We’ll be home for Christmas? Only in your dreams.
Yes, I know… we should do the decent, right? Be with our families, etc. Alas, technology makes clueless monkeys of us all. This horrible rust-bucket leftover from some forgotten interplanetary invasion we rented as transport during our interstellar tour has blown yet another gasket or some such thing, per our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. He used a lot of big words, none of which I’d ever heard before (though Matt was familiar with several of them… strange…). The upshot is, we’re chugging along at subnormal speed, making our leisurely way back to Earth from the Kuiper Belt – last stop on the ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour.
So… like my cat Macky, we’re making the best of it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has fashioned a Christmas tree out of whatever was available. The mansized tuber has been coaxed out of his terrarium to serve as the aforementioned “whatever was available”. John’s playing “Oh, Holy Night” on his four-string banjo. (I keep singing “Oh, Holy Shit!” to annoy him, but still he is not annoyed.) Lincoln and Anti-Lincoln are dec’ing the halls with clumps of Neptunian seaweed, considered a delicacy on Titan and a form of currency in the Kuiper Belt. (If you’re wondering how we were paid for all those performances on those tiny asteroids, wonder no more.) Yes, it’s quite festive out here in deep space.
Me? I’m telling holiday stories to anyone who will listen. Thing is, no one will listen. Actually, as rock bands go, we’ve got a lot of holiday related material. There’s our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, of course, featuring 13 songs that use Christmas as raw material for songs that are about other things entirely. Few people know that that is the tip of the iceberg. During his salad days (i.e. back when he was rich enough to afford salad), Matt wrote and recorded about 60 or 70 songs themed on Christmas as cassette gifts for friends, relatives, etc. 2000 Years To Christmas is a sampler from that body of songs. Trust me, there are a lot more where that came from.
Fact is, we finished 16 songs for that project, so there are 3 unreleased numbers. One day … maybe next Christmas … you may find them under your tree. (Or under indictment.) In any case… have a happy.
Yes, this is Big Green, reporting live from the Goldilocks Planet, recently discovered orbiting the star Gliese 581 – technical name is Gliese 581g, actually, one of six sibling planets (Did Goldilocks have siblings? Don’t know. What an exasperatingly ill-defined folk tale!) After its recent discovery, we decided to make it a stop on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour, but now I’m beginning to have some regrets. It’s just to damned perfect down here. It’s a planet of anal retentive mo-fo’s (though they’re not too obsessive about it … which if anything is even more exasperating).
It gets worse. When they get really, really frustrated (which took us about half an hour to accomplish), they retreat to their beds and pull the covers up over their oddly-misshapen heads. (Strange thing is, they all seem to have three beds, even the ones who live alone…. and they always sleep in the smallest ones.) I’ll tell you, it’s a good goddamn thing we brought our own craft services with us (the mansized tuber is our chef this time out), ’cause all these fuckers eat is porridge. Peas porridge. And they don’t care if it’s hot or cold. (Sometimes they leave the stuff sitting around for days on end… deeeeee-sgusting).
I want to start this week’s “usual rubbish” blog with a thank you to all of those who helped bail us out of the Kaztropharian jail. (You know who you are.) Not sure how everyone worked out how the bail-bond system works on Kaztropharius 137b – must have looked it up on the interwebs. (You have to put up at least three cases of cotton swabs per pound of body weight. It can get costly… so hey, thanks.) Well, as much as I like it on Kaztropharius, we left the moment they opened the cage door, overdue as we were for the next booking on our super-fantastic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour. A little place called…. The “Goldilocks” Planet.
What was our Thanksgiving like? Well, about as good as it can get in deep space. We brought out a couple of days’ rations and squished it all together in the shape of a roasted turkey. Then we buried it, because it was disgusting. Burial in space, you understand… you put the waste in the wasted disposal tubes and order Marvin to hit the eject button. Then we gather around the starboard port, like the little family that we are, and watch the mangled wads of tofu disperse into the void. That’s what we call Thanksgiving.