The weekend that was

Given what went down last night (which included this, among much else), I'm on an incapacitating mental high that makes me not want to do anything for a while, but I also have a lot to write about, so I'll give you something. That said, I have a review of the show running at Jersey Beat in the next day or two, so I don't want to spoil that.

For now, I'll just give you a bit of an overview of the rest of my time in Pittsburgh.

Tom and I left from State College around 9 p.m. on Friday, and after about two and a half hours, one unforeseen detour (turns out a toothless Sheetz employee can know some things that Google Maps does not) and countless humorously-named Central Pennsylvanian towns later, we arrived in Pittsburgh. We met up with some friends from high school and their friends from college for a the latter half of a party and then fell asleep some time after 3 a.m. Our hosts had a house and some empty beds, so I slept well.

Because we arrived so late on Friday and left so early today (slept late, grabbed a wildly disappointing lunch at the famous-for-some-reason Primanti Brothers, left shortly thereafter), the only time I spent really exploring Pittsburgh was on Saturday. We walked around the campus and a bit of the surrounding area, but that was really it. For anybody that might ask me "How was Pittsburgh?", my answer is a simple "I don't really know."

Unfortunately, that's kind of a boring story, so I'll tease a bit of what happened last night. After the show, I hung for a little in the hopes of talking to a few of the E6ers who had just played. I opted against interviews for a whole bunch of reasons (namely: it was approximately 1:30 a.m., they were all exhausted from having played for more than four hours, some were a bit drunk, plenty of other people wanted to talk to them as well, and I was a bit unprepared), but for the most part, they were all pretty approving of my goals and I seem to have their blessing, at least for the time being. I'll go into it more a bit later, but this alone made the entire trip worthwhile.

It was possible from the start to do this entire thing over the phone and e-mail, but I felt it pertinent to make a live, personal connection with at least some of them before I made any big moves. I want to do this the right way, and I will.