Usual Rubbish

Dipper in road.


No, no – that is Antares. This is Betelgeuse. And Kaztrofarius 137b is way over here, not here. Jesus christmas, Mitch! I thought you said you could read maps.

Okay, well… that’s great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE – our current interstellar tour – and we’re freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn’t true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like… not at all.

How lost are we? Hard to tell. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) what he thought, and he just blinked his lights on and off for a minute or two, said nothing. A deathly silence from this man of brass. Not a good sign when you’re lost. Though I looked out the portside window and a few of the constellations looked familiar. A little farther away than I’m used to, but familiar none the less. The big dipper actually looked small, and the little dipper was microscopic. I mentioned that to Lincoln, and he went into this long meditation about the infinitely large intersecting with the infinitely small, and how we may all be mere subatomic particles in the vast body of our universe, etc., etc. Pretty esoteric stuff from a man of the 19th Century, wouldn’t you say? (I think he’s been watching my old Cosmos tapes.)

This is taking a bit longer than we thought, and we may be losing our performance “edge”, if you will (or won’t). As you might expect, it’s a little challenging to rehearse in a zero-gravity environment. Sure, the guitars, keys, and drums float away from time to time. But what’s worse is when you play up tempo stuff – we actually start floating in circles around each other, rotating on multiple axes as if we were mounted on gyroscopes. It’s a little unnerving… except for sFshzenKlyrn, who does that sort of thing all the time, gravity or no. It’s kind of his natural state. So… yeah, we’re getting rusty up here.

Damn! I should ask sFshzenKlyrn where the hell we are? What am I thinking? Have to sign off and suit up (he’s out on the hull smoking a Venusian cigar).

Political Rants

What’s up.

Just a few thoughts prior to the most expensive mid-term elections in U.S. history.

Don’t abstain. You’ve heard this before from wiser people than me. You’ve even heard it from me. In any case, here it is again – don’t stay home on election day. Go out and vote. Vote against the money tide from corporate America. Make their Supreme Court-sanctioned pay-to-play electoral machine useless to them. It only works if we cooperate by failing to oppose their favored candidates – don’t. Get out there and mark those ballots – again, not because that’s the only thing that needs to happen in order to build a better world, but because it’s necessary to keep the media-fueled G.O.P. “tsunami” myth from materializing.

I’m most particularly addressing this message to folks in states like Wisconsin, where you are represented by the finest member of the U.S. Senate. For god’s sake, don’t replace Feingold with some vacuous millionaire CEO. And for those of you in Nevada who, I’m sure, read this column religiously, I encourage you to hold your noses and vote for Harry Reid, rather than allow that bigoted Schlafly clone to become one of the most narrow-minded members of the world’s greatest deliberative body. (Any sane person would vote against her on the basis of her incendiary anti-immigration ads alone.)  

Bloody mess exposed. I’ve sifted through only a tiny corner of the Iraq War documents released by Wikileaks, and I have to say I feel something distantly related to PTSD. Go to the Guardian site and check it out. This trove helps to confirm the oft-criticized claims of the antiwar movement; that the Bush administration was wanton in its disregard for the well-being of Iraqi civilians, that it had an administrative policy of non-intervention when detainees were being tortured, and so on. The torture revelations are not that surprising – this is the kind of approach we traditionally followed with third world allies prior to Bush’s wars: have the CIA guy observe while the El Salvadoran officer applies the thumb screw or the electrodes. In Iraq we had both the new way and the old.

Relax. When the power went off on that nuclear missile base in Wyoming, the major media outlets – including NPR – offered a brief item that amounted to, don’t worry, we never lost the ability to launch them. I slept a whole lot better after hearing that.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Heavy week.


You can’t lift that? Are you sure? Try again. Put your back into it. Some robot assistant you turned out to be! Can’t even lift a freaking bottlecap.

Okay, well, here we are on a virtually invisible “supermass” planet orbiting the red giant Antares. Hate to tell you what the fine is for littering on this rock. Something to do with being staked out while drunken cops take pot shots at you with flame throwers. (I think I’ve got that right.) Thing is, the gravity here is outrageous. I admit we’ve all put on a few (and when I say “all” I mean “me”) since our salad days back in the ’80s, but on Antares 3 we’re all heavyweights. In fact, I weigh about seventeen tons here. (I’m talking metric tons, besides.) And when you drop something, it’s like the sucker is welded to the ground. (Of course, in places, the ground is molten, so it might just BE welded to the ground.)

I shouldn’t blame Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for not being able to lift the bottle cap I just dropped. It’s just all the pressure, man, the pressure. About seven tons per square inch – that kind of pressure. Fortunately our endlessly innovative mad scientist Mitch Macaphee cobbled together some protective blisters for us so that we won’t be crushed to a pulp. Good thing too – there’s an ordinance here against hiring pulp, even if it’s musician pulp. Strict in these parts. Sticklers for the law. Hard as rock, these Antareans. In fact…. they’re made of rock. (And they say we rock.)

Why do we go to such places to perform? Well, I’ve told you, certainly – we crave danger. Did I say “danger”? I meant to say money. It’s really just the cash. Harder than hell to find it on Earth, especially with the quirky songbook we carry about with us. At least out here we sound appropriate. Sure, there are downsides. But isn’t life mostly about turning downsides up? (And upsides down?) And so long as we have the incoherence not to notice how bizarre this all is, we’ll be just fine, thank you, just fine.

Well, I’ve wandered a bit. And on this planet, that’s very taxing. Hardly wait for the next leg – someplace called Kaztrofarius 137b. We’re supposed to catch a shuttle there and leave our lousy ship in long-term parking. Sounds simple enough.

Weird ass music since 1986