Hey, what can I tell you? I didn’t intend to piss him off, guys. Not my intention at all. Nor was it my intention to destroy the planet Jupiter. Furthest thing from my mind.
Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a little band meeting. (Bret? Here. Jermaine? Here. Murray? Here.) I’m being raked over the coals by my fellow Big Green members and our various hangers on – Mitch Macaphee (our mad science adviser), Lincoln, anti-Lincoln, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man-sized tuber… even Big Zamboola has chimed in. What’s the “issue”, as they say? Oh, hell… it’s about our perennial sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. He’s been a house guest here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the past week or so. That is to say, he was our guest, up until he departed yesterday in a bit of a Zenite huff. (How do I know? His radioactive vapor trail was tinged orange around the edges. Sure sign.)
So, why the hurried departure? Was he on his way to, I don’t know, Joseph A. Bank to get two free suits after buying one overpriced suit? No, no, nothing like that. It’s down to me, I’m afraid. One of those obscure cultural faux pas you run into when dealing with the denizens of another galaxy – kind of like showing the soles of your feet to an Iraqi. I insulted sFshzenKlyrn in some way, apparently, when I turned down his generous offer of Zenite snuff. I believe that, combined with a hand gesture I made involuntarily, is the equivalent of telling a Zenite that his specific gravity is roughly equivalent to that of Yak dung. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Zenite etiquette, that is considered a particularly grave insult.)
sFshzenKlyrn left in a cloud of radioactive dust. I imagined he was going straight home, using his typical method of traveling between the dimensional layers of the wobbly thing we call reality. Not so. I guess he was a little madder than he looked, because he felt the need to act out his anger. And he did this by driving straight into the planet Jupiter, causing a bit of a disturbance. (I’m told he did that one time before, some few years back. Left a bit of a red spot, as I recall.) What this has meant to the inhabitants of Jupiter I do not know, though I suspect we will hear about it the next time we go on interstellar tour. (Late this summer, I believe. Stay tuned!) It did, however, cause quite a stir back home here, with people calling it a dramatic collision, a missile, an asteroid, and so on.
Nah. Just a pissed off Zenite guitarist, that’s all. And from the ‘splosion he created, I guess his specific gravity must be quite a bit greater than that of Yak dung after all. Whoops! Sorry, sFshzenKlyrn!
Down and down and down we go, round and round and round we go… Ah, I forgot what comes next. Oh yeah – it’s either “ker-splash!” or “crunch!”
Dropping him into the crevice is like dropping a potato down a well. In fact, I don’t know why I’m using a simile – it IS dropping a potato down a well, waiting to hear the splash. I know what you’re thinking, but just remember… the man-sized tuber did nothing but oppress us as mayor of our little town, and so he owes us, in our estimation. (No, I don’t have a mouse in my pocket. I’m referring to the entire Big Green entourage.)
some ‘splainin’ to do, as Tom Coburn said to Justice Sotamayor. Take, for instance, this little number by Matt called “Edward Teller”: