That’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go, cat, go! Don’t you step on my… ah, what’s the use? Can’t do covers… even when I’m panhandling.

Welcome back. I almost said “to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill,” but I caught myself in time. Actually, our august squat house is now, indeed, abandoned… in the sense that there is now no one in it. Yes, friends… our new extra-terrestrial mayor, Gizmandiar, has made good on his threat to evict us – call it a down payment on the opportunistic election campaign he’s planning for this fall. This fucker’s racking up empty promises so fast, you could swear he was born on the planet earth. (In fact, never having seen this creature, I can’t say for certain that he wasn’t.) Everywhere you turn in this town now, it’s Gizmandiar’s doing this, and Gizmandiar’s in favor of that…. and one of those things he’s doing is enforcing building codes and vagrancy laws, no matter how obscure. Hence, our homelessness. (He sent in the goons. And let me tell you, baby… they’re good at what they do.)

Matt, John, Mitch Macaphee, and the others (with the exception of the two Lincolns) think that the lawn-loving space people are just sticklers for the law, and when they took over the town government (by bribing our local officials all the way to Tahiti), they went on a good-government rampage. I personally think that this Gizmandiar character is taking revenge on us for complaining about the carpet-like lawn they established in our courtyard when they first arrived on this sorry planet. What the hell, I even cajoled Trevor James Constable into training his orgone generating device on their space craft. I’m sure even on their anemic planet, turnabout is fair play. (Though if they have negative gravitation, that may not be the case.) Whatever the truth may be, they have found an effective way to squelch criticism of their landscaping fetish…. and we’ve earned our one-way ticket to palookaville. (I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody… instead of a bum….)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s one hell of a coincidence that astronomers have discovered a strangely Earth-like planet a mere 20 light years away at precisely the same time that these odd space aliens showed up in our little town. We asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to calculate the odds of these two events happening at the same time, and the results were astounding – seventy-three trillion to one against. (Of course, those are the same odds Marvin gave me when I asked him if it was going to rain last weekend…. and it rained last weekend. So yes, he could certainly be a meteorologist in this town.) So… is it true? Are the local aliens really from the strange rocky world known as “New Earth?” Can discarded lawn darts really be repurposed as inexpensive bottle openers? Is guar gum a vegetable? Is our children learning?

Yes, friends…. the answers to these and other questions can be found right here next week. And for all those who wrote letters of sympathy and support for your friends in Big Green last week, all I can say is… something went wrong down at the post office, because we didn’t receive any letters of sympathy and support. (I haven’t checked the trash can today, to be fair.) Write us, damnit – we need scrap paper!

First there was day of the triffiids. Then there was night of the living dead. Now there’s week of the homeless virtual rock band. And what do they all have in common? Space people. Mother-fucking space people.

Hello again from sleepy upstate New York (formerly known as Sri Lanka). Last week as you recall, your friends in Big Green had made the fearful discovery that our local city hall was under foreign occupation. No, it hadn’t been overrun by stormtroopers from a distant power – this was a far more congenial takeover. Space people, armed with sacks of cash and buckets of Miracle Grow bribed their way into the building and have taken the place of our entire city council. This could be a problem, folks. Got a tax dispute? Tell it to the space man. Need the street sweepers to do a once-over on your block? Better learn to speak Betelgeusean real quick. (And take it from me – it is not an easy language to learn. No vowels. Nada.) Someone set your house on fire? Contact the mother ship… pronto. (Little bit of extra response time, you understand.)

I suppose you’re wondering how in the world our elected officials could possibly have been coaxed away from their posts by large amounts of cash… how proffered piles of filthy lucre could convince them to abandon their constituents to other worlders… how the promise of permanent paid vacation could somehow outweigh their dedication to public service. Well, stop it. Of course they took the money and ran – that’s their job. Damnit, if our public officials weren’t corruptible, we would never have been able to remain in our adopted squat house for lo these many years. Our corporate label – Loathsome Prick Records – understood this very well. It’s thanks to them, in part, that we were able to keep Marvin (my personal robot assistant) under our leaky roof. Apparently there’s a local ordinance against harboring mechanical men. (You’d be surprised what kinds of Byzantine laws lurk in the dusty volumes stacked down at your local codes department.) Nothing a little palm grease couldn’t finesse.

