Frankensong.

 

I thought you said it was organic. What do you mean “all natural” – that’s a vacuous term. Everything’s natural, goddamn it. Yellow cake uranium is natural, but that doesn’t mean you should serve it at a birthday party.

Cheese and crackers, I don’t know what’s the matter with my squat-mates. They think anything that’s not on fire is good for you, even if it was recently on fire. That’s what happens when you spend the better part of twenty years loitering in an abandoned hammer mill, staying three steps ahead of the property owning capitalists, two steps ahead of the bourgeois lawyers that represent them, and one step ahead of the police that guard their wealth with clubs and guns. It’s kind of like Stockholm syndrome, except that we’ve been taken hostage by our general lack of resources, and my associates are now trying to squeeze every molecule out of the toothpaste tube. (I don’t mean metaphorically – they literally want that last molecule!)

Anyway, they’ve taken to eating GMO rice and GMO corn and whatever else because that’s what’s lying about. Not the best reason to eat something. There are a lot of old hammer heads strewn throughout this mill in various states of corrosive decay – they wouldn’t eat those, would they? (Or WOULD they?) Actually, Anti-Lincoln might sample the hammer heads for some extra iron, but I digress. If I can’t discourage my flop-mates from eating franken-food, then so be it. The trouble is, when you share you place with a mad scientist, the wheels can come off of the lunch cart very easily. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be making muffins out of yellowcake and feeding them to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t have the tools for digesting actual food but seldom refuses a handout from his creator, Mitch Macaphee.

There’s a lot of scavenging going on in this mill. It’s a sign of desperation setting in after months of lockdown, economic hardship, and bad weather. We’ve even taken to plugging together fragments of songs in an effort to make new music out of something that was abandoned months, years, even eons ago. (Well … perhaps not eons. Ages, maybe.) Ah, ’tis an impoverished soul indeed that cannot pull even a slap-dash song out of his or her ass, but such are the times we live in. I’ve got idea tapes lying all over the place. Some of them are incoherent, the product of leaving a cassette machine next to my bed so that if a song comes to me in my sleep I can sing it into the condenser mic and drop back off to dreamland without missing a beat. That almost invariably results in a tape full of drowsy mumbling followed by a respectable snore. Still …. even that can be useful in a mashup, dance mix, whatever. Hey … a frankensong is better than no song at all … or maybe not. IT’S ALIVE!