Lincoln has returned to the 1860s via the Orgone Generating Device intertemporal portal, and best of luck to him. Hope he doesn’t run into any dental problems while he’s back there. Whiskey and pliers, that’s what he’ll have to look forward to in that grisly century.
Well, that kind of solves his problem. What about the rest of us in the Big Green collective? A kind of dwindling party, it seems. Lincoln is back in Washington (though his evil doppelganger Anti-Lincoln remains). Washington is presumably back in Lincoln (Nebraska). Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is still on an extended tour of resort hotels, attending mad science conferences and watching the sun set on five continents with a glass of bourbon in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Now that our interstellar tour is over, our occasional guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has returned to his home planet of Zenon in the Small Megellanic Cloud.
Let’s see … what else is in the news? Oh, yeah … the mansized tuber has decided at long last to take root in the courtyard. He’s pushing twenty now, and feels it’s high time for him to settle down and start a garden. Hard to argue with a root vegetable. We’ll see how long THAT lasts. Christ on a bike, about the only ones around here I can count on are my brother Matt and Marvin (my personal robot assistant), 
though I caught the latter thumbing through the want ads the other day. It seems there are more opportunities out there for personal robot assistants than there were just a few years ago. I may have to start PAYING him, for chrissake.
The bottom line is that, with all of these departures and major life decisions going on, it’s getting pretty quiet around this big old barn of a place. We’ve talked about finding someplace smaller to squat, maybe opt for another three-room lean-to of the kind we occupied back in our Sri Lanka days. So long as it’s big enough to produce a podcast in, we’re good.
Well, here we are, inching closer to the release date of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, Big Green’s third and perhaps silliest album ever. Fully 21 tracks of pure, unadulterated goofiness, each one performed by what is nominally a completely different combo. We’ve got the master all set. We’ve designed the packaging for our limited run of CD-Rs and the graphics for our digital distributors. Now all we have to do is, well, complete the arcane process of acquiring ISRC codes for all of the tracks, manufacturing the discs, doing a run of wax cylinders for those listeners still enamored of that format, and so on.
Some have told us that we should have called the label Hammermaid, like Milkmaid condensed milk. We don’t listen to some people, particularly if they are Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a particular liking for condensed milk products because they remind him of motor oil. In any case, we don’t take a lot of pains over trifles like imprints and logos, because in all honesty, that’s not what we’re about. We are the original discorporate rock band. We say no to corporate hegemony. We’re off the grid, man. (Aside from all that stuff involving money, paying for things, etc.)
Sheesh. Another dejected look. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has now officially joined the ranks of the disgruntled. That makes about nine of us, if you count both Lincolns. We are in the dog days and, apparently, the doldrums of summer here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, and I can tell you personally, nobody’s happy around these parts. I blame our persistent lack of gainful employment. Most band entourages, as you know, can occupy themselves with the somewhat questionable benefits of touring. Big Green, though, has not done a tour yet this year, and I fear that fact is beginning to wear on us all.