Yeah, there’s some in here, too. Yep, all over the floor. Jesus Christ on a bike. Where are all the freaking buckets? Why don’t squatters have landlords … with buckets?
Oh, hi… Yes, Big Green has made its triumphant return to Earth from its somewhat less-than-triumphant [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, pulling our rental spacecraft into a low, low … very low parking orbit (approximately 100 feet above the Earth’s surface) over the Cheney Hammer Mill, our abandoned mill of a home in upstate New York. And, as will happen when one leaves one’s home for a stretch of weeks, some maintenance issues have emerged to greet us, providing us with distraction even before we’ve had the chance to remove our tour galoshes. They say all roofs leak, but I doubt they all leak this badly. My converted hammer assembly room suite looks like a freaking swimming pool. I think I see fish.
Right, well… that’s the kind of problem you expect. What I didn’t expect was to have to deal with obstinate bandmates after our return as well as throughout the tour. I’m thinking specifically of … wait for it! … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). You may have thought I was going to say the mansized tuber, but really… he’s no trouble, hanging out in his specially climate-controlled terrarium, working his smartphone with both roots, tweeting pictures of himself in a methane sauna on Neptune. (Very therapeutic for cruciferous beings.) No, no… Marvin gets the prize this week. He has refused to leave the circa 2001: A Space Odyssey rent-a-vessel we took on this latest tear through the solar system. He has developed what Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) calls “Hal 9000 Syndrome”. It’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome, except, well, a lot less congenial.
Okay, so Marvin is refusing to open the pod bay doors. This is not a tragedy. We’ve got too much on the agenda to care, frankly, so he can float up there, 100 feet above our heads, and play Captain Bligh to his brass heart’s content. Matt and I have a Christmas podcast to produce, and time is running thin… I mean, short. (Premise is running thin.) Lord knows we want to have an action packed episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN posted before the fat elf flies – an episode full of new recordings, old yuletide favorites, an outtake from our “classic” (i.e. elderly) album 2000 Years To Christmas, and just the sort of incoherent ramblings you expect from us.
No, no…. you don’t have to thank us. Just send buckets. Lots of buckets.
Yes, I know… we should do the decent, right? Be with our families, etc. Alas, technology makes clueless monkeys of us all. This horrible rust-bucket leftover from some forgotten interplanetary invasion we rented as transport during our interstellar tour has blown yet another gasket or some such thing, per our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. He used a lot of big words, none of which I’d ever heard before (though Matt was familiar with several of them… strange…). The upshot is, we’re chugging along at subnormal speed, making our leisurely way back to Earth from the Kuiper Belt – last stop on the ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour.
Me? I’m telling holiday stories to anyone who will listen. Thing is, no one will listen. Actually, as rock bands go, we’ve got a lot of holiday related material. There’s our first album,