Did you hear that? Hmmmm…. no, neither did I, I guess. How about that? You too? No. No, I didn’t either. Okay, nevermind.
See, here’s the problem with trying something new – you just don’t know how the hell to do it. I keep telling my colleagues this all of the time, but do they listen? No. Oh no, Joe, they tell me, I know just what I’m doing. And besides, bungee jumping off the Eiger doesn’t seem all that challenging to me, at least from the comfort of my easy chair. You try to help a brother out, and that’s what you get – a load of attitude, special delivery. I am depressed.
I might have mentioned last week how, out of desperation, various members of the greater Big Green cohort have been ranging around this backwater town, looking for means of gainful employment, no matter how demeaning. Well, as you might expect, WAL*MART and Home Depot were not hiring our kind, so we’ve been forced to apply some creative thought to the problem. As it happens, some of us tend to be a bit overly creative. And so we encounter what might be described as distortions of normal reality, in which familiar actors become involved in highly unfamiliar undertakings. And, well, yes… I am talking about Marvin (my personal robot assistant); official bomb-sniffing robot of the Little Falls 
constabulary. Such an honor. NOT!
I don’t know why Mitch Macaphee programmed cluelessness into Marvin. Seems to me he could have done just as well without it. In any case, he made the simple calculation that a bomb-sniffing robot would have very little to do here in sleepy upstate New York. Under normal circumstances, that might be so. But we are at WAR, as you know, and any resources our local police organizations can bring to bear in support of that fight may be deployed without warning. That’s where Marvin comes in. We have a Homeland Security training center around here someplace, and they’ve roped Marvin into live-fire drills, climbing over concrete walls and pulling ticking bombs out of baby carriages. Not at all what he was expecting.
Hey, I warned him. What else can a mentor do? We try to direct our charges, but…. they have minds of their own. (Or at least half-minds of their own.)
Have to resort to non-banjo alternatives, I guess. That’s the way things go here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. You got complaints? Stand in line for the pluck string instrument. You may call it annoying mountain music. We call it aural psychotherapy. (Of course, when Marvin’s doing it, I don’t know quite what to call it. ) Be that as it may, you need some kind of relief in these troubled times, when money is as rare as …. well … rare earths. We’ve got lots of common earths. My point is… we’re freaking broke again. Join the select club of 90% of Americans, eh? Busted!
turnip truck. (Not to mention the offense that enterprise gave to our companion, the man-sized tuber.)
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.
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.