Yeah, I know, I know – heat costs money. Unless we start burning shit, right? I mean, we’ve got a lot of fuel in this joint, don’t we? And when that runs out, we’ve got a mad science advisor on hand. He can either invent some way to keep us warm, or we can burn those many notebooks he has, all stuffed with theorems to destroy whole planets. We’d be doing humanity a favor!
Howdy, everyone. Sure, we want to do humanity a favor. But we also want to do ourselves the favor of keeping from freezing to death. If the coming winter turns out to be anywhere near as chaotic as this past summer, people will be porting us out of this dump with a pair of ice tongs. Oh, the humanity! And yes, I am being a bit paranoid over the question of how we are going to heat this place, particularly as the nights are get colder and damper. And spookier. But let’s face it – as squatters here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we have no means of acquiring energy from mega-corporations and using it to keep ourselves toasty. Besides, the idea is loathsome to us. Give in to big corporations? Bah! We’d sooner, well …. burn something other than what they’re selling.
There are a lot of drawbacks to living in an abandoned hammer mill. Lack of heat is one of them, sure, but the real problem with our Big Green lifestyle is that we tend to sleep through the worst weather, no matter how bad it gets. That is not a good thing. It’s not that we’re particularly comfortable here. It’s just that we’ve been musicians so long that our diurnal clock has ceased to function properly. You’re supposed to be up all night, in bed half the day, then it’s supper for breakfast and you’re off. (Supper used to be my very favorite breakfast!) Of course, we used to drink like fish … or like fishes. Maybe just Phish. (I think they drink Saranac, actually.) If we still did that, well …. we’d jam more.
Which makes me think, hey …. in this weird ass COVID world we now inhabit, why don’t we join all of the other out-of-work musicians and start jamming on YouTube or Zoom or some other web platform? Well, I can think of one reason – our internet access is dotty, to say the least. I’d like to say we have a legitimate node or ingress to the Web here at the mill, but I don’t want to be accused of lying. Let’s just say that it’s sub-optimal, so if we ever do start cranking out virtual performances, live or pre-recorded, we’ll probably have to tap into somebody’s broadband wifi. I’m looking at you, Ken’s Barber Shoppe!
No doubt about it – Fall is the season that hangs us up the most. Always has been. But here at Big Green, we make the best of things, even if things are …. well … just things. Maybe we can convert Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of space heater. (He was partially constructed from an old hot water tank, as legend has it.)