Tag Archives: Marvin

Everything but the bathroom sink

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn it, what’s the temperature out there again? Fifty-seven and windy? Mother of pearl. This is an effing roller coaster, man. Tubey was frozen to the ground last night, now he’s sprouting corn flowers. It’s insane!

Oh … hi, friends. I know you probably don’t think of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) as ground zero in the climate crisis that’s underway. In fact, you probably don’t think of the Cheney Hammer Mill at all, right? That’s a shame, because like Xanadu, the mill doesn’t exist unless you believe in it. (Is that how Xanadu works, or am I thinking of Brigadoon? I can’t keep these mythical paradise worlds straight.)

Weather or not

Got a news flash for you: this place ain’t insulated. The fact is, it barely even has window glass. That’s not our fault, people. Those nasty kids from up the street keep chucking rocks through our windows. Purely coincidentally, it tends to happen when we’re rehearsing. Whatever the cause may be, the weather blows into this place like a landlord on the first of the month.

Of course, it’s even worse than it sounds. The ne’er do wells in our neighborhood have been climbing in through those broken windows and walking out with our stuff. That’s right – shoplifters! Morning Joe warned me about this, and I didn’t listen because, well, I never listen to that ass clown. Of course, last month they took everything but the kitchen sink. This month, it was everything but the bathroom sink. Rapscallions!

Doing something about this shit

Well, we decided we needed more security around this dump, so we deputized Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and commanded him to patrol the area during the wee hours of the morning. That worked great, until it didn’t, and a few mornings ago I woke up to a blank, discolored wall where the bathroom sink used to hang. THEY FINALLY DID IT.

I was ready to read Marvin the riot act, but it seemed strange that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had been unusually quiet on his invention’s failure to prevent burglary. When I dropped by his quarters earlier this week, I discovered why – our missing stuff was stacked in pile in Mitch’s laboratory. Apparently HE had been the rapscallion, the ne’er do well. But why?

Making it (not) rain

Well, it turns out that Mitch has been working on some kind of weather control machine, and he needed all that junk to produce fuel for his smoke-belching behemoth. There he was, shoveling plumbing fixtures, old electronics, and broken furniture into the hatch. Kind of hard to criticize a man when he’s working that hard, right? Who needs a bathroom sink, after all.

Incidentally … Mitch is also causing a lot of the bad weather. That and shoplifting. So I apologize in advance. The weather sucks and it’s all his effing fault.

Another day, another blizzard.

2000 Years to Christmas

I know it’s not the 20th anniversary any more. Stop reminding me! We’re practically at the 23-year mark, for crying out loud. I’m just too damn lazy to change the promo. Mea culpa, okay? MEA CULPA, GODDAMMIT!

Whoops, sorry. Was a bit on edge just then. I was talking to our advertising manager, otherwise known as Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He keeps telling me that I left the 2000 Years To Christmas billboard up too long. The suggestion is ludicrous. Accurate, but ludicrous. I didn’t program him to tell me the truth. (To tell the truth, I actually didn’t program him at all.)

Incremental sales … without the increments

It actually doesn’t much matter whether or not we advertise, frankly. We don’t sell a lot of units, which may be a function of the fact that we don’t put out a lot of new material. I am being generous, of course – we haven’t put out a new album in nine freaking years. Where did that time go? Same place all time goes – into the hole, after the sun. (What does that mean? Well, I had an explanation, but I dropped that into the hole as well.)

Hey, it’s not like you can’t find our albums on the internets. They’re out there. If you look around for 2000 Years To Christmas, you’ll find it in a boatload of places, including many I’ve never heard of, and some destinations I’ve never been to. In fact, that album is on so many outlets, you’d think we would be selling them left and right just by osmosis … or inertia … or some other physical principle. You know what I mean – you toss your album out into the street, and eventually someone will come by and pick it up. (We’re still eagerly awaiting that day.)

With an effing vengeance

It’s not like we couldn’t use a little extra scratch. Winter is descending upon us like a frozen shroud. Or a great frozen wall, dropped by the ice gods. Or some other metaphor I can’t think of because I’m too damn cold. What the hell, do you want me to draw you a picture? There’s white stuff falling from the clouds. It’s snowing in New York. Hal-lah-freaking-loo-yah.

