Is that all he’s got? No, wait… there’s another page coming through. Slowly. Somebody got another quarter for the payphone? I don’t want to …. oh, man goddamn!
Oh, hi. Yeah, just grappling with our communications issues, once again. Everything in Big Green’s world is held together with duct tape and baling wire… but then you knew that. What you didn’t know is that we’ve got a mom and pop drugstore up the street from us that has what may be the world’s last coin operated pay phone. That’s right… and it’s bloody handy, now that Verizon has pulled the plug on us. (Damnable message unit charges!) So, yeah… we can call mom, talk to our label, harass our booking agent, order strings, all with a pocket full of change. It’s like freaking magic. Who needs the twenty first century? We’re harnessing the technology of yesteryear. (Or yestercentury.)
Well, as you may remember, our sometimes agent Tiny Montgomery has been trying to fax us from his six-room lean-to in northern Madagascar. We have no fax, ma’am … we are fax-free. But what we do have is a resident mad scientist (Mitch Macaphee) and a rolling pile of spare parts known as Marvin (my personal 
robot assistant). Mitch was able to fashion a primitive fax machine and dial-up modem out of Marvin’s printer module, an operation that, while painless, seems to have left a bit of a deficit in the automaton’s left flank. No matter – with the money we glean from this upcoming tour, we will gladly spring for some new robot stuffing.
That is, if we ever get this tour off the ground. Not going to happen without someone willing to do the hard work of booking the dates, threatening the club owners, and bribing the officials. (Did I say that? Well, someone sure as hell did.) So here I stand, pumping quarters into the maw of an abandoned payphone, its receiver parked on the modem of Mitch’s primitive fax machine. Trouble is, every time more than three inches of page peaks out from the printer, our time runs out and we have to find more change. My guess is that we would probably get Tiny’s tour proposal faster if he folded it into a paper airplane and sailed it across the African mainland towards the Atlantic. But I exaggerate.
I don’t know – I may be the only one of our number who’s truly anxious to get back on the road. Everyone else seems content to hang out in this drugstore, watching bicarbonate of soda fizz. But even that has to get old… eventually.
Oh, hi. Just trying to recall some ancient lyrics from The Band, off the Cahoots album. Not their best work, but still worthy of a listen. I don’t know what brought that to mind aside from this nagging desire to, I don’t know, go out into the park across from my house and take a few swigs of red eye. Why? Just because it’s time for something completely different. Though something completely different might be standing out there with a tray full of cocktail sized vegetable samosas and a big vat of apricot chutney. Hang the whiskey. (Never sat very well with me anyway. That’s more a drummer kind of thing. Fits very nicely just under the drum throne.)
Well, as you might imagine, we’re trying to prepare for the worst here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Hurricane season is just starting, after all, and this has been the worst year for tornadoes for as long as anyone can remember. So we’re getting all of our ducks in a row. (Kind of an ongoing project, as they keep waddling away and we have to keep having to chase them and carry them back.) We found some old tent stakes in the basement just in case anything… needs staking… down. Not sure when that’s likely to come up, but if it does, we’ll be ready. Then, of course, I’ve got some old tarps from my barnstorming days. Yeah, they’re moldy and motheaten, but we’re talking about emergency readiness here, not aesthetics. Get with the program!
Our thought was emergency communications, of course. We’ve got some other measures we can take, too. Like running down the cellar. Sure, that’s where our studio is, but that’s okay – we can combine hiding from the storm with rehearsal. Should be a huge time saver this year, as it thundered and rained every day in May, I think. In fact, flood water was pouring down the basement stairs at a couple of points. I had to ask Marvin to act as a dehumidifier for a few days. (We just stuff him full of cotton wool and reverse the polarity on a couple of his cooling fans, then plant a bucket under him to catch the condensation. How easy is that?)