Whoa – that didn’t take long. Is it Saturday already? Guess those orgone energy waves have an affect on your sense of time. As Dylan once sang, now things just keep getting uglier, and I have no sense of tiiiiiime…..

Well, now, those gall-dang other-worlders who came here to steal our land, take our jobs (they took our jobs!) and plant genuine Kentucky bluegrass turf all over our courtyard just couldn’t take the heat from Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine. What happened? Well, I’m gon’ tell yuh. That unearthly contraption started shakin’ and shakin’. Then it began to hop around like a Mexican jumping bean. I could hear little yips emanating from inside, and I could swear I saw someone waving a small, sucker-ended middle finger at me from one of the portholes (it may have been an optical illusion – no one else saw it but me, I guess….). Well, now, the hops got higher and higher, and at one point it just hopped clear out of sight. Damnedest thing. The way that fucker was pummeling that courtyard you’d think even god’d be a-feared of it.

Next thing I knew, something hit me square on the back of the head. Youch! Everything went black (actually, it was kind of a midnight blue, really, with orange and yellow sparkles – very nice). Not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, I had a headache and something Mitch Macaphee calls “frontier accent syndrome” – a dreaded disorder that people in the mad scientist community have been grappling with for nigh onto a hundred ‘yar. Dag nabbed syndrome makes yuh talk like a gall dorn character actor at least every other sentence that festers outa’ yer gob. (I have a particularly strange variant that appears to incorporate some elements of archaic British slang… most curious… dash it all….) Mitch and others tell me that I was struck by the hull of the bouncing ship driven by our turf-obsessed space invaders – apparently the fucker busted through the roof and into my private study… and dang near knocked my fool head off. (Haw…)

Let me tell you, friends – it was pandemonium around here for a stretch of minutes, right up until that highly agitated space vehicle bounced off the property entirely. Someone called upon Trevor James to pull the plug on his orgone generator before it burned a hole in the courtyard and cracked through the arches below into the drainage system of this quiet little upstate village. (Quiet though it may be, there is a lot of sewage that runs through this place – just ask the DEC… if you can catch them not hunting…) Though my head was, well, a bit more dented than before (dag nab it!), our little experiment appeared to be a success. But as you know… appearances can be deceiving. Within the next couple of days, similar mysterious space ships had appeared in the courtyards of many of our neighbors. Lawns were soon sprouting up all around us…. green, carpet-like landscaping. It was terrifying!

And me, well….. my frontier accent syndrome has calmed down a bit. But that extra dent in my skull seems to have affected my balance, so I’m typing this column face down on my bedroom floor. Yes, I type that well in the prone position… especially with Marvin (my personal robot assistant) at the keys. (Handy little critter.)

Got a bead on it yet, Trevor James? Try 16 degrees azimuth something-the-fuck… you know what I’m trying to say. Ready? Steady…. Fire rockets! No rockets? Well, then, let’s just settle for etheric energy waves.

Hello again. Yes, who would’ve thought it would come to this? Big Green fighting for the very ground we stand on. (We’re standing our ground!) That’s right – Big Green, the pacifist band; least rowdy motherfuckers on this rowdy motherfucking street we call music. Us… fighting over a broken down mill that isn’t even ours. Oh, the shame of it all. (Somebody hand me a bar rag – there’s a good chap.) But you know what they say – possession is nine-tenths of the law. (That’s why exorcists do such a cracking good business ’round these parts.) What’s that? No, we don’t count the Cheney Hammer Mill amongst our possessions, strictly speaking, in as much as we don’t “own” it. (Like that guy said on Kung Fu – “You can smell hell, but you don’t own it.”) However, you’re forgetting that remaining tenth of the law that isn’t possession: murder. (Or, as they say in Brooklyn, moy-duh.)

