A little more to the left. I said LEFT! (Schmucks…) Little more…. little more… good. Okay, now we need another one for the north wall. Hurry… I think I hear the sound of bricks crumbling.

Oh, hi. Didn’t notice you there on the other side of the computer screen. Greetings from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, just one week after our triumphant return from the great beyond (where we do nearly all of our performances). Did I say triumphant? Wrong word. Ignominious is a better fit to the circumstances. What can I tell you? Broken down spacecraft (nothing new there). Problematic re-entry (nearly a burn-up, as it happened). Crash landing on solid ground (ouch!). Limping home in disgrace (with the exception of the man-sized tuber, who had to be wheeled in a cart… being a vegetable and all…). Being met at the Hammer Mill door by virtually an entire police department (investigating an abandoned space vehicle complaint… and yes, it was down to us). So that thing about “triumphant?” Yeah…. just forget it.

Okay, well… it took a couple of days to clear up that whole police thing. They took us down to the station, fingerprinted us, scanned our retinas, etc. Keen to unpack from our long interstellar sojourn, we scraped together enough bail to get the human contingent out of there – that left Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the tuber, and Big Zamboola behind bars for a few hours while we called the local bail bondsman. As it happened, they set a pretty stiff bail for Zamboola, mainly because of the impracticality of keeping a celestial body (with its own gravity) in a holding cell. Marvin they let go on his own recognizance. (He was talking to them while they worked and, well… it got kind of annoying, I think. He started telling them about his anvil collection. Sheesh.)

Once the bribe… I mean, bail was paid and we had a chance to re-acclimate ourselves to positive gravity, it became obvious that things hadn’t been going very well at the Cheney Hammer Mill in our absence. No, those mongooses (mongeese?) hadn’t come back, though that remains a very real possibility. No, it wasn’t once again occupied by either pirates or space creatures, nor by denizens of middle earth…. nor cavemen. (Did someone say mimes? No, no mimetic infestation as of yet.) No, it was more in the way of general dilapidation. Frankly, the place is falling to pieces. No great surprise, right? I mean, the foundation is literally crumbling beneath our feet. (Especially Mitch Macaphee’s feet. He’s been putting on a little weight lately… not from good eating, you understand, but from some arcane experiment he’s running on himself… something to do with increasing his specific gravity to nearly five times its original value. We now call him “titanic man” behind his back.)

So anyway, we’ve been down in the catacombs, the arches, the basement… whatever, shoring up the beams with spare timbers. Not a lot of those left…. we may need to use something else. Oh, tubey! Got a job for you!

Gosh, but it’s great to be back home! My favorite five words in the alphabet. Wait… did I say something? Did someone just say something…?

Whoa, sorry, friends. I’m a little woozy after that hard landing the other day. Did I mention our landing was hard? Well, if I didn’t (and I do believe I did), let me tell you… it was HARD. We more or less followed the re-entry instructions Urich found tucked under the navigation console (it was buried in coffee grounds and cigarette butts, but still readable). His angle of descent was a bit too steep, perhaps, and the second-hand Soyuz capsule heated to the traditional 450 degrees Kelvin. That was the first piece of difficulty. The second? No water landings with Russian spacecraft. We were forced to find open ground somewhere within walking distance of our long-term squat at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (Why walking distance? No cab fare. And it’s not like we’ve got the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln out there trawling for us…. even though we have not one but two Lincolns on board.)

So, down and down and down we went. Objects on the ground became larger and larger. I could see my own broken down car – a crispy 1989 Honda Civic – and Mitch Macaphee could even see a pair of cufflinks he lost last summer at one point. That’s when it dawned on him that we were getting close… too close. Soon we could see even smaller objects… pinheads, protozoa, large molecules, smaller ones…. then, CRACK! We came to a kind of sudden stop. I think we all lost several inches in height – particularly Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who may have compacted one of his hip-gimbals. (He’ll need to consult with Dr. Macaphee on that, no doubt.) My teeth seem to move around a lot more than they did last week. Oh, and the man-sized tuber has a greater specific gravity than he did before. (Mother… now I know why they call it CRACK.)

