Just settling in here. Man, but it’s good to be back home! If by home, you mean … something a little more congenial than this dank, drippy, drafty old mill.
It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green, being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket… and some oxygen.) It’s a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire… but not TOO close. It’s a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you.
So, yeah, it’s snowing, soon as we get here, and the freaking place is cold as a polar bear’s ass. Basically we’re confining ourselves to indoor activities. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is on the treadmill. Hour after hour he pedals away. What’s the point? Perhaps in his robot mind he is actually going somewhere interesting. (Actually, Matt thinks he’s road testing some new kind of lithium battery.) The Lincolns are catching up on their reading. Carl Sandberg is the selection this week. (Last week, too, as it happens.) And Mitch Macaphee? Off to the lab, creating something that may enable him to (dare I say it?) rule…. the world…! (Or perhaps making a club sandwich. Turns out it’s a very similar process.)
How am I wasting my time? Well… usually it’s my job to waste OTHER people’s time. But this week, bored, I opted to do a little video New Year’s greeting for all you folks out there. Just a brief tour of the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, a little look inside our “creative process” – what it looks like when we’re making the sausage we call “music” – and so on. I have posted same for your edification on our YouTube site and other internet haunts bearing our likenesses. Marvin was of some help, though…. his attention was divided, as per usual.
Man, it’s cold. Maybe I can get Mitch to try some kind of fusion reaction to generate a little heat in here. Not too hot, you understand…. (he measures everything in Kelvin scale).
New Year’s Video:
All right. We’ve been out on tour for a while, but not that bloody long. Certainly not long enough to forget where we came from. And yet here we are, trying to work out which abandoned mill belongs to us (and when I say “belong,” I mean that in the broadest sense imaginable… broad enough to encompass loose associations). Trouble is, so many mills have closed down around here even since our departure some weeks ago that it’s hard to sort it all out. Seems a lot of people are getting into the abandoned mill trade. It’s a buyers’ market, so to speak… or a squatters’ market, actually.
rocks and trees, smashing car windows, and so on. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was called into action – we got him to clasp the anchor in his prehensile claws and wheel it along the ground as smoothly as possible while we, one by one, climbed down to safety. (if you can call life on Earth “safe”).
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?).