Tag Archives: lincoln

Usual Rubbish

What’s next.

How about a bicycle tour around Scandinavia? They don’t have any big hills there, do they? Oh. Okay, well … how about Holland? Right. Too many stoned drivers. So I guess, by your logic, Colorado is the worst of all possible worlds for bike tours.

Big GreenYeah, well … Lincoln didn’t think that last comment was too funny, and apparently now he’s determined to jump back into the past, where (arguably) he belongs … even though in much of the past, he’s dead. So I guess he’s saying he’d rather be dead than spend another summer with Big Green. That’s just plain sad, you know? I’m sure plenty of less revered ex presidents would be more than glad to spend the summer with us, rather than in some poorly defined version of America’s past. But Lincoln does not count himself among that number.

So, it looks like pretty soon we’ll be going down to the cobweb-choked basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and dusting off Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device – the only piece of technological instrumentation capable of putting Lincoln back where he belongs. I’m a little nervous about doing this in Mitch Macaphee’s absence. He is, after all, our mad science advisor, and I hesitate to engage in the fraught discipline of mad science without his counsel. But … my president has called upon me, and I must respond.

Send me back four score and seventy yearsHave you stopped laughing yet? Good. I’ll continue.

Part of the issue here is that we’re just not sure what to do with ourselves, man. What the hell is next for Big Green? The bike tour idea was suggested by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), so that means we arrived at it almost entirely at random. I’m not sure who told us this (perhaps our first manager, way back in the day), but I’m pretty sure we’ve established that it’s not a good idea to make major life decisions through any process that resembles random selection. We need to put on our thinking caps.

Caps on? Great. Think, Big Green, think. Get me your ideas by midnight Thursday. Or not. I’m easy.

Usual Rubbish

Yonder bound.

Marvin (my personal robot assistant), didn’t I tell you to pick those Legos up about three hours ago? Can’t you do anything without being told twelve times?! Are you even awake?! MARVIN!!

I'm your Lincoln ConciergeChrist on a bike. Sloth has reached a new level of intensity here at the hammer mill, and it’s no surprise. We have been cooped up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of three years (the worse part, too … I remember those awful days…), not a hand’s turn of work. Sure, we produced and released an album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and have dutifully (and pitilessly) posted our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN every month, on the month (or quite nearly). But gainful employ? Naught, my friend. Goose egg.

Arguably, it goes against human nature (and personal robot assistant nature, presumably) to be idle for so long. I’ve seen signs of restlessness, to be sure. Not from anti-Lincoln, of course, who spends most of his day in the forge room, swilling cheap rum that he got from god-knows-where. But his positive doppelganger, Lincoln, tries to keep busy in imaginative though annoying ways. (I keep telling him, I can’t afford a big fat car – it’s just not in the game plan. But just try telling Lincoln not to sell you something.)

Big GreenMarvin is always coming up with pass-times, as well as hair-brained schemes for making money. But I think he’s hit a wall, and it’s understandable. Even his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, has wandered off to richer pastures, taking advantage of some time-share property he invented in Madagascar. (Something about hanging gardens … though I’m not sure about what stage of insanity he was in when he told me about it.) So Marvin sits and rusts a little every day, his battery running down. He needs a change of scene, and so do the rest of us.

That’s why I have started making inquiries about doing an interplanetary tour to support extraterrestrial sales of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. (Spoiler alert: Terrestrial sales have been abysmal.) Stay tuned for details. Big Green out.

Usual Rubbish

Roll with it.

Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close … too close.

Another day at the Hammer Mill
Another day at the Hammer Mill

Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won’t go!) We’re just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you’ll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths … even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It’s brutal out there!

Okay, so we’re thin skinned. That doesn’t stop us putting shit out there, friends. That’s because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example – perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week as he decided to attend the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX, along with all of the living ex-presidents and his evil doppelganger, anti-Lincoln. And the current president, btw). Talk about motivation! And who can forget Mitch Macaphee, mad scientist extraordinaire, inventor of Marvin, promoter of the interstellar space-time warp, and collector of dark matter, that mysterious substance that comprises most of what we know and hold dear.

No, my friends, we cannot be dissuaded by mere cat calls from beyond the internets. We have an album to finish and a podcast to produce. We are behind schedule on both, and that’s okay, because we are determined to finish. HAARUMPH! Right, then. Sorry. I was listening to a Dale Carnegie tape someone left in the forge room a few decades ago. Sometimes that stuff gets into you head, like the earworm from hell. Anywho, we are basically finished mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – that much is true. We’ve got another episode of Ned Trek in the can. Our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast will be posted by the end of the month. Projects, projects, projects.

I don’t know … maybe it’s time for a tour. Any takers?