Okay, so Big Green (like master) is in the cold, cold ground – then what? Well, we did manage to land (by sheer good fortune… nothing to do with piloting skill, I can assure you) within walking distance of the Cheney Hammer Mill. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy limping distance, so it took the better part of an afternoon getting over there. (Lincoln and anti-Lincoln grousing all the way, of course…. If I have to come back there again!) In fact, it took us so bloody long that the local constables beat us to the door. So how, you may ask, were we able to run afoul of the law in such a short time on Earth? Well… our Soyuz capsule is apparently considered hazardous waste… not surprising, since it is chock full of noxious chemical substances and was found lying squashed like a cigarette butt in the middle of a beet field. We should have taken Mitch’s advice and set the freaking thing on fire before we limped off into the sunset. Live and learn.

Live and learn? $4,000 for hazardous waste removal? W.t.f. – that’s our entire take from this last few weeks, assuming Zenonian drachmas are still convertible to genuine U.S. currency. (That’s assuming a lot, I will admit.) Easy come… easy go.

Hot enough for you? 450 degrees Kelvin, Mitch tells me. (That’s about 350 for all you Fahrenheit fiends.) Urich, you got your eye on that splash-down point? That’s it? Are you sure? Looks like freaking solid ground to me…

Well, as you may have surmised, Big Green is just now wrapping up its launch tour for our new album, International House, and is headed back home through that ever-thickening blanket of atmosphere that surrounds planet Earth (our seasonal home). And as the more discerning amongst you may have noted, our re-entry method leaves a bit to be desired. You see, Big Green’s pilot on this outing – a certain Urich Von Braun, reputedly the last surviving member of a little-known German kamikaze squadron – is a “driver” (as George W. Bush would put it) of airplanes. Spacecraft? Well, not so much. Anyway… this re-entry phenomenon is kind of a new thing for him, and while he’s a quick learner, it’s the sort of situation that doesn’t allow for a whole lot of trial and error. We’ve been supporting him in every way we can think of – bringing him drinks, digging up the circa-1975 instructions on how to land a Soyuz, giving him pep talks, etc., but I must admit… I don’t have a real good feeling about this landing.

Take the instructions (please). Urich has read them and he seems to be pointing the ship towards solid ground. I always thought the idea was for a splash-down type landing. But now I’m told by Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that the Russians always landed somewhere out in Kazakhstan, hopefully in an open field. So now… I don’t know if that means we’re going to Kazakhstan or someplace slightly closer to our actual home in upstate New York – namely, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (right now, abandoned even by the gaggle of squatters it usually houses). On John’s suggestion, Matt devised a kind of bomb-sight device for him with crosshairs hastily scratched into it using a pen knife. (Best we could manage.) I keep trying to get him to point the sucker towards water of some kind, but Urich is a pilot who pretty much follows his own counsel. (The result of Kamikaze training, I suspect.) If he wants to point at a slag heap outside a stone quarry, that’s where we’re going, concussions be damned.

That being the case, the only one likely to come out of this without any serious bruises is the man-sized tuber (AIM screenname ManSizedTuber… just so you know). He is, as you know, a large root vegetable and, as such, an extremely gnarly character who doesn’t bruise easily. This is just as well, since he is the one who put together that video for our new song “High Horse” – our mock-country satirical contribution to the George W. Bush legacy project. It’s been up on YouTube for a week now, and it’s got maybe 250 hits thus far… not exactly a screaming viral hit, but not bad for something submitted by a root vegetable. Reviews so far have been good, but I’m trying to keep him real on his expectations. Not sure it’s necessary. As I said, he’s got a pretty thick skin. You might even call it a husk or rind, perhaps. Not easy to get through to that boy, no sir.

So anyway… I can see my house from space, and it’s getting bigger and bigger with every passing minute. And as much as that sounds like a good thing, it’s… really… not….