Damn it. Misplaced my breakfast again. Third time this morning. I definitely need more sleep. If anybody trips over some cold toast and a half-empty mug of tea, drop me a line.
We keep odd hours here in the cohort of collectivists known as Big Green. Matt, the naturalist in the group, is up at all hours chasing after critters, feeding them, changing their diapers, keeping them safe from the elements. That’s a slight exaggeration, but only slight – the guy is attempting to single-handedly make up for all of the injustices meted out by god and man. Kind of time-consuming. Me? I am the unnaturalist in the group. When I am outside, I think to myself … “This is too strange for us, Hanar. We are creatures of outer space. We long for the comforting closeness of walls.”
Okay, if I’m paraphrasing classic Star Trek, I must be a little groggy. (Too much grog, perhaps.) I’m up late at night in the lab, sometimes. Did I say lab? I meant studio. Cranking up the keyboard, jamming along with drum loops, listening to old recordings and occasionally committing something to disc. Then I’ll climb the stairs to my bedroom and get halfway through a decent night’s sleep before Mitch Macaphee detonates some weakly controlled “experiment” in his lab (yes, lab), shaking the walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill to their very foundations. We’re not so different, Mitch and me. Profoundly sleep-deprived. Trying to make loud noises using sophisticated instruments. Nearly bringing the house down on our heads.
One of my obsessions of late has been rebuilding our YouTube site. That’s my hobby, if you will, until Matt returns from Peregrine Falcon watch. (To catch up with him, see his Falcon Watch blog.) We don’t have a lot of video to post as of late, but we do have archival material that may be of interest to those who have limped along after Big Green for lo these many years. I will drop a note to all and sundry when I launch the new YouTube channel. There will be a few takes from an old video demo in there, most likely, along with our usual compliment of strange videos.
Okay, down goes the toast. Turn the keys up to eleven. And Mitch is back in the lab, so … boom goes the dynamite.
Just the other day (don’t ask me which day) I stumbled upon some old promo shots of Matt and me back in our Big Green duo days, in the late 80s. (I can tell when it was because I was wearing a sports jacket with the arms rolled up. Hey … it was comfortable, like the fuzzy slippers.) I think it was right after Ned Danison left the group and I moved back to the Utica area. In a couple of shots we were consciously trying to lampoon a Rolling Stone magazine spread about U2’s current album at the time, Joshua Tree. (They had a shot of U2’s drummer looking admiringly at Bono from about five paces away. I think there was a cactus in the photo somewhere.)
Sorry. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m hip deep in finishing the script for our next episode of Ned Trek, as featured on the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. And though I write for a living, writing has always been a teeth-pulling process for me, resulting in sleepless nights, even more sleepless days, and other trepidations too numerous to … to enumerate. Am I making sense? (Possibly not.)