Jesus Christ on a bike. I told you this hard drive was full. And now there’s smoke emanating from the processor. Can’t understand it. It’s a 486, isn’t it? Sure, hot damn. Fast as one of those new-fangled horseless carriages.
Oh, hello. Just grappling with some minor technical difficulties. You know, little stuff like gear that was obsolete in the last century, now over-burdened with production content, bowing deeply under the weight of yet another project, bursting at the seams. Just the kind of thing we’re likely to run into here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted squat house. Things can always be worse. We could have opted to do something else with this space, like start a church or something, but that doesn’t always turn out that well. (See Word of Life Church, Chadwicks, NY … up the road a piece.) Music it is.
Sure, I know … it’s been three years since the release of our last album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. And while we haven’t completed a new album, we have recorded the equivalent of about three albums worth of new material over these last few years. It’s all stuff cut into our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, so you may have heard it (or not). Bunch of songs, some of them sung by a pantomime horse. Who wouldn’t want to listen to that? So there’s little doubt in my mind that at some point we will package some or all of 
these into an album of sorts and toss it out on the street for passers-by to happen upon and drop into their MP3 players.
Now you may ask, what kind of an economic model is that? Well, friends – we are a creative collective, built on an anarcho-syndicalist theoretical foundation, but with neo-socialist flavor notes that put us more into the worker-owned enterprise category. At least that’s how I describe it while hopping around on one foot. (I do that when someone is shooting at me for talking like a goddamn commie. This IS upstate New York, after all.) We’re giving a whole new meaning to “dance band”: We hit the first chord, and Yosemite Sam pulls his six-gun out and shouts “Dance, varmint!”
So, yes … we will assemble a new album by and by, assuming I can find a big enough technological bucket to carry it around in. Stay tuned!
If back in 2014 more of us had said “Damn the torpedoes, I am going to vote against those fuckers if it takes me all day,” Obama would have been able to send a nominee through a normal Senate review process. If we had kept the Senate out of the hands of the wrecking crew known as the GOP, we would likely have pulled the Supreme Court back from the extreme right for the first time in more than thirty years. Now that opportunity is completely up in the air. We don’t know what’s going to happen in November, but I can tell you what isn’t going to happen before then: a Supreme Court confirmation vote, that’s what.
Next up in the internal audition queue was, well … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). This didn’t go very well either. Picture that scene in Room Service when the Marx Brothers are trying to pass customs with Maurice Chevalier’s passport, attempting to imitate him convincingly. Marvin was like Harpo with the phonograph strapped to his back. He’s got a bunch of scratchy recordings stored in his internal hard drive (or tape drive – he is getting a little long in the tooth), and when he sings he selects individually sung words from that entire library. It’s great if you want a mashup, but …. I don’t.