Thank you for being here.
so sad
Thank you for coming, have a great day. It would be amazing if there was two here tonight. We got cakes
for you out in the...
It's a vice cold beer.
to introduce a very special person. You all may know him. World renowned. You see him almost every day.
If you're lucky, that's not true.
working man in poetry. Let's welcome to the stage, give him a warm welcome, Mr. Ross Gage.
This is right that when this book came out, we had a book release at the IFAO. It would have been like
February of 2015. And I'm pretty sure we were saying, yeah, I think Bussman's playing for that, too.
So it's just, you know, it's amazing. I thought it would be fun to do. So I want to remember, there's
a couple things. One is that we have these broad sides of catalog of Anabash Gratitude, like a kind
of a pamphlet that our friends Vaughn and Daniel made. They're beautiful.
one-off, they're letterpress cover, they're out there, they're free. And there's also copies, like I
think we have like 150 copies of catalog, and they're free. So take them, if you have a copy, you know,
leave it. But if you have a copy and you've got someone to give it to, take it. So that's that.
You know, and I wanted to do that because this is the first book I think that I wrote every poem here
in Bloomington. And there's a lot of Bloomington in this poem.
in this book, it's not all Bloomington, but there's a lot of Bloomington here. And a lot of the ways
that these poems got made are with beloveds here, like, you know, Bryce, old dirty Bryce who's on the
base, spicy Brycey. We were in a writing group together back in the day, and he saw some of these poems early.
I also was remembering that as I was riding my bike when I first got here, I'm pretty sure it was Bryce
that I saw like turning compost somewhere and he invited me to turn compost. Changed my life, you know.
But anyway, this is so many people who have helped with these poems. So I'm just grateful. And,
you know, Dave and Kay and Alex and Chris Mattingly
and on and on and on. But, you know, my partner Stephanie, like, when these poems were first shaping
up, I didn't know if they were poems. And she was like, no, I think they're poems. So, endlessly grateful
to her. I'm going to read a handful of poems and then get you back to them. This first one is called
Burial. Oh, and it's so fun.
I get to ask this question, if it's legal to ask anymore. Has anyone done anything interesting with
a placenta? There's one.
Beautiful. That's awesome. That was like, you're like a plant. Like you're exactly answer. You know,
there may have been a placenta in a freezer that I almost thought was bananas or a smoothie once. Maybe.
Anyway, thank you. That's, you got it. Didn't happen. You know, I didn't, I... Burial. You're right.
You're right.
The fertilizer is good. It wasn't a gang of dullards came up with chucking a fish in the planting hole
or some midwife just got lucky with the placenta. Oh, I'll plant a lilac bush here. And a sudden flush
of flowers. Yes, the magic dust our bodies become cast spells on the roots about which someone else
could tell you the chemical processes, but it's just magic to me.
which is why a couple of springs ago when first putting in my two bare root plum trees out back, I took
the jar which has become my father's house and lonely for him and hoping to coax him back from my mother
as much as for me. I poured some of them into the planting holes and he dove in, glad for the robust
air, saddling a slight
gust into my nose and mouth, chuckling as I coughed, but mostly he disappeared into the minor yawns
in the earth, into which I placed the trees, splaying wide their roots, casting the gray dust of my
old man evenly throughout the hold and replacing then the clods of dense Indiana soil into the roots,
and my father were buried.
Watering it all in with one hand while holding the tree with the other straight as the flag to the nation
of simple joy of which my father is now a naturalized citizen. Waving the flag from his subterranean
lair. The roots curled around him like shawls or jungle gyms, like hookahs or the arms of ancestors
before breast stroking into the xylem, riding the elevator up through the cambium and into the leaves
where, when you put your ear close enough,
You can hear him whisper, good morning, where if you close your eyes and push your face, you can feel
his stubbly jowls. And good Lord, this year he was giddy at the first real fruit set and nestled into
the 30 or 40 plums in the two trees, peering out from the sweet meat with his hands pressed against
the purple skin like cathedral glass.
