we're so on tour right now (pt1)

We have a lot to write about, so I'm going to try to stick to the highlights.

Jim, Peter, and I are officially on tour. We started off in New York. Jashin and Egan set up a show for us at Yoyo's amazing loft in Soho. It was also Jess's birthday party.

First: Egan and Yoyp set up a fantastic space and hung several of their photographs and paintings. It was a really beautiful setting. We performed. I think we all performed well. I forget details. There was a lot of wine etc.

Everyone we met was very supportive, even the people we didn't previously know. It is not rare to get to do shows for your college friends, but the mix was much more eclectic than I expected. Besides the usual suspects we had several Germans, a Marine, a professor, a renowned documentarian, and several others and everyone seemed to get along and be into our presentations. As sappy as it may seem, it's actually very touching and inspiring to share work with a large group of people and find that it's genuinely appreciated by such diverse crowd. And then there was the wine etc., which lasted practically until dawn.

The next morning, we cleaned the apartment. Mostly I cleaned the apartment because I woke up early and couldn't fall back to sleep. This led to an unfortunate sequence of events in which a fairly large rag was accidentally flushed down a toilet and amateur plumbing (with all of it's attendant anxiety and hilarity) was forced to ensue. The clog was fixed. The rag was not salvaged. We owe Yoyo a rag.

Our second minor hitch of tour: Getting out of the city. Day 2 was relaxed, but we were also pretty worn out. Peter was still working at the Vision Jazz festival, so Jim and I hung around the city and caught up more with friends.

I am trying to avoid listing names of friends because there are a lot of them and I've chosen to omit all rather than forgot any. Except for the people that actually helped organize the evening. And us. Our names stay in. Anyways...

We'd stashed the car at Russ's house on Long Island (I used another name, but that's really more of a location). Jim and I returned there in the evening and waited for Peter to finish. We made mistakes in planning. We thoroughly enjoyed our stay at Russ's, but we stayed too long and got started too late on our drive.

Also, we had to return Matt's guitar. This sucked. We got lost. We went out of our way. We did not find his house. The guitar is still with us. By the point of the failed guitar return, it was 2 am and we were in suburban New Jersey. We pressed on to Ocean City, where we had lodging at Jim's shore house. I took over driving and made good time for the first hour or so, and by 4, we seemed about to finally reach our destination. The fog materialized. Visibility rapidly approached zero, as did our speed. We crossed the bay in such a haze that we were unable to tell that we were even above water. We finally crawled into Jim's shore house around 430 and promptly passed out.

We woke up too soon the next morning because we needed to make Pittsburgh by 7. Jim's dad was at the house and we met him and spent a too-brief morning visiting, and then drove for 6 or 7 hours.

We are currently in Pittsburgh. This entry is getting too long. Pittsburgh will be described in the next few days, but for now I am going to sign off.

-Ben

PS: This tour is rad.