No more. See, this is where our problem lies. Not only are these space people total-ass lawn freaks, they’re also straight as the proverbial arrow. Incorruptible, at least by any terrestrial standard of graft. And now that they have taken over our local government, they appear determined to follow the letter of every law on the books, dating back to… well… the civil war, perhaps. Not a good thing at all. Just the other morning, there was a loud knock on the door. It was some of Marvin’s old colleagues from the local constabulary, only they weren’t collecting quarters for the annual charity cotillion. They were putting us out on the street, in effect – a 10-day eviction notice, signed by someone named Gizmadiyar (apparently the acting mayor… and between you and me, I don’t think he’s acting). Even Marvin’s timely intervention seemed to have no effect – the constables seemed quite happy in their work…. almost… TOO… happy….

Now, those of you who’ve been reading this blog for the last seven years know. We of Big Green have seen the elephant and heard the owl… or is it heard the elephant and seen the owl…? (Can you herd elephants?) Either way, we’ve been through far too much in our time to allow ourselves to be made homeless by some interstellar freak named Gizmandiar. Not to worry… though if you do happen to send a package our way, be sure to address it:

Big Green

Open garbage can

Corner of Sherman Street and Bolton Place

Colombo, NY

… and be sure it’s waterproof. (And trash-proof.)

Spacemen to the left of me. Spacemen to the right of me. Spacemen above my head. And beneath my soles? Astroturf. That’s right… astroturf.

Welcome back, Big Green-ites, to a world turned upside-down. Well, not upside-down exactly… probably more like 180 degrees clockwise, with a slight southward dip on the “y” axis. Either way, things are not what they used to be. This neighborhood has gone downhill fast. Jeebus christmas – just three weeks after the first spaceship arrived and we’re practically the only people in this village who were born on the planet Earth. (All except Big Zamboola, of course, who was born on… on… well, on himself, because he is, in fact, himself a planet… or planetoid.) Those strange, lawn-obsessed space people have brought their interstellar modular homes to our sleepy little town and set up their own community superimposed over ours. WTF!

You know, it wouldn’t be so bad to have all of these new neighbors if they had taken up residence the normal way: the way we got here… find an empty house and squat. No, that wasn’t good enough for them. They had to bring their own houses. And before you say anything, no, I don’t have a “problem” with space people. In fact, some of my best friends are from far beyond the confines of our little solar system. Did I mention Big Zamboola? I did. Okay. Well, there’s also sFshzenKlyrn, our perpetual sit-in guitarist. He, of course, is from the planet Zenon in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy far, far, away. sFshzenKlyrn and I go way back, so you can’t say I don’t like space people, even if they do keep me up all night with their smelly lawn mowers and their noisy stellar infrarometers running incessantly over the same measurements. (Ooooooh, I hate them, I hate them!) Don’t listen to Mr. Subliminal. I love those dang space people, I really do. (RRRRrrrrrr)

Not that there aren’t remedies open to us. Sure, I know – we’ve been squatters here at the Cheney Hammer Mill for more than six years. And yes, we have run afoul of the law one, two, or perhaps a dozen or more times. But we do have some items in the plus column. For instance, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) did serve with distinction in the local constabulary. And we have, in fact, generated a little bit of economic activity in the area with the occasional payout we receive from our new corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, which has been willing to advance us a bit on our upcoming release (still in the mixing stage – arrrrrghhh). Yeah, we help keep the pizza joint and the pub in business, so that’s probably worth an ordinance or two from city hall about unauthorized extraterrestrial housing and landscaping. (Turns out, it isn’t even real grass. It’s like a freaking lawn toupee, man!) So one would expect a little cooperation from the authorities, eh?

Well, if one were to expect that… one would most certainly be mistaken. When we made our way over to city hall, we couldn’t help but notice the flawless green carpet of newly installed lawn on either side of the walkway. And the mayor has a strange unearthly glow about him. Don’t know about you, but I think the fix is in.