We’re fresh out of duct tape, man. All gone. And no, I don’t have any large magnets. That wouldn’t work anyway – the floors aren’t made of metal, fool. Geez.
Yeah, I’m getting asked a bunch of dumb-ass questions by my house-mates, bandmates, mill-mates, etc. again. Everybody’s all worked up about our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee and his latest raft of experiments. (Why he keeps them on a raft, I cannot say.) Mitch has been working on selectively negating gravitation, which really should be impossible … I mean, we all wish it was impossible, but apparently it’s not. Naturally, his experimental subject was the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s longtime squathouse, and a place where gravity has always reigned supreme … until now.
Now, most people have a sense of how gravity works, but for those of you unfamiliar with the ways of this mysterious unseen power, here’s a primer: it holds you down. That’s it. When people talk about being held down in life, they’re talking about gravity. When Bruce Springsteen sings “I’m goin’ down, down, down, down,” he’s singing about gravity. When some politician is making a speech, imploring his audience to understand the gravity of a given situation, that politician is … well … you get where I’m going with that. How does it work? That’s complicated. Einstein had his ideas about this. More recent work has detected gravitational waves. My personal view is that there is a enormous horseshoe magnet buried deep in the earth. Next time we do a subterranean tour, I’m going to check that theory out.
Right, so … Mitch Macaphee has his own theories. And his theories usually lead to some nameless device that looks like a ham radio rig from the 1960s, with dials and meters and knobs and blinking lights. It makes a “woo-woo” sound. Sometimes he puts arms and legs on it and calls it Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sometimes he throws a switch and things disappear … or appear. This time around, he adjusted the right combination of buttons, switches, lanyards, etc., to suspend gravity in the hammer mill. An anti-gravity machine, as it were. And that means more than floating hammers, my friends. Suffice to say, I haven’t had to use the stairs all week. If this keeps up, we may be battling obesity before long.
Thing is, most of us are pro-gravity. Hence the search for duct tape, glue, velcro, etc. Or maybe we should just pull the plug on Mitch’s gizmo. Worth a go, right?
Well, I’ve wandered a bit. But the point I’m trying to get to is this: we tend to write happy little songs about big nasty things. This month we appear to be back on the fascist beat again. Next month, who knows? Some other grave subject matter that can be turned into a nursery rhyme or a mambo. That’s the way it works round these parts. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles. (Yes, I’m a Marxist. My favorite is Groucho, but it’s not a strong preference.)
Of course, it’s not like it was in the old days. Way back then, we would write songs the old-fashioned way: by knocking branches against rocks for a few hours, then scratching the changes out in the dirt floor of our primitive caves. A little later on, the trombone was invented, though that was of little utility since none of us actually plays the trombone. (True story: Every time Matt tries to play trombone, he loses a tooth … which is just another way of saying that he only has a limited number of plays in him.) No, it wasn’t until the discovery of the Lowery Organ that we began to move forward expeditiously into an era of serious songwriting. Then we got silly. Super silly.