Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Lock, stock, and barrel.

Is that the time? Right – time to close up for the day. It’s 4:20 in the afternoon and I’ve been slaving away for nearly half an hour. Shut it down.

Woe is he who must labor in vain. I don’t know what that means, but whatever… your friends in Big Green are proprietors for the nonce. That means we have proprietary interests, perhaps for the first time in our lives. And you know what they say… as soon as you get a stake in the world, it’s all over. Kiss your altruism goodbye, my little scaly friend. Forget your deeply held values – this is cash, Jimmy-boy, cold hard cash! To hell with all that other stuff. All we care about is pushing product out the door at a tidy profit.

What products? Hey…. whatever comes flying out of that hole to China. Mitch Macaphee burned a tunnel through the earth so clean, it doesn’t even whistle when it spins (and it should). Now it’s like one of those air-tube delivery systems in an old department store. On the other end, probably just outside the gates of a Foxcon plant, somebody’s dropping consumer items into a hole … and they come flying out of the opening in our forge room floor moments later. It’s a tunnel to the bank, my friend.

Okay, so… on our marketing advisor Noname’s recommendation, we opened a storefront in the Mill that we’re calling, “GREENMART”. People come in with plastic shopping carts they borrow from the supermarket up the street and load up on cheap swag built by slave labor – an all-American pastime if ever there was one. (And there was one.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been working the cash register, so to speak. Actually… there is no cash register. Marvin just does the calculations using his own processor unit, then spits out a receipt. He even takes major credit cards, which is news to me. (If I’d known that during our last tour, I would never have hocked my Bean Boots for that hoagie back on Neptune.)

Yes, I know… this is like selling stuff that fell off the back of a truck. Where’s the outrage? Ask Bob Dole.

Usual Rubbish

Hold it.

There’s a valuable resource for you. And right here under our noses. We’re rich, I tell you, rich. It’s like finding a whole bag full of doubloons. Or perhaps triploons.

What am I talking about? What indeed. I’ll tell you, friend(s), we’ve been squatting in this abandoned hammer mill for more than ten years. You know what squatting that long does to your quadriceps? Seriously, we’ve been occupying the Cheney Hammer Mill before the Occupy movement ever put on its first pair of short pants. Not for any principle, you understand, other than that of having a roof over our heads. A penniless band, Big Green was in those days. Ah, but no more. Fortune has smiled upon us, once again.

So often these things happen by accident. Someone tinkering with something, blowing some time, and next thing you know, whoosh! Well, that’s what happens when you live with a mad scientist, anyway. For weeks, Mitch Macaphee has been tinkering with that orgone generating machine Trevor James Constable left behind some years back. He hooked it into one of his little ion generators and – as I said earlier – WHOOSH! Fortunate that no one was standing in front of the machine’s array at that moment. The thing was pointing down at the floor of the forge room and, well, suddenly there was a clean, round hole in the fire-brick floor.

Now, I tend toward curiosity, I must admit. But I, like you, have seen Crack In The Earth, so there was no way I was going down that hole. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) wasn’t having any of it either. (I’ve been volunteering him for way too many duties just lately.) I tried to get the mansized tuber to check it out, but no luck. Fortunately, there was no need to send anyone down there. They just started popping out of the hole. What did? Boxes. Boxes of goods from China. Valuable goods, just popping out of the hole. We’re rich, I tell you, RICH. Forget everything you know about value-chain management and global enterprise logistics. We’ve got a hole to where stuff is made. People drop the stuff in on the other end, and it comes out here. End of story.

Okay, so… we’re working on the sales component right now. Stay tuned. And while you’re tuned, check out the latest episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, the February edition. Two new songs by Rick Perry. Another extra by us. Corporate underwriting spots tried and botched. Something for everybody. Yeeha.

Usual Rubbish

Last ditch.

This isn’t a pillow, man. This is a freaking anvil. You got this from the forge room, didn’t you? What do you think I am, some kind of machine?

Yeah, I know – I should expect this sort of thing, living in an abandoned hammer mill. Remnants from the forge room, repurposed for bedding materials. Such are the times we live in. Big Green, like many indie bands, lives pretty close to the margin, my friends. We don’t have the resources for all of those extras bands like The Decemberists and Black Flag can afford. God, no… we just make do with what we’ve got. In these hard times, our fans expect this much at least: that we should be every bit as miserable as they are. And friends, we don’t disappoint.

That said, I do wish Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would use a little sense in straightening up my living space. Admittedly, his mind has been elsewhere. I think our new marketing advisor, Noname – a minion from our corporate label Loathsome Prick Records – has been reprogramming him when no one’s looking. Beyond her ken? I don’t think so. Marvin’s not that complicated. He’s running a 486 processor, for chrissake. If he went to Harvard for seven years, he might end up with as much brains as your $10 wristwatch. Even an art history major like Noname can reprogram his ass, no problem.

Right, so… first she got Marvin all ironic. Now she’s working on getting us to do, well, more interesting things. Stuff that will make the news, you know? Like, I don’t know – setting the mill on fire, or drinking to excess and lying in a ditch in the middle of town, or hijacking a weather balloon and dropping tins of condemned sardines on the Washington monument, or…. well, you get the idea. You can see the headlines now: Big Green Makes Last Ditch Effort For Big Time. Or perhaps BAND BETS FARM ON MAJOR MELTDOWN. Or perhaps not. Sometimes I wonder if Noname is really that well checked out on this stuff.

Hey, we just do what we’re told, right? When was that ever the case?