Spring chills.

 

Throw another log on the fire. What’s that? No more logs? What the hell. Then break up one of those lobster traps. We haven’t caught a single lobster in twenty years of squatting in this mill – can’t understand it. Stupid trap!

Oh, hi. Yeah, you caught us looking for alternative sources of fuel again. It’s pretty much a full time job for the likes of us here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It takes a lot of fuel to heat a big old barn of a place like this, even with the entire west wing collapsed and the north wing taken over by lunatic neighbors. In this current cold snap, we’ve resorted to burning whatever wood we can get both hands on. Brother anti-Lincoln has even started pulling up the floorboards in his personal apartment. Inasmuch as it’s on the third floor, this is making navigating around his living space more and more of a challenge. (He’s devised a system of ropes, but I believe he’s thinking of throwing those into the fire as well.)

Now, plenty of people have asked us, “Hey, Big Green …. since your name is Big Green, why don’t you install some solar panels on the roof of the Cheney Hammer Mill?” To that I respond, good question, plenty of people. We resort to something like passive solar energy – opening the blinds on sunny days and rubbing our hands together furiously. And sure, we could ask our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to fashion some kind of perpetual energy machine, but our Mitch is a temperamental artist – if he invents a perpetual energy machine, it’s because he saw a hole in the world shaped like such a machine, then carved something out to plug that hole. Selfish human concerns, like avoiding hypothermia, are of no interest to him. He’s looking at the BIG picture … and that picture is big enough to block his view of yours truly.

We tried to get in touch with our cousin, Rick Perry, former Energy Secretary and Governor of Texas, as well as subject of our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, but he hasn’t taken any of our calls. So much for pulling strings. (Hey …. maybe we can pull strings to generate electricity … ) There is another option besides resorting to the assistance of celebrity relatives – getting one of those energy generating recumbent bike thingies. Just hook that thing up and go. We could get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to pedal the thing, and that would produce enough juice to power a block of space heaters as long as your arm and thick as your ass. For the record, Marvin’s not crazy about the idea, and suggested I might consider doing it myself as a way of shedding some of the COVID pounds I’ve put on over the past year. Still, it’s one way of getting through March without ending up having to be picked up with a pair of ice tongs.

This will be easy. Just set up the bike, plug it into the wall, and pedal backwards. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.