Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Usual Rubbish

Planning a tour on the ground floor

Get Music Here

Okay, I really think you have the order of operations wrong. One thing has to come before the other thing, and you’ve got the wrong thing first. Dude, it’s not that hard – why are you blinking those lights so frantically? This isn’t differential calculus … whatever the hell THAT is.

Oh, hey, out there in normal people land. Just having a little conversation here, nothing to get excited about. Just a handful of friends getting together for a quick jawbone. That’s a big motherfucker, man. I’ve seen smaller jawbones on a donkey. Whoa, is that the time? Okay, well … gotta go, guys! Great chewing the fat with you.

Right … now that I’m out of earshot, JEEEsus, what a bunch of asshats. That’s what I get for raising the issue of touring again. Let me ‘splain.

Cart before the horse

You know the old saying: don’t put the cart before the horse. For one thing, the horse might decide to drive away in the cart. And if you’re applying a different meaning to the expression “put X before Y”, you should always prioritize animals over inanimate objects. That’s a no brainer. (Or perhaps a YES brainer. But I digress.)

I guess the point is, I seem to me among a stark minority of members of Big Green’s broader entourage who believe that we should RECORD and RELEASE an album before we go on tour promoting it, not after. Not sure why I feel that way, but I do, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can’t get his little brass head around that idea. I mean, I can understand why antimatter Lincoln would be in favor of the before plan – he’s from that backwards universe where everyone eats corn on the cob vertically rather than horizontally.

I don't know, Abe. That doesn't look right to me.

What’s that you say?

Now, some of you out there may be asking, what album? And yes, I know lately we’ve been doing little more than posting old archival video of us playing random songs. But just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn’t snow in the living room as well. (I’ve got to stop using so many cliches, particularly the ones that don’t make any sense.) The simple fact is, we’ve got some songs … a whole lot of them.

What are we doing with said songs? We’re incubating the fuckers. We’re tossing parts back and forth, writing chord charts, barking into microphones, squinting at pages of poorly recorded verse. We’re pulling things apart and patching them back together with bailing wire and scotch tape. We’re …. killing time, frankly. It’s just fun to play new stuff, even when you’re doing it over the internets.

Why the internets? Matt is sequestered in his naturalist redoubt, watching birds, feeding beavers, and somehow writing scores of new songs. So we use sophisticated web-based technology to do our dirty work. Because that’s how we roll.

Where to begin. So many choices.

Now, if we were to go on tour … AFTER finishing the new album, we could start on that pulsar I talked about last week. Nobody’s played there yet, so we could finally be the first to market with something. (Damn, we suck at capitalism!)

Usual Rubbish

Hello, Captain Neutron – we are receiving you

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Sure, there’s probably a reasonable explanation behind it. Why wouldn’t there be? Lord knows, everything we know is firmly rooted in reality. Except, of course, for our upstairs neighbors. And Mitch Macaphee. Yes, yes … and Anti Lincoln, too, but only when he’s drunk. Which is most of the time.

Just spending a little time as a Big Green family, sitting around the hammer mill, reading the headlines to one another. Now, as you know, we can’t afford a subscription to the real newspaper. That’s way beyond our humble means! Luckily, there are the internets. All you need to do is borrow a little wi-fi, do a search or two, and voila! Instant news. Not terrestrial news, you understand – that would cost money. No, we read news from outer space. It’s fresh, it’s interesting, and there’s always a head-scratcher or two in there.

From a land beyond time

Here’s something, Bob! (Your name is Bob, right? I always assumed that was the case.) A strange radio-emitting neutron star has been discovered in a stellar graveyard. Now, I know what you’re going to say. We shouldn’t be so morbid, reading about stellar graveyards. Why not focus more on what’s happening in stellar nurseries? Hey, you know, we find news wherever we can. If it leads us into stellar graveyards, so be it. Don’t be so judgmental, Bob!

