For the last time, Mitch, I said no. No, damn it! Isn’t it cold enough in upstate New York? And you want to go way the hell out there? Forget it!
Ah, right. I’m typing all this as we speak. My apologies – we were just having a band meeting and, well, things were starting to get a little contentious. You see, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee got it into his head that we should book a performance or two on Ultima Thule, that snowman-shaped object in the Kuiper Belt recently photographed by a NASA space probe. “You’d be the first,” he said. “Don’t you want to be first in something?”
You see what we have to put up with around here? I mean. Matt and I were just asking for ideas about new venues, new opportunities to connect with a broader audience … preferably a terrestrial one. That’s when Mitch piped up about the planetoid. Sure, we’ve played planetoids before. But honestly … you want to go someplace warm during the winter months, right? Somehow an open air concert on the shore of a sea of frozen methane is not my idea of a plum gig. In fact, I’m shivering already. (The Cheney Hammer Mill is kind of leaky, as you might expect.)
Now, it’s no secret that we’re not super fond of live performances. Our battles are fought in the laboratory, not the prize ring! I mean … we make music in the studio, for the most part. Hell, it’s easier, and you get do-overs. So the notion of traveling billions of miles in some dodgy rent-a-spacecraft with a mad man at the helm is not particularly appealing. At the very least, we would need to send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do the advance work, which on a gig like Ultima Thule would involve checking the gravitation (too strong, too weak) and doing an atmospheric analysis. I’m guessing the lab work could be finished maybe nine months after his return, which given current technology, might take 40 years.
We could just shoot a line up to the snowman-shaped planetoid and yank it a little closer so that Marvin can do his work. Frankly, he doesn’t need to check its temperature – you just know the sucker is cold, right? It’s shaped like a freaking snowman, for chrissake.
Fast forward to the 2000s. As many will remember, we were living in a five room lean-to in Sri Lanka back in those days. We had scratched together enough filthy lucre to buy some recording equipment, which we used to record our first album, 
So we’re walking into the twentieth year of this phase of Big Green’s existence, and really … not much has changed since 1999 except that our releases aren’t typically on CD anymore and we’re driving smarter cars. Other than that, everything’s about the same around the Hammer Mill. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) still has a lot of his original vacuum tubes, and his various grease fittings haven’t been lubricated since those early days. The mansized tuber is still man-sized …. he hasn’t grown into some kind of gnarly behemoth. And our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is still off his meds … at least the ones his doctor advised him to take so many years ago.