Rubble. Dust rising. The dark silhouette of an ancient structure looms in the background. I can just barely make out its profile… something strangely familiar about it. Deep and foreboding. A frightening presence — home!
Greetings from what might euphemistically be described as “home”. Big Green here, more or less. We have arrived back at the Cheney Hammer Mill after a long, long, loooooonnnggg sojourn in the outer reaches of the galaxy, living the dream (or nightmare, perhaps) of performing for adoring fans (albeit five-legged ones with green antennae and ion-charged grappling hooks for claws). Always falls a bit short for this group, quite frankly… the excitement factor, that is. Sure, everyone thinks it’s “exciting” to be a rock performer and to travel to different planets, make them explode, and all that. Well, when you’ve seen one exploding planet, you’ve seen them all, right? But I digress. (Got to keep talk like that to a minimum — where Big Zamboola comes from, exploding planets are no laughing matter.)
Last you looked, we had somehow talked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into dragging us over land back to our beloved homestead. It doesn’t pride me greatly to say that, yes, he did complete that task — one worthy of John Henry himself. In fact, I’ve been calling him Marvin “John Henry” (my personal robot assistant) for a couple of days now. (Probably won’t stick.) Actually, it wasn’t that bad for our atomic powered automatonic assistant. He just threw it into low gear and tugged us onto the nearest highway (about 40 miles inland, as it happens). We just scraped the rest of the way, sparks a-flying. (Marvin had to stop and take a leak at one point, but otherwise…) Probably made a curious spectacle for our fellow travelers. Reminded me of going “skitching” when we were kids — the renowned winter pass-time of hanging on to the back bumper of a car and dragging along the icy pavement with your boots. Great fun (’til you fell off in front of a logging truck). Don’t try this at home!
Yes, it took a few days, but before any of us were ready, the looming hulk of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill came into view. It was, contrary to our expectations, still standing, but the neighborhood had definitely gone downhill in the past eight weeks or so. Street fires, 
excavations, random acts of mayhem, some kind of carnival people were referring to as “The Doo-Dah Parade”…. shall I go on? There was so much dust rising it was kind of hard to tell what this strange ritual entailed, but it appeared as if there were three… perhaps four men on stilts. Jugglers, too. So strange was this spectacle, neither the man-sized tuber nor Big Zamboola drew any significant attention when they piled out of our space RV into the middle of the street. If anything, they looked… well… almost normal. So did Lincoln. (Not anti-Lincoln. He just doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.)
There goes the neighborhood. For chrissake — leave town for five minutes and they choke the fucking place with doo-dah parades! And us with an album to finish… and I mean finish … in the next few months. Where’s my blindfold?
a small item tucked inside my Gannett daily newspaper. If memory serves, Tel Aviv’s indignant denials were displayed a bit more prominently. Now that no one’s paying attention, it’s okay to admit that you used chemical weapons in violation of international law. First law of modern warfare, I suppose. (It certainly worked for the U.S. in Fallujah, where similar weapons were enthusiastically deployed.) We live in a strange world where war crimes such as these are not taken seriously unless (a) they are committed by our enemies, or (b) they rise to the level of Nazi war atrocities. It apparently raises few eyebrows anymore to drop burning phosphorus on people and generally trash the Geneva Conventions. What next — a reality show?
This last couple of weeks have seen a good many more “unintentional” deaths added to the bill of particulars against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Blair — more civilians blown to bits in Afghanistan, more people caught up in the most recent counterinsurgency sweeps in Baghdad… to say nothing of the 2,800th U.S. soldier to die in Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. All this death and misery provides a morbid backdrop for this year’s political campaigns — few candidates speak directly to the issue that is in the back of everyone’s mind, namely, when and how is this all going to end? The response from the administration is to change their rhetoric so that they will seem more flexible, while denying (quite laughably) that Bush was ever big on the phrase “stay the course”. Fact is, they’re trying to avoid the issue as well, hoping some superficial atmospherics will help grease their way to another slender victory.
Hear that scraping sound? Dragging my ass this morning. Literally. Don’t lo0k at me like that — you know what I’m talking about, that blog look you always give me. I can see you in the back there… don’t try to hide behind the fat guy!
boat to check it out before attempting to land. Trouble was… no long boat. (We didn’t even have a short boat.) Matt, John and I began to roll our eyes around the ship’s cabin, searching for a gullible… I mean, workable solution. Which one of our party had the greatest natural buoyancy? The answer came quite quickly…. BIG ZAMBOOLA — a true living, breathing floatation device.
(Did I say that it is our home? The mill? Okay, then.) Next step: get the ship on dry land. But how to accomplish this? Though it was capable (until recently) of interstellar travel, and has of late been modified to serve as a sea-faring vessel, the imitation J-2 space cruiser has zero capability as an over-land vehicle. We needed some means of locomotion — not wind power, not ion power… something that would give us traction for the long road ahead.