Buffalo, New York

never been to buffalo. i only think of vincent gallo when i think of it.
it was pretty. we arrived at gabrielle’s home, her street is lovely with lovely homes on it. the show was a lot of fun. it was set for 8 but there were maybe five people there. we couldn’t really understand it, then we looked again at the paper’s write up, it said october tenth as opposed to the fifth. when we started the show we had 17 people in the crowd. and it ruled. we gave them all that we had and we had a really great great time. the guys had been fed drinks from the bartender eric throughout the show, so they were a litttle drunken by the time we left the venue. eric shared with us his profuse thanks, he wouldn’t except any money from anyone in the bar the whole night. he told me that he had come into work today like any other, a little hungover, expecting to just make some drinks, make a few bucks, he knew something was happening tonight but he figured it’d be whatever. what he got he said, was a religious experience. he’s a writer as well, and the night’s show changed him, was a spiritual happening and he couldn’t bring himself to ask for any money after having something like that surrounding him. it was really sweet and really nice to hear.

we all went back to gabrielle’s afterwards. this cat james that i had met when i passed through ithaca a month ago, came up from his school about an hour and a half away from buffalo, and he hung as well. we sat around making my dick is so big jokes.*
once folks left, we crashed in the livingroom on couches and floors, popped in the 40 year old virgin and fell asleep.

*said in a voice that's a mix of elvis and jesse jackson, and utterly cocky:
My dick is so big, I had sex with the Grand Canyon and lubed it with history.

Westechester, New York

morning gig at the westchester community college, arranged by our good pal zork. we did two one hour sessions, performing a stack of poems and taking questions afterwards. it went really well, a lot better than we were expecting.
it was in a lecture hall, with the chairs going up stadium style, and us performing at the bottom. the wings were two short staircases going down. while waiting dan was attacked kissy face style by a fan of his and during the set, derrick, hidden in the stairwell, showed mike his “brain.”
afterwards, unfortunately, we had to hustle the shit out as we had a gig way in fredonia located in way north new york.

Circle of Hope, Philly

the space was in a church located upstairs off the streets in the city. it’s a really lovely space. very unassuming and unimposing and welcoming. hardwood floors, white walls, it looks like a loft gallery. it feels tolerant. most of the crowd were high schoolers that came courtesy of a teacher friend of i believe derrick’s. andrea (gibson) was there.

my boy aaron also came on out. we went to SCAD together and he was part of the couch crew in portland before moving back home to philly. he has a website called interview-press.com, which houses his interview records record label, that puts out his crazy wild interviews of different themes and subjects, and his cartoons, which include his sketch-reporting and amongst those, the sketches he took of the sparrows during our show.
also there, my old friend jessie bowley, now schlabach, a girl i dated back in savannah, ga, who incidentally dated aaron right before me (amongst the craziness of THE CONTEST, a competition between aaron and myself to see who was the bigger ladies man, as in proving that the other one was said bigger ladies man. we each wanted to prove to the other that we were the bigger dweeb). so it was interesting that the three of us were chilling there talking it up after the show. would have liked to have hung out more, but we needed to get a jump on the road and start heading to westchester so we would be there in the morning for our AM gig the following day.
so after saying bye to aaron and jessie, i joined the guys as we rocked out with the cold war kids’ hospital bed, with derrick on drums, buddy on keyboard, dan on a bongo drum, mike on tambourine, and me doing something. following that jam session, we screamed our way through 1947 by neutral milk hotel while playing bumper cars with the metal chairs of the room, pushing them speedily across the room, ramming them into one another.

let’s roll.

Providence, Rhode Island

400+ kids came.

been wanting to visit providence for five years now and i finally got to see it. it totally is the savannah of the north. we pulled up to brown university there was a line in front of the door curling down the walkway an hour before the show started. on a sunday. and most of the kids there never having gone to a spoken word event. it ruled. it really was a great show, one of the best so far (and as i write this more then a week after the show, still is). put on by sarah kay and phillip kaye (both japanese-jewish poets of the same age with family from orange county and both with siblings respectively named phillip and sarah. wtf. they’re best friends and are awesome.)

before the show we ate thanksgiving sandwiches at the meeting st. cafe and i got a brown shirt, a german winter flap cap, and a blue and white striped long sleeved russian navy shirt at a cheap surplus store.

after the show the wonderful and amazing kit cooked dinner for us the. a bunch of the boston kids came up, so we dined with kate, brian ellis, casey, and eamon was there as well. i love these northbeasters. love them. utterly. they are beautiful songs that will always sound good when you hear them on the radio, bringing beautifuller pictures of tener memories into you.

in the morning we had breakfast with the kay(e)s. i had raspberry pancakes. time to go to philly.

