I don’t care what the sucker weighs in an alternate universe! I want to know what it weighs right here. Cheese and crackers, do I have to do EVERYTHING myself? (Where’s everybody going? I wasn’t serious…)

Oh, hiya. Didn’t hear you log on. (Usually, I’m pretty good at that.) I was just engaging in a little scientific debate with our mad, mad science adviser, Dr. Mitch Macaphee, Ph.D., D.M.S.A. (that last one stands for “Diplomate of the Mad Science Academy”, and august body located in Madagascar), who claims that our weight ratios are all askew for lift off. You see, this is the problem with mad geniuses… they get this crazy idea, and it may be a really, really good idea in crazy town, but here in NORMAL-ville, it’s bug fuck nuts, okay?  I mean, I happen to know (from watching repeats of Lost in Space over and over again) that the Jupiter 2 space vehicle is very weight sensitive. If our cargo is off by even just a few ounces, we could go spiraling off into deep space, rudderless and alone, waiting for bored television writers to scribble us back to civilization. This was the fate of the Robinsons, as many of you know, on more than one occasion. This will NOT be the fate of Big Green … yet again.

I mean, good God damn it! We’ve gotten lost on at least three (maybe four) of our interstellar tours since 1999. It’s reached the point where Dr. Hump (our previous mad science advisor) won’t even ship out with us anymore… unless we play covers by the Wallflowers. (I’m not doing it, Hump!) And though no one else seems to give a shit, I am trying my damnedest to keep it from happening again. And yet here I have Mitch trying to convince me that weight doesn’t matter, because in an alternate universe that he’s visited recently, there exists an equal and opposite counterbalance to every object in our universe. Ergo, according to Mitch, nothing weighs anything, if you think of the two universes as part of a single, infinitely massive (or not) thing. And I’m like, w.t.f., Mitch… you can go ahead and kiss the equal and opposite doppelganger of my ass in that other universe.

Oh, yeah… I feel a lot better, now. Sure, I know. It’s wrong for me to diss the creator of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), especially when he’s doubling as our spacecraft engineer/mechanic. (In point of fact, Marvin does most of the wrench work, with an assist from Posi-Lincoln.) Downright dangerous, in fact. After all, our nefarious corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, has chosen to send us on a swing through the terrifying Kuiper comet belt just beyond the orbit of Neptune. I think Matt spoke for all of us when he said, “WHAT THE FUCK? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” He may have understated the matter slightly. The Kuiper belt is not known for particularly good indie-rock venues, though there are one or two annual events that are relatively well-attended, I’m told. (Not sure who… or what… typically attends them, but no matter.) A whole lot of frozen ammonia out there…. which piques Anti-Lincoln’s interest.

Why, you ask? He’s thinking profit. Even in the crowbar hotel, he plots and schemes. There is no end to his ambitions for self-enrichment. SHUN HIM! SHUN HIM WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT!

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Flag the commissioner, Alfred, we’re ready to roll! Hope you fixed the sticky hinge on the bat cave door. You did, didn’t you…. ? DIDN’T YOU??

Wha-at? Oh, man… what an awful dream! Not that you asked me what it was about, but… I dreamt I was an MBA in the accounting department at Enron, and… Oh, no, wait. That was Thursday night’s. Last night’s was a bit more blood-curdling (if that can be imagined). But I won’t go into that in detail. Suffice to say that it resembled something from mid-sixties television, populated by big pointless-looking computer consoles covered with flashing, multi-colored pin-sized lights. (They made whirring sounds. It was terrifying!) Lucky to get out of that particular sojourn alive. Thank uncle Jebus our tours are nothing like that. When we do interstellar travel, we tend to avoid whirring sounds…. at least, the evil, low-pitched ones. Uuuhhhllll….

Enough about me. Glad to be able to say that we’ve finished provisioning our interstellar tour bus. By which I mean, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has finished loading the un-spaceworthy crate we’ll be taking to Jupiter and parts beyond.  Now I know what you’re going to say… and stop me if I’m wrong, but I think you were going to caution me on embarking on interstellar journeys in a forty-year-old rust bucket. (You weren’t going to say that? Bugger.) In any case, I’ve asked Marvin to work with the man-sized tuber in bondo-ing up all the panels that have rusted-through on the J-2 spacecraft since our last tour. About 4 dozen spots. More than I’d imagined, actually. (We put it up on blocks all winter, too. Go figure.)

