Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Planet pool.


We’re off the charts? Finally! Took long enough. What the hell… this band has been going for 25 years and we… What? Oh. We’re off the star charts. Right.

Well, space travel has just gotten a lot more confusing, people. Much, much more complicated than even a few weeks ago when we left planet Earth to embark on this ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour. It seems that normal (i.e. not mad) scientists back on Earth have discovered the existence of literally millions…. perhaps BILLIONS of Earth-sized planets circling stars throughout our galaxy. As we’re bobbing around out here, trying to find our next destination (Kaztropharius 137b), we’ve been scratching our heads, trying to figure out where all of these freaking planets came from. None of them are on the charts. Lots of them look alike. This is bloody ridiculous.

Okay, so… where do we start? With the mad scientist, of course. Mitch Macaphee knows everything about planets and planetoids, from concocting them to blowing them up (particularly the latter, truth be told). We caught him in the middle of one of his favorite experiments – turning lapis lazuli into marble fudge. (It’s not exactly a value-creation experiment, but hell… I did say he was mad, didn’t I?) The conversation went something like this:

Joe: Hey, Mitch?
Mitch: Can’t you see I’m busy
Matt: Wait…. Is that lapis lazuli?
Joe: Never mind that. Mitch, the planets, Mitch…!
Mitch: Yes, yes? What about them? Yes??
Matt: I didn’t know lapis lazuli is blue. Thought it was …
Joe: There are too many of them! How do we tell them apart?
Mitch: Don’t ask me such foolish questions. When you want to blow them apart, let me know.

As you can tell, we weren’t getting a lot of help from him. A little later on, he sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into my quarters (an empty storage bin, actually) with a recorded message. “Use the laser cannon,” Mitch said on the recording. “If a planet splits straight down the middle, it can’t be Kaztopharius 137b. That thing is made of solid quintilium. The best you can get is a clean hole, no split. Just keep shooting til you find it.”

I’m not sure, but I think Mitch is suggesting we incinerate multiple worlds, and personally, I’m a little uncomfortable with that. (Anti-Lincoln seems kind of keen, though.) Better take tonight’s watch, just to be sure.

Usual Rubbish

Dipper in road.


No, no – that is Antares. This is Betelgeuse. And Kaztrofarius 137b is way over here, not here. Jesus christmas, Mitch! I thought you said you could read maps.

Okay, well… that’s great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE – our current interstellar tour – and we’re freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn’t true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like… not at all.

How lost are we? Hard to tell. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) what he thought, and he just blinked his lights on and off for a minute or two, said nothing. A deathly silence from this man of brass. Not a good sign when you’re lost. Though I looked out the portside window and a few of the constellations looked familiar. A little farther away than I’m used to, but familiar none the less. The big dipper actually looked small, and the little dipper was microscopic. I mentioned that to Lincoln, and he went into this long meditation about the infinitely large intersecting with the infinitely small, and how we may all be mere subatomic particles in the vast body of our universe, etc., etc. Pretty esoteric stuff from a man of the 19th Century, wouldn’t you say? (I think he’s been watching my old Cosmos tapes.)

This is taking a bit longer than we thought, and we may be losing our performance “edge”, if you will (or won’t). As you might expect, it’s a little challenging to rehearse in a zero-gravity environment. Sure, the guitars, keys, and drums float away from time to time. But what’s worse is when you play up tempo stuff – we actually start floating in circles around each other, rotating on multiple axes as if we were mounted on gyroscopes. It’s a little unnerving… except for sFshzenKlyrn, who does that sort of thing all the time, gravity or no. It’s kind of his natural state. So… yeah, we’re getting rusty up here.

Damn! I should ask sFshzenKlyrn where the hell we are? What am I thinking? Have to sign off and suit up (he’s out on the hull smoking a Venusian cigar).

Usual Rubbish

Heavy week.


You can’t lift that? Are you sure? Try again. Put your back into it. Some robot assistant you turned out to be! Can’t even lift a freaking bottlecap.

Okay, well, here we are on a virtually invisible “supermass” planet orbiting the red giant Antares. Hate to tell you what the fine is for littering on this rock. Something to do with being staked out while drunken cops take pot shots at you with flame throwers. (I think I’ve got that right.) Thing is, the gravity here is outrageous. I admit we’ve all put on a few (and when I say “all” I mean “me”) since our salad days back in the ’80s, but on Antares 3 we’re all heavyweights. In fact, I weigh about seventeen tons here. (I’m talking metric tons, besides.) And when you drop something, it’s like the sucker is welded to the ground. (Of course, in places, the ground is molten, so it might just BE welded to the ground.)

I shouldn’t blame Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for not being able to lift the bottle cap I just dropped. It’s just all the pressure, man, the pressure. About seven tons per square inch – that kind of pressure. Fortunately our endlessly innovative mad scientist Mitch Macaphee cobbled together some protective blisters for us so that we won’t be crushed to a pulp. Good thing too – there’s an ordinance here against hiring pulp, even if it’s musician pulp. Strict in these parts. Sticklers for the law. Hard as rock, these Antareans. In fact…. they’re made of rock. (And they say we rock.)

Why do we go to such places to perform? Well, I’ve told you, certainly – we crave danger. Did I say “danger”? I meant to say money. It’s really just the cash. Harder than hell to find it on Earth, especially with the quirky songbook we carry about with us. At least out here we sound appropriate. Sure, there are downsides. But isn’t life mostly about turning downsides up? (And upsides down?) And so long as we have the incoherence not to notice how bizarre this all is, we’ll be just fine, thank you, just fine.

Well, I’ve wandered a bit. And on this planet, that’s very taxing. Hardly wait for the next leg – someplace called Kaztrofarius 137b. We’re supposed to catch a shuttle there and leave our lousy ship in long-term parking. Sounds simple enough.