Empty again, eh? Throw another bucket down there. Was that a ker-plunk I heard just then? No? Okay, okay. Dry as a bone, I guess. Saints preserve us… not that they have any reason to. What the hell — we’re not saints…
Pardon my mental meandering. We’re just working our way through another one of those “issues” (or what honest people call “pains in the ass”) that crop up from time to time when you’re squatting in an abandoned hammer mill. Don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure. Actually, it’s not that different from sleeping out in the road. Cold all winter, hot all summer. Every spring, a river runs through it. And now, because of the freak weather, we can’t find the water table. Now, before you ask how anyone could build a table out of water, let me just pre-empt you by saying that I do, in fact, mean the aquifer we draw upon for our sustenance. No, we haven’t paid the water bill — that takes money (or as Democratic fundraising consultant Chris Lehane puts it, “munnee”), something that is in short supply ’round this manor, squire.
We started dropping the bucket down our community well yesterday when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) dumped the last of our drinking water onto the mixing console. (Yes, Marvin is still having “issues”, even with his newly installed framistat. Lately he’s taken to wearing silly hats, but just don’t get me started on that subject…) All that came up was air. Not that air is unimportant — quite the contrary. I’ll tell you, if we were on Titan or Kaztropharius 137b, we would KILL for that air. No sir, there ain’t hardly a terrestrial rock band that understands the value of air better than we do. It’s just that, here on earth, we have no practical use for an air well. We expect water from the ground, damn it. We get no water, we get no where — simple as that. Little known fact: Big Green is more than 60% water. So, in essence, it’s as if one of us — John, say — were made of rock. Something to think about.
There have been a number of different views on how to satisfy our water needs — one view per squatter, in point of fact. Some have been a bit more aggressive in their thinking than others. Anti-Lincoln thought that we should take a three-pronged strategy that goes something like this:
- Invade the neighboring row house
- Kill neighbors
- Steal precious water
- Do primitive victory dance with punching fist motion (which he helpfully demonstrated)
Got that? Personally, I didn’t think much of that idea. (Neither did the local constables, who now have an APB out on our anti-matter emancipator friend.) Of course, that’s not the only suggestion that’s been turned in. The man-sized tuber, for instance, suggested we all send down tap roots to the aquifer. So, okay… what we need now is a solution that is somewhere between those two poles. Anyone? I’m getting thirsty over here…
brought on the mea culpas. Like the many politicians who supported this seemingly endless war at the outset, the press is only sorry that Bush/Cheney’s Iraq adventure wasn’t a swift success. The thing they’re decidedly not sorry for is the fact that they helped send thousands to their deaths needlessly. For this, they couldn’t care less. And you can bet politicians, pundits, and Pulitzer-prizewinning scribblers will raise a collective cheer for war with Iran if they see short-term benefit in it.
So… why does this shit make the front page of the Times? Because the prevailing model in mainstream journalism is to take the word of government spokespersons and “senior administration officials” at face value. Often it seems that reporters rely upon these highly placed sources even when it conflicts with the evidence of their own senses. In Iraq, they rely upon official information for just about everything that occurs beyond the boundaries of the Green Zone. So Judy Miller may be gone, but the Miller brigade marches on — next stop, Teheran! And if Cheney is to be believed (as he most assuredly will be in the corporate newsrooms), it will be another cakewalk. Hell, look what a difference the British have made in Basra, eh?
Flashlight. Anti-static wrist band. Screwdriver. Vise-grips. Oscillator. Got everything… except the part we’re installing. Mitch!
All right. What is the bone of contention this week? Well, we’re back to maintenance on Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Mitch Macaphee, Marvin’s inventor, is still nominally on strike over our failure to, well, pay him for his efforts on our behalf. Ergo, we are forced to perform routine and extraordinary repairs on our automatonic cohort without adequate counsel from Marvin’s designer. Well, the shit has definitely hit the fan on this little dispute — Marvin is having serious issues (i.e. problems). I mentioned the thing about watering our mixing desk. Just lately, he’s taken to repointing the bricks on the north side of the mill. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that he thinks “repointing” means ripping the bricks out and filing them into spike-like objects with his atomic hand. Clearly, it was time to operate. 
notebook on the construction of Marvin. It was a little yellowed and dog-eared, but still readable. We paged through the sucker by candlelight, making rough sketches of his diagrams, then studying them at our leisure between mixing sessions. Even a blind man could see that Marvin was suffering from a dysfunctional framastatic conversion unit — it was right there in front of us! So we booked the conference room upstairs (no reservations necessary, since it’s abandoned like the rest of this dump) and prepared to open Marvin up like a pull-tab can of pacific salmon. (Actually, that’s sort of what he looks like inside. Strange. Very strange…)