What the hell kind of itinerary is this? I have never seen a more incompetent attempt at organizing a freaking interstellar tour. Who put this bullshit together, anyway? Me? Oh … oh dear.
Well, as usual, I spoke too soon. Not the first time. Honestly, I don’t know why my bandmates don’t look over my shoulder when I volunteer to do shit like this. After all, I’m just connecting dots on a map. I’m not a rocket scientist or anything. Sure, I used to launch Estes rockets when I was 10 or 11, but that was kind of a long time ago, and I think technology has moved on a bit since those days of cardboard tubes, butyrate dope, and solid fuel engines. Oh, and ignition wires. Yeah …. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has moved beyond those texts. He of all people should have known that what I was suggesting was just plain impossible.
Let me explain. The third leg of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 brought us to Sirius and then back to the great red spot on Saturn. All well and good, right? Trouble is, our next gig is on Saturday in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which I am now reliably told is nearly 200,000 light years away. Jesus. No wonder it looks small. Even pedal to the metal, it will probably take far longer than the rest of human history for us to get even halfway there.
What’s worse, even if we were to make it the the Cloud by Saturday or several aeons after that, it’s a freaking galaxy that is itself about 7,000 light years wide, so it may take us a while to find exactly where we’re expected to perform. (My contact in the Cloud told me we couldn’t miss it, but then she or he is a transcendental being without form or persistent location in time-space, so everywhere is as close as it needs to be for that fucker.)
I hate to cancel a paid engagement, but unless we find a serious wormhole or radically rewrite the laws of physics in the next day or so, we may have no choice. Besides, that gig on Sirius was a serious pain in the butt, and the big Red Spot isn’t as hot as it used to be back in the day. Hell, the older it gets, the slower it turns, and well … there goes the electricity, my friends. So I’m for packing up and heading home. What about the rest of you? Show of hands? All in favor, say aye! Anyone for an aye? Don’t all speak at once.
Well, the good news for our Interstellar Tour is that we’ve got a whole boatload of possibilities for new venues. NASA just discovered 715 new planets, and scientists say that the law of averages dictates at least 3% of them must have indie music venues. Even better, our sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn, has been to at least half of these newbie planetoids, and has established relationships with the relevant booking agents. He’s out ahead of us now, greasing the wheels a bit. I was hoping he’d take Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with him, but alas … sFshzenKlyrn flies without a spaceship and Marvin gets vertigo easily. Useless bag of bolts.