Tag Archives: interstellar tour

Usual Rubbish

Project zero.

Someone’s knocking at the front gate – I can hear them. Anti Lincoln, can you see who it is? No, of course you can’t see them from down here in the basement. I meant go up stairs and take a look. Jesus …. how did you EVER serve as president? (Actually, I think I may now know the answer.)

Well, I spent this week counting the number of balls I’ve dropped since the start of the summer. And I don’t mean ping pong balls. No, I’m talking about projects started and never finished, plans laid but not implemented, sandwiches assembled but not eaten, sentences commenced but never …. what was I saying? Oh yeah. I never finish anything, and this summer is no exception, folks.

First there was the archive project. I will admit, I did get further on this one than any of the others. I’ve resurrected about 200 songs, by my rough count, all recorded in the eighties and early to mid nineties. I have the files … I haven’t done anything with them, but I HAVE them. And possession is nine tenths of the law. It’s also about ten tenths of this project. No, I haven’t abandoned it, but I did need a break from archive land, just as Matt has needed some extra time to go chasing falcons around (see the Utica Peregrine Falcon project site at http://www.big-green.net/falcon).

Think you can shake a tambourine?Then there’s the interstellar tour idea we were kicking around. What happened to that? Well, apparently someone kicked it into next week, figuratively speaking. I’m not ruling it out, but no one aside from Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his inventor, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has any inclination towards doing the fucker. And frankly, neither one of them can play an instrument (though Mitch can use instruments in his work … and Marvin sometimes makes a noise like a fire whistle). That’s not the kind of band I can bring to Neptune! Those crystalline ice creatures would laugh us out of orbit, and THEN where would we be.

Okay, so archives all but abandoned, check. Tour forgotten, check. What’s left? Project zero? Let’s get to work then. But first … answer the freaking door!

Usual Rubbish

Stage fright.

I spy with my little eye … a boiler. Right over there. You can’t see that? It’s as big as a commercial refrigerator, for chrissake! What? Oh, right … I forgot to turn the lights on. Been here too long, man … I know this place like the back of my hand.

Well, here we are in the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, trying to survive the onslaught of another cycle of global warming-fueled temperature extremes. You have to fill you time with something, right? As I mentioned last week, we tossed around the idea of doing another interstellar tour. That is to say, I tossed it to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), he tossed it back, then I tossed it to Antimatter Lincoln, and he dunked it into the ancient cistern. Call me Kreskin, but it seems to me like nobody wants to do this tour thing.

Somehow it’s not a surprise. We haven’t been live on stage in a few years, and at that point, the idea of it starts to seem alien and hostile. Now, as it happens, most of our interstellar audiences are both alien AND hostile, so that’s not such a bad thing. Still, I shudder to think of what might happen if we attempt a show on an outdoor stage on Titan and just freeze up like statues. (Not from fright, you understand – the surface temperature of Titan is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. My point is … aside from being frozen solid, we might be intimidated by the crowd as well.)

Cold as Titan. Now I know what that old saying means.I’m guessing there’s a little pill we can take for stage fright. And there’s probably one we can take for 290 degrees below, too. I’m sure we’re not the only band to grapple with these types of questions. Why, I hear Mumford and Sons spent a week on Neptune waiting for a connecting flight to Proxima Centauri. Nobody said this was going to be easy, people. Look on the bright side. We have Mitch Macaphee, our own in-house mad scientist, who will no doubt contrive (or perhaps borrow from one of his fellow madmen) an appropriately appointed interstellar spacecraft. We’ve got, I don’t know … Marvin, who can … lift very heavy things. We’ve got the mansized tuber who … will not be joining us because he’s taken root in the garden. Okay, scratch that.

Anyhow, the jury’s out on this tour, people. Don’t look at me – tell it to the band. They’ve been in the basement too long.

Usual Rubbish

Tourmageddon.

Idle hands do the devil’s work, right? What about idle minds? Are they commandeered by some other malevolent agency? Inquiring minds want to know.

We appear to have arrived at the doldrums of summer a bit early here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York. Just finishing up a stretch of 90-degree plus days, some of them feeling over 100 degrees with the humidity. When it gets like that, we go subterranean – down into the cavernous basement of the mill, where it’s about 30 degrees cooler and wherein we have built an alternative habitat of sorts. Makeshift furniture made of bits and bobs. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a charging station set up down there. It’s a big, dank, windowless home away from home, perfect for summer staycation.

Okay, I’m exaggerating. It’s anything but perfect. It’s drab as hell and it reeks down here. Even worse, there’s nothing to freaking do except scratch on the walls and think about shit. That’s where the idle minds come in. I don’t remember if it was my idea or someone else’s, but at some point we got to talking about how we haven’t done a tour in years, why that was the case, and where we would go if we decided to go on the road again. Before we knew it, we were scratching out the rough outline of a 40-city tour, using a sharp piece of slate on the cellar wall. I say rough because Anti-Lincoln can’t tell the difference between Jupiter and Saturn – he keeps mixing them up, putting the rings around the wrong one. You may think that’s a detail, but once you’re out in interplanetary space, these details matter.

Io, Lincoln? I don't know ... Okay, so …. here’s the hole we dug ourselves into, at least on paper (or, rather, concrete). Two weeks of engagements in the greater Jovian system – you know, the Great Red Spot, then on to Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (we limit ourselves to the Galilean moons because, well, they’re more well-rounded). As stop-over at Saturn and Titan (always a lively show). Then from there, straight out of the solar system, assuming we can rent a vessel that will handle interstellar travel. Our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee says he knows a guy. We’ll see about that.

I must confess – I’m not sold on this idea, but if it keeps my colleagues content for a couple of weeks, there will be peace in the basement. And when the heat wave breaks, then maybe I can talk them out of another tourmageddon.