a couple of days’ rations and squished it all together in the shape of a roasted turkey. Then we buried it, because it was disgusting. Burial in space, you understand… you put the waste in the wasted disposal tubes and order Marvin to hit the eject button. Then we gather around the starboard port, like the little family that we are, and watch the mangled wads of tofu disperse into the void. That’s what we call Thanksgiving.
We’re running this little web-a-thon to raise funds for our bail, frankly. That’s why we’re broadcasting from this cramped little cell in a Kaztropharian jail. Yes, yes… we landed back in the crowbar hotel here on Kaztropharius 137b thanks to the efforts of Mitch, here, who took it upon himself to start playing ducks and drakes with the planet’s gravitational field. Long story short, it ended up more drakes than ducks, and a pound of flour on Kaztropharius 137b now clocks in at about five tons. At 37 drachmas a pound… well, you do the math. No one can afford the stuff. Bread factories are closing down. Bread riots have plagued the capital. And as the last pockets of resistance are vanquished, the emperor gazes ruefully down from his citadel and ponders the fate of his… his…
of a massive technological thumb on the scale of every commodity on the planet. To say nothing of the Kaztropharians’ self-esteem. They all weigh several tons now, and most are too ashamed to go to the beach. (Of course, here on Kaztropharius 137b, the beaches all front pools of liquid methane… so if you were considering this a possible tourist destination, consider again.) So, into the hoosegow we went. Sad but true. Got any good ideas about getting out of here? Seriously, if you ever did time on this planet and found a tunnel to the nearest launch pad, get in touch with us pronto…. like NOW.
Oh, hi…. We’ve found our way to planet Kaztropharius 137b with both hands, as you might divine from that last bit of dialogue – the latest venue on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour of the galaxy. How do you tour a whole galaxy exactly? Quite simple – just jump on the ship before we take off… next time. Right now we’re deep in the middle of nowhere, anchored to a planet that seems to like our music (something in the air, I think, makes it sound better up here… perhaps a hallucinogenic quality). Kaztropharius 137b (I think I’ve got that spelling correct) is a solid little globe with a nickel core. Molten nickel, I’m told – I can’t say for certain, since I’ve never been there, but it seems a reasonable assumption. 
I don’t know – we probably just wore out our welcome. The Kaztropharians have always been fairly hospitable, even when Mitch made the mistake of sending us back through a time vortex to their Pleistocene era 
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.”
Okay, well… that’s great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE – our current interstellar tour – and we’re freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn’t true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like… not at all.
This is taking a bit longer than we thought, and we may be losing our performance “edge”, if you will (or won’t). As you might expect, it’s a little challenging to rehearse in a zero-gravity environment. Sure, the guitars, keys, and drums float away from time to time. But what’s worse is when you play up tempo stuff – we actually start floating in circles around each other, rotating on multiple axes as if we were mounted on gyroscopes. It’s a little unnerving… except for 
Okay, well, here we are on a virtually invisible “supermass” planet orbiting the red giant Antares. Hate to tell you what the fine is for littering on this rock. Something to do with being staked out while drunken cops take pot shots at you with flame throwers. (I think I’ve got that right.) Thing is, the gravity here is outrageous. I admit we’ve all put on a few (and when I say “all” I mean “me”) since our salad days back in the ’80s, but on Antares 3 we’re all heavyweights. In fact, I weigh about seventeen tons here. (I’m talking metric tons, besides.) And when you drop something, it’s like the sucker is welded to the ground. (Of course, in places, the ground is molten, so it might just BE welded to the ground.)
Macaphee cobbled together some protective blisters for us so that we won’t be crushed to a pulp. Good thing too – there’s an ordinance here against hiring pulp, even if it’s musician pulp. Strict in these parts. Sticklers for the law. Hard as rock, these Antareans. In fact…. they’re made of rock. (And they say we rock.)
Second leg of our interstellar tour is now underway, and we’ve already broken some records. I mean 45s and LPs – Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, insists on bringing his cache of vintage sides with him everywhere he goes. (He’s an analog kind of guy.) That’s where the dare comes in. You know how these deep space passages can be – lots of time on our hands, watching asteroids go by. A few hours pass in silence and you start looking for something to do. That’s when anti-Lincoln dared 
All those rare sides! Some of them broken to bits, others vaporized, some melted into caramel-like pretzels. A dismal end for Mitch’s record collection, to be sure. He didn’t take it very well. In fact, I think he’s building something special for Anti-Lincoln… something that may be the gift of a lifetime. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a sixth sense about these things, and he’s been avoiding Mitch’s cabin like it’s a fire hole. (For all I know, it may be a fire hole. Fire in the hole!) Crikey… if we make it to Antares in one piece, I will be astounded.