Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

Usual Rubbish

Hold on.

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Turn the key and …. nuts! Nothing again. Hey, Mitch – you’re a mad scientist. Make yourself useful. Get this freaking car to run, willya?

Oh, hi. Just working through the usual nonsense. Trying to get a car going. Working on a broken amp. Turning all the chairs in the house upside-down. (We do that to discourage visitors from staying too long.) There’s never a lack of useful things to do, and lucky for us we have a lot of help. Mitch Macaphee, for one, can be counted upon to invent some new way of dealing with minor annoyances, like invasive insects or gravity. Ooops, did I say gravity? I wasn’t supposed to mention that one. It’s going to be a surprise. A BIG surprise. HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAA!

Well, THAT took a dark turn. Anyway, aside from Mitch tinkering with … uh … continental drift, we have the able services of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who can, among many other talents, life very heavy things. He picked up a whole desk set the other day … one of those three-pen jobs, all by himself! Tomorrow I’m going to have him replace the Kleenex in all of the dispensers distributed throughout the hammer mill. Yeoman work, to be sure. (I would do it myself, but I am not a Yeoman.)

Uh, Mitch ... Gravity again?I suppose you’re wondering where your podcast is. Well, I was getting to that. THIS IS BIG GREEN has been coming together slowly. We did the voices for the next episode of Ned Trek last week, then we’ll need to do some editing and dubbing, etc. We’re probably looking at another couple of weeks, during which time I will frantically try to dig up some not-too-uninteresting material from our archives. There will likely be a few more Wayback Wednesdays on tap, so stay tuned.

I am sure some of you have already said, “Y’know, if you didn’t waste so much freaking time doing useless shit, you’d have finished the podcast by now.” My response is a simple one: “Freaking” is not a word. It’s a cop-out, my friend. Say what you mean and mean what you say. That’s our motto ’round the mill. Call it a mill motto. Call it anything. I’m getting back to that dumb-ass car.

Usual Rubbish

Toast terrific.

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.

Lincoln, did you steal my toast?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.

Usual Rubbish

Here comes the sun.

My Martin D-1 needs strings again. So what’s new? I always let stringed instruments go to seed – it’s how I roll. That’s why true guitarists hate me. (Dude, you KNOW it’s true.)

I just don’t play the fucker enough, that’s my problem. But then I guess you could say my problem is that I don’t do ANYTHING enough, so it’s just part of a larger problem. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has volunteered to act as my guitar technician. Only trouble is, his inventor – the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee – gave him prehensile claws for hands, so it’s kind of a challenge to restring a guitar in his little tin world. Kind of outside his wheel house. (That’s not a metaphor. He actually does have a wheel house.)

It’s when the sun starts shining and the leaves unfurl in this part of the country that the mind turns more to making music. Maybe that’s someone else’s music, sure, but music nevertheless. You can hear it wafting out of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill on a night like this … me framming on my broken down guitar, Matt hammering on an anvil, Marvin jumping up and down like a chimp, slapping his bongos. I won’t even get into what Anti-Lincoln does to make noise. Let’s say it doesn’t involve the harpsichord, which I think may have been his primary instrument at one time. (We don’t have a harpsichord … hell, not even a harp.)

Bzzt ... Let me tune guitarTrouble is, we spend so much time on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, that practically everything else suffers. The garden has fallen to shit. (Granted, we did plant in the dead of winter. We may be “Big Green” but none of us has enough of a green thumb to grow a freaking rock garden.) Our songwriting is becoming even more bizarre by the day. And what the hell – the harder we work, the longer it takes for us to finish a freaking episode. It’s like we’re running backwards on a train heading in the opposite direction, following a track shaped like a mobius strip. Wrapped in an enigma.

Complain, complain, complain. That’s what blogging is all about, right? Shut up and play your broken guitar!