It’s awful hard to hide on a ship, m’ladies. Scuttle me britches, sons-of-a-bitches. Raise the yard-arm. Lower the yard-leg. Hoist the mizzen-mast. Mast the hoist-mizzen. Hast the moist hizzen, for shizzle.

Whoops. Didn’t know you were copying all that. Just practicing my ship-board jargon. Getting a little bit rusty, what with having spent the last year on solid ground. My pirate words are getting all tangled up with one another. (Hard enough to understand those scurvy fuckers to begin with without putting their ravings through a scrambler.) We’re getting awfully close to launch time (it’s about noon right now, and I’m getting peckish) … launch time, and if I’m going to be scuffling around in zero gravity environments, I want to talk the talk as well as walk the walk, you follow me? Arrrgghh.

Enough of this gay banter. We are about to embark on a bold new expedition to remote corners of the galaxy. I’m not talking some old Ford Galaxy, either, I’m talking about the big enchilada, the mongo galaxy… what we know as the Milky Way. No, not the candy bar. The real deal. No, not John Kerry. Arrrgghhhh. Bloody brand names! You just can’t get away from them. Try to have a five minute conversation without stumbling upon large swaths of the language they have appropriated to their own dark purposes… just TRY. Okay, I’m a bit on edge – I admit. This trip is looming, and I’m just not ready. Not packed, not rehearsed, no house-sitter. I haven’t even gotten Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to agree to sign an appearance contract so that he can join us on stage without charging extra money later on. (Oh, he learns QUICKLY.)

Actually, speaking of contracts, we’ve gotten some interest from another corporate label. You remember our old label – Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc.? (I think they’ve contracted that to just Hegephonic since our day.) Well, just as we were packing our pipe organ onto the spacecraft, a blank contract came in from a label called Loathsome Prick Records. Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of them before. I think they do a lot of spoken word stuff. (They may be the guys who distribute Bill O’Reilly’s books on tape, but that’s just supposition.) I’m not sure where they found out about Big Green, but what the fuck… they HAVE to be better than Hegemonic (or Hegephonic). Sound like a nice bunch of people, anyway. Think maybe I’ll drop them a note before we blast off. Or maybe I’ll have the Big Zamboola carry it over to them personally. (He can always catch up with us, being a planetoid and all.)

What’s that sound? It’s the low murmur of our stardrive engines revving up. Yeah, I just made that up. I don’t know what propels us from planet to planet – we just press buttons, consult our science advisors, and somehow we get there. What the hell, do I look like someone who knows what he’s doing? Look closer!

Can you talk any faster? Me thinkst not. Even if you could, I can’t type any faster, so it wouldn’t do any good. That’s what I’ve become, after seven years of this. Stenographer to assorted denizens of cyberspace. Can I stand the strain? Well, no.

I’m sitting on the landing gear of our rent-a-spacecraft, killing time as my cohorts continue their preparations for the upcoming Big Green GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE interstellar tour. Yes, we did change the name — thought better of it. I think this is a bit more descriptive than the last one, wouldn’t you agree? There’s a greater urgency, a more definite sense of momentum. Just wait a momentum, please. WATCH THAT CRATE! THOSE COMMEMORATIVE VASES COST A FORTUNE! Okay, sorry. Hard to get good help these days — very hard… especially when you don’t have any money with which to pay them. We just hope to bugger off before they expect compensation. (Hey… I told you the new name was more appropriate.) JUST LET ME KNOW IF YOU NEED A HAND, GUYS!  

As I mentioned last week, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will accompany us this time out, as he has so many times before. This decision was taken by popular demand on the part of Marvin’s enormous cyborg fan base out yonder. (So if you’re listening out there… he’s coming, damn it! Stop e-mailing me, you obsessive cyborgs!) Yes, we will have the full complement on board the imitation J-2 space cruiser; a regular who’s who of Notes From Sri Lanka lore. We got your man sized tuber, your sFshzenKlyrn, your Trevor James Constable (complete with orgone generating device; additional T.J. Constable accessories sold separately), your Mitch Macaphee, your posi Lincoln and anti-Lincoln, and even your Dr. Hump right here. I’ve seen each one of their crates being carried on board whilst I’ve been sitting here, relaxing. (Yes, we’re keeping them all in crates. Why not, eh?)

