What is this again? Beeswax. Do you have to keep it in my bedroom? We’ve got an entire abandoned 19th century mill here – there’s plenty of space in the forge room. Marvin??
Oh, hello. Didn’t see you there on the other side of that iPhone screen. Thanks for dropping by Big Green’s near totally useless blog, now more than ten years in the making! (Slogan: Blogging pointlessly since 1999.) You caught me in the middle of a small dispute with the help. No, we are not effete artists with domestics swarming all over the place, attending to our every whim. Certainly not! Our domestic workforce consists of a handful of surly operators, including:
- Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – Created by a mad scientist and one-time scrap metal dealer, Marvin helps around the mill with lifting fairly heavy things, moving those things from one place to another, and …. and lifting other fairly heavy things.
- Mansized tuber – Talk about growing your own! Matt harvested this oversized sentient sweet potato back in the old days, when we were in the witness protection program and pretended to be living in Sri Lanka. Anyhow, the mansized tuber isn’t really much of a help at all, but he does give me something to blog about once in a while, and that amounts to a particular kind of heavy lifting.
- Lincoln – Storied 16th president of the United States, saved the Union, ended organized chattel slavery, and became the greatest president Hollywood has ever seen. Rescued from the awful past via Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine, which created a time portal through which Lincoln and his evil doppelganger passed and …. well …. search the blog for details; it’s complicated. Anyhow, he helps around the house with light cleaning, some cooking, occasional legal counsel. Probably the best natured of the bunch.
- Anti-Lincoln – Surly opposite doppelganger of the above. (See above for creation myth or just follow the tag anti-Lincoln.) He burns things when it gets cold outside. Sometimes he’ll throw something edible into the fire.
That’s the list of what might be termed domestics. Everyone else around here is an associate, or hanger-on, or I don’t know what. It’s a squat house, for crying out loud. And now Marvin has gotten it into his head to sell lip balm or something. He managed to trade some bricks from one of the outbuildings in exchange for a couple of barrels of beeswax. Entrepreneurs! They’ll be the death of all of us!
Sorry. He gets a little over enthusiastic sometimes, that’s all.
Hey howdy. Welcome back to the hammer mill. Who won the Lincoln contest? Still up in the air. My bets are on Anti-Lincoln, but that’s just a hunch. He does have an ace in the hole – namely, Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, the monstrosity of modern engineering that brought him here from the past in the first place. Anti-Lincoln seems to think that by stepping into that thing and turning it up to eleven, he’ll get the full Daniel Day Lewis treatment.
Oh, right…. I’m keying this into the internets, not merely speaking to some disembodied listener. What was I thinking? Right, well…. as busy as things get here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, we never seem to stop finding other things to do with our time. Last week Marvin (my personal robot assistant) discovered numismatics … with a little encouragement from his creator, Mitch Macaphee, who was really attempting to program a penchant for petty larceny into his brass hide. Not one of Mitch’s proudest moments, convincing Marvin that lifting stray coins out of people’s pockets is how coin collecting works. (That mad science grant from the Cato Institute must not have come through.)
Just writing whilest we’re having a little Thanksgiving layover on Titan, moon of Saturn, mother of all Tofurky. (Yes, this is where it comes from.) Taking a little break from the feasting, conversing, and pontificating (Anti-Lincoln is back on his Mexican-American War soapbox again), so this is a good time to open the mail, it seems. Most of our inquiries appear to be about our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, so let’s start with this:
That’s the problem with interstellar tours, my friends. A billion opportunities for misunderstandings. No shortage of those, particularly when you’re traveling with the two Lincolns (posi- and anti-), as we appear to be out here on Big Green’s vaunted [INSERT NAME HERE] INTERSTELLAR TOUR 2011. Anyway, here’s how it went down this week:
Oh, hi. You’re getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present…) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green’s music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn’t even know was there when we were tracking them. That’s part of the Big Green method, man. It’s a bit like found sound; it’s basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment.
Okay, there’s this parchment scroll tacked to our door with a dime-store knife. And it’s got some rubbish scribbled across it about how we need to vacate the premises of our adopted home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, by the end of July… “or else”. No signature. But a very distinctive style of penmanship, I must say. South paw. (You can tell by the smudging of the India ink. ) Can just barely read the thing, frankly. (Or even dishonestly.) Clearest thing is the illustration of a shaking fist – kind of threatening.
Whoops, sorry. I didn’t know anyone was listening in. Well, this is kind of embarrassing. Actually, I was just giving a small piece of advice to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with regard to what is acceptable and unacceptable when one is contemplating organizing a major religion. Not that I know all that much about it, but I think I know more than Marvin does, and I think that gives me “tell you something right now” rights and privileges. Especially with a bloody robot. (Don’t tell him I said that – he’ll start sulking again.)
Sheesh – now who’s the robot? (I guess that still would be Marvin.) Marvin was looking for a religious movement that would be, well, sticky enough to draw some fanatical adherents even in this forgotten backwater of Central New York. Kind of a back stoop movement, if you will. Marvin would do the organizing, with a little help from anti-Lincoln, who is himself a pretty effective fanatic. (Thing is, I don’t know if he can get the space-age guitar thing just right.) I am a bit skeptical, but even so… it could kind of work. Here you have a millennial movement whose goals – hijacking a fictitious space vessel and driving it to an equally fictitious planet – can never be realized, only hoped for – worshipped, if you will. Pretty much the stuff successful religions are made of. And hell, Marvin’s got his first converts: Lincoln, Big Zamboola, and the man-sized tuber.
Have to resort to non-banjo alternatives, I guess. That’s the way things go here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. You got complaints? Stand in line for the pluck string instrument. You may call it annoying mountain music. We call it aural psychotherapy. (Of course, when Marvin’s doing it, I don’t know quite what to call it. ) Be that as it may, you need some kind of relief in these troubled times, when money is as rare as …. well … rare earths. We’ve got lots of common earths. My point is… we’re freaking broke again. Join the select club of 90% of Americans, eh? Busted!
turnip truck. (Not to mention the offense that enterprise gave to our companion, the man-sized tuber.)
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.