Still, you have to admit that it’s interesting. I mean, what are the chances that another race from a land beyond time would have stumbled on the same invention that Marconi did? Even more intriguing, they appear to be trying to communicate with us, via radio. It seems to me that we should be able to decipher their language relatively easily. Why? If they’re on the surface of a neutron star, whatever they’re saying must be the deep-space equivalent of GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE! We just work backwards from there.

I think it's trying to tell us something, Lincoln.

Strange magnetism

At the same time, scientists are detecting a new type of magnetic wave emitting from the earth’s chewy center. Is this a coincidence? I think not! The coincidence of these two stories on the same week is certainly no coincidence. (Wait, what?) I think it’s only right that we speculate on why this is happening at this particular juncture. To my tiny mind, there is only one possibility …. mother earth is responding to the neutron radio waves with magnetic fields. It’s like neutron man is calling collect, and she’s accepting the charges. Like any good mother would.

Skeptical? Well, there’s really only one way to test this theory. We need to break out Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device. The thing’s been in mothballs since we used it to bail Anti-Lincoln out with those crypto-kidnappers last year. But dramatic rescues are only one of the device’s practical uses. It can core a apple, make mounds of julienne fries, raise pole cats, and interpret interstellar communications, particularly those emanating from invisible flying predators.

Point it to the sky, Mack!

Damn, I wish we were more resourceful. If we had half the moxie of those forties guys that used to sing backup in our Ned Trek songs, we would have solved this mystery by now. As it is, it’s taking most of the week just to drag the Orgone Generating Device up from the cellar. And then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has first dibs on it. (He’s making julienne fries.)

Usual Rubbish

Open the Door, Richard – It’s Mitch!

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I’ve seen that one before. That can be anything, for crying out loud. Just because a rock looks like bigfoot, doesn’t mean that there’s an actual bigfoot. And when you add Mars into the equation, all bets are off. Just call me when you find your missing clue.

Oh … hi, there. We’re just flipping through a few photographs. Typical suburban activity on a Thursday afternoon, am I right? Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that the residents of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill are as prone to random conspiracy theories as the general population. That said, conspiracy theories do have some purchase around the premises – even the ones that are easily debunked.

Vacation photos from the red planet

Take these rover images from Mars (please!). Everyone thinks they see something recognizable in the background. One object looks like a lawn ornament of some kind. Another looks like a still from that bigfoot video from way back. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is convinced that some Mars rock is his long-lost cousin Franklin. Never mind that he doesn’t have any cousins, Franklin looks nothing like that freaking space rock.

When I heard all this crap, I was about to launch into a diatribe about perception and how culturally situated all of these supposed sightings are. Easy mistake to make, right? If you’ve seen a lot of lawn ornaments in your time, then a rock that looks like a lawn ornament is going to ring a bell. Not sure how that explains the bigfoot sightings, unless some of my cohorts have been spending time amongst the local Susquatch population. (Not that such a thing exists …. or DOES it?)

Macaphee’s razor

Then there’s that shot that looks like a doorway on the surface of Mars. Immediately, people started speculating about what or who might live in there. Others suggested that it may be a Martian domicile that was recently abandoned, but I think that’s ludicrous. If something lived there and then decided to go on vacation to, say, Saturn – which is very lovely this time of year – mail would be stacked by the door at least a foot high. (That’s what’s called applying the scientific method.)

That rock looks a hell of a lot like Mitch.

It takes a scientist to bring speculation to a halt. The closest thing we have to that is Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, recently back from his conference in Buenos Aires. Turns out Mitch has a completely logical explanation for the phenomenon of the mysterious doorway on Mars. We showed him the picture, and he turned red as a beet. Apparently, that is the back door to his Martian redoubt – a spare lab on the red planet for when he really doesn’t want to be disturbed. Now that NASA knows where it is, of course, there goes the privacy.

Suggestion box

Right, so now Mitch needs a new redoubt. It needs to be 100% NASA-proof, so nothing on the inner planets. Maybe Uranus or Neptune. If you have any suggestions, please share them. You don’t want to be around Mitch when he’s out of sorts.