Okay, I’m going down into the basement. Anyone care to join me? No? Right … off I go, then. If anything dramatic happens while I’m down there, be sure to let me know.
Hello, friend(s) of Big Green. Yes, I’m trying to push the envelope a little bit here. The mail carrier doesn’t like to get to close to this place (in that it’s an abandoned mill), so whenever I mail something, I have to push the envelope down the walk to the curb. Also, we’ve just recorded something like half a dozen songs and someone … someone has to mix them. Even though that means cloistering myself away in a dank and musty basement, churning out the mixes and probably missing that monumental event that’s scheduled for the coming week: namely, the asteroid fly-by or “near miss”.
I put that in scare quotes because, as George Carlin pointed out years ago, what people call a near miss should really be called a near-hit. Semantics aside, I just want to re-emphasize here that THERE’S AN ASTEROID HEADING TOWARDS THE EARTH!!! Am I panicking? Well, I wouldn’t call this state of mind “panic” – it’s not shrill enough. It’s more a kind of agitation … the kind you get when an asteroid grazes your exosphere and puts a scare into your large natural satellite. Am I scared? No more than the man in the moon.
It had occurred to a few of us that we should take the opportunity of this asteroid fly-by to gather some important data on this mysterious visitor from deep space – data that could provide answers to vital questions like, “what color is it?” and “is there a Starbucks there yet?” How would we go about this? Well, we have Marvin (my personal robot assistant). And we have Mitch Macaphee’s model volcano. If we put one in to the other at the right moment, there’s a moderate chance that item A (Marvin) could reach escape velocity and, maybe, navigate his way to the asteroid. And when I say “moderate”, I mean a degree of probability that is, perhaps, calculable if and only if we were willing to make the effort to calculate it. And, well … we’re not. So, Marvin? GET IN THAT VOLCANO!
Okay, so … before you think less of me, remember that Marvin does not need air to survive, nor gravity, nor food or water. He is an automaton. That said, he doesn’t much care for outer space. And in light of the fact that he’s nowhere to be found, he’s not too fond of volcanoes, either.
We’ve just lost Tiny Montgomery again. His carrier just dropped the call. By “carrier,” I mean the phone line tap he rigged up outside of his six-room lean-to in Madagascar. (That’s how he makes all of his calls, apparently.) Tiny’s been helping us pull together our next interstellar tour. He sent through the itinerary by primitive fax, and man… it’s scary as hell. Perhaps it’s a communications issue. You know – hard to get ahold of the better venues, especially when you’re using the modern equivalent of soupcans and string to make your calls. I get that. Tiny has his issues, and we have ours… and mothers, this itinerary is one of ’em.
Yes, we’re still bobbing our way home at sub-standard speed in our partially-disabled rent-a-spacewreck. Our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour now shrinking in the rearview mirror, we have managed to limp as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where we are now dodging larger than average planetoids, popcorn-like fragments, and other assorted celestial debris (including some familiar looking stuff I last saw in the crawlspace above my old garage from seventeen rentals ago…. always wondered what became of that).
Why Hammermill Days? Well, when we started this blog back in 1999, it was actually called “Notes from Sri Lanka” – check our deep archive and you’ll see. We changed it to Hammermill Days a few years ago. As you know, every band needs a back story. You know the deal – raised by wolves, dropped by martians, etc. Frankly, we didn’t have an actual personal history, so we invented one, using the old (and now long-since demolished) Cheney Hammer Mill (in Little Falls, NY) as our mythical home. (Because all bands live together, right?) The rest is obvious (or is that oblivious?).