And imagine his joy as the sun wizarded forth those abundant sugars and I plotted barefoot and prayerful
at the first ripe plum swell and blush almost weepy conjuring some surely ponderous verse to convey
this bottomless grace. You know, oh father, oh father kind of stuff. Hundreds of hot air balloons filling
the sky in my chest, replacing his intubated body listing like a boat keel side up.
replacing the steady stream of water from the one eye, which his brother wiped before removing the tube,
keeping his hand on the forehead until the last wind in his body wandered off while my brother wailed
like an animal. And my mother said, weeping, it's OK. It's OK. You can go now, honey. At all of which
my father guffawed by kicking from the first bite of plum buckets of juice down my chin.
staining one of my two button-down shirts, the salmon-colored silk one, hollering, there's more of that,
almost dancing now in the plum, in the tree, the way he did as a person, bent over and biting his lip
and chucking the one hip out and then the other, with his fists loosely made and his elbows cocked and
his eyes closed and his mouth made trumpet when he knew you could make you happy just by being a little silly,
and sweet. Thank you. This is called To the Mistake. And this is like a, it's a school poem. Anyway,
but it's an LSD poem more.
When I was, it was just like a weird, I don't want you to miss it, because it's kind of crucial to the
poem that kind of slipped by, but I, weirdly, I was in, you know, like the, what do they call it, gifted
classes. I mean, they kicked me out in eighth grade, but, you know, when I was really little. But they
had a reunion my senior year of that crew at like the teacher's house, and for some reason,
Three of my friends took a bunch of acid shortly before the, I'd never done acid, so I didn't know how
long it lasted. So I guess we ate the inebriant around 10 in the morning and the reunion was at three.
To the mistake.
It is good to know a thing or two about that of which you speak, or even to be expert, which is not
requisite, though a thing or two is good. Like the prop plane I know is going to land on the canvas
roof of my friend's rickety Jeep, while the salutatorian to be sits in the backseat giddy with her new
graphing calculator. And the driver says something I think about Arsenio Hall, but he sounds like a
bunny in an echo chamber.
And it's hard to hear with those propellers roaring above. And today in class, I am lecturing on the
miracle of the mistake in a poem. That hiccup or weird gift that spirals or jettisons what's dull and
landlocked into as yet untraversed, i.e. cosmic, I overuse this metaphor with my students, grounds.
I tell this to 105 give or take undergrads who mostly don't care.
and wrestle second to second the by now blood-borne drive to check their beckoning phones, which mostly,
bless them, they don't. The mistake, I say, is a gift. Don't be afraid. See what it teaches you about
what the poem can be. I know of what I speak.
Like the two tabs of very potent, evidently acid, I dropped four hours before this reunion and graduation
party of sorts for we the gifted and talented. Corn chips and Mr. Pibb and store bought cookies, the
texture of which sunk me knee deep in a desert. I imagine I looked something like an opaque cloud.
that day when Mr. and Mrs. Szymanowski, our brainy hosts and teachers, guffawed in claymation, the tremendous
bead of spit balancing on Mr. Szymanowski's lip before Gustav Ehr lifted it and it drifted slowly to
the coarse fabric of his beard, all the spiny hairs of which seemed to screech like crickets.
And no wonder I declined the invitation from the volleyball court, although I was a phys ed major. And
beneath the white arcs, the ball painted in the sky, my classmates Lisa and Eugene and Ick and Becky
all looked a bit alien with craniums engorged slightly and spines compressed, if not even serpentine,
their limbs flailing about wildly like cuttlefish speaking only in polysyllabics, which must have made
my breathy grunts
all the more apish. Who knows where the poem will lead you? I tell my students to let go their reins
and listen to the tongue's half-wit brilliance, the corner of the mind made light by some accidental
yoking of two impossibly joined things. One or two in the rear of the classroom, I notice their eyes
roll into the backs of their heads. And my plastic cup of root beer by now is spilling a bit while Mr.
Szymanowski laughs
like a hyena plunging its face in a ruptured gut and nothing has ever been as clear to me as the bell
that rang in my head that day. We were a 12-year experiment. The garden variety brainiacs from a suburban
school, passable genetic mixture, forgettable location. Mr. Sim's oddly large eyes and his long reptilian
tail now making sense.
And the way someone with an electric can opener voice seemed always to be inside him speaking when he
spoke, now making sense as the night winds down and the last of the cake is served writhing with some
fluorescent scrawl only I seem able to read.
