Need a couple more of those buckets. How about some pale green in the upper left hand corner? And put that HMI light just behind the plastic fichus tree. That’s the ticket.

Ah, visitors. Welcome, welcome. Reading this, you may ask yourself, “What the fuck – do these guys do everything themselves?” (No, I’m not affecting to give you permission to ask such a question. Nay, I believe in free will, and am merely speculating on the character of your thoughts. Affected, me? Perish the thought!) And the answer to that question might be yes, if by “everything” you mean “everything that can be done in that run-down mill.” (If you mean something else, well… what can I say?) So… yes, we do… uh… do everything around these parts. Well… most of us do, anyway. (Some of us don’t do everything… or “do nothing”, as the saying goes.)

Oh, sure – we have the equivalent of domestic help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) counts as a domestic, technically speaking. (Very technically.) I suppose the man-sized tuber counts, too, sort of like a coffee table might. (Hey… it holds coffee for you, right? Defies gravity in a sense, no?) But how much help are they, really, when it comes to the important stuff, like… like bricking up an open window, or finding a lost quail egg, or whitewashing the widder-woman’s fence? How about mastering an album, damnit? How much help is Marvin, eh? Squat! And the freaking man-sized tuber – when’s the last time he twiddled a volume pot? Day before never, that’s when! So, hey… the next time you wonder why it takes us five years to make a m.f.-ing album, here’s an easy answer – we get no help from nobody, no how. (pant, pant, pant….)

Phew! I feel much, much better now. Catharsis aside, there is a grain of truth to what I’m saying, albeit an extremely minute one. Don’t think I need to mention that our rapacious corporate label is worse than useless in this regard. What the hell – who would have ever thought a company called Loathsome Prick Records would be run by scoundrels and assholes? And yet, there you have it. (Don’t tell them I said so, okay?) And then there are the closer-to-home issues, like the quarrelling Lincolns (posi and anti), and Big Zamboola, who just hangs around the courtyard confounding the local astronomy club with his mysterious gravitational light-bending trick (quite astounding). It’s not so much that they’re destructive – more that they simply don’t contribute to a harmonious living atmosphere. Neither does Mitch Macaphee, with his rapidly multiplying horde of experimental critters. (Frankenstone has discovered the rave. A couple of decades late, but what the hell… he’s made of stone.)

At least we’re back in the confines of the mill, safe from the rain (or most of it, anyway). Now if we could just get past these household projects, maybe we could … I don’t know … take a raft down the Mississippi… or the Mohawk…

This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. Leave the mill immediately. Proceed to the exits marked “exit”. We apologize for the absence of standard, lighted exit signs – crayon on cereal box will have to do.

Oh, hello. Sorry for the confusion – just affecting a temporary evacuation of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Actually, it’s more complicated than it sounds. The place isn’t actually abandoned in the sense of being vacant – just abandoned by its owners. We, the members and various hangers-on of Big Green, actually live there, and therefore must be told to leave the building when a) a natural or fire-related disaster strikes, b) the land agent arrives to chuck us out, or c) Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, builds a more-dangerous-than-usual monster with which to amuse himself. (You know… just the usual things homeowners fret about day in and day out.) And we are faced with one of those exigencies today. See if you can guess which one. Go ahead… I’ll just hum a little tune while you mull it over…

Oh, Dinos had a good time on the trolley,

Dinos had a good time at the fair!

Dinos had a holiday ’til the skies turned mean and gray

Their underbellies went a gushing jelly and they died in searing pain!

All set? Good. No, it wasn’t number two, though that’s the one everybody picks. And no, I’m sorry little Jennifer, it wasn’t number one either… though part of this building is always on fire, we just don’t pay it any attention. (Why encourage the gods of fire?) Nope, I’m afraid it’s number three – little Mitch Macaphee, the Papa Geppetto of robots, cyborgs, and monstrosities. As you recall, he recently fashioned a Frankenstein’s monster out of solid granite, then made the son of a bitch ambulatory. So that now when the smoke alarm goes off at 3:00 a.m., it isn’t just Anti-Lincoln lighting up one of his acrid stogies… it’s Frankenstone lighting up the man-sized tuber. WTF anyway!

Well, sure… that would be bad enough, right? And you’d think that Mitch would have learned his lesson and put his portable life force animation device back into mothballs, right? Not so. Nothing succeeds like success, as they say, especially in the land of mad scientists. I mean, what would the guy say to his colleagues at the next convention if all he had to show for his efforts over the preceding months was one… just one! … monster carved out of stone? Embarrassing, to be sure. Also, between you and me, I think old Mitch has a problem meeting new friends. Now, making friends is something he’s real good at. And he just keeps making more and more all the time. And some of them are proving a bit inconvenient, setting things on fire, spreading hazardous materials around the mill, etc. Hence our current dilemma (noxious gases – some of them, evidently, are trying to poison our asses, to borrow a line from Flight of the Conchords).

So, what to do? Well, first on the list – EVACUATE!!

Lesson one: if you find yourself staked out in an abandoned hammer mill with your bandmates, never… never let your resident mad scientist work unattended. Negative consequences will be had.

What do I mean, specifically? Just try it and find out! Yes, you aspiring bands out there… get yourself a mill and a madman, shake vigorously, and wait until it starts to fizz. Then you will have your answer. In our case, we didn’t even need the vigorous shaking. Our resident mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, sort of shakes himself up. You may recall that last week he had taken up a new hobby – sculpting. We of Big Green thought little of this… our cohorts are always trying new things, starting new trends, discovering new interests. (Like the man-sized tuber and his harmonica playing. Or John and his anti-matter bicycle collection. Or me and my cucumber sandwich juggling.) But soon we noticed some disturbing signs that Mitch was perhaps taking his new thing (or “thang“) a little too far.

Sure, this sort of thing is bound to happen with a creative mind, right? Our Mitch is always throwing something together. Marvin (my personal robot assistant), after all, is one of his greatest inventions (and, not coincidentally, one of the greatest pains in my ass). Trouble is, unlike other idle hobbies and casual interests, what Mitch creates tends to have a mind of its own. That’s why I became a bit concerned when he chipped his Frankenstone sculpture free of its moorings. My colleagues tried to reassure me. “Relax, Joe,” they would say, “Mitch obviously prefers freestanding three-dimensional art.” This surprised me. (Not because of what they were telling me, but because they had not addressed me with my usual nickname “fucker.”) So I tried to put my concerns out of mind.

Then sometime last week, don’t recall which night exactly, I heard something clomping around downstairs. I assumed it was anti-Lincoln looking for his goat cheese, as usual, kicking up a fuss because someone had walked off with it yet again. (Sometimes I think there’s a bit of the pirate in that old man.) But the footfalls were heavier than that. Sounded like they were breaking through the floorboards. Shortly thereafter, I saw a sinister shadow in the hall. Totally unrelated to the stomping, as it happens. (Just a bit of water damage on the drywall – nothing to get worked up about.) Nonetheless, those steps were strange, unnerving. And when I rose the next morning, the Frankenstone statue was gone. That’s right – GONE! Just a faint trail of stone dust leading out into the hall.

Yeah, you’re right – I should talk to Mitch Macaphee about this. But he’s been busy, and I’ve been busy. Just haven’t had time to deal with it, in all honesty. That Frankenstone statue – I’m sure it’ll turn up. And if not, we’ll just have Mitch sculpt a private investigator.