Spread some oil on them sticks. That’s good. Now bring a bundle of straw over here. In a bunch, in a bunch! Okay…. kerosene. Where’d I put it? What? You sure that’s not Vodka? Well… take a glug and let me know. Now, who’s got a match?

Yikes – didn’t know you were logged on. Again, I apologize. Keeping this place in order is a 24/7 kind of job, as you might well imagine. Yes, friends – the Cheney Hammer Mill may be a decrepit, broken down, fetid old ruin with rising damp and water snakes in the basement, but it’s home and every once in a while you need to start a bonfire in the courtyard to let the place know you still care. Oh, you may laugh. You may laugh! But we have our traditions here in Big Green. One of them is making Marvin (my personal robot assistant) do all the heavy work. (Of course, that’s more a habit than a tradition.) More to the point, another of our traditions is that of setting bonfires on alternate Saturdays during the growing season when the moon is in crescent phase. I admit it doesn’t happen all that often, but then neither do the Olympics. So what of it?

Sounding plaintive, am I? You should hear my cohorts. Hardly a moment passes without giving rise to a new gripe. Earlier this week, it was the man-sized tuber, kicking up a fuss over his terrarium being a bit too snug. And when I say “kicking up a fuss,” I don’t mean literally, of course. Tubey has no feet, as you know, only roots, and he moves rather slowly. It was just the look on his… his… his north-facing side (the side with the moss); I could just tell he was dissatisfied. It was an expression veritably dripping with indignation. (Though it may have been some kind of syrup, to be fair. You know how yams get this time of year – kinda juicy.) And those bloody Lincolns – posi and anti – never stop bickering over who ignored the warning signs just prior to secession and who let the rebs walk away with the first battle of Bull Run. I could knock their bearded heads together! Oh, why… why did Trevor James have to cart his orgone generating machine back to the states? Why couldn’t he send those freaks back to the 1860s, where they belong?

The only one not complaining is brother Matthus, and frankly he has the most to complain about. After all, our entirely grisly and unreasonable corporate label, Loathsome Prick, has demanded a finished album out of us by the middle of November. That’s a lot of finishing, and frankly it’s not going to happen. (Just don’t say anything, okay? I’m not ready to go into the ground just yet.) Sure, we’ve got the sucker recorded – fifteen songs in the can, most of which are mixed. But we’ve got a lot of mastering to do, and we haven’t even worked out a running order. (I know, I know…. in the era of the iPod, who cares, right? I do, damn it!) Then there’s designing the package, pressing the disc, distribution… not a ten-week job, friends. And yet Matt is not taking it real hard. Just sorting his anvils, like any normal person. Won’t even join me in a game of mumbly peg. Geez.

Ouch! Now I know why he doesn’t want to join me. Because I don’t know how to play mumbly peg. Our old pirate friend, Admiral Gonutz showed me the ropes a few years ago, but I’ve lost the knack. So it’s bonfire time, friends. Light ’em if you got ’em. And bring a bucket.

That spot. I dropped acid there over a year ago. No, no – not L.S.D. … hydrochloric acid, and I wasn’t using “dropped” as a euphemism for “ingested,” I literally dropped it. Didn’t the man-sized tuber clean it up? Strange….

Oh, there you are. Thank you for joining us once again at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – ground zero for the Big Green experience in all of its glorious cognitive dissonance. So good of you to drop by every week for the latest installment in our little notebook of horrors. Pretty mundane horrors, I will allow, this being the world we all know it is, but horrors none the less, and very much our own. Last week, as you may recall, we were at the point of being waterboarded into a binding contract regarding the distribution of our upcoming CD release (still in the mixing/mastering stage), the working title of which is WORKING TITLE. Big Green‘s current corporate label, Loathsome Prick records, had grown a little impatient with our interminable production delays and, well, decided to apply a little pressure in the shape of a gang of kidnapping goons.

