Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

Yo mama.

Okay, so what are we inventing this week? Ten gallon sippy cups? Anti gravity yo-yos? It’s worth asking.

I hate to be the one always checking up on our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee. For one thing, the hazmat suit doesn’t fit me very well. And I can’t speak very clearly through that portable blast shield, particularly with the welder’s mask on. Suffice to say that you enter his lab at your own risk, so we only do it when absolutely necessary. Very often I will send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in with a note clutched in one of his claws.

Not that Marvin is expendable, you understand. It’s just that he has wheels and can roll backwards. If I sent Anti-Lincoln or the mansized tuber in there, they could end up on melba toast with a caper in their eye. (That’s the caper.)

Fact is, the only reason I’m venturing into Mitch’s wing of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our now-permanent squat house, is that the neighbors have been complaining. You know what I’m hearing about, right? Loud noises in the nights. Mad cackling. Subtle but noticeable shifts in gravitation. Midnight sunshine and black skies at noon. All those little things that tend to put the retired plumber next door in a bad humor. We don’t want to hear from the authorities, of course. We might get the Ammon Bundy treatment, after all. That is … they will ignore us until we pull guns on them more than twice or three times. (Since we’re white, we would probably get the Bundy mulligan, so to speak.)

You know what to do, Marvin.Mitch has been in poor humor since they found his coveted dark planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. He had been clinging to the vain hope that it would remain the undiscovered country for another generation, at least … plenty of time to convert it into a black hole or neutron star. In any case, now he’s drowning his sorrows in experimental work, and it’s got all of us on edge. Hard to work on music when the laws of physics are collapsing all around you. Last Monday morning, for instance, he temporarily suspended the third dimension within the immediate boundaries of our hammer mill. It was like being a ColorForms character for the day – very distressing!

Okay, well … I’m going in there. If you don’t hear from me soon, send Marvin in.

Usual Rubbish

Blame us.

Hmmm. I thought Mitch was looking a little depressed. Are you sure that’s the reason? Wow. Who knew?

Oh, hi. Christ on a bike, sometimes living in this abandoned hammer mill is like working in a clinic for the chronically depressed. What a bunch of moody Melvins! Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been giving us all the silent treatment for about a week. My brother keeps saying he needs a charge-up, but that’s just making apologies for the fucker. (Stop defending him!) Every time there’s a new episode of “Mercy Street”, old Anti-Lincoln goes all pear-shaped, starts drinking and cursing at us like we’re General Grant or General Sherman (with our inimitable bow-ties snapping). Insufferable.

And then there’s Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser. Though to be fair, his depression is usually rooted in mad science. Anyway, his smile turned upside-down earlier this week, and we had to start rooting around for the cause. (You don’t want to allow Mitch’s moods to fester … that’s when he starts getting really creative in the lab.) At first I thought it may have been about that North Korean A-bomb test, but that wasn’t it. Then I saw the story about the astrophysicist who claimed that there was evidence of a massive ninth planet way beyond the orbit of Neptune, and I knew I had found the cause. Busted!

Frankly, Mitch, it looks kind of ominous.Yeah, we’ve known about that planet for years. Mitch discovered it on one of our interstellar tours, and he was so thrilled at his own cleverness that he resolved to keep it secret from humanity until he could find some practical use for it. It is, in scientific terms, a big motherfucker, with enough mass to line up all the other planets in our puny solar system like billiard balls. (I think that played into Mitch’s plan for the dark world beyond Neptune. He dreamed of racking them all up like nineball and running the table, as if he was the Minnesota Fats of interplanetary collision.)

Okay, so now we need a cover story. Here goes: just call the new planet “Blameus”. Legend has it that this dark world is responsible for all of our sorrows. That should focus people’s attention a bit … at least until Mitch can work out his next shot. (Okay, so I’m an enabler. Just a little harmless fun.)

Usual Rubbish

King of the F-ups.

What the hell. Did I get that wrong, too? Jesus Christ on a bike. Just make a freaking list, okay. And no, I’m not making a special effort to be polite today – that’s just the way I talk … every day.

Oh, hello. Didn’t know you were reading what I appear to be typing in my sleep. Yes, just spending a day exploring my human failings, which appear to be depressingly similar to those of other humans. No, I didn’t think of myself as somehow elevated above the herd. It’s just that I can SEE all of them, whereas I can’t see MY ass unless I’m looking in a mirror. And there are no unbroken mirrors in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (That should come as no surprise.)

What was I “effing up”, as they say? Well … a couple of things. Last night I left Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine running at full tilt. Mitch Macaphee says it came up as a blip on his stellar infrarometer, whatever the hell that is. I apparently  created an anomaly in the space-time continuum that nearly achieved the mass displacement value of the planet Neptune. This hole in the fabric of space might have swallowed the Earth whole had it been allowed to continue. (It’s the kind of anomaly that might do its grocery shopping in the Whole Earth Catalog, if you know what I mean.)

Oh, hell. Did I do that?Okay, so THAT disaster was averted. No doubt there will be other threats to mankind caused by carelessness and listlessness, but they won’t happen on my watch. Maybe on Mitch’s watch. (He’s got one hell of a watch.) But then I had to go and make a pancake breakfast for everyone. We were out of baking powder, but I went ahead and made them anyway, just to show all those snobby cooks that I won’t be ruled by protocol. I have my pride, you know. My pride and a bunch of inedible flapjacks.

Well, you know what they say – stick to what you know. If you’re going to fuck something up, it’s best that you put your whole heart and soul into it. It’s like playing that sour note in the middle of a solo. Just hammer that sucker again and again – hit it like you mean it. That’s the stuff. Now … have some pancakes. (No, really … get them out of my sight.)