What is this? More bickering? Jesus Christ on a bike. Can’t you guys ever just let it drop? Always putting the boot in, putting the boot in. Leave it, damn you, leave it. Do I have to come back there again? You’re distracting me from my driving!
Oh, it’s you. Honestly… sometimes I feel like the parent of three-year-old quadruplets. (Or is it four-year-old triplets? Same total number of life years, you see.) It’s especially bad when we’re out for a ride in the woody. No, that’s not a euphemism for some kind of warped sexual encounter between bandmates — we really do have a paneled station wagon, an old Ford country squire. Don’t look at me like that. It’s an old junker, okay? I can’t help it if it belches black smoke into an otherwise moderately breathable atmosphere. For chrissake, if you lived with this crew, you’d have to find a way to get them all out of the hammer mill from time to time too. It gets pretty close in there, even with all that space. Mitch and his cigars. Matt and his cooking. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his incessant juggling.
We went out for a brief ride in the ‘wagon just yesterday, and I had to pull over at least a couple of times specifically to speak to Marvin about those bloody pins he keeps tossing in the air. (He had the best juggling coach, too… some guy named Sven. Go figure.) Not a lot of headroom in that car, as you might well imagine — this isn’t some suburban land-yacht or Mercedes SUV, friends. Anyway, it was my turn to drive and by virtue of our friend sFshzenKlyrn’s generous holiday gift (a small poke of Zenite snuff), the vehicle somehow ended up in a roadside drainage ditch. I’ve been in a number of crashes in my time; most of them involving space vehicles (or at least one space vehicle and a car of some sort), but this was among the more embarrassing incidents of its kind. For one thing, it transpired within eyeshot of the freaking mill. My comrades elected to walk the rest of the way home, singing the ridiculous round with which they had been bludgeoning me while we were still on the road. That left me to beg assistance from a passing donkey cart. I think you can imagine the ride home, station wagon in tow. Not a pretty sight.
When did it become my responsibility to entertain the troops? I’ve been elected by default, quite frankly. Mitch Macaphee may be able to 
pilot a spacecraft, but he’s no taxi driver. And don’t even ask me about the man-sized tuber. Why, his little spindly roots can’t even reach the pedals, poor fucker. Matt and John? They like to hang out the windows with their tongues flapping in the breeze. I suppose the most likely candidate for chauffeur would be Marvin, but hell — we get Marvin to do everything. I mean, that robot is entitled to a little down time, even if he is my personal robot assistant. Besides, if you put a robot in the driver’s seat, it’s like riding with Hitler. Don’t ask me why… some truths are imponderable.
With a bullet… literally. Big Green’s acoustic anti-war song Red, Gold, and Green has reached number 250 on Neil Young’s Living With War Today chart — that’s out of about 1,100 songs and without any promotion from yours truly… until now. Get over there and click that mo-fo! (By the way… The President’s Brain is Missing is at #399 and could use a few click, too.)
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murdered by assassins’ bullets or the electorate’s ballots. The first political campaign I ever worked for was George McGovern’s in 1972 — I was 13 — and I didn’t work directly for another candidate until just last fall. Voted for a lot of losers in-between, I might add. So no, I don’t expect miracles when I pull the little levers every November, and I’m seldom disappointed in that expectation. But I will tell you that it gave me tremendous pleasure to watch Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzales sit so uncomfortably before a relatively hostile group of congresspeople, especially after the free ride they’ve gotten over the past six years. You can see reflected in their dour expressions the petulance of their boss, now so obviously irked at the prospect of having to share a portion of the government’s vast power with people who at least mildly disagree with him. There is also that telltale grimace of accountability… something very unfamiliar indeed. Perhaps it’s finally dawning on them that every dog may well have its day.
All right — it’s more than a shame. It’s compounding the crime. We’ve got to save our own people, and there’s only one way to do it: Get out now. But we’ve also got to help the Iraqis overcome the clusterfuck catastrophe we’ve brought upon them. First step is to get our troops off their streets. We are not wanted there, and the longer we stay, the worse it will get. We do need, however, to provide the Iraqis with assistance — a portion of the cash we were going to spend on blowing the place up for the fifth time — so that they can piece their country back together. Yes, there will be continued violence, but that will happen no matter what we do. And sure, Bush and Cheney keep telling us that failure is not an option, but frankly, their credibility is about zero right now, maybe less. Besides, it’s not a question of failure. The Iraq mess was fairly predictable from the beginning. What we’re seeing now is the successful outcome of a lunatic policy, not the failure of some noble effort that never was. Bush, Cheney, and the rest need to be told what to do in Iraq because they’ve thoroughly demonstrated that they can’t find their ample asses with both hands.
Play it again, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Hmmm… doesn’t quite have the right ring to it. Add a bit more ring. Brass ring is okay; gold is even better. That’s right — a GOLDEN RING. Don’t say we’re not worth it.
Yes, yes… we are broke again. Break out the violins. (Hmmm… violins. We could use more violins on that track.) Right, well, you’ve certainly heard me complain about money before. I’d be the first to admit that we have a kind of chronic problem in that area. It’s like that old Italian proverb — money she’s-a hard to hold onto. Okay… that particular proverb is only moments old, in actuality. But it’s true, nonetheless. Sure, we live in an abandoned hammer mill in the middle of nowhere, paying no rent, no property taxes, no utilities, no nothin’. We’re off the grid, man. How do we keep the lights on? Innovation. One week it’s plugging into Marvin’s ion generator. The next week it might be running an extension cord from Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine. What will it be next week? Only next week can say (and it’s not talking).
giving a single thought to what everything costs. Isn’t that what you expect of us? I mean, you don’t want a bunch of bean counters serving up your music, do you? Of course not! You expect us to be clueless about finances; to drink away the profits and smoke away the savings; to burn through the night’s take before the night has even begun. Not only that, but you want us to be lazy, shiftless, self-destructive, and random in every endeavor. And the last thing we want to do is disappoint you.