Jen wants more, more she gets:

We are experiencing a delay in the moving John plan as he is opting for a u-haul over my van and it won’t be available until three. So that gives me more time to sober up and blog at you. Where we were we? Arriving early at Riddle’s – sevenish – for a band that wouldn’t start until nine – we got a bottle of Australian white to sip on while we talked all things family. She wants to take me to New Guinea at some point because there’s this whole chapter in my family’s history that I don’t have experiential context for. I was born there, but had my first birthday on the plane home.

My favorite part of last night was a moment when an elderly black man, potentially a homeless man, walked into the bar and in loud music sign language I offered him a seat at our table, two feet from the trumpet player. He was wearing a blue cap with gold ropes inlaid in the bill that I recognized as a navy hat. He had gaunt look and a slightly stooped walk that may have been a gesture rather than a condition. He was a supplicant of place. He produced a blank white sheet of paper and a pen from the folds of his jacket and began to furiously sketch the band.

When he had the paper half full Vick and I had decided to leave for the next bar. We had gotten to Riddle’s early enough such that our table was closest to the band. It was the best table in the place – the envy of many. Three men walked into the bar as we were standing and I offered them our table on the condition that they allow the man to keep sitting there and drawing. “I think we can do that.”

They warmly accepted the offer and slid into the seats amid the press of the crowd, all of us glancing at the immerging images in black ink of the twenty something drummer with his fresh out of high school face, the enormous base player whose tree trunk frame wrapped itself around the fretless, dark wood base, the fifty something soul patched guitarist with his lightwood Stratocaster gliding his gaze from player to player in an ocular negotiation of solos, happy as hell that the trumpet player showed up before the end of the first set, just in time for his turn, just in time to be the foreground in a homeless navy vets sketch.

The seventeen year seperated siblings, oldest and youngest of a brood of six, hit the proud highway, off to meet the lesbians at Amp.