Well… not moy-duh, er, murder, exactly. Repulsion is more the word. Let me back up a bit. As you may recall (by simply scrolling down a little further on this page), some strange other-worldly aliens landed in our courtyard last week. We began to get the distinct impression that they were planning to stay a while when they somehow generated a rich carpet of suburban lawn in the area immediately surrounding their vessel. Now, we’re not fond of grass, okay? Marvin (my personal robot assistant) particularly loathes the stuff, and he’s not alone. (I think it’s the sound of lawnmowers and sprinklers – reminds him of the primordial shop floor from which his ancestors emerged, their brass knuckles scraping the cobblestones as they slouched toward the homes of their new owners. Just a guess.) I’ll tell you, these fuckers must be from a whole planet of lawn freaks – they never stop working on that thing.

Funny thing is, we haven’t actually seen the space people. I mean, they fire up their robo mowers, roll out their crawling sprinklers, occasionally call in the Chem Lawn guys to putrefy the neighborhood with their toxins… but they never actually come out of that ship. Even so, it was clear that they had to go before our entire squat house was converted to suburban domestic sprawl – a nightmare in ubiquitous green. Matt, resourceful fellow that he is, thought to ask Trevor James Constable to train his patented orgone generating device on their craft. Matt’s theory (totally unencumbered by scientific validity) was that the etheric energy would excite the atoms of the unearthly metal in their hull, generating an uncomfortable temperature within. (Hot? Cold? Not sure about that part….) That was good enough for Trevor James (or T.J., as I call him) – he duly positioned the array and flipped the “on” switch.

What happened then? Well…. not much. At least, not yet. We’re patient over here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. What the hell – it might have taken them decades to make the trip from their home planet, for all we know. This could take time. Hey, T.J. – can’t you crank that thing up a bit? Mister Chem-Lawn’s coming up the street again…

What the….? Marvin (my personal robot assistant), is that you? No, wait… you’re over there. Well then, what the fuck is causing that glow if not your power-on indicator? Why it’s… well… unearthly.

This started to be just another week here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Giving rudimentary philosophy lessons to the man-sized tuber. Producing anvil-shaped holograms with Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine. Playing Stratego with Lincoln and his evil anti-matter counterpart, anti-Lincoln. Mixing (at a snail’s pace) our sophomore album. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then, out of nowhere, an unanticipated wrinkle in our otherwise smooth existence. It happened early yesterday morning, in fact. Matt heard it first – something that sounded like a laundromat dryer winding down. The power went out… and there was this… strange…. glow….. emanating…. from…. the… courtyard……

(*whew*) Are you sitting down? Okay, good. Clearly, someone needed to see what was up outside. And just as clearly, that wasn’t going to be me. Or Matt. Now John, maybe, but he was otherwise occupied, so really… not him either. My vote was for Marvin to do the recon, which of course he more or less willingly acceded to, being a soulless machine with no overriding inclination towards self-preservation. Yes, he did need a brisk push out the door, but I attribute that to my laziness about oiling his foot-casters. (The yodeling and frantic arm waving might have been the result of some kind of computer error – I’m having Mitch Macaphee look into that now.) In any case, the intrepid Marvin cantered out into the cobbled courtyard, while we watched on his chest-mounted Web cam. (The view was momentarily obscured by one of his robotic fingers… I think it was the middle one… but pretty soon we had a look at what was happening.)

What did we see? Well…. I’d have to say it looks a bit like a large football. An enormous, glowing football, with windows on the upper flank. Stranger still was the racket it was emitting – sounded like a lawn mower more than anything. We tried to get Marvin to circle around, but there appeared to be something wrong with his audio receiver – he turned on his heel and sprung through one of the mill’s cellar windows. (Definitely a software glitch – gotta be a patch available online somewhere….) Well, it took about an hour and a half to convince him, but we eventually got Big Zamboola to float himself up above the mill and get some pictures. And what we saw… astounded us. (Well… me, anyway. I admit, I’m easily astounded.)

Okay, so let me tell you what those fuckers in the football are up to. They rolled out some turf onto our courtyard, set up a little fence, built a swing-set, and now one of those freaks is mowing the lawn…. in our squat yard! Bad enough we have to fight the locals to live here for free – now people are horning in from other planets. What’s this world coming to?