Who will be keeping an eye on the mill while we’re gone? Well, this is where the clever part comes in. Frankly, I didn’t have the heart to leave tubey or any of the others behind to face the hostility of an entire community, still bent out of shape from the bombing run that Gung-Ho treated them to on our behalf. (Well… they all flatly refused, for one thing, and let’s face it — there are more of them than there are of me.) So we commissioned our scientific cohort Mitch Macaphee to rig up the equivalent of a baby monitor system… our “eye from the sky”, as it were. That’s the more clever half. The slightly less clever half involves cardboard cut-outs of ourselves strategically positioned at all the windows. This will give the mill the appearance of occupancy. What purpose does that serve? Not sure. Fact is, we set them up before really thinking through what the effect of doing so would be. So rather than let all that good work go to waste…. we left them there. And we mounted one outside the front viewing port of our space craft. Call it a hood ornament… or a baby monitor.

Anywho, Mitch set it up so that we can talk back through those monitors and, hopefully, intimidate any intruders into abandoning their nefarious designs. I thought that was a nice touch. And as I sit here watching people work, I can only applaud Mitch’s initiative in devising this “solution”, as they say in the corporate world (where thesauruses are as rare as hen’s teeth).

Hopefully when you hear from me again, it will be from somewhere in outer spaaaaaace. Somewhere with breathable air and a positive gravity. (Hey… we wrote it into the contracts this year, so no surprises, right?)

No baby on that. I’m off pop songs this week, friends. Had it. Mention one and it’s with me all day, like those little transmitters they plant in your head when you’re in the mental institution. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? No? Where did I hear that? Well…. let’s just say a little voice told me.

Okinawa! (Another island entirely.) We are getting closer to the goal of launching our ad hoc interplanetary tour. How much closer? Well… I’ve got a hat, a baseball hat, and it says Big Green Tour ’06 on it. And we’ve got suitcases. Hey, it’s closer than we were LAST week, okay? What am I, a machine? That’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s role, not mine. For those of you who have been wondering (particularly you fans in the greater cyborg community), we have relented on the topic of bringing Marvin along on the tour. We simply can’t do it without him and expect the kinds of flies… um… crowds we’ve been drawing the last few times out. Looks like the task of running interference back on old terra firma will have to fall to someone else. Man sized tuber, perhaps? Hmmmmm….

No, seriously – we have made progress. For one thing, we’ve settled on a name for our tour. It’s going to be called BIG GREEN’S GET OUT OF TOWN FAST! SUMMER TOUR 2006… for obvious reasons. There are also some less than obvious reasons, like our perpetual need for additional cash. Can’t beat the revenue of an interplanetary tour, especially when – like us – you remain unhappily obscure on your home planet. (Just barely moving the needle down here on Earth, friends – I’ll be frank with you. And don’t call me Frank.) And with all these (ahem) unexpected rebuilding costs, damn it, man! That scaffolding is going to be up for months on end. Do you have any idea how much masons charge in our neck of the woods? They have to import all the bricks from Madagascar, for chrissake. We need to make hay, gentlemen, make hay. Cause as we’ve learned from Edward G. Robinson during Israel’s captivity in Egypt… can’t make bricks without straw. Nyeaah. Where’s your Moses now….? 

So there you have it. Don’t delude yourself that we are only in this for the sake of “art”, or that we make music for reasons of “peace” and “love” and “pastrami”. No, look… the utilities don’t take crystal necklaces in lieu of a check every month, no matter how hard we try to polish them up and make them look nice. No dice! Money makes the world go round. (Pop music again!) Anyway, like anyone else who wears pants and eats sandwiches, we gotta have it, and if we can’t find it here on the good oit, we’ve got to go out in space and rake it up. Necessity breeds invention – we have posi-Lincoln inventing the tour for us right now, working the phones, sending interstellar e-mails to the usual venues, mailing out contracts. He’s actually pretty good at it, though he does tend to write everything down on ancient pieces of paper that have already been written on. One of them had his old address on it – guess he lived in Gettysburg once. Who knew? Damn his habits of thrift! Not the most efficient filing system, but hell… it’s better than mine. (Mine was bombed out with the mill, thankfully.)

We’ll be setting dates real soon and making them public, so if you’re planning to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Ursa Major in the next six or seven weeks, leave some space in your calendar. And bring an appetite! Mitch Macaphee plans to handle the catering this time out. He’s supposedly a really solid cook, as most chemists are. (I hear he has over 100 recipes. He calls them “elements.” Funny guy.)