Give me an A. Okay… how about a lower one. Yeah, that’s good. Now, give me a D. No, no…. that’s an H. There ain’t no H, so try D. That’s more like it.
Oh, hi. Didn’t notice you there on the other side of that flat screen. (Damn, it’s tight in here!) Forgive my inattentiveness – we’re just trying to work on Big Green‘s next release, [INSERT TITLE HERE – FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T POST UNTIL YOU FIX THIS!!]. Quite an innovative title, eh? Took a long time to work it up, but that’s what we’re all about here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – spending inordinately large amounts of time on stuff that should take five minutes. I know what you’re thinking. That’s why we live in a squat house, right? Well, well… it isn’t a squat house. It’s an abandoned squat mill. Just as easy to get these things right, you know. In any case, here we are, down in the dungeon, the musical dungeon, trying to make this thing scream. The drums are all miked up and ready. Matt’s bass is plugged in and buzzing. I’ve replaced the broken keys on my piano (all 47 of them) and sFshzenKlyrn is cranked up to 111. (Yeah, that thing goes up to 111).
And yeah, I did say sFshzenKlyrn. No, he’s not staying at the mill, chez Big Green, as it were. (Or, rather, as it weren’t.) Our ever-reliable, extraterrestrial friend from the planet Zenon is piping in his parts from many, many 
light-years away. How does he do this, you may ask? (And well you may ask.) Well… he uses the Zenite equivalent of broadband. It’s kind of like a beam of high-energy particles that slices through space faster than grease lightning. He just adjusts it to a particular frequency, points it at the Earth (or as many of us call it, the “oyt”), and the sound starts emitting from one of our abandoned speaker cabinets. It’s quite amazing. There is a slight latency problem – he actually has to start playing a note sometime last year in order for it to sync up with our performance. Fortunately, sFshzenKlyrn is a transcendental being of no fixed hairstyle and can slip from one place in time to another. (Yes, but can he go from one time in place to another? Huh? Can he?) So he simply dials himself back several months to the precise interval needed for transmission, and he’s right with us. (Monitoring is a little complicated – I’ll skip that bit.)
Then, of course, there’s the process of arranging our songs. You’ve already heard about how Big Green actually composes music. Arranging is a whole other thing. I call it the music-minus method. We start by giving everybody an instrument. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) gets an acoustic guitar, the man-sized tuber gets a 
trombone, anti-Lincoln gets a pipe organ, and so on. We literally fill the studio with noise, everyone playing at the same time, as many notes as they can squeeze in. Then we start to edit it down. You know – maybe a little less tuba in the chorus… not a constant stream of noise, but just a few notes… perhaps (preferably) none at all. We just keep slashing away at it until it gets close to something listenable. Funny… in the end, we always seem to end up with the three (or four) of us playing the instruments we usually play. So, I guess this whole arranging process is kind of a waste of time. Hmmm…. must re-evaluate. Bear with me, now.
Yeah, well… as we’re mulling that over, you can probably go back to whatever it was you were doing. Check back in a few days to see if we’re still mulling. If we are, kick the mill in the side a couple of times – that should do it.
but this is way beyond what I expected. Now that we’ve all been treated to six straight days of red-faced rage, I have to say – this is just fucking surreal. It’s not surprising that people are pissed off, but to see politicians, pundits, and news correspondents gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at the sky is kind of hilarious. What – they’ve never heard of out-sized executive compensation before? Of top-level managers walking away from failed enterprises with a big bundle of cash? Where have they been for the past 25 years? It’s only been happening my entire adult life, practically. Oh sure, I know – AIG took public funds. But plenty of companies with obscenely over-compensated management teams suck off the public feeding tube. Just look at our defense contractors, for chrissake, or Agri-business, fed fat with subsidy. AIG is a dramatic example of something that’s been common practice for a long time, made possible by the very people who are screaming the loudest.
but that they took the payout to protect the interests – get this – of the American people, who had bailed Goldman out and were, therefore, shareholders of the extremely well-connected investment bank. (Insert laugh track here.) When you view this in the broader context not only of massive bonuses (more than a billion to executives of bailed-out Citibank) and ongoing payouts via the Federal Reserve, but of the stuff that doesn’t get talked about at all, like the missing $50 billion or more in Iraq reconstruction funds (remember the pallets of cash?) and the other assorted wild commitments of public funds initiated by the previous administration, AIG is small potatoes. It also provides a good opportunity for the thieves to yell “thief”, if only for a few days.
Let’s see, what was it? Spring back, fall forward. Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Set the clocks back, kids… it’s really only 11:00 in the morning.
Big Green and our uncommon lifestyle. And before I go on, yes, I did say discarded soap sculptures. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been going through one of his creative phases of late, and has taken to whittling figurines out of bar soap. This is a little inconvenient, as we are going through lean times and we haven’t a bar of soap to spare, quite frankly. It’s also inconvenient because he leaves his discarded shavings and abandoned projects lying around where they end up under foot… like on those bloody brick stairs. (And by “bloody,” I now mean literally.) Damned self-absorbed artists! And Marvin’s still getting spammed – look at this:
These fuckers never give up. Right, now back to my lifestyle point. Hmmm…. What was it again?