There was a break in the rain when we rolled up to the wedding party (union ceremony?) and, noticing the opening in the weather, the whole of them, joined together by a red string wrapped around the two gardeners in love and stretching back in the column of folks that each hand in the parade held on to, 50+ people all holding this string, they all came walking down the 20-yard-long steep asphalt driveway we were trying to pull our hatchback up into. I guess we have to get out of the way. I pulled into the closest available area and we hopped out of the car and were folded, soufflé-like, into the parade which, as we got closer to it, revealed itself to be made of many familiar faces, old buds lightly aged by the intervening years. We grabbed the sting, we marched around the holler, stopping like a traffic jam every time the banners held by the two gardeners in love got stuck in the lower hanging branches of the trees along the path. The property was slick with rain, deeply green, profoundly devoid of cell service or internet of any kind. The structures appeared to sprout out of the ground of their own accord, like overnight whitecap mushrooms (not to say these folks hadn’t put a lot of work in to live here - they work very hard - just that their lives seem so fully a part of the landscape, although in another sense I also felt like we had landed on a settlement on Venus, they were terraforming the planet). No speeches were made, just an announcement about how no speeches would be made which concluded with a reference to a Mike Myers bit from Saturday Night Live (“Rhode Island is neither a road nor an island, discuss”). Then we started eating, other people started drinking, and a long afternoon of saying hello to people for 5 hours seamlessly crossfaded into an evening of saying goodbye to people for 5 hours.

I had a lot of conversations about how I knew various people, how I had come into their lives or how they had come into mine, but we never got to the root of it. I had the distinct (but also technically incorrect) feeling that we had always known each other, or at the very least that my inclusion in the lives of these folks was in some way inevitable. Before we met I remember listening to the groom’s band in the parking lot of a liquor store when I was 19 - I was sitting in my friend’s Audi, he had downloaded the songs of of MySpace, our of-age friend was buying us beer - and at some point later he and I actually became acquainted, and at another point we became peers, and somewhere in-between we amassed enough shared experiences and mutual friends and time lived to overwrite, palimpsestually, the original memory of meeting. When you “get to be my age” (I am 30 as I write this) you have lived a very full life, you have forgotten a lot. Faces, details, names, etc. So I get a serene pleasure from outlining the social interactions between folks - like last night at the show in Charleston there were two people I distinctly remember throwing a frisbee with two summers ago in Prospect Park, it took them a moment to remember me but I was so pleased when we finally traced it out, relieved that I recalled correctly - but at a certain point the people in your life are a product of simply living your life, there’s no root cause, particularly if you live your life generously and with kindness, as I try to do (and have failed to do many times, I’m sorry). My friend who played me the holler groom’s music in the parking lot of the liquor store was someone I met in college - we became friends because I told him “nice t-shirt” when I recognized it from Tom Goes to the Mayor - but I went to that college 3,000 miles away from where I grew up because of myriad circumstances, and ultimately I was born and brought into this world because my parents met in 1978 when they worked in the same strip mall in Long Beach and there were circumstances that caused that, as well, although I could only speculate about those. Each little handshake is a small fractal curl in the grand scheme of shit, and I felt all this in granular and nonalcoholic psychedelic detail in the holler.

But so much else - right now I'm sitting on a rotted out porch swing at dusk deep in a national forest I don't know the name of, staying at the house on a swamp our host last night gave us directions to, earlier today I fell asleep in a hammock with a novel folded open on my chest. I haven’t written about the music we’re playing, really, which is deeply special to me and is reminding me of all the reasons why I like doing this, why I’ve happily subjected myself to so much time in the car these weeks (it’s about listening, it was always about listening!). When we played in Asheville we kept introducing every song as "one for the gardeners in love" and I keep saying that phrase to myself over and over again. Or how being in a place where someone used to live can bring you closer to them, I ran the same path my friend ran in Charlottesville and saw them in a new light (early morning, riverside light), there was Pickles the tiny, tiny dog at our friends’ apartment in Asheville, sleeping on their floor and waking up with a bruised hip, sitting around in a pile on the couch and watching Law & Order with no internet connection like it was 2007, there was weed vaping on our friend’s roof patio, climbing through his window to stand on tar paper, there was crying in public in Charlottesville, pacing back and forth in front of my friends' apartment in the light rain, there was the unexpected high five a stranger gave me while I was running in Charleston, the slap of it echoing in the seemingly empty downtown, the joy of using my body in different cities in America, there was the broken speaker in the belltower buzzing ominously in the wind, growling louder as I approached it, as overbearing as a high-powered blender and no one around but me to hear it, there was the incessant rain and all the wrecks on the highway, there were two boneheaded and deliciously transgressive trips to Cook Out for milkshakes and corn dogs (we are sober on this tour), my friend in one rush of boldness lifting his shirt at the party to show us his scars, to remind us how he cheated death, he lived, he won, he was alive, the vanquisher of the vanquisher and by seeing him and his lifted shirt we were alive, too.