Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Hard feelings.

Hey, what can I tell you? I didn’t intend to piss him off, guys. Not my intention at all. Nor was it my intention to destroy the planet Jupiter. Furthest thing from my mind.

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a little band meeting. (Bret? Here. Jermaine? Here. Murray? Here.) I’m being raked over the coals by my fellow Big Green members and our various hangers on – Mitch Macaphee (our mad science adviser), Lincoln, anti-Lincoln, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man-sized tuber… even Big Zamboola has chimed in. What’s the “issue”, as they say? Oh, hell… it’s about our perennial sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. He’s been a house guest here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the past week or so. That is to say, he was our guest, up until he departed yesterday in a bit of a Zenite huff. (How do I know? His radioactive vapor trail was tinged orange around the edges. Sure sign.)

So, why the hurried departure? Was he on his way to, I don’t know, Joseph A. Bank to get two free suits after buying one overpriced suit? No, no, nothing like that. It’s down to me, I’m afraid. One of those obscure cultural faux pas you run into when dealing with the denizens of another galaxy – kind of like showing the soles of your feet to an Iraqi. I insulted sFshzenKlyrn in some way, apparently, when I turned down his generous offer of Zenite snuff. I believe that, combined with a hand gesture I made involuntarily, is the equivalent of telling a Zenite that his specific gravity is roughly equivalent to that of Yak dung.  (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Zenite etiquette, that is considered a particularly grave insult.)

sFshzenKlyrn left in a cloud of radioactive dust. I imagined he was going straight home, using his typical method of traveling between the dimensional layers of the wobbly thing we call reality. Not so. I guess he was a little madder than he looked, because he felt the need to act out his anger. And he did this by driving straight into the planet Jupiter, causing a bit of a disturbance. (I’m told he did that one time before, some few years back. Left a bit of a red spot, as I recall.) What this has meant to the inhabitants of Jupiter I do not know, though I suspect we will hear about it the next time we go on interstellar tour. (Late this summer, I believe. Stay tuned!) It did, however, cause quite a stir back home here, with people calling it a dramatic collision, a missile, an asteroid, and so on.

Nah. Just a pissed off Zenite guitarist, that’s all. And from the ‘splosion he created, I guess his specific gravity must be quite a bit greater than that of Yak dung after all. Whoops! Sorry, sFshzenKlyrn!    

Usual Rubbish

Noise on.

Turn it on, the fan. The BIG fan. Broken? Okay, then turn it on, the smaller fan. No smaller fan? What the hell. Right. Then just turn it on, the radio.

Another hot one here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Global warming at work, no doubt. Whatever the cause, it’s sweltering in here. I spent the morning hanging my head into the primitive air shaft at the center of this unused pile of industrial masonry – it seemed strangely airless. That’s why I’m asking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to break out the fans. It’s times like this when any performer turns to his/her biggest fans. (Boom-crash!) How are ya, how are ya, how are ya! Anybody from Detroit in the audience tonight? Anybody? You in the back? There you are. Gotta’ love the motor city!

Ooops. Heat prostration briefly turned me into a Borscht Belt comedian. (Shecky Green, perhaps.) Must be incoherent thinking that Marvin would help me out, considering how I failed him last week during the inaugural performance of Marvin and the Lawn Robots. What’d I do? Rather ask what I did not do. What I did not do was anything right, that’s what I did … not. I twiddled all the wrong knobs on the board. (At one point, they had no top end at all. Later on, it was “generation reverb” time.) I pointed the lights in the wrong direction. I overloaded the mains so that by the end of the night they sounded like king size kazoos. (Rented, too. Good grief.) And I assigned the door to some straggler who – surprise, surprise – walked off with Marvin’s $57 take for the evening. WHERE DID I GO RIGHT?

I have an excuse, though not a very good one. Just the night before, our beloved sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon sFshzenKlyrn dropped in on us quite unexpectedly with a rather large poke of Zenite snuff. I partook of the, ahem, aid to digestion rather liberally before collapsing into my distressed Army cot sometime before 2:00 a.m. I suppose you could say I was a little worse for wear the following night – not unexpected by any means. Disappointing for the mechanical men, however. Their little shoulders were slumped as they watched me load the van. One of them started rotating at one point, his phony machine guns a-blazing with incandescent rage. Sad scene.

So my calls to Marvin, understandably, go unanswered today. He’ll get over it, I expect. But what of the lawn robots?

Usual Rubbish

Dropping stuff.


Want the mic a little higher? Okay…. that’s the works. Too short still? Let me put it on a milk crate. There – how about now? STILL too short? Ooooooooohhhh!

If it sounds like I’ve been reduced in rank to roadie status, that’s because it’s true. Just call me Spike or Lenny – you know, one of those roadie names. I’ve considered investing in a carton of muscle shirts, but I don’t have any muscles, so… what’s the point, right? (How do I lift those heavy bass cabinets? Tendons only, my friend.) There are worse things to do for a living, only up to now I haven’t had to do any of them, so… this is rock bottom. The things we do for friends! And by “friends” I mean robot friends.

As I mentioned last week, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has mustered a small army of robots to do his bidding. He started with a landscaping enterprise, but found that putting lawn mowers in the hands of automatons is kind of a bad idea. (They tend to be a bit more self-directed than he had anticipated.) So his next venture was an all-robot band, which he calls “Marvin and the Lawn Robots”. I admit, at first I laughed. What a ludicrous idea! Who would want to hear them? That was Monday. By Wednesday they had a gig at one of the local gin mills, taking the door (and perhaps a couple of windows) for their trouble. Again, I laughed! How, I asked (laughing), will you even get your P.A. gear in the freaking door? 

Turns out I’m the “how”. Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t be wasting my time on this shit. Only.. he’s the only robot I’ve ever had, and when those brass eyes start to tear up, I relent. Mind you, I’m the only member of Big Green involved in this enterprise. Matt and John both flat-out refused to carry water for a bunch of mindless robots. None of our other household denizens and assorted hangers on at the Cheney Hammer Mill would agree to lug Marvin’s gear around either (I thought I could at least get the Lincolns interested, but they REFUSED, insisting they had something else going – some kind of debating society, I believe.) As for the man-sized tuber, he’s running the sound board, and… well, those little twig-like arms of his are even less suited to a roady’s tasks than mine.

So here I am, trying to get a mic in front of a 12-foot-tall robot Marvin calls “Tiny” (stage name, I expect). This should be an interesting night.