Tag Archives: morlocks

Usual Rubbish

Down under what?

What the hell is that? Sounds like the howl of the wind in a box canyon. No, wait … I know that sound. I think it’s a distant didgeridoo. That’s it, fellows – we have dug ourselves a tunnel to Australia.

Well, barely a day goes by here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill without some kind of discovery. Last week it was a new source of precious reverb – a commodity rare as hen’s teeth up here in central New York. Now we’re looking at (or staring down into, I should say) a superhighway to down under. And when I say “down under”, I don’t mean merely down underground. Nay, sir … I mean the actual land “Down Under”, meaning the continent of Australia.

What luck, eh? Here I thought this elevator shaft to the center of the Earth would yield only another string of unsuccessful and unsatisfying performances in front of restive gaggles of Morlocks or some other troglodytic denizens of the dark. But now it seems the tunnel is a bit deeper than we thought … like maybe twice as deep. Because you can just about see some light coming though from the other end, and it looks like Aussie sunlight. There’s also a vague scent of flat beer. (Though I think that might be coming from Anti-Lincoln. He’s been hitting the cache lately, and it shows.)

Then came MarvinWe could be wrong, of course. After all, one random strain of didgeridoo music does not a continent make. The only way to be certain is to send a emissary down there. It’s a highly dangerous mission, so there’s no way in hell that’s going to be me. Matt’s no stranger to danger, of course, but only in the context of helping birds, animals, and other living things. (Snowflake!) Then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant). If he’d been around in 1969, NBC might have done a show about him called “Then came Marvin.” He could have played a disillusioned android who starts riding a scooter around Minneapolis, then got canceled after two seasons.

Anywho, if we send Marvin down there and he comes up with an Aussie hat and a kangaroo’s footprint on his brass, we’ll know we hit Aussie paydirt. Sounds like a plan. Ish.

Usual Rubbish

Words worth.

I’m still not sure this is a good idea. The memory of the last time we tried this still haunts me. And that Morlock with the sandals never answers my postcards. And yes, I’ve been dropping them down the hole. Jesus!

Okay, so someone, I won’t say who (Mitch), thought it would be a great idea to do a second subterranean tour, since we now have the equivalent of a superhighway to the chewy nougat center of the Earth. Mitch plans to fashion some kind of urban gondola (very popular in small post-industrial cities these days) that will allow us to treat the mega-hole in our floor like a kind of futuristic cargo elevator. I don’t remember where I heard this, but it seems like this mode of transportation might be problematic, to say the least, particularly when you’re dealing with magma and other natural hazards.

Mitch isn’t worried, of course. In his world, there’s a mad scientific fix for everything. That must be a nice feeling. When stuff goes wrong for the rest of us, we have little to fall back on other than playing instruments and/or writing songs, and maybe playing a few rounds of mumbly peg. (That doesn’t usually help, but it does give us something to strive for, since none of us knows how to play mumbly peg.) Everyone needs some kind of solution. For Marvin (my personal robot assistant), it’s a seven percent solution of machine oil and antifreeze.

Yeah, that looks like a maybe.Why does songwriting help? Don’t know, exactly. Ask Matt – he’s more prolific than me by a mile. As I’ve said before, he comes up with songs while walking the length and breadth of his rural domain, composing them out loud like a latter-day Ewan MacTeagle. Me, I take forever to crank out a few lines. My muse is like an old, rusty typewriter with an even older ribbon, very parsimonious and begrudging of every line. Even so, if we do undertake this underground tour, we should have plenty of material that hasn’t been heard down there before. Nothing the middle-Earth denizens hate more than old, recycled material.

So, yeah, we’ll consider it. Though God only knows why.

Usual Rubbish

Killers from space.

Just an FYI: this post has nothing to do with Killers from Space, either the thing or the movie by the same name. I just used it to draw your attention to an even more immediate problem: Killers from Underground!

Say what you want about Big Green. Sure, we may not be the most successful band around. And true enough, we don’t perform very much … or even at all, really. And it’s fair to say that we spend much of our band time recording stuff in the basement, releasing the resulting tracks buried in incomprehensible podcasts. Further, you wouldn’t be wrong to say that we are gaunt, pigeon-toed freaks with bad builds and gray hair. Right … are you done saying what you want? This is getting depressing.

Oh, yeah – my point is simply that, even though we don’t deliver on a lot of what you might expect from an indie rock band, we try to be useful in little ways. Like giving you pointers on how to handle a disgruntled mad scientist. Or tips on personal robot assistant maintenance. Or best practices with regard to the care and feeding of man-sized tubers. I think you’ll agree that there’s value in that. And you can listen to music while you learn. That’s the kind of service we provide.

You may be on to something, Marvin.Anyway, some of you may recall our Journey to the Center of the Earth a few years back. For highlights, just look back a few years in this very blog. (If you find it buried in the madness, let me know. I can’t freaking find it for the life of me.) Well, we have had indications that the Morlocks are planning some kind of attack. How do we know? For one thing, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an electronic earthquake monitor built into his water works, and it has been turning out some disturbing data … data that suggest a veritable army of Morlocks digging their way to the surface. Either that or someone is fracking in the neighborhood. We’re opting for the far more likely Morlock scenario.

Trouble is, with our luck, they’ll probably break through the earth’s crust right in our courtyard or in the basement of the mill. We’re trying to prepare for that eventuality. Matt’s got a shovel handy. I’m ordering a couple of pizzas. Carrot and stick, friends.