Yeah, so our ship whistles when we fly…. so what? We’ve got that can-do spirit that put Armstrong, Aldrin, and… uh… that other guy on the moon forty years ago. (Actually, Collins had his own one-man party in lunar orbit, as I remember. Judging from the footage, that would have been the job for me.) What the hell…. we live in an abandoned hammer mill, for chrissake. We haven’t had anything beyond basic cable in, like, five years. Mitch Macaphee rides a bicycle that doesn’t even have fenders on it.  Seriously…. we can handle anything deep space can dish out. As long as it isn’t on fire. Or radioactive. I hate radioactive stuff. (It makes my fillings glow.) Besides, Mitch (our mad science advisor) has assured us that the J-2 replica is perfectly safe to fly, so long as we stay away from that massive swarm of comets circling menacingly just outside the orbit of Pluto.  We told our agent in no uncertain terms – by no means book anything within the deadly comet belt!

Ahh. Our tour itinerary has just been faxed from our good friends at Loathsome Prick records. And guess where we’re going on week 3. Just…. guess….

Well, great day in the morning… I was wondering where I left that freaking thing. Who might have thought it would turn up in the rock garden? What’s next, eh? (Well, the next thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire…)

I don’t have to tell you – when you start packing your bags for an extended trip beyond the bounds of our solar system, that is when things start turning up… things you haven’t seen for months, maybe years. Just yesterday I found a pair of sneakers I’d misplaced during last year’s election. The day before that, Matt stumbled across the remains of his first kazoo (the one he’d used to record the theme from our never-completed sci-fi epic, “Destination: Space”). John has been turning up all sorts of remnants of past lives, such as an ancient banjo labeled simply “The Gibson”. And I’d rather not get into what Mitch Macaphee has been dragging out of the depths of his makeshift studio in the old forge room of the Cheney Hammer Mill, our humble squat-house. Half-human cyborgian experiments. Beakers of nameless goo, glowing five colors at once. A bald unicycle tire. (How did that get in there?) What did the man-sized tuber find in his terrarium? Some old plant food… that’s about it.

It’s always hard to know what you’ll need on this kind of journey. Big Green’s last interstellar tour required a great deal of ingenuity on our parts, and that’s mostly because we didn’t have the proper supplies. This time, that’s not going to happen. In fact, we’ve given Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the responsibility of being our quartermaster. He has, as I’m sure you realize, a machine-like memory. (I don’t mean a computer kind of machine… more like a desk stapler or tape dispenser.) In addition, he has the strength of ten ordinary men (like the cartoon Hercules), so he can load whatever he requisitions. Now that is what I call efficient use of humanoid resources. Now if he could only convince the man-sized tuber to put his little push-cart to use loading the spacecraft. (Though that degree of efficiency might be considered borderline obsessive. Scratch that.)

How are the Lincolns helping us? Good question. Anti-Lincoln is still billeted in the hoosegow, the crowbar hotel, the pokey… whatever you call it where you come from.  Trust me – the biggest help he can be is by staying right there until launch date (or launch date plus one, even). Posi-Lincoln, for his own part, has been keeping to himself of late. I think he’s working on an address of some sort. He keeps poking his head out and asking Marvin to find him some used envelopes and a spare bottle of India ink, then he disappears again, scratching away. Another Gettysburg address in the works? No man can say. Not sure what the occasion would be. Maybe he’s working on his memoirs… though they are likely to make a very strange read at this juncture. (I’ll look with interest for the chapters describing his transit to the 21st Century via Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device.)  And then there’s Mitch, who… who…. Oh, bloody hell! He’s blown a hole in the side of Jupiter! Nice going, Mitch! They’re going to love us in the Big Red Spot! 

With all this going on, of course, we’ve had to… well… hold up the countdown. Or something close to that, anyway. (We’re counting sideways, in point of fact.)