the name of my shower is the road

The great thing about waking up at 6:30AM is the fog and the fact that the people who take 7AM buses tend to do things like juggle random breakfast foods or play chess on their laptop while resembling the guy from Entourage. The shitty thing about waking up at 6:30AM is that waking up so early probably means you didn't sleep much, which gives you ridiculous anxiety, so when you have minor upper back pain, you think "Oh no, my lung is collapsing."

All that aside, I have been waking up early and having some good treks. Went to Providence on Tuesday. Ate pizza with Mark Baumer, who owns my favorite kind of coffee maker. Hung out with Evelyn Hampton and hired her bicycle helmet to help me perform a thing. Saw a man talk about how he'd like carriages to come back in fashion. Ate a gyro and watched foreign music videos in the restaurant. Saw Dan-Beachy Quick read and talk like someone who can scoop up a handful of river water and tie the water into shapes like a balloon maker. Basked in the terrific hospitality of Mairead Byrne, who told me some Irish history about the color orange, served blackberry ice cream, and hosted Rachel and me at a fun and brisk reading.

Then went to Boston yesterday and did another reading with Matt Salesses and Nicolle Elizabeth. We held the mic like wrestling announcers. I ate some overpriced chili. The venue served all its alcohol with complimentary potato chips. Macho Man Randy Savage worked there. There was a cloud outside that kept dipping down and asking everybody for Susan B Anthony coins. Inside the venue was a tissue box where you could speak to a random sad person from the past, but legally they were required to be vague about their identity, but really you could always tell from their accent.

After the reading, I hung out with Peter (who I called Keith at one point; sorry Peter), an Emerson MFA fiction writer dude, and Gene Kwak. We ate overpriced nachos and drank whiskey and talked about fly fishing and Michigan and Omaha and moving places and trying not to romanticize a storyteller's suffering as the gangplank for their storytelling, which is kind of impossible not to do. Gene gave me this awesome book 19 Knives by Mark Anthony Jarmon, which is a self-flagellating beast of sizzle. I read half of it on the early bus. The early bus drove by some Autumnal mansions. The early bus hulked past some very self-confident trees.