Need a couple more of those buckets. How about some pale green in the upper left hand corner? And put that HMI light just behind the plastic fichus tree. That’s the ticket.
Ah, visitors. Welcome, welcome. Reading this, you may ask yourself, “What the fuck – do these guys do everything themselves?” (No, I’m not affecting to give you permission to ask such a question. Nay, I believe in free will, and am merely speculating on the character of your thoughts. Affected, me? Perish the thought!) And the answer to that question might be yes, if by “everything” you mean “everything that can be done in that run-down mill.” (If you mean something else, well… what can I say?) So… yes, we do… uh… do everything around these parts. Well… most of us do, anyway. (Some of us don’t do everything… or “do nothing”, as the saying goes.)
Oh, sure – we have the equivalent of domestic help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) counts as a domestic, technically speaking. (Very technically.) I suppose the man-sized tuber counts, too, sort of like a coffee table might. (Hey… it holds coffee for you, right? Defies gravity in a sense, no?) But 
how much help are they, really, when it comes to the important stuff, like… like bricking up an open window, or finding a lost quail egg, or whitewashing the widder-woman’s fence? How about mastering an album, damnit? How much help is Marvin, eh? Squat! And the freaking man-sized tuber – when’s the last time he twiddled a volume pot? Day before never, that’s when! So, hey… the next time you wonder why it takes us five years to make a m.f.-ing album, here’s an easy answer – we get no help from nobody, no how. (pant, pant, pant….)
Phew! I feel much, much better now. Catharsis aside, there is a grain of truth to what I’m saying, albeit an extremely minute one. Don’t think I need to mention that our rapacious corporate label is worse than useless in this regard. What the hell – who would have ever thought a 
company called Loathsome Prick Records would be run by scoundrels and assholes? And yet, there you have it. (Don’t tell them I said so, okay?) And then there are the closer-to-home issues, like the quarrelling Lincolns (posi and anti), and Big Zamboola, who just hangs around the courtyard confounding the local astronomy club with his mysterious gravitational light-bending trick (quite astounding). It’s not so much that they’re destructive – more that they simply don’t contribute to a harmonious living atmosphere. Neither does Mitch Macaphee, with his rapidly multiplying horde of experimental critters. (Frankenstone has discovered the rave. A couple of decades late, but what the hell… he’s made of stone.)
At least we’re back in the confines of the mill, safe from the rain (or most of it, anyway). Now if we could just get past these household projects, maybe we could … I don’t know … take a raft down the Mississippi… or the Mohawk…
This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. Leave the mill immediately. Proceed to the exits marked “exit”. We apologize for the absence of standard, lighted exit signs – crayon on cereal box will have to do.
right? Not so. Nothing succeeds like success, as they say, especially in the land of mad scientists. I mean, what would the guy say to his colleagues at the next convention if all he had to show for his efforts over the preceding months was one… just one! … monster carved out of stone? Embarrassing, to be sure. Also, between you and me, I think old Mitch has a problem meeting new friends. Now, making friends is something he’s real good at. And he just keeps making more and more all the time. And some of them are proving a bit inconvenient, setting things on fire, spreading hazardous materials around the mill, etc. Hence our current dilemma (noxious gases – some of them, evidently, are trying to poison our asses, to borrow a line from Flight of the Conchords).
not a typo nor a brain fart – Vietnam is exactly what I mean. Totally different war, of course, but the reasoning in both the public and the internal planning spheres is very much the same. It’s kind of instructive to look back at how that war was sold to us – swap a few nouns around and you’ve got the Iraq narrative, post 2003. Interestingly enough, opportunity presented itself this past week in the shape of various remembrances of Robert Kennedy on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Amy Goodman played a tape of a talk RFK gave at St. Lawrence University in 1966 (I believe my cousin was at that event, as it happens) in which the senator responded to a question about Vietnam with a somewhat lengthy defense of LBJ’s escalation policy, in progress at the time. His justification, in essence, was the contention that the Vietcong (NLF), Hanoi, and China were hoping that the U.S. was going to “turn and run from Vietnam” and that to pull out would be “disastrous”.
RFK said a lot of things that year, some of it more principled, and you had the feeling that there was some movement in him along the lines of what the entire country was going through. Really, today, we have less of an excuse than folks did in those days – we have the experience of Vietnam to draw on, whereas this was new territory politically in the 1960s. And I suppose, for sentimental reasons, I always assumed that he would have ended that war sooner if elected, though I have very little concrete to go on in that regard. Same thing with Obama. His statements on Iraq carry a certain amount of equivocation, and it’s hard to say with any certainty that he will bring the Iraq hell-disaster to a close. One thing we can be sure of – the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being foisted on Iraq as we speak reflects the actual planning goals of this war more accurately than any public statements from our fearless leaders. That document will set us up for the long term military presence the war’s authors sought from the very beginning – a goal that’s very unpopular in the U.S. and in Iraq… which is why they’re not talking about it much.