No, Mitch. That’s not the point, man. Wait a minute, wait a minute…. I think somebody may be reading what I’m typing into my stupid blog. Hold on… Yeah, I posted it. Sorry, Mitch – I’ll call you back. Bye.

Hi, everybody… it’s your old pal Bozo. Did I say Bozo? I meant Joe. Beg your pardon, I’m all farmisht. Just spent the last half-hour on the phone to Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has taken up residence in a relatively comfy treehouse outside of Buenos Aires for the summer. (Just to be clear, Mitch is in the treehouse, not Marvin. Marvin is the one who fell out of a tree.) I hate to treat so distinguished a mad scientist as some kind of cheap tech support, but damn it, we’re desperate… desperate, I tell you! (Phew!) No, no… not life or death. Marvin’s on the fritz, that’s all, and it’s proving to be a bit of an inconvenience.

It happened just after we crashed back home last week. As you know, Big Green had taken a little trip out to Cancri 55 for a showcase gig that ended up lasting two freaking months. Long story short, we had a bit of a rough landing on our return (right into my m.f. bedroom) and in the process, Marvin seems to have shaken some key piece of electronic brainology loose. What’s the problem? Haven’t a clue. That’s why we dialed up the man who put him together… this in hopes of getting a step-by-step method for setting the tin man straight. Of course, Mitch being the typical mad scientist that he is (he’s living in a fucking tree, for christ’s sake!) has proven incapable of giving a coherent answer one way or the other. Three calls, and the best I could get out of him was a recipe for gazpacho. (Actually, it’s a pretty good recipe. But I digress…)

What is Marvin doing that’s so annoying? Well… first he donned some nautical headgear left behind by that mad man Admiral Gonutz. Then he installed himself on the rusting freight elevator and insisted that everyone call him “Admiral”. Admittedly, that was only mildly annoying. After a couple of days of that, he took it into his robotic skull to start swinging around on the rafters in hammer assembly room five. Now, Marvin was never much of an athlete, so this was actually a bit dangerous, as all 267 pounds of him (yes… he’s made of metal, friends) would come crashing down onto the work floor every ten minutes or so. What the hell – we thought that was pretty bad. But we hadn’t seen anything yet. Nope. Nothing. (Is this thing still on? Oh, right.)

Here’s the capper – one night last week, Marvin broke into my wall safe (unlocked, as it happens), took our squatter’s contract to the Cheney Hammer Mill, and sold it to Loathsome Prick Records, our label. Now they own our sorry asses, lock, stock and barrel. So Mitch… if you’re reading this… love the gazpacho, but… how do you fix this s.o.b.??

Through the glass darkly. That was our trip home. Better believe it, my friend. (Jesus freaking Christ…. if I say “my friends” again, I’ll turn into John McCain. And we can’t have that… not with all these Lincolns around.)

Okay, well, so I’m not such a good pilot. I kind of already knew that – that’s why we of Big Green made common cause with the likes of Mitch Macaphee, our sometimes-resident mad science advisor. But when Mitch ain’t available, we improvise and… well… things don’t always turn out the way you hope. It hurts my pride to say so, but I did push the stick when I should have pulled it, and our rented space craft went into a dramatic nose-dive. We were dropping faster than the S&P 500 during the dot-com bust (forgive the metaphor). How could I tell? Well, things on the ground were getting awfully big, awfully fast. I was just opening my mouth to say “Marvin (my personal robot assistant)!!!” when the Cheney Hammer Mill got big enough to crack our windshield.

I won’t tell you what came out of my mouth next. (My guess is that you’ve heard the word once or twice, but fuck it… this is a FAMILY blog!) It’s the kind of utterance that comes of driving someone else’s vehicle through one of the only unbroken windows in your squat house – namely, the one right over where I sleep. (Rather, slept.) Glass all over my best bedspread, glass in the water fountain, glass ground into the floor. Worse than that, high-explosive spacecraft fuel had spewed all over the walls (and my bedroom couch) and ignited, reducing my humble domicile to a somewhat more humble state. It was ugly… very ugly. (In fact, it still is ugly, as this catastrophe is compounded by the fact that I am not at all a good housekeeper.)

Were there any injuries? (Thanks for asking, actually.) The most serious one was sustained by John, who laughed so hard at my inept piloting that he was grasping his sides in pain. Big Zamboola caught some shards of windshield glass, but in as much as he possesses his own atmosphere, the shards burned up in re-entry. Moments before the crash, the man-sized tuber scrambled off for his specially designed, climate-controlled, shock-mounted terrarium and strapped himself in. I’m not sure how my brother Matt or the Lincolns managed to emerge unscathed, but it could have something to do with their common interest in avian biology. Yes, they were bird watching in our moment of sheer terror. Callous and uncaring? You might think so. But anti-Lincoln’s lifetime list of birds is getting longer every day. (Between us, I’ve seen the list, and there are at least six or seven chickens on there, entered by name. I’m just saying.)

Okay, well…. so we’re home anyway. I, for one, am glad to have my feet firmly planted on the ancient planks of this august old squathouse once again. It feels good… even if I have to sleep with an umbrella (and a hazmat suit).

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed, wind in the willows, egg on your face. What the hell – why can’t we get lift? We need lift, man, lift! Arrrgh! Where the hell is Mitch Macaphee when you need him?

Answer: Buenos Aires, at a mad scientist conference. You know as well as I do, don’t you?

Well, friends and countrymen (and countrywomen, as well… and, well, city men and women… and dogs and cats and….. oooooohhhh!), your associates in Big Green have finally arrived in the environs of the small marbled greenish-blue planet we know as Earth. And when I say “environs,” I mean atmosphere; straight down the chute in our rented spacecraft, nose pointed towards the upstate New York industrial ruin we know as the Cheney Hammer Mill. As John and the others are otherwise occupied, I have taken it upon myself to man the helm, with Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man-sized tuber (see his Facebook page) handling the navigation console. (Yes, it takes both of them to do that… and there’s only one chair.) And as you may have gathered from my previous utterance, it’s not going real well. Not real well at all.

Okay, full disclosure: I’ve actually never piloted a spacecraft of any kind before, let alone a rented one. And as many may already know, I don’t have any practical experience in the driver’s seat of any manner of flying machine. Oh, sure… I’ve dabbled from time to time – when a band spends as much of its working life in the icy void between worlds as we do, you tend to pick things up – but there’s nothing that resembles skill in my method… nothing at all. In fact, we’re in the midst of what might be described as an “unpowered descent” and I haven’t the foggiest idea how I initiated it. (I pressed some pretty buttons, pulled a lanyard or two, and heard a strange crunching noise… that’s all I remember, officer. Swear to Jesus or Moses or any of them saints.)

Ahead of me I can see the North American continent growing larger and larger. Pretty soon it fills the viewing screen. I point the rented space cruiser towards the dotted outline of New York State and begin looking for the inscriptions for “Little Falls”. 100,000…. 75,000… 45,000 feet and still nothing! Then it strikes me… ouch! Damn lanyard hit me right in the face! (Rat bastard.) There was also something else… this must be a topographical continent, not a political one. No wonder there’s no type, no little target-like symbol over Albany, no heavy lines for major thoroughfares. Looks like I’ll have to land without those subtle cues. Marvin points to a fat-looking peak – could this be Bear Mountain? Need a map, damnit. Tubey – Look in the glove compartment. Good vegetable.

What’s this…. the lights are going out. The sun has gone behind the horizon. I’ve got to fly this thing in the DARK? And my navigator is back on Facebook? Jeeezus.