Tag Archives: sFshzenKlyrn

Usual Rubbish

Hard feelings.

Hey, what can I tell you? I didn’t intend to piss him off, guys. Not my intention at all. Nor was it my intention to destroy the planet Jupiter. Furthest thing from my mind.

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a little band meeting. (Bret? Here. Jermaine? Here. Murray? Here.) I’m being raked over the coals by my fellow Big Green members and our various hangers on – Mitch Macaphee (our mad science adviser), Lincoln, anti-Lincoln, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man-sized tuber… even Big Zamboola has chimed in. What’s the “issue”, as they say? Oh, hell… it’s about our perennial sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. He’s been a house guest here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the past week or so. That is to say, he was our guest, up until he departed yesterday in a bit of a Zenite huff. (How do I know? His radioactive vapor trail was tinged orange around the edges. Sure sign.)

So, why the hurried departure? Was he on his way to, I don’t know, Joseph A. Bank to get two free suits after buying one overpriced suit? No, no, nothing like that. It’s down to me, I’m afraid. One of those obscure cultural faux pas you run into when dealing with the denizens of another galaxy – kind of like showing the soles of your feet to an Iraqi. I insulted sFshzenKlyrn in some way, apparently, when I turned down his generous offer of Zenite snuff. I believe that, combined with a hand gesture I made involuntarily, is the equivalent of telling a Zenite that his specific gravity is roughly equivalent to that of Yak dung.  (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Zenite etiquette, that is considered a particularly grave insult.)

sFshzenKlyrn left in a cloud of radioactive dust. I imagined he was going straight home, using his typical method of traveling between the dimensional layers of the wobbly thing we call reality. Not so. I guess he was a little madder than he looked, because he felt the need to act out his anger. And he did this by driving straight into the planet Jupiter, causing a bit of a disturbance. (I’m told he did that one time before, some few years back. Left a bit of a red spot, as I recall.) What this has meant to the inhabitants of Jupiter I do not know, though I suspect we will hear about it the next time we go on interstellar tour. (Late this summer, I believe. Stay tuned!) It did, however, cause quite a stir back home here, with people calling it a dramatic collision, a missile, an asteroid, and so on.

Nah. Just a pissed off Zenite guitarist, that’s all. And from the ‘splosion he created, I guess his specific gravity must be quite a bit greater than that of Yak dung after all. Whoops! Sorry, sFshzenKlyrn!    

Usual Rubbish

Noise on.

Turn it on, the fan. The BIG fan. Broken? Okay, then turn it on, the smaller fan. No smaller fan? What the hell. Right. Then just turn it on, the radio.

Another hot one here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Global warming at work, no doubt. Whatever the cause, it’s sweltering in here. I spent the morning hanging my head into the primitive air shaft at the center of this unused pile of industrial masonry – it seemed strangely airless. That’s why I’m asking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to break out the fans. It’s times like this when any performer turns to his/her biggest fans. (Boom-crash!) How are ya, how are ya, how are ya! Anybody from Detroit in the audience tonight? Anybody? You in the back? There you are. Gotta’ love the motor city!

Ooops. Heat prostration briefly turned me into a Borscht Belt comedian. (Shecky Green, perhaps.) Must be incoherent thinking that Marvin would help me out, considering how I failed him last week during the inaugural performance of Marvin and the Lawn Robots. What’d I do? Rather ask what I did not do. What I did not do was anything right, that’s what I did … not. I twiddled all the wrong knobs on the board. (At one point, they had no top end at all. Later on, it was “generation reverb” time.) I pointed the lights in the wrong direction. I overloaded the mains so that by the end of the night they sounded like king size kazoos. (Rented, too. Good grief.) And I assigned the door to some straggler who – surprise, surprise – walked off with Marvin’s $57 take for the evening. WHERE DID I GO RIGHT?

I have an excuse, though not a very good one. Just the night before, our beloved sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon sFshzenKlyrn dropped in on us quite unexpectedly with a rather large poke of Zenite snuff. I partook of the, ahem, aid to digestion rather liberally before collapsing into my distressed Army cot sometime before 2:00 a.m. I suppose you could say I was a little worse for wear the following night – not unexpected by any means. Disappointing for the mechanical men, however. Their little shoulders were slumped as they watched me load the van. One of them started rotating at one point, his phony machine guns a-blazing with incandescent rage. Sad scene.

So my calls to Marvin, understandably, go unanswered today. He’ll get over it, I expect. But what of the lawn robots?

Usual Rubbish

Mitch, please!


Hear that whistling? There it is again. Is that coming from upstairs or…. down… stairs. Mitch!

Oh, hi. Not sure I should be signing in today, in point of fact. No, we’re not too busy with our melodramatic posing to blog. We’ve moved beyond that phase entirely. (No money dropped like rain from the sky, so that obviously wasn’t working.) Besides, we were all getting sick of hearing one another. And as you might suspect, the Cheney Hammer Mill is like an enormous cave. Why, it’s the Howe Caverns of the northern half of central New York. (Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. Maybe the Petrified Creatures Museum of Little Falls.) Don’t tell Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that I suggested anything of the sort. He’ll start emoting again!

Well, that’s not all that’s going on around here. There are whispers of some festival this summer. That’s all – whispers. I’m not saying sFshzenKlyrn is going to squirt lighter fluid all over his famed Telecaster and light it up, then mutter cryptic oaths over its burning carcass. I’m not saying that at all. But one never knows what may happen in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the summer. And if we get called onto the big stage, what happens next is a conundrum wrapped in a tortilla. (John used to have a conundrum, but he broke the bottom head on our last live show. Pity that. Now he’s stretched a tortilla over the hole. But I digress… )

There are other things as well. Mitch has had another brainstorm. Here’s how it happened. You know how everyone is complaining about the cost of travel these days. Fuel costs! Baggage fees! It’s enough to drive a painfully normal person (or a T.V. journalist) nearly mad with anger. Well, Mitch has a solution. You see, it seems the diameter of the Earth is a shorter distance than the circumference. And if you tunnel straight through the Earth’s crust, you can get places a hell of a lot faster. W.t.f. – China is only 8,000 some odd miles away, and it’s all straight down. All you need is a parachute for the very end (and something clever to say to that “America’s Energy Companies” lady riding past you in that glass elevator). Only trouble is… all these holes in the ‘Oit is going to make the old girl whistle as she spins.

Hmmmm… Whistle and spin. If they still made records, that would be a good name for one.