Tag Archives: One Small Step

Usual Rubbish

News from mustyville.

Hoo-boy, it’s hot in here again. Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! Open a window. No, not with a chair. You don’t open windows by tossing metal chairs through…. HEY!

This is not good, folks. Marvin is doing the renegade robot from Mars bit again. It must be an errant line of code somewhere in his reams of programming. Every once in a while he gets ornery… I mean SUPER ornery. Starts breaking things, running things over, insulting people (including anti-Lincoln, who’s sensitive, you know) and otherwise causing mayhem. I suppose I should count myself lucky that we’re not on some interstellar tour with this happening. Living with a mechanical nutjob is one thing; sharing a cramped spacecraft with one is quite another. I don’t have to tell you that…. HEY! PUT THAT DOWN! THAT’S THE ONLY ONE OF THOSE WE’VE GOT LEFT, YOU DOLT!

Right … so much for our last rotating clay bust of Roy Orbison (with glasses a slightly darker shade of gray). Very discouraging. As if such vandalism isn’t bad enough, I think it was Marvin who started circulating nasty stories about me in the press. Or maybe it’s a coincidence – I have to think there’s SOMEONE else out there with the name Joe Perry. It’s a big universe, after all. In any case, yesterday, I’m sitting here minding my own freaking business. I open up the newspaper, and some dude named Tyler is trash talking my ass. I quote the Associated Press:

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Tyler says he and Joe Perry did drugs together in 2008 after years of sobriety …. Tyler says Perry was so impaired by snorting prescription pills, he couldn’t even play his instrument.

Okay, three things. One, I don’t know anybody named Tyler, so this is obviously a contrivance by a disgruntled robot (probably Marvin). Two, I resent the suggestion that drugs are making it so I can’t play my instrument. Many would say I can’t play my instrument even without the drugs. And finally…. how the hell did they know I’m sober? Are they hiding in my refrigerator? In my medicine cabinet? Is there no such thing as privacy anymore?!

Whoa, my apologies.  I need to get out of this abandoned hammer mill a bit more. (It is a little musty in here.)

Usual Rubbish

Open season.

Whoa, was that a week from hell or wasn’t it?  Spring is here, after all, and the planet’s wrecked. Time to cultivate another one. Any preferences? Neptune, perhaps? Or…. maybe we can just open the mail bag.

Here’s one from a local:

Dear Big Green,

I think I saw one of your number tagged in a photo on Facebook, dressed up in a ludicrous leprechaun get-up. What’s up with that? Are you going to start playing traditional Irish music now? Should I look for you on Thistle and Shamrock any time soon?

Best,

Rich Taggert
Toad in the Hole, NY

Well, Rich…. that does seem to be my name, so perhaps it’s me. I may be a secret leprechaun, or perhaps I fell asleep at a St. Patrick’s Day bash and simply don’t remember what happened next. (Distinct possibility.) Then again, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have put me in the ludicrous outfit while I was sleeping and then invited local children in to have their photo taken with the funny, funny elf. I’m guessing here.

The closest we’ve come to Irish music is a Christmas number Matt wrote some years back called “McBridy”, which later segues into a country song called “Evening Crab Nebula”. Written around the times of the troubles in Northern Ireland – now thankfully past – the McBridy lyric went something like this:

Well, hiddly- hi, in the Christian World, it’s eye for eye
And hiddly-hi, we’ll get another try
It’s the same dear thing McBridy sang
before he caught up with the plan
that threw him on his back one Christmas ‘morn

McBridy, McBridy! You lived in a wholly Christian world
But still you blow your brother away
McBridy, McBridy! You lived in a holy Christian world
But died another link in the chain.

And no, not Thistle and Shamrock… but possibly Pagan FM, if you listen regularly.

Next missive…

Dear Big Green,

I don’t exist, and you can’t make me.

Yours truly,
Chester Ether

Thanks for writing, Chester. A lot of our listeners are in much the same condition. It’s a sign of these difficult times, as I’m sure you – a non-existent person – can truly appreciate.

Now back to work, damn it.

Usual Rubbish

Plugging.

Another Web bucket to fill. Good grief, tubey! How many Web sites am I supposed to maintain? I’m the one with the arms, remember… and the cerebral cortex.

Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.

As always, money is a challenge. Copies of One Small Step are not exactly flying off the shelf on this planet (though I hear it’s moving quite briskly on Kaztropharius 137b, that nasty little planetoid that hosts us every year or so). It’s predictably hard to repatriate profits from other planets – that’s not surprising at all. They use a whole different kind of currency up there… not to mention a whole different kind of gravity, air, and background radiation. Hell, funds transfers are the least of it. If you’re a bank courier, you’re lucky to get out of there with your skin. Word of warning.

There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions. 

Note to Mitch: Your next invention should just be money. Just invent some cash, there’s a good chap.