Man, it’s hot on Aldebaran. (How hot is it, Joe?) Well… it’s hot enough to make the man-sized tuber sprout new branches. (W.t.f., Joe… that’s hot and a half!) Damn right.

Hi, there. Got a little sick of the monologue, so I thought I’d throw a call and response deal in the old blog. (Got to keep entertained somehow.) Big Green here, and I’m here to tell you that everything you learned about red giant stars is wrong. Sure, I know – they always told you that red giants are big, fat, overly cooled-down stars, right? Not so hot as those blue dwarfs, right? Well… looks like they was wrong, as they say in the old neighborhood (when somebody was wrong, that is). It’s hot as all get-out up here. It’s so freaking hot, Mitch Macaphee had to invent a sno-cone machine out of available materials… materials that included Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I regret to say. (Sorry, Marvin. I owe you one, man. Actually… I owe you a dozen, if memory serves.)

I don’t mind telling you, it took us ages to get here. That second-hand Soyuz we’re flying is nothing to write Moscow about. It’s cramped, leaky, and can’t get out of its own way, what with that four-cylinder ion drive Mitch cobbed together and wired up to Marvin’s internal power source (again, Marvin…. sorry… sorry…). Fact of the matter is, we had to fly through a hastily-contrived space/time warp in order to get there in less than a century or two. Luckily, our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has one or two tricks up his sleeve with respect to the space/time continuum. In as much as he is an etheric being of no fixed temporal location (or hairstyle), he can play with time like it’s a wad of Silly Putty, stretching it, flattening it, pressing it onto the Sunday comics and making Dagwood Bumsted look like he weighs 3,000 pounds. (Lots of laughs.) So, luckily for us, sFshzenKlyrn has served as our interstellar fixer, once again. (Helps to have friends in high places. Very high places.)

Well, by the time we got on stage on Aldebaran, we were all so dehydrated that we probably looked like the California Raisins up there… or those Fruit of the Loom guys doing the Coldplay knock-off. Matt launched into the first song off of our new album, International House – a little number called “Welcome To It.” I admit, the band sounded a bit raspy at first. No question but that the enormous bucket of Gatorade was a welcome site when Anti-Lincoln came peddling up with it near the end of the first set. Always thinking ahead, that anti-Lincoln (though he is such a contrary creature, when he thinks ahead he’s actually remembering). We plowed on through the set and a half of material on the new album, then took a well-deserved rest… on the tailgate of a vehicle owned by one of our Aldebaran patrons. Some kind of jitney, I believe. (Though an oddly misshapen blob of protoplasm, I think he’s in the motor coach trade. Who would have thunk it?)

Anyways… we got through our first performance, with only a minor rescue needed. Mitch has our Soyuz in parking orbit around the crust of rock our corporate label, Loathsome Prick, chose for our first venue. In fact, I’d better fly…. I think the meter’s running out in about five minutes.

Half a league, half a league, half a league on. Man, this sucker is going slower than I would have expected. You call that an ion drive? I call it junk. Do you hear me? JUNK!

Oh, hi. Didn’t know anybody was within shouting distance. Don’t pay too much attention to what I just said – again, I like to keep the crew on their toes, if you know what I mean. Mitch Macaphee does much better mad science when you light a fire under him (I mean this literally – he responds to fire with greater productivity). So if you have any questions about our progress, I have answers… depending upon specifically which questions you are asking. Since you’re not saying anything, I will guess that they are as follows:

Q: Are you making progress towards your goal, Aldebaran?

A: First of all, don’t call me Aldebaran… at least not while there are other people in the room. The answer, quite simply, is yes. However, I’d prefer if you not ask me how much progress we have made in the time elapsed since my last posting.

Q: How much progress have you made?

A: DAMN! I was afraid you’d ask me that. Well, the fact is, we’ve been chugging along at a very tepid speed. Our second (or third) hand Soyuz space craft was built in a different century, you see. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the last century (not the next) that I’m referring to. So, yeah… you’ve seen those ultra-fast cigarette boats zipping along? Picture this thing as a bunch of old telephone poles lashed together into a raft.

Q: You’ve said a lot of things here. How can I be sure you are who you say you are?

A: STOP IT! Not sure why I said that. (I’m not quite myself today.) I have consulted my legal advisor (the man-sized tuber) and he has suggested that I should avoid answering that question.

I hate to raise this issue when there are others present, but Mitch has suggested that we utilize some of the technology he built into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who apparently has an ion-pulse generator locked away in his bread basket somewhere. Mitch says that if we could run a line from that sucker, we’d have all the power we need. Not sure how Marvin will feel about this, but….

Whoops. He heard me. Oh, Maaaaarrrvinnnn…… Got a little job for you.

I don’t know. What does that look like to you, Mitch? I think it’s a fizgig, but I can’t be sure. A space sextant? Nah, no way. Never a sextant.

Oh, hi, folks. Big Green, here. Yup… we’re on our way, once again, to sunny Aldebaran. (Since Aldebaran is, in fact, a sun, it’s always sunny there.) Turned out old Dimitri had a few units within our price range. Of course, Mitch has never driven a Soyuz (they’re all standard transmission, you see), but our own Johnny White has volunteered to sit in on the flight controls. Got a pretty good deal on this old clunker, I must admit. I think it may have been part of the Apollo Soyuz mission, but I’m not certain. (At least parts of it might have been part of that mission…. hopefully the good parts.) But it’s sealed, it holds an atmosphere, it’s space-worthy… it’s sold! Though I think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may be becoming unduly attached to the navigational computer. (Unseemly.)

Okay, so how, you may ask, can we possibly use a 70s-80s vintage vehicle to travel light-years through interstellar space in anything less than millions of years? Good question. Real good question. (I’m thinking.) Quite simple, actually – our resident mad scientist Mitch Macaphee has been hard at work modifying the used Soyuz (or “Soyuzed”, if you will), hopping it up like he did with his ’57 Chevy Bel Aire back in the day. You should have seen old Mitch – he was throwing headers and chrome exhaust on the old Russian capsule like a madman, cranking up its horsepower to the point where it could make such a titanic journey in such a brief period of time. (I speak figuratively, of course. The “headers” are actually ion reactors and the “chrome exhaust” kinetic force generators. Those are, in fact, what Mitch added to his Bel Aire, as well.) Not sure if it’s going to be enough, but I guess we’ll know when we get there (or not).

Who’s doing the navigating? Well, I’m not real good at finding my way from place to place in the universe, I’ll be the first to admit. And we have others in our ship’s complement that are even less talented in this area than I. Still, I think between all of us we can probably find a red giant star that is relatively close to our own solar system. In fact, it should be pretty hard to miss. It’s not like we’re looking for dark matter, or some remote galactic body, like that foreboding place where sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, comes from. (Zenon…. not a real good place if you like breathing oxygen.) I’ve always been a big fan of just pointing the ship at a random object and firing up the engines, but Mitch tells me that’s not the best method. It’s kind of like shooting skeet (not that I’ve ever done that, but…. it’s kind of like it) or like commanding a missile defense battery. Except that this might actually work. (Maybe.)

As I said, we’ll know when we get there. Though at this rate, we’ll probably need Mitch’s time distortion device to catch up with our scheduled performances. (Our contractual pot of coffee is probably cold as a stone by now.)