Worcester and Jamaica Plains, Massachusets

in worcester. awesome. fucking great show. we remembered to have fun again, and upped the ante. we’re starting to find our groove i feel, it’s falling into place. mike cried after the show. brian ellis and simone came from boston for the show which was pretty sweet. i wanted to hang out afterwards, cool folks, cute girls but i had to leave the gang and ride back to boston with brian so i could fly out to charleston the following day for the naca south conference. brian and i spent the ride talking about poetry and him telling me about his job at this gourmet grocery store where one of the guys is an wine and cheese enthusiast and was so pumped about brian being a poet that he had brian share work at the wine/cheese class he teaches, to add to the experience for the participants. it was pretty funny. also brian shared with me about how with truffles, truffle buyers keep secret the truffle hunters of tiny truffle towns from other truffle buyers and there is all this intrigue with it. i’m relatively anti-foodi, but that sounds so fascinating i want to research and write a story about it.
upon arrival in boston, we headed to jamaican plains and to brian’s home, the Whitehaus, which is a 3 story abode houses 11 individuals and a shitload of instruments, musicmaking, creativity, and love.
i slept on one of the several couches, in the main living room that houses the house’s weekly event “The Hoot,” short for hootenanny, where crowds of folks show up to participate and enjoy and share a myriad of things from music playing to poetry to fire breathing to puppetry to whatever, sky writing. in the cradle of a drum kit, a rhodes organ, 4 electric guitars, two acoustics, a couple basses, some toy pianos and a glockenspiel, and under a white comforter i fell into a lovely sleep.

the next morning brian was already gone for work so i walked into the kitchen and met kate, adam, brian, and john deuce. kate was making french toast out of old scones and they invited me to join them for breakfast, which i did, which was delicious, and which amongst that john had a guitar and kate a ukulele and the two of them started harmonizing on a song of john’s called don’t cry mama which was beautiful and which adam came in later on a flute. we then moved into the big room and kate jumped on the rhodes piano and the started working on a different song of john’s. unfortunately i needed to hightail it out of there to catch a plane, so i packed up my bag walked to the train and rode it to the logan airport to fly to charleston, completely in love with my first experience of the whitehaus.

Oneonta, New York

again gorgeous countryside we drove through. huge sweeping valleys to the left of the van as we curved through the land, withe mountains scattered with orange and red leaves through the green trees. upon arrival at the school we headed to the house we were staying in. it was sweet. next to the dean’s house, it’s an old school place filled with lime green shag carpeting across the bottom floor, and cute rooms upstairs, everything decorated from with fifities furniture, and a world map painted on the upstairs wall.








my room.


good show. we remembered to have fun and we scrapped the story transitions and smoothed out the show and brought the energy and handclaps to the opening. shorter show, cuz of time restraints but still successful. afterwards we went to a party at somebody’s house and the fellas got snackered. we also had a freestyle session in the van consisting of the chorus: balls balls he sucks his own balls.

it was interesting, the party. the bathroom was filled with pictures of jeff goldblum.

one forgets that there are kids out there that really respect and adore one’s work. we’re all just, as derrick puts it, guys trying to make the rent. and we were just chilling post show with some cool kids, but these kids were telling us thanks for one of the best and happiest nights of their live and it was “thanks” but we’re all just folks hanging out. but i realized that if when in college after i first heard jeffrey mcdaniel read, if jeff had come out and hung with me and my friends afterwards, yes that night would have been forever ingrained in my head as mad rulage. it’s just weird to realize that to some people out there, one is their j. mcdaniel. that feels weird to write that down.

when we left the party and headed home, there was a drizzle in the air, shine on the streets and between the sky and the streetlights, the night was an orange blanket, still. a whisper. a closed library with no walls. a sleeping book, a stack of them. we are all growing up.

the following day we went to the baseball hall of fame. our friend ben couch works there and got us in for free. i'm not a big baseball fan but it was still pretty interesting.



honus wagner, one of the first five inductees said:
"There ain't much to being a ballplayer, if you're a ballplayer."

Hiram, Ohio

driving to hiram was gorgeous. the sloping green banking the roads. i wanted to buy a house and some land out there and stay and eat and write and stare and live.
a big blocky house with white paint peeling and the bones of wood scraping out from underneath its skin, keep company with ghosts. pick apples. play the guitar. run through the rain kiss outside climb trees stay up till dawn getting drunk on candles and pots catching leaks. build a fence around nothing.

our show was way off. it was in a small ballroom for crowd of maybe 30. in an attempt to craft a story of solomon sparrow to weave through the evening, we have shaved off time for so much poetry, and the energy lags, and felt like sloppy community theatre, and with a low energy crowd, we weren’t too happy with our show, but we learned a lot from it, and folks still enjoyed it.
after bringing stuff down to the van, the sky opened up and poured it iself all over the streets. POURED itself. buckets. we sat in the van and three shirtless jocks jogged past like smiling phantoms while a man stood across the street from us, still as a statue which we thought he was till he turned and freaked us out, standing there getting soaked. we went and got some grub with a couple of teh student organizers, will and jenn. burgers for a buck with a beverage purchase. sweet.
we stayed in the hiram inn, supposedly haunted. a sweet house inn with tasty old school dark wood four post beds and robes. derrick and i pimped out in them. baz and dan's room however looked like the beach house room of a seven year old girl decorated by her grandparents, with one large bed with a pink peach bedspread, yellow pastel walls, and white wicker chairs. our room however had beautiful victorian looking wallpaper with green illustrations of crests and huntsmen and lions and hounds. slept beautifully.