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?

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