While all the good-natured kids whose fingernails are chewed raw and jaws pulsed who are so good, they
are so very good, and soon will be hauled into the bottomless sky under which I stumble to see what
direction they're coming from. And can I run?
Thank you. The poem gets truer every day I read it. This is a poem called To the Fig Tree on Ninth and
Christian. Bless you. And one thing, you know, there's someone who shows up in this poem named Mr. Liao.
He's my best friend Jay's dad. And he died in April. I think it was in April. And he gave me fig trees
that I brought here and then shared with
Bloomington Community Orchard. So there's fig trees at the orchard that were Mr. Louse trees. They're
cuttings from his trees. And I had a hunch that they might make a lot of fruit this year. They haven't
made much fruit, but this year there's a lot of fruit on them. And, you know, God willing, they'll ripen
all the way up. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is, he was like one of my first garden teachers.
He didn't really tell me much, but he showed me something.
And he gave me and us figs. Some of you might have cuttings from those fig trees. To the fig tree on
9th and Christian. Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up the racket in the lug
work, probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did, some crime or other. The city, they say,
is a lonely place until, yes, the sound of sweeping.
And a woman, yes, with a broom, beneath which you are now, too, the canopy of a fig, its arms pulling
the September sun to it. And she has a hose, too, and so works hard, rinsing and scrubbing the sidewalk,
lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip and not probably reach over to gobble
up the perpetrator.
The light catches the veins in her hands when I ask about the tree. They flutter in the air,
and she says, take as much as you can, please help me. So I load my pockets and mouth, and she points
to the stepladder against the wall to me, and please take more. But I was without a sack, so my meager
plunder would have to suffice.
And an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low slung branch and its
eye wept like hers, which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her
teeth. And soon there were eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree looking into it like
a constellation pointing, do you see it? And I am tall and so good for these things. And a bald man
even told me so.
When I grabbed three or four for him reaching into the giddy throngs of yellow jackets, sugar stone,
which he only pointed to smiling and rubbing his stomach. I mean, he was really rubbing his stomach.
Like there was a baby in there. It was hot. His head shone while he offered recipes to the group using
words which I couldn't understand. And besides, I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart
rolling in my mouth.
pulling me down and down into the oldest, oldest countries of my body, where I ate my first fig from
the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night. And maybe never said more than
five words to me at once, but he gave me figs.
And a man on his way to work hops twice to reach at last his fig, which he smiles at and calls, baby,
come here, baby, he says, and blows a kiss to the tree, which everyone knows can't grow this far north,
being Mediterranean and favoring the rocky sun-baked soils of Jordan and Sicily. But no one told the
fig tree or the immigrants.
There was a way the fig tree grows in groves. It wants, it seems to hold us. Yes, I am anthropomorphizing.
God damn it. I have twice in the last 30 seconds rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else's sweaty
shoulder, gleeful, eating out of each other's hands on Christian street in Philadelphia, a city like
most, which has murdered its own people. This is true.
We are feeding each other from a tree at the corner of Christian and 9th. Strangers may be never again.
This is called Two More Cents on Gratitude. Just in case. Seems like we need reminders.
If gratitude is, at root, the acknowledgement and celebration of our needs, our fundamental and undeniable
and common neediness, and if the practice of gratitude illuminates not only our needs, but the needs
of others, if it illuminates the web or net of need we are in and of, though it be devastating sometimes,
though it be terrifying to be mostly to be only need. A web or net of thicket or tangle of relationships
known and not from which we will never on this side of things escape or be free of. And if that web
or net of need might also be called simply life. And if therefore gratitude is the acknowledgement,
the practice of being life.
The practice of acknowledging ourselves as tiny knots in the net of need. The practice too of celebrating
the net of need, which let's remember is another word for life and being it. If we in here talking about
the practice of being life, and if we are living or trying to in a murderous,
genocidal lunatic system whose objective is to corral and dominate and destroy life to phase us and
usness out to put a highway between or through us or over. And in so doing to also corral and dominate
and destroy gratitude and joy and love along the way.
