Got a bead on it yet, Trevor James? Try 16 degrees azimuth something-the-fuck… you know what I’m trying to say. Ready? Steady…. Fire rockets! No rockets? Well, then, let’s just settle for etheric energy waves.
Hello again. Yes, who would’ve thought it would come to this? Big Green fighting for the very ground we stand on. (We’re standing our ground!) That’s right – Big Green, the pacifist band; least rowdy motherfuckers on this rowdy motherfucking street we call music. Us… fighting over a broken down mill that isn’t even ours. Oh, the shame of it all. (Somebody hand me a bar rag – there’s a good chap.) But you know what they say – possession is nine-tenths of the law. (That’s why exorcists do such a cracking good business ’round these parts.) What’s that? No, we don’t count the Cheney Hammer Mill amongst our possessions, strictly speaking, in as much as we don’t “own” it. (Like that guy said on Kung Fu – “You can smell hell, but you don’t own it.”) However, you’re forgetting that remaining tenth of the law that isn’t possession: murder. (Or, as they say in Brooklyn, moy-duh.)
Well… not moy-duh, er, murder, exactly. Repulsion is more the word. Let me back up a bit. As you may recall (by simply scrolling down a little further on this page), some strange other-worldly aliens landed in our courtyard last week. We began to get the distinct impression that they were 
planning to stay a while when they somehow generated a rich carpet of suburban lawn in the area immediately surrounding their vessel. Now, we’re not fond of grass, okay? Marvin (my personal robot assistant) particularly loathes the stuff, and he’s not alone. (I think it’s the sound of lawnmowers and sprinklers – reminds him of the primordial shop floor from which his ancestors emerged, their brass knuckles scraping the cobblestones as they slouched toward the homes of their new owners. Just a guess.) I’ll tell you, these fuckers must be from a whole planet of lawn freaks – they never stop working on that thing.
Funny thing is, we haven’t actually seen the space people. I mean, they fire up their robo mowers, roll out their crawling sprinklers, occasionally call in the Chem Lawn 
guys to putrefy the neighborhood with their toxins… but they never actually come out of that ship. Even so, it was clear that they had to go before our entire squat house was converted to suburban domestic sprawl – a nightmare in ubiquitous green. Matt, resourceful fellow that he is, thought to ask Trevor James Constable to train his patented orgone generating device on their craft. Matt’s theory (totally unencumbered by scientific validity) was that the etheric energy would excite the atoms of the unearthly metal in their hull, generating an uncomfortable temperature within. (Hot? Cold? Not sure about that part….) That was good enough for Trevor James (or T.J., as I call him) – he duly positioned the array and flipped the “on” switch.
What happened then? Well…. not much. At least, not yet. We’re patient over here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. What the hell – it might have taken them decades to make the trip from their home planet, for all we know. This could take time. Hey, T.J. – can’t you crank that thing up a bit? Mister Chem-Lawn’s coming up the street again…
God be praised! What are we to make of this great triumph? That the incalculable suffering of the past four years has somehow been worth it now that McCain and some other bonehead politicians can go shopping in downtown Baghdad under heavy guard? Not sure, but I think they could have done that more easily before they started this stupid war. (One can only hope they’re not planning any shopping trips to Tehran in the near future.) It’s obvious that McCain is playing to the idiot Republican base – those folks that would support Bush if he knifed their grandchildren in front of them. And the administration, desperate for any sign of success in Iraq, is more than glad to glom onto the senator’s grandstanding.
Perhaps there’s an opportunity for the anti-war movement in all of this happy talk. What the hell – if it’s going so well over there, why don’t we leave? Let’s call their bluff. Baghdad is safe? Fine! Everybody go home. That’s what a majority of Americans and a supermajority of Iraqis want, right? There’s one way to make everybody happy. Of course, that would bring us down to the core issue of this whole bloody enterprise – our government doesn’t want to leave Iraq. They didn’t go through all the trouble of contriving and sustaining this invasion just to be pushed out a measly four years later. For all intents and purposes, America is in Iraq to stay, which means we won’t leave until there is simply no other alternative. I happen to believe only Americans can bring and end to this, but so long as we as a nation behave as though the war doesn’t exist, it will go on and on and on. 
What the….? Marvin (my personal robot assistant), is that you? No, wait… you’re over there. Well then, what the fuck is causing that glow if not your power-on indicator? Why it’s… well… unearthly.
(*whew*) Are you sitting down? Okay, good. Clearly, someone needed to see what was up outside. And just as clearly, that wasn’t going to be me. Or Matt. Now John, maybe, but he was otherwise occupied, so really… not him either. My vote was for Marvin to do the recon, which of course he more or less willingly acceded to, being a soulless machine with no overriding inclination towards self-preservation. Yes, he did need a brisk push out the door, but I attribute that to my laziness about oiling his foot-casters. (The yodeling and frantic arm waving might have been the result of some kind of computer error – I’m having Mitch Macaphee look into that now.) In any case, the intrepid Marvin cantered out into the cobbled courtyard, while we watched on his chest-mounted Web cam. (The view was momentarily obscured by one of his robotic fingers… I think it was the middle one… but pretty soon we had a look at what was happening.)
with windows on the upper flank. Stranger still was the racket it was emitting – sounded like a lawn mower more than anything. We tried to get Marvin to circle around, but there appeared to be something wrong with his audio receiver – he turned on his heel and sprung through one of the mill’s cellar windows. (Definitely a software glitch – gotta be a patch available online somewhere….) Well, it took about an hour and a half to convince him, but we eventually got Big Zamboola to float himself up above the mill and get some pictures. And what we saw… astounded us. (Well… me, anyway. I admit, I’m easily astounded.)