Spread some oil on them sticks. That’s good. Now bring a bundle of straw over here. In a bunch, in a bunch! Okay…. kerosene. Where’d I put it? What? You sure that’s not Vodka? Well… take a glug and let me know. Now, who’s got a match?
Yikes – didn’t know you were logged on. Again, I apologize. Keeping this place in order is a 24/7 kind of job, as you might well imagine. Yes, friends – the Cheney Hammer Mill may be a decrepit, broken down, fetid old ruin with rising damp and water snakes in the basement, but it’s home and every once in a while you need to start a bonfire in the courtyard to let the place know you still care. Oh, you may laugh. You may laugh! But we have our traditions here in Big Green. One of them is making Marvin (my personal robot assistant) do all the heavy work. (Of course, that’s more a habit than a tradition.) More to the point, another of our traditions is that of setting bonfires on alternate Saturdays during the growing season when the moon is in crescent phase. I admit it doesn’t happen all that often, but then neither do the Olympics. So what of it?
Sounding plaintive, am I? You should hear my cohorts. Hardly a moment passes without giving rise to a new gripe. Earlier this week, it was the man-sized tuber, kicking up a fuss over his terrarium being a bit too snug. And when I say “kicking up a fuss,” I don’t mean literally, of course. Tubey has no feet, as you know, only roots, and he moves rather slowly. 
It was just the look on his… his… his north-facing side (the side with the moss); I could just tell he was dissatisfied. It was an expression veritably dripping with indignation. (Though it may have been some kind of syrup, to be fair. You know how yams get this time of year – kinda juicy.) And those bloody Lincolns – posi and anti – never stop bickering over who ignored the warning signs just prior to secession and who let the rebs walk away with the first battle of Bull Run. I could knock their bearded heads together! Oh, why… why did Trevor James have to cart his orgone generating machine back to the states? Why couldn’t he send those freaks back to the 1860s, where they belong?
The only one not complaining is brother Matthus, and frankly he has the most to complain about. After all, our entirely grisly and unreasonable corporate label, 
Loathsome Prick, has demanded a finished album out of us by the middle of November. That’s a lot of finishing, and frankly it’s not going to happen. (Just don’t say anything, okay? I’m not ready to go into the ground just yet.) Sure, we’ve got the sucker recorded – fifteen songs in the can, most of which are mixed. But we’ve got a lot of mastering to do, and we haven’t even worked out a running order. (I know, I know…. in the era of the iPod, who cares, right? I do, damn it!) Then there’s designing the package, pressing the disc, distribution… not a ten-week job, friends. And yet Matt is not taking it real hard. Just sorting his anvils, like any normal person. Won’t even join me in a game of mumbly peg. Geez.
Ouch! Now I know why he doesn’t want to join me. Because I don’t know how to play mumbly peg. Our old pirate friend, Admiral Gonutz showed me the ropes a few years ago, but I’ve lost the knack. So it’s bonfire time, friends. Light ’em if you got ’em. And bring a bucket.
trademark way about what he sees as evidence of success in his “surge” strategy, but which is actually the result of a coincidence of purpose between U.S. forces and Sunni tribal leaders there who had resolved to rid themselves of al-Qaeda types some time ago. I can’t tell you how many times I heard about insurgent groups in central Iraq turning against that stark minority of foreign jihadists through the course of last year. That is not the work of our military strategists – that is probably the Iraqis taking on a destructive force they feel they can actually defeat, as opposed to fighting the U.S., which they can bleed but not defeat. No one should kid themselves into thinking that this is the beginning of a long-term alliance, unless our government is planning on playing the imperial minority-rule card again, and lord knows that game won’t work now. The moment Sunnis push the jihadis out, they’ll turn the guns back on our troops… if they’re still in country.
Of course, now that we’ve invaded Iraq and caused more Iraqi deaths than Saddam himself, we are demonstrating the degree to which we and the reviled “Butcher of Baghdad” see eye-to-eye. We despise the Iranians, as did Hussein. We persecute Moqtada al-Sadr and his many followers – the poorest of the Shi’a poor – as did Hussein. We live in Saddam’s palaces, fill his prisons with dissidents, torture our enemies, and pray for a “strong man” to emerge who will preserve Iraq’s territorial integrity and serve as our local administrator. Imagine for a moment that our government’s fondest wish were to be fulfilled and a stable, pro-American government coalesced in Baghdad – one that would tolerate the permanent presence of the U.S. military. What would happen next in this extremely unlikely scenario? Probably a repeat of the 1980s – an attack on Iran launched in part from Iraqi soil, which is, in a sense, what is happening right now. The decades may change, but the broad themes remain the same.
That spot. I dropped acid there over a year ago. No, no – not L.S.D. … hydrochloric acid, and I wasn’t using “dropped” as a euphemism for “ingested,” I literally dropped it. Didn’t the man-sized tuber clean it up? Strange….
hired thugs, mongooses, extraterrestrials, morlocks, mutant space aliens, hostile Neptunian metal fans, and a host of other nasties. Big Green laughs in the face of death, sneers at danger, and gives blackmail the finger. That’s the long answer. The short answer is, well, yes… it did work. Hey – I couldn’t let Marvin (my personal robot assistant) suffer! They insisted on waterboarding him first and, well, he hasn’t been detailed in a few weeks, so his water resistance is less than what it should be. I won’t draw you a picture, but the proceedings were quite unsavory. So we signed. What the fuck, right?
took up residence in opposite wings of the mill; John returned to his virtual aviation console; Matt to his anvil collection… and so on. I retired to the kitchen for a swipe at the cooking sherry, taking that opportunity to thumb through the document we had just signed. (No easy task, since my thumbs were still sore from the interrogation sessions. There ought to be a law against that sort of thing.) As Trevor James Constable always told me, it’s a good idea to read documents you sign because, well, they may have something written on them. Sound advice.