Where did my paring knife go? Anyone seen it? It was here just a minute ago. Hey, anti-Lincoln — have you seen my knife? You were just in here a minute ago… uh-oh…..

Oh the butt-aches of living in a communal residence! Yes, yes, it is good to be back at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill — our adopted home — after so long an absence, especially given that this may have been the most irritating Big Green tour ever. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, sure, he says that every time, right? Okay, well maybe I did say it after our Journey to the Center of the Earth tour a couple of years ago. And maybe I did say it after our last tour, when we were kidnapped and held against our will on a hostile alien planet. And I grant you — I may well say it again after our next tour, whatever kind of disaster that may turn out to be. But I’m sure I’ll be just as convinced of its suck-acity then as I have been all the previous times. (Now you’re thinking, God, what a pain in the ass this fucker is! Why do I read this blog? WHY?)

Okay, so I’m not a very good mind reader. No matter — here we are, back at the mill, having extracted ourselves from the dreaded Doo-Dah parade (where Big Zamboola was a massive hit, I should tell you). The condemned sign has been torn from our front door. Reprieve from the city? Not quite. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to pull it down. It amounts to the same thing in this city. (They won’t get around to knocking this place down for another couple of years, at the very soonest. Other fish to fry.) He will be tacking up a “do not disturb” sign in its place, in hopes that this will discourage the curious (and the creditors) from trying to gain access to the mill as we turn our attention to what has become the most monumental labor of our careers — making an Irish stew without meat or potatoes. (Oh, yeah… and then there’s that album thing we’re working on. Where the hell did we leave that, anyway?)

Great day in the morning, I know it seems like Big Green has spent way too long in production. It’s nearly possible to calculate the trajectory of our latest CD project in terms of geological time. What the fuck, we started planning the sucker shortly after the release of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, back in 1999. Of course, there was some slap-dash songwriting after that, then we started recording the bastard in early 2003. Here it is three years later, and we’re finally to the point of mixing / mastering. Can hardly believe it. My guess is that, in a few more of your earth time units known as months, we will actually have something to show for all of this seemingly pointless activity. (No, Mitch. Not money. That’s your day job, okay?)

So, back to the console. But first the stew. Or perhaps just a sandwich. Where the devil is that knife? No, Anti-Lincoln, I can’t use a gun. Just put it away, now. Slowly…. slowly…. (Hey, out there… somebody call the cops… I’ll have Marvin take down the “do not disturb” sign again…)

Rubble. Dust rising. The dark silhouette of an ancient structure looms in the background. I can just barely make out its profile… something strangely familiar about it. Deep and foreboding. A frightening presence — home!

Greetings from what might euphemistically be described as “home”. Big Green here, more or less. We have arrived back at the Cheney Hammer Mill after a long, long, loooooonnnggg sojourn in the outer reaches of the galaxy, living the dream (or nightmare, perhaps) of performing for adoring fans (albeit five-legged ones with green antennae and ion-charged grappling hooks for claws). Always falls a bit short for this group, quite frankly… the excitement factor, that is. Sure, everyone thinks it’s “exciting” to be a rock performer and to travel to different planets, make them explode, and all that. Well, when you’ve seen one exploding planet, you’ve seen them all, right? But I digress. (Got to keep talk like that to a minimum — where Big Zamboola comes from, exploding planets are no laughing matter.)

Last you looked, we had somehow talked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into dragging us over land back to our beloved homestead. It doesn’t pride me greatly to say that, yes, he did complete that task — one worthy of John Henry himself. In fact, I’ve been calling him Marvin “John Henry” (my personal robot assistant) for a couple of days now. (Probably won’t stick.) Actually, it wasn’t that bad for our atomic powered automatonic assistant. He just threw it into low gear and tugged us onto the nearest highway (about 40 miles inland, as it happens). We just scraped the rest of the way, sparks a-flying. (Marvin had to stop and take a leak at one point, but otherwise…) Probably made a curious spectacle for our fellow travelers. Reminded me of going “skitching” when we were kids — the renowned winter pass-time of hanging on to the back bumper of a car and dragging along the icy pavement with your boots. Great fun (’til you fell off in front of a logging truck). Don’t try this at home!

Yes, it took a few days, but before any of us were ready, the looming hulk of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill came into view. It was, contrary to our expectations, still standing, but the neighborhood had definitely gone downhill in the past eight weeks or so. Street fires, excavations, random acts of mayhem, some kind of carnival people were referring to as “The Doo-Dah Parade”…. shall I go on? There was so much dust rising it was kind of hard to tell what this strange ritual entailed, but it appeared as if there were three… perhaps four men on stilts. Jugglers, too. So strange was this spectacle, neither the man-sized tuber nor Big Zamboola drew any significant attention when they piled out of our space RV into the middle of the street. If anything, they looked… well… almost normal. So did Lincoln. (Not anti-Lincoln. He just doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.)

There goes the neighborhood. For chrissake — leave town for five minutes and they choke the fucking place with doo-dah parades! And us with an album to finish… and I mean finish … in the next few months. Where’s my blindfold?

Hear that scraping sound? Dragging my ass this morning. Literally. Don’t lo0k at me like that — you know what I’m talking about, that blog look you always give me. I can see you in the back there… don’t try to hide behind the fat guy!

Sorry if I came across a bit touchy just then. This has been a long hard slog, but I have no right to take it out on you — you who have stood with me every league of the way. Damn it, I’m ungrateful! But isn’t that the way it goes with pop band denizens. Anyways…. our wayward breeze did come along eventually, and pushed us on our way-ward. (Or forward, as it were.) Once we were clear of the strange psycho-miasma surrounding the dreaded Sea of the Weekly World News, we were able to navigate using something other than Trevor James’ Orgone Generator (which, with the polarity reversed, acts as a crude bio-plasmic compass. It’s a little hard to explain, actually. Okay… just drop it, all right?)

Right, right — back to my tale of woe and intrigue. We were on the high seas for several days, making fairly good time (as pops used to say), when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spotted the silhouette of a substantial coast line to our port side. Land! But what land was it? Iceland? Greenland? Long Island? It was hard to be sure. We thought it best to send a scouting party in the long boat to check it out before attempting to land. Trouble was… no long boat. (We didn’t even have a short boat.) Matt, John and I began to roll our eyes around the ship’s cabin, searching for a gullible… I mean, workable solution. Which one of our party had the greatest natural buoyancy? The answer came quite quickly…. BIG ZAMBOOLA — a true living, breathing floatation device.

Well, friends… Zamboola went ashore and did the recon, as they say (looking more than a bit like that “Rover” critter from the sixties TV show The Prisoner), quickly determining that we had, indeed, sighted land and that — yes — it was indeed the land of our homestead, the besieged, much maligned Cheney Hammer Mill, which we call home. (Did I say that it is our home? The mill? Okay, then.) Next step: get the ship on dry land. But how to accomplish this? Though it was capable (until recently) of interstellar travel, and has of late been modified to serve as a sea-faring vessel, the imitation J-2 space cruiser has zero capability as an over-land vehicle. We needed some means of locomotion — not wind power, not ion power… something that would give us traction for the long road ahead.

When it came to a vote over who would be elected to drag the ship back to Colombo, Marvin won by three votes. (My vote was on posi-Lincoln, but that was out of bitterness… sheer bitterness.) So forward we went, propelled by the power of Marvin’s ion reactor. Hammer Mill, here we come! Giddyap!