Tag Archives: Neptune

Usual Rubbish

There it goes.

That was firecrackers, right? It’s getting closer to fourth of July, I guess. Or maybe it’s someone’s birthday. Please tell me that was firecrackers, because if it wasn’t … ugh … there goes the neighborhood.

Yeah, well … we went to bed to the sound of gunfire last night. Some knucklehead pulling a Yosemite Sam imitation right out in front of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Could be they thought the place was empty – it is, after all, abandoned. Anyway, we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out there to have a look. He’s kind of like one of those tactical bomb-sniffing robots, except that he doesn’t have a tactical bone in his body and he hates the smell of explosives.

Anyway, he tottered out there and took a look around, then came back in with a couple of bottle caps. Not 100% sure that was related to what we sent him out there for, but there you have it. We may be looking for a gunman who enjoys drinking soda while he/she is shooting up the place. Hey, look … we have to go with the robot we have, not the one we wish we had. He’s not a tactical robot; he’s more of a strategic robot in that he helps us map out our plans for interstellar tours. (Trouble is, he does it in a language I don’t understand … a language shared by maybe a half-dozen robot assistants worldwide, all built by Mitch Macaphee.)

Oooh! Let's go to Gallactic Centre! That sounds like FUN!

Needless to say, the recent degradation of our little neighborhood is hastening our decision to go out on the road again. And when I say “road”, I mean deep space pathways … imaginary lines through the trackless void. We’re working on an itinerary for a Spring Tour 2019, starting off in the outer reaches of our own solar system, then moving on to some of the more distant locales where the gravity is unpredictable and the audiences more profoundly diverse. It’s all still on the drawing board, but we’re thinking it looks something like this:

  • May 12, Neptune
  • May 15, Proxima system
  • May 20, Barnard’s Star system
  • May 27, Procyon system
  • May 30, Epsilon Indi
  • June 5, Jupiter, red spot

Naturally, we’ve got some gaps to fill. And then there’s the question of transportation. Details, details! Don’t bother me with trifles. We gotta get on the road before some of these local Yosemite Sams start using us for target practice. Tour for your life! (Hey … there’s a theme.)

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.)

Usual Rubbish

Gearing up.

You know, any other band would be talking about a summer tour right about now. But that’s what “normal” bands do. They play in front of actual people and stuff. Big Green? Not so much.

There must be SOME clubs out there...Here’s the thing about Big Green. We are not a “normal” band. We are a musical collective, a band of brothers, a loose association of critters, a gaggle of organisms, a … I don’t know, something else that implies more than one of us. And weird. The very suggestion of a “summer tour” brings to mind something quite different from what most people picture. We’re not rolling into Akron or Missoula, playing in a urine-soaked noise cave, and sleeping on someone’s floor. No, sir – typically, we’re sleeping in the urine-soaked cave. That cave? It’s called the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home.

Okay, so we never, ever do normal tours. I’m not saying we never will, but everyone ELSE is saying it, so who am I to argue? No, sir … when we go on tour, it’s not the usual plainclothes, indie circuit – it’s in outer space, on other planets, in other solar systems, and so on. Actually, one time, we did an inner space tour, deep beneath the Earth’s crust, but that was the one exception. So if you heard us, and it was after 1993, you would have had to either (a.) tunneled to the planet’s chewy center or (b.) traveled to Neptune, Jupiter, or the Crab Nebula. Unlikely, I admit.

Anyway, when we want to do a summer tour, we start by looking up. Way up. Hey, think of it this way. The Hubble Space Telescope, now 25 years in flight, has demonstrated that the visible universe is far busier a place than we had ever previously imagined, with fields of literally millions of galaxies within view. In short, there are a lot of punters out there – a lot more than you’ll find down here on old Terra Firma. So what use is it trying to hit it big in America or England or India? We want to be big in M24 and environs. Fuck the Milky Way – it’s podunk, according to sFshzenKlyrn, and he should know … he was DISCOVERED by the Hubble.

So, yeah … there may be a voyage this summer. Grass is always greener in the next galaxy cluster over.