Destroy our understanding of and belief in the sanctity of our connection, our relationships,
our beholdenness to one another. Destroy our belief in the necessity of our relationships to one another,
the necessity that is of our need for one another, and all the loving practices born of that need.
such that we come to believe the murderous genocidal lunatic system that is actively phasing us out,
the murderous genocidal lunatic system for which phasing us out constitutes a market, a boon, that that
system might tend to our needs, in large part by destroying our need for one another, though their phrase
would be freeing us of our need for each other, freeing us
from each other. And if gratitude, in so being a celebration of our need for one another, a celebration
of our being life, of our being mutually, commonly, needfully, beautifully, inescapably life,
then it is also, in addition to a defense of life, true gratitude is a defense of life. It is perhaps
A way by which we come to understand the murderous genocidal lunatic system for what it is. And also,
maybe and crucially, a way by which is said or sung or meant or practiced or might be to the murderous
genocidal lunatic system itself. Yo, fuck that shit motherfucker. Or you can get out of my face with
that fucking bullshit.
Which is to say, gratitude might also be a way of being, as Cornelius Eaddy writes, a brick in a house
being built around their house. A way of remembering, of practicing, as Fred Moten and Stefan Oharney
write, that we owe each other everything. A way of practicing or remembering, as Thomas Lux puts it,
that we love the thing because someone else loved it enough to make us love it.
a way, as June Jordan puts it, of fathoming mercy. And as Adeselis Girmai writes, that you and you and
you are who I love. Of remembering and practicing that, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, the more something
is shared, the greater its value become. That we might be and are, as Janann Alexander writes,
caring for what lives, living for what cares and moves in us, oh, each brief company. That, as Gwendolyn
Brooks writes, we are each other's harvest, we are each other's business, we are each other's magnitude
and bond. All of which is to say, gratitude might be, no, no, it is. Gratitude is, as Patrick Rosale writes,
and altar for listening to the beginning of the world. This is a poem by Rafat Alarir, who was assassinated
by the IDF in December of 2023.
called If I Must Die, Let it Be a Tale. If I must die, you must live to tell my story, to sell my things,
to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, make it white with a long tail, so that a child somewhere
in Gaza, while looking heaven in the eye, awaiting his dad who left in a blaze, and bid no one farewell,
not even to his flesh,
not even to himself. See the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel
is there, bringing back love. If I must die, let it bring hope. Let it be a tale. It's Rafat Al-Arir.
This is a short little poem called Catalogue Unabashed Gratitude. The orchard features prominently in
this poem. The Bloomington Community Orchard, if you don't know, go. There's so many things about it.
I mean, working on that project with so many beloveds, I could go on and on. I've written about it elsewhere.
You can read that. It totally changed my life.
like gave me my life in a lot of ways. Catalog of unabashed gratitude. Friends, and also thanks for
coming out, I'm glad, investment. Thanks for having me, boys. Friends,
Will you bear with me today, for I have awakened from a dream in which a robin made with its shabby
wings a kind of veil behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south of Spain, its breast
a flare, looking me dead in the eye from the branch that grew into my window, coochie cooing my chin.
The bird shuffling its little talons left and then right while the leaves bristled against the plaster
wall, two of them drifting onto my blanket while the bird
opened and closed its wings like a matador giving up on murder, jutting its beak, turning a circle and
flashing again the ruddy bombast of its breast by which I knew upon waking it was telling me in no uncertain
terms to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude not quite dormant
in my belly. The bird said so in a human voice.
bellow forth, and who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel? Hear ye, hear ye, I am here
to holler that I have hauled tons, by which I don't mean lots, I mean tons of cow shit, and stood ankle
deep in swales of maggots swirling the spent beer grains the brewery man was good enough to dump off
holding his nose where they smell very bad.
but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips twirling dung with my pitchfork again and again
with hundreds and hundreds of other people we dreamt and orchard this way.
throwing our brows and hauling our wheelbarrows and sweating through our shirts. And less than a year
later, there was a party at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth, one of which a Liberty Apple,
after being watered in, was tamped by a baby barefoot with a bow hanging in her hair, biting her lip
in her joyous work. And friends, this is the realest place I know.
