Day six. Lifted my head, shook the sand out of my hair, and looked around. Picked up notebook and pencil. Started scratching out some notes. Starfish attacked me from behind — not good. Dropped off to sleep. Day seven…

Hi, kids. Thought I’d treat you to an excerpt from my journal as a castaway on this remote tropical island we’ve been calling Ben-Lostawhile. Kind of has a biblical ring to it, no? (No? Guess not.) I’ve just gotten started on this narrative, and hope to parlay it into some kind of publication — a novel, perhaps. Use a little creative license, what the hell. Just me instead of bunch of re-entry-burned bandmates. Nothing for sustenance but coconuts and coconut milk and… and coconut sorbet. A humble but loveable native islander assistant named Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sounds about right. But I need a more literary sounding name. Like … DeFoe, perhaps. Or Pope. How about DePope? How’s that sound, Marvin?

Aside from the journal, things have been pretty quiet here on Ben-Lostawhile — quiet as a grave since we made landfall last week. Once the fires in and around the ship went out and Matt, John, Mitch Macaphee, Trevor James, the two Lincolns, and I were finished hopping up and down on the sand, clasping our smoking feet recently pan-seared on the super-hot hull of our space vehicle, we took a few moments to inspect the damage, looking for tell-tale signs of irreparability, like… well, like major navigational components missing or large breaches in the hull. We found nothing like that, but as you may remember, our engine was blown to atoms by Posi-Lincoln (whose master’s license was revoked more than a century ago, after he got tanked up and drove the monitor into a giant starfish — a lost chapter of history, to be sure), so we weren’t going anywhere fast. Or slow, for that matter.

Okay, so what did we do next? Ask yourself, “Self? What would you do next?” I think the answer might be… search the island for an affordable dry cleaner — the kind that doesn’t use that deadly chemical stuff. Surprising as this may be to you ultra-urban types, our search turned up nothing. Plantains. We found lots of plantains. But no two-hour shirt services to speak of, at least not within walking distance. Dejected, I sat on an overflowing chest of pirate treasure and tried to work out how we were going to survive on such an un-cosmopolitan outpost in the middle of the … well… I’m not even sure which ocean it is. The only one who seems relatively happy with this miserable exile is the man-sized tuber, who has planted himself a few hundred yards from the beach so that he can hit on this mango tree. (He’s been in space far too long, that boy.)

No, we haven’t given up. (Except for sFshzenKlyrn, who drifted off just moments after our arrival — as only he can do.) Who knows… maybe I can write my way off of this island. Worth a shot. Day seven. Sun burning hot through the palm leaves. A mast appears on the horizon. Nah. Too easy.

Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip; that started in Colombo, aboard this fucking ship. This is (A) 110 pounds of mashed potatoes; (B) George Washington, our first president; (C) the ballad of Big Green; (D) Gilligan.

Well, friends, in the titanic battle between Big Green and gravity, gravity won and won big. Let’s face it, we were fighting over our weight. That mighty magnetism of old mother earth is more than a match for the likes of us. So, as I indicated last week, it was down, down, down, through ever-thickening (and ever-sickening) layers of atmosphere, our skin temperature reaching somewhere around 7,600 degrees Kelvin (no, no, not our skin — the skin of the space ship, damnit!). That was a wee bit exciting, especially when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) started popping diodes left and right. (I was reminded of his “renegade robot from Mars” routine on a previous tour. Those were the days… not!)

Okay, so where was I? Ah, yes. We managed to survive re-entry thanks to the timely intervention of our bandmate John White, who has done enough virtual flying in his time to actually… well… know how to fly a second-hand spacecraft. (Multi-talented fellow.) On the advice of our resident science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, John kept us at the proper attitude for re-entry, then brought us down through the troposphere, dodging obvious atmospheric disturbances (i.e. tropical storms), and pointing us toward what appeared to be open water. (Actually, it was more than mere appearances. It was, in fact, open water… and lots of it.) As the waves got closer and closer, we broke out the floatation devices and prepared for the worst. Didn’t look good at that point, quite honestly. Even the man-sized tuber was breaking out into a cold sweat… and he doesn’t even have pores.

I expect it’s not easy for you to imagine how we worked around this particular crisis. Well, it wasn’t easy for us either. In fact, seconds before impact, we blacked out, all of us, cold as whitefish on a bialy. (Mmmmmmmm. Whitefish.) Where was I? Oh yes — when we came to, we were on the beach of this picturesque made-for-television desert island somewhere in the South Pacific… or North Atlantic… or Western Indian… actually, I’m not entirely sure where we are. We could be on a Hollywood back lot for all I know. Wherever we are, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so long as you have your north and south straightened out and your eyeglasses aren’t on upside-down. (Or perhaps you’re built upside-down. Does your nose run? Do your feet smell?)

Closing a tour with a forty-year-old joke — that’s just sad. But this is what we’ve been reduced to, my friends. At least the fucking phone isn’t ringing every five seconds. (Though, in fact, it very well may be…. I haven’t dug it out of the beach sand yet.)

I spy with my little eye… a planet. See it? Just outside the viewport there? Right — very good. Yes, that’s right… the one that’s getting bigger and bigger with each passing moment. That’s the one. You’re good at this game.

Ah, the distractions we devise to keep our minds off of unpleasant things. Things like uncontrolled descents, fiery crashes, and all that. Yes, friends — that bit of engine trouble I told you about last week was a bit more serious than we’d thought. Now it appears we’ve been issued a one-way ticket to Kerplackistan, if you catch my meaning. And let me tell you something, blog-o-file… it’s downhill all the way. It’s that irresistible force of gravity that’s the problem — no matter where you go in the universe, you’re never quite free of it. Too technical? To simplify matters, I will convey the problem in song, while Marvin (my personal robot assistant) renders its emotional import in a brief interpretive dance:

What goes up
must come down.
Spinning wheels
got to go round
Talk about your troubles
it’s a cryin’ sin
Ride a painted pony
let the spinning wheel spin

Then there’s the bit about having no money and no home, but you already know that part.

How did we arrive at such a revolting predicament? Well, after drifting aimlessly through the asteroid belt, past the object briefly known as the “planet” Ceres, one of our number stumbled upon a novel idea for interplanetary propulsion. No, it wasn’t a member of our scientific contingent — both Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James Constable had long since retired to their cabins with a case of Beefeater’s (each) and a sizeable poke of Zenite snuff (courtesy of sFshzenKlyrn). It was, in fact, the man-sized tuber who first “suggested” (i.e. made his idea known through the art of bad cooking) placing our main PA speakers inside the aft airlock and turning them up to eleven, with sFshzenKlyrn obligingly supplying a mega power chord from his trademark trashed-out telecaster. We just cracked the hatch open, let that bad noise out, and forward we lurched.

When I say “lurch”, I mean just that — an aimless forward motion. (Not a large, Frankenstinian butler working for the Addams family). We were propelled by the sustained power chord out of the asteroid belt and into the gravitational pull of our home planet, known to you terrestrial types as “de oit”. (That’s like “Detroit” without the “tr”.) Well, as many of you already know, the “oit” has a much stronger gravitational field than the asteroid formerly known as “planet” Ceres. And resisting said gravitational pull will take more than a mere power chord or two.

So, let me close with the refrain from another highly apropos little number:

Down and down and down I go!
Round and round and round I go
like a something, something, something….

P. S. — YAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!