There it is again. Hear it? That creaking noise. Yeah, yeah… that one. Is that your astronaut couch or one of the main support beams holding this clunker together. Don’t be in a hurry to answer that.
Oh, hi, Web-based readers, listeners, and curiosity seekers. It’s your old pal Big Green, out here in deep space, fresh off a thrashing series of gigs on Kaztropharius 137b – one of the few places in the known universe where our music gets played, bought, and reviewed – and headed in the general direction of home. Yes, we’ve had it for the time being. After all, the holidays are coming, daylight savings time has ended (spend all that saved-up daylight yet?), and darkness is falling across the northern hemisphere of our tattered planet. It’s at this time of year, more than any other, that the sojourner’s thoughts turn to hearth and home, and certainly we of Big Green are no exceptions. Many’s the time I’ve repaired backstage (what the hell, you can hardly repair onstage – it’s distracting to the audience!) and, in the privacy of my own musings, longed for the dank closeness of my squathouse bedroom back in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Mildew, dear mildew….
Whoops. I apologize. Didn’t mean to get all sentimental on you. Deep space will do that to a man. (Also to a man-sized tuber, as it happens…. could be all about the size, actually.) Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) seems to be feeling the effects after just a few weeks in 
space. The other day I saw him looking at photos of the Coke machine at the corner drug store. (You know, they really hit it off.) And then there’s the holidays or, as we call them, the FREAKING holidays, with which our group has been more than tangentially associated. What the hell, I mean…. how many alt-indie rock bands do you know whose first album was a collection of original songs written around the idea of Christmas? More than one… really? There was that Boston band called “Christmas” back in the 1980s, but that doesn’t count. (Neither does the L.A. bar band called “Big Green”. Coincidence, I tell you!) Anywho, we’ve been putting our best minds on how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the release of our album 2000 Years To Christmas, and thus far… no great ideas. None yet, anyway. Just a recognition that we’re out of money and it’s time to roll back to the mill.
One of the better bad ideas thus far was piped up by the newest member of our contingent, Benjamin Franklin, who has been tagging along since our visit to the bizarrely time-
scrambled planet Earth on the other side of a time-space wormhole (look back a few columns, you’ll see it). “Fynde thee a performance venue, and render your music within!” he said, which, roughly translated, works out to be … book a gig somewhere and play a bunch of music from our now 10-year-old first album. Yeah, not bad for a founding father. Still… that would require some effort on our parts, and looking around this crew cabin, I don’t see a lot of motivation. Matt, you in for this? How about you, Johnny? sFshzenKlyrn – any interest from the man from Zenon? Don’t all speak at once! Sorry, Ben…. this idea is going to take some developing. Let’s just say that it was probably easier to convince the landed gentry in colonial America to revolt against the world’s most powerful empire than it would be to get these fuckers on board with some Christmas gig. I’m just saying.
So maybe that creaking is just my attitude. I hope so – service stations are a little thin on the ground out here in interstellar space.
Long time Republican Congressman John McHugh was tapped by Obama to be Army Secretary, opening up a special election to replace him. Instead of being in essence a regional race for a national office, this became a clusterfuck grudge match between two wings of the Republican Party – the moderate-conservative and the lunatic-conservative. And the actual fighting took place not so much between office holders in the G.O.P., but among retirees, resignees, also-rans, and professional bloviators like Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, George Pataki, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Army, and so on. The G.O.P.’s-nominated candidate was apparently not conservative enough to please these… these…. objects, so they inserted themselves into a district of which they have no knowledge, to which have no connection, and in whose welfare they have no interest, just to score a point for their brand of reactionary politics. They supported the Conservative party nominee, pumped money into the race, and packed the airwaves with their endorsement messages and attack ads. And, well… they lost.
lesser extent, the Democrats poured millions into influencing the outcome of the race for a then-open seat. (We even got a visit by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, endorsing the Republican. Not sure it helped much.) It’s the kind of thing that makes campaign finance reform seem a more urgent matter than either party is willing to admit. In that kind of atmosphere, it takes real effort to discern the actual political positions of the various candidates. Much of the advertising is intended to discourage people from voting, rather than changing their minds. I am a registered Democrat and received stacks of direct mail from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, all of them flailing away at now-Congressman Michael Arcuri, the Democrat, accusing him of pretty much everything short of the Kennedy Assassination. None of it stood up to the most cursory review, but who has time to do research, right? Again… very cynical.
Just found our way over to Kaztropharius 137b in hopes of finding some Big Green fans. (Seems like that quest takes us farther and farther with each passing year.) Not a lot of love to be had in the Great Magellanic Cloud, but the Kaztropharians are reasonably congenial … if a bit super-sized. Jesus christmas, what an enormous crowd of revelers we had that first night! It was like being in the outer-space version of Gulliver’s Travels, not the Lilliput journey but that other one. (No, not the horse people. The other, other one… with the big people.) While giants tend to make me a little nervous, most of my colleagues seemed unperturbed. Mitch Macaphee just worked on various science projects, off in a corner some where. The man-sized tuber practiced his saxophone backstage – a bit distracting, but what the hell. Only Marvin (my personal robot assistant) seemed to share my sense of trepidation, and that may have been due to our failure to bring him in for his scheduled maintenance (you know… refit bushings every 10,000 miles).
anybody? Yeah, well… pretty much just a home crowd. We came in a little hard, with “Primitive” – probably one of the closest things to a thrash tune Matt’s ever written. Brother 
vernacular. Back on our earlier tours, distinguished theorists like the disembodied brain we knew as Dr. Hump used to follow us on our rounds, collect data on our activities, then formulate theories to destroy (or, in their words, “enhance”) entire solar systems. I like to think that we didn’t contribute much to those efforts, but judging by the facial expressions we see at some of our more remote venues, I may… be… mistaken…. (Sure is a lot of space rubble around this planetoid, isn’t there? Damndest thing.) Some may accuse us of having a science-centric worldview, but I disagree. I see it more as an artistic spaceview. (Some see the hole in the donut. I see the donut itself. It’s all about choices.)