No, no – that is Antares. This is Betelgeuse. And Kaztrofarius 137b is way over here, not here. Jesus christmas, Mitch! I thought you said you could read maps.
Okay, well… that’s great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE – our current interstellar tour – and we’re freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn’t true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like… not at all.
How lost are we? Hard to tell. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) what he thought, and he just blinked his lights on and off for a minute or two, said nothing. A deathly silence from this man of brass. Not a good sign when you’re lost. Though I looked out the portside window and a few of the constellations looked familiar. A little farther away than I’m used to, but familiar none the less. The big dipper actually looked small, and the little dipper was microscopic. I mentioned that to Lincoln, and he went into this long meditation about the infinitely large intersecting with the infinitely small, and how we may all be mere subatomic particles in the vast body of our universe, etc., etc. Pretty esoteric stuff from a man of the 19th Century, wouldn’t you say? (I think he’s been watching my old Cosmos tapes.)
This is taking a bit longer than we thought, and we may be losing our performance “edge”, if you will (or won’t). As you might expect, it’s a little challenging to rehearse in a zero-gravity environment. Sure, the guitars, keys, and drums float away from time to time. But what’s worse is when you play up tempo stuff – we actually start floating in circles around each other, rotating on multiple axes as if we were mounted on gyroscopes. It’s a little unnerving… except for sFshzenKlyrn, who does that sort of thing all the time, gravity or no. It’s kind of his natural state. So… yeah, we’re getting rusty up here.
Damn! I should ask sFshzenKlyrn where the hell we are? What am I thinking? Have to sign off and suit up (he’s out on the hull smoking a Venusian cigar).
Okay, well, here we are on a virtually invisible “supermass” planet orbiting the red giant Antares. Hate to tell you what the fine is for littering on this rock. Something to do with being staked out while drunken cops take pot shots at you with flame throwers. (I think I’ve got that right.) Thing is, the gravity here is outrageous. I admit we’ve all put on a few (and when I say “all” I mean “me”) since our salad days back in the ’80s, but on Antares 3 we’re all heavyweights. In fact, I weigh about seventeen tons here. (I’m talking metric tons, besides.) And when you drop something, it’s like the sucker is welded to the ground. (Of course, in places, the ground is molten, so it might just BE welded to the ground.)
Macaphee cobbled together some protective blisters for us so that we won’t be crushed to a pulp. Good thing too – there’s an ordinance here against hiring pulp, even if it’s musician pulp. Strict in these parts. Sticklers for the law. Hard as rock, these Antareans. In fact…. they’re made of rock. (And they say we rock.)
Second leg of our interstellar tour is now underway, and we’ve already broken some records. I mean 45s and LPs – Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, insists on bringing his cache of vintage sides with him everywhere he goes. (He’s an analog kind of guy.) That’s where the dare comes in. You know how these deep space passages can be – lots of time on our hands, watching asteroids go by. A few hours pass in silence and you start looking for something to do. That’s when anti-Lincoln dared 
All those rare sides! Some of them broken to bits, others vaporized, some melted into caramel-like pretzels. A dismal end for Mitch’s record collection, to be sure. He didn’t take it very well. In fact, I think he’s building something special for Anti-Lincoln… something that may be the gift of a lifetime. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a sixth sense about these things, and he’s been avoiding Mitch’s cabin like it’s a fire hole. (For all I know, it may be a fire hole. Fire in the hole!) Crikey… if we make it to Antares in one piece, I will be astounded.