It makes me squirm like a worm. I'm so grateful. You could ride your bike there, or roller skate. You
could catch the bus. There's a fence and a gate twisted by hand. There is a fig tree taller than you
in Indiana. It will make you gasp. It might make you want to stay alive even. Thank you. And thank you
for not taking my power when the engine of his mind dragged him to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle
or two of Booth.
And thank you for taking my father a few years after his own father went down. Thank you, Mercy. Mercy,
thank you for not smoking meth with your mother. Oh, thank you. Thank you for leaving and for coming
back, and thank you for what inside my friend's love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod gleaming
into the world, likely hauling a shovel with her like one named Aralee Ott.
with hands big as a horse's and who, like one named Erra Lee Ott, will laugh time to time till the juice
runs from her nose. Oh, thank you for the way a small thing's whale makes the milk or what once was
milk in us gather into horses hucklebuckling across a field. And thank you, friends. When last spring
the hyacinth bells rang,
And the crocuses flaunted their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved the beehive, which when I entered
were snugged, two or three dead fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames, almost clinging to one
another. This one's tiny head pushed into another's tiny wing, one's four legs resting on another's
face, the translucent paper of their wings fluttering beneath my breath. And when a few dropped to the
frames beneath,
And after falling down to cry, everything's glacial shine. And thank you, too, and thanks for the corduroy
couch I have put you all on. Put your feet up, here's a light blanket, a pillow, dear ones, for I think
this is gonna be long. I can't stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here
with me, for moving your lips as I speak.
Here's a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it. And thank you, the tiny bee's shadow perusing these
words as I write them. And the way my love talks quietly when in the hives, so quietly, in fact, you
cannot hear her but only notice barely her lips moving in conversation. Thank you, what does not scare
her in me but makes her reach my way. Thank you, the love she is which hurts sometimes.
In the time, she misremembered elephants in one of my poems, which, oh, here they come. Garlanded with
mourning, Gloria and Wisteria blooms trombones all the way down to the river. Thank you, the quiet in
which the river bends around the elephant's solemn trunk, polishing stones floating on its gentle back,
the flock of geese flying overhead.
And to the quick and gentle flocking of men to the old lady falling down on the corner of Fairmount
and 18th, holding patiently with the softest parts of their hands her cane and purple hat, gathering
for her the contents of her purse and touching her shoulder gently in her elbow. And thank you to the
cockeyed basketball court on which in a half court, three on three, we old heads made of some runny
nose kids a shambles.
And the 61-year-old, after flipping a reverse layup off a backdoor cut from my know the past to seal
the game, he ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods and hollered at the kids to admire the
pacemaker's grin across his chest. Thank you, the glad accordions wheeze in the chest. Thank you, the
bagpipes. Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress for stopping her car in the middle of the road
and the tractor trailer behind her and the van behind it, whisking a turtle off the road. Thank you,
God of Gaudi. Thank you, Paisley Panties. Thank you, the organ up my dress. Thank you, the sheer dress
you wore kneeling in my dream at the creek's edge and the light swimming through it, the coy
kissing halos into the glassy air, the room in my mind with the blinds drawn where we nearly injure
each other, crawling into the shawl of the other's body. Thank you when I just say it plain, we fuck
each other dumb. And you, again you, for the true kindness it has been for you to remain awake with
me like this, nodding time to time or making that noise which I take to mean yes,
Or, I understand. Or, please go on, but not too long. Or, why are you spinning so much? Or, easy, tiger,
hands to yourself. I am excitable. I'm sorry. I'm grateful. I just want us to be friends now. Forever.
Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you.
I promise I will stay on my side of the couch.
And thank you the baggy of dreadlocks I found in a drawer while washing and folding the clothes of our
murdered friend. The photo in which his arm slung around the sign to the trail of silences. Thank you
the way before he died he held his hands open to us. For coming back in a waft of incense or in the
shape of a boy in another city looking from between his mother's legs or disappearing into the stacks
after brushing by.
For moseying back in dreams where, seeing us lost and scared, he put his hand on our shoulders and pointed
us to the temple across town. And thank you to the man all night long hosing a mist on his early bloomed
peach tree so that the hard frost not waste the crop. The ice in his beard and the ghosts lifting from
him when the warming sun told him sleep now.
thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long
journey. Who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground. Who loved you before
she knew you by not slaughtering the land. Thank you who did not bulldoze the ancient grove of
dates and olives, who sailed his keys into the ocean and walked softly home, who did not fire, who did
not plunge the head into the toilet, who said, stop, don't do that, who lifted some broken someone up,
who volunteered. The way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant is called a volunteer.
