Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

Usual Rubbish

Keeping distance.

2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, closer. A little closer. I said a little! Right, so push the tray this way. That’s good enough. Great, thanks. Now get away from me, you scavenging ghoul!

Oh, hi. I should have thought someone would be reading this blog today, as there is precious little else to do now that we live in plague times. (I’m sure someone out there is doing something more useful, like writing their own latter-day version of the Decameron.) Frankly, this is when it pays to live in a podunk town. New York’s governor has banned events with audiences of 500 people or more. While that’s a huge problem down in Manhattan, that’s like falling off a log up here. Hell, there aren’t even 500 people within five square miles of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Safe as houses! It pays not … to get paid.

Here inside the hammer mill, we’re taking drastic steps to respond to this crisis. Well, maybe “drastic” is too strong a word. Big steps. We’re stepping bigly, particularly when we see someone coming towards us. In other words, we’re practicing social distancing. In a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has determined the precise distance we need to keep from other human beings in order to remain safe from COVID-19. That’s 47.5 inches. Kind of a problem, as our corridors here in the mill are about seventy inches wide. So to remain on the safe side, we’ve adopted a single-user hallway policy for the foreseeable future. That means everyone walking in the same direction, like those mysterious figures in that M.C. Escher drawing, ascending and descending, except all one way.

That's it, guys. Stay in your lane.

Unfortunately for anti-Lincoln, the local St. Patrick’s Day parade has been canceled. That said, I think he fully plans to roll down main street in his log cabin float made entirely from bricks of expired government cheese. He’s agreed to fly the Big Green banner as a way of signalling that he’s not just some random crazy person, but in fact an antimatter ex-president from the nineteenth century representing a bunch of random crazy people. In the meantime, Anti-Lincoln plans to wear his float around the mill as his own version of social distancing. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been recruited to serve as his flag man, so that he doesn’t keep crashing into the hallway walls. Hey, we all cope as best we can.

So no worries, folks – we’re not sick yet. At least not in that respect.

Political Rants

Hand washing.

2000 Years to Christmas

What happened to all the hot water? What the fuck, man. There’s no soap, and the hand towel is missing. This place!

Well, friends, like most of America, all members of the Big Green collective are ready for the onslaught of the dreaded Corona virus. That is to say, we’re as ready as anyone else around these parts. That means a lot of hand washing, and nearly as much hand-wringing. Sometimes it’s possible to combine the two, so long as you use liquid soap. It’s a little hard to wring your hands with gusto when there’s a bar of Ivory in the way. Of course, you can never be too careful. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is obsessively dunking his hands in the sink. And when I say “hands”, I mean rudimentary claws. He’s a robot, you see.

We’re trying not to obsess about this thing. I know that seems unAmerican, but that’s just the Big Green way. That said, I can tell you that anti-Lincoln is deeply depressed by this whole thing – much more so than anyone else in our circle of acquaintance. Is he a high-risk individual? Well … no, not for the virus. It appears that he’s despondent over the drop in the stock market. He was working with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, on some complex variety of derivative, one built on debt value that increases as time moves backwards. (Yes, I know … that sounds impossible, but that’s why he needs Mitch.) Apparently he’s been pouring money into this financial instrument with the intention of making himself rich back in the 1860s. It’s kind of like a money portal, sending gold back in time. Wild!

Got to wash your face AND hands.

Well, that didn’t work out well for anti-Lincoln. That’s what he gets for playing the damned market. He should remember what happened to Lincoln during the panic of 1857. (Indeed he should … because I don’t. At least he was there … in a sense.) To cheer him up, I tried to interest him in the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day parade. My suggestion was that he pull together some kind of parade float. Maybe it could be shaped like a log cabin and made out of discarded government cheese. Or …. maybe something else. Now, he never showed any interest in St. Patrick’s Day, but he has always been fond of drinking, so there’s a chance he’ll drown his sorrow once the Grand Marshall strikes up the band down on main street.

Knock yourself out, anti-Lincoln! Just stay about three feet clear of everyone else in the parade, and you’ll be just fine.

Usual Rubbish

My back pages.

2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmm, let’s see …. here’s a fragment. I think I wrote this in 1987. Or maybe a couple of years before that. Yeah, more like ’85. It’s got tahini stains on it, and I swore off tahini in ’86.

Yes, here we are, doing what upstate New Yorkers typically do during the colder months, when we’re all frozen in place, afraid to leave our homes, waiting for the waxing sun to favor us once again – digging through the archives! Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’ve got lots of room for old cardboard boxes and file folders, hundreds of which have somehow found their way here from wherever we came from previously. I don’t know about you, but all of my possessions follow me around like a lost dog. I just don’t have the heart to turn them away. Poor little motherless stand mixer! You’ll always have a home with me!

Right, well … I don’t want to trouble you with some shabby inventory of my personal possessions. I’m mostly interested in old compositions from the early days of Big Green, when we were all knee-high to a locust. Ah yes, I remember those days well, piled into our spartan garret, scribbling away into repurposed notepads leftover from school, crossing out drafts of expository writing essays and replacing them with angry verse, channeling the angst of a then-young generation choking on its collective anger over … uh … having to do expository writing essays. And a couple of other things. Hey, those were the immediate post-punk years. We all started on Dylan and the Beatles as pre-teens, then moved on to the harder stuff when we were 20. Those 60s hipsters were our gateway drug.

Okay, let's have a look, then.

So, what are we finding? Old songs, pieces of songs, idea tapes, etc. I’m guessing there’s an album in this somewhere, though it’s going to look a lot like that Mousetrap board game by the time it’s finished. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to help me evaluate what to do with all of this old material. That’s a fairly simple process. I find some lyrics, I insert them into Marvin’s scanner, and the music goes round and round, whoa, whoa, whoa, and it comes out as a series of numbers. I then look up the numbers on the decoder ring Mitch Macaphee built for me (coincidentally, it looks just like the ones I used to get in my Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes) which renders a “yes” or a “no”. If it’s yes, then we consider turning it into something. If it’s no, well, into the bin it goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of nos, frankly. Either there’s something wrong with this ring, or I really sucked my way through the eighties. It’s one of the other, folks.