Marvin's picks.

Any sales this week? Huh. Didn’t think so. That album is a goddamn drug on the market. Which is a strange saying, as drugs sell pretty well, generally speaking …. much better than our albums. Damned capitalism!

Well, here we are, my friends. Your friends and comrades in Big Green, frittering away our time in this abandoned hammer mill in upstate New York, dreaming of the days when we had things to eat other than fritters. (Actually, fritters are pretty economical, if you know how to make them. Two words: saw dust.) We were having our weekly planning meeting, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was delivering the quarterly sales report. How did it go? Well, the good news first – there were, indeed, sales. And yes, there was revenue. Though the amounts were so infinitesimal that they can neither be accurately calculated in natural numbers nor seen with the naked eye. (I tried clothing my eyes, but I still couldn’t see anything.)

Now, I know what you’re going to say: It’s not Marvin’s fault that sales of Big Green music have fallen through the crust of the earth. My response to that is simply … you’re letting him off too easy. We assigned Marvin the role of sales manager specifically so that he could take the blame for our continuing commercial failure. That may seem unfair, but he, being an automaton, does not grasp the concept of fairness. He is programmed for mirth and chagrin, but not that special feeling of annoyance and offense you get when someone is hurling insults at you and treating you unfairly. It just rolls off of him like … well … like insults off of a brass automaton. His primary contribution to the Big Green enterprise is to keep us from yelling at one another for our failings. That’s quite an accomplishment.

Once in a while Marvin comes up with a suggestion worth more than a moment’s consideration. Recently he opined that we should set up a Patreon site and sell our songs and other junk to whomever. We hemmed and hawed over that for a while (Matt did most of the haw-ing), then decided to table it for the time being. What the hell are we going to sell, right? Baked goods, for crying out loud? Sure, we have songs. We have buttons. We have, uh … discs. Some of them even have music on them. I think we’ve got some guitar picks lying around. Though some of them have been claimed by Marvin – he uses them as shims when a contact goes wonky somewhere in his electronics bay. I suppose we could run a Patreon promotion – Marvin’s Picks: five for a buck. Or maybe not.

Damn. Capitalism is hard, man.