Like the plum tree that marched beside the raised bed in my garden. Like the arugula that marched itself
between the blueberries. Nary a bayonet. Nary an army. Nary a nation.
Which usage of the word volunteer, familiar to gardeners the wide world, made my pal shout, oh, and
dance and plunge his knuckles into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries and digging a song
from a guitar made of wood from a tree someone may be planted. Thank you. And thank you, Zinnia and
Gooseberry, Rebekia and Pawpaw, Ashmeads, Colonel, Coxcomb, Scarlet Runner, Feverfew, Lemon Balm.
Thank you, Knitbone and Sweetgrass and Sunchoke and False Indigo whose petals
it apart by bumblebees. Good Lord, give me that. And Moonglow and Katkin and Krupnack and Painted Tongue
and Seed Pod and Johnny Jump up. Thank you, what in us rackets glad, what glad rackets us. And thank
you to this knuckleheaded heart.
This pelican heart, this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw to the sky. Oh, clumsy,
oh, bumblefucked, oh, giddy, oh, dumbstruck, oh, rickshaw, oh, goat twisting its head at me from my
peach tree's highest branch, balance impossibly gobbling the last fruit, its tongue working like an
engine, a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle into my mouth.
like the smell of someone I have loved. Heart like an elephant screaming at the bones of her dead. Heart
like the lady on the bus dressed head to toe in gold, the sun shivering, her shiny boots singing Erykah
Badu to herself, leaning her head against the window. And thank you to the way my father one time came
back in a dream by plucking the two cables beneath my chin like a bass fiddle strings that played me
until I woke singing. No kidding, I was singing and smiling. Thank you.
where the Juneberry's flowers had burst open like the bells of French horns. The lily my mom and I planted
oozed into the air. The bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops below. The collard greens
were waving in the wind like the sails of ships, and the wasps swam in the mint bloom's viscous swill.
And you, again you, friend, were hanging tight.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes. I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last
thing, including you, which, yes, it's awkward. The suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling
gem slipping into your eye, soon it'll be over.
Which is precisely what the child in my dream said, holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and
the sky, hurtling our way like so many buffalo who said, it's much worse than we think. And sooner.
To whom I said, no duh, child in my dreams. What do you think this singing and shuddering is? What this
screaming and reaching
and dancing and crying is other than loving what every second goes away. Goodbye, I mean to say. And
thank you, every day. Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay. That was nice. Thank you to Ross. Yeah.
That was beautiful. It's a rare treat to see that poem read again. Can we get a spotlight up here? Make
it low for us. It's cool too.
the pawn shop in town, and it gets a little out of tune. It was $100, and I was trying to get a deal
on it, so I was like... And I was like, what are you gonna do about that? And the guy was like, you
don't play up there anyways. You gotta buy that. And he was right. I did buy it. I'm a sucker.
Brand new song. So the band hasn't learned it yet.
Asia Essex here on the soprano saxophone. Matt Narrowland on the trumpet back there. And Dylan Maloney
here on the alto saxophone.
One second before I said it, because we've gotten his name wrong a bunch of times. Not the Dylan part,
but the second part. I'm pretty sure I said Dylan Maloney. But we've, that's the one. Yeah, that's it.
Okay. Good. Yeah. Yeah. When you're with Dylan Maloney. Yeah, we know
Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you so kindly. Took a lot of great support to get to this
moment, so really appreciate it. It's been a really crazy year for us, so we really appreciate everybody
being here. Yeah. Thanks so much. This is our last song. Thank you all for being here.
Come on, we'll do it again. What's the point of being hard though, you know? That's right. Thank you
all for being here. We really appreciate everybody being here. It really means a lot. Yeah,
we love you all. Yeah, let's make this one last. We really appreciate it. Thank you to Ross. Let's give
him a round of applause again. Ross Gay, everybody. Ross, National Treasure.
He's a national treasure. We really appreciate him being around and inspired around us. Okay,
let's rock this.