Did it do the trick? Well, let me tell you – those suits at Loathsome Prick are obviously not real familiar with the history of this band. Those of your who’ve been with us since back in the day know that we’ve faced down intimidation by hired thugs, mongooses, extraterrestrials, morlocks, mutant space aliens, hostile Neptunian metal fans, and a host of other nasties. Big Green laughs in the face of death, sneers at danger, and gives blackmail the finger. That’s the long answer. The short answer is, well, yes… it did work. Hey – I couldn’t let Marvin (my personal robot assistant) suffer! They insisted on waterboarding him first and, well, he hasn’t been detailed in a few weeks, so his water resistance is less than what it should be. I won’t draw you a picture, but the proceedings were quite unsavory. So we signed. What the fuck, right?

Well, anyway…. once the paper was signed, we at least had the opportunity to settle back into our digs, restoring some order (or familiar disorder) to the hovel we had been forced to abandon some weeks back by a cadre of lawn-obsessed extraterrestrial invaders. The man-sized tuber made his way back to his climate-controlled terrarium; the two Lincolns took up residence in opposite wings of the mill; John returned to his virtual aviation console; Matt to his anvil collection… and so on. I retired to the kitchen for a swipe at the cooking sherry, taking that opportunity to thumb through the document we had just signed. (No easy task, since my thumbs were still sore from the interrogation sessions. There ought to be a law against that sort of thing.) As Trevor James Constable always told me, it’s a good idea to read documents you sign because, well, they may have something written on them. Sound advice.

That’s when I noticed that the date for our next CD was moved up to November 14. Those mothers at Loathsome Prick! (They sounded like such a nice bunch of folks…) Crikey, we’re only in our fifth year of production on this thing. You can’t put inspiration on an assembly line! (Or can you….?)

Okay, now where does the signature go? Ah, yes – the line which is dotted. Okay, okay. Right, now… where is that dotted line? Sure, sure… on the contract, sure…

Oh, hi blog-o-files (or perhaps merely ultra-patient Big Green-o-files). You’re probably thinking you may have stumbled in on some kind of trade negotiation, perhaps the latest upgrade of NAFTA. Not so, though it is coercive, expropriative, and downright nasty, so I can understand the confusion. Yes, indeed… after several days (or was it weeks?) in the back of some grimy delivery van, bound and gagged by belligerent strangers, we arrived at our destination. T’was a strange and lifeless place, cold as the grave, its chalky brick facade crumbling beneath the groaning burden of decades of neglect and abandonment. This was the grim place our captors had intended for us to see when our blindfolds were removed.

The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – just as I pictured it!

I know what you’re thinking. What the hell are the chances that these brigands and ne’er-do-wells would have chosen for their hideout the same condemned hole we had occupied illegally for the last five or six years? Good question. Hard to calculate those odds. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is totally stumped. Still, there’s no need to strain your brain or burn out your pocket slide-rule – these pirates of the open road had known about our residence at the Cheney Hammer Mill, and had deliberately brought us back there. Now I can hear you saying, “For what PUR-pose!?!” (That is you talking, isn’t it?) Well, my friends, the answer to that is both simple… and complex…

Actually, it’s really just simple. (Forgive me. Can’t resist a little cheap drama.) These rough fellows are merely representatives from our (relatively) new corporate label, Loathsome Prick records. It seems we never quite got around to formalizing our relationship with LP, so the company hired some strong-arms to pressure… ahem… negotiate with us on the terms of how we will divide the proceeds from the interstellar sales of our upcoming album, [Marvin: insert album name here before we go to press, there’s a good lad]. This is a bit technical, but we had agreed on a release date of [Just stick any date in here – we can back away from it later – thanks, jp], assuming the mastering and publishing processes went according to schedule. Only catch is, they kind of want to keep all of the money. Sure, I know – that’s their starting position, but they’ve presented it after tying us to waterboards. Not sure I like where this is headed.

Best we can do at this point is stall on the signing. I have asked Marvin to send transmissions to his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, in hopes that he will drop his six-month martini in Montserrat and fly in to our rescue. Until then, we’ll just play dumb. And hold our breaths….