Is that the time? Right – time to close up for the day. It’s 4:20 in the afternoon and I’ve been slaving away for nearly half an hour. Shut it down.
Woe is he who must labor in vain. I don’t know what that means, but whatever… your friends in Big Green are proprietors for the nonce. That means we have proprietary interests, perhaps for the first time in our lives. And you know what they say… as soon as you get a stake in the world, it’s all over. Kiss your altruism goodbye, my little scaly friend. Forget your deeply held values – this is cash, Jimmy-boy, cold hard cash! To hell with all that other stuff. All we care about is pushing product out the door at a tidy profit.
What products? Hey…. whatever comes flying out of that hole to China. Mitch Macaphee burned a tunnel through the earth so clean, it doesn’t even whistle when it spins (and it should). Now it’s like one of those air-tube delivery systems in an old department store. On the other end, probably just outside the gates of a Foxcon plant, somebody’s dropping consumer items into a hole … and they come flying out of the opening in our forge room floor moments later. It’s a tunnel to the bank, my friend.
Okay, so… on our marketing advisor Noname’s recommendation, we opened a storefront in the Mill that we’re calling, “GREENMART”. People come in with plastic shopping carts they borrow from the supermarket up the street and load up on cheap swag built by slave labor – an all-American pastime if ever there was one. (And there was one.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been working the cash register, so to speak. Actually… there is no cash register. Marvin just does the calculations using his own processor unit, then spits out a receipt. He even takes major credit cards, which is news to me. (If I’d known that during our last tour, I would never have hocked my Bean Boots for that hoagie back on Neptune.)
Yes, I know… this is like selling stuff that fell off the back of a truck. Where’s the outrage? Ask Bob Dole.
Yeah, I know – I should expect this sort of thing, living in an abandoned hammer mill. Remnants from the forge room, repurposed for bedding materials. Such are the times we live in. Big Green, like many indie bands, lives pretty close to the margin, my friends. We don’t have the resources for all of those extras bands like The Decemberists and Black Flag can afford. God, no… we just make do with what we’ve got. In these hard times, our fans expect this much at least: that we should be every bit as miserable as they are. And friends, we don’t disappoint.