Of course, the mansized tuber is taking necessary precautions, moving in from the courtyard and squeezing into a planter for the duration. Marvin is avoiding the out of doors, which is a little hard to do, as we are officially out of doors. (We broke one last week, and we don’t have any spares.) The rest of us are just huddling around stoves and registers, waiting for it all to be over. So, in other words, a really productive week around the abandoned hammer mill.

Nice place to spend the winter.

Modern insensibilities

One thing I hadn’t counted on with the onset of global warming is the degree to which people’s expectations about winter weather would dramatically change. There’s going to be 10 to 16 inches of new snow on the ground when this week is over, and they talk about it like it’s a natural disaster. Back twenty years ago or so, we used to call that Tuesday. Or Tuesday and Friday.

Hell, we had a method back then for telling how bad the snowstorm is. It was called looking out the window. In other words, if you could look out the window and see something, anything other than white, it wasn’t that bad. The whole mill was like one of those measuring sticks. If the drifts meet the top of the second story windows, well …. it will have snowed a bit.

There’s a little tip to take home with you – no charge.

Getting a good-ISH start on another year

2000 Years to Christmas

Oh, damn, I did it again. Can’t stop writing 2021 when I mean 2022. It’s like I’m trying to go back in time. And why the hell would ANYONE want to go back to 2021? I mean, aside from Mitch Macaphee?

Yeah, Mitch had a pretty good year last year. He made some stuff blow up real good. The rest of us, however … not so much. We made things blow up, but not intentionally. And I have to say, this drafty old abandoned hammer mill is no place to spend January. If we were as rich as … well, as pretty much any other band, we could just pick this place up, put it on a flatbed, and move it someplace warm. But no how, my friends, no freaking how.

Random ways to stay warm

Okay, so when the heat is not so hot, how do you keep from turning into a band-cicle? Well, there are ways. One is to play your damn instruments. That’s what we do typically when the iceman calleth. I start banging on my acoustic guitar, beating the living shit out of it with my pick-less paw, raising callouses and annoying the neighbors with my hollering. (If you want to know what THAT sounds like, give my recent nano concerts a listen. )

Sometimes when it gets particularly frosty, I’ll play covers, like old Neil Young songs or numbers by Elvis Costello, Stones, Jethro Tull, etc. Some of it’s a little hard to render on a solo acoustic guitar, but I don’t let THAT stop me. What I can’t do is a credible version of Matt’s song Why Not Call It George, which we used to do with the full band. Our guitar player Jeremy Shaw used to do a volcanic solo on that song – holy cats! If that doesn’t warm you up, I don’t know what will.

I'm frozen solid

Through the trackless wastes

Now, as everybody knows, January is a very quiet time for bands here in upstate New York. That’s always been the way, since grand-daddy was knee-high to a grasshopper’s grandaddy. Of course, now it’s even worse with COVID, though that doesn’t stop some people from going out and making it rain in a club somewhere. That’s fine, guys … just don’t breathe while you’re there and you’ll be fine.

We of Big Green tend to prefer our solitude. And who the hell needs the money, right? I mean, besides us? We can always ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to manufacture some cash for us. He’s got one of those inkjet printers built into his ass. (Not literally his ass, you understand – just a figure of speech.) And if he just refrains from putting Art Linkletter in the president hole of the bills, someone might actually accept them as legal tender. (Hope so – it’s a long slog to Spring.)

Extraordinary means

Now, one of the benefits of having a mad science advisor is that, when you can’t afford to run the central heat, he or she can come up with some technical solution that will keep you from freezing to death. Yesterday Mitch Macaphee somehow managed to build a fire in the forge room of the mill. Only it wasn’t something impressive, like a flame generated by a concentrated tachyon beam. He literally just pulled beams out of the mill roof and threw them in the fire.

What a freaking luddite! I expect some kind of miracle cure to our hypothermia, not burning the house down one plank at a time!