For Father's Day, we got my dad an ersatz "Little Green Egg" from a big-box hardware store. He wasn't totally sold on the gift but he had heard it doubles as a pizza-cooker that comes close to replicating a wood-fired pizza oven like at fancy pizzerias.

He had us all over the other night to break it in. The first pizza was barely passable. The ones that followed improved and by pizza number seven at the end of the night, we realized that we had something great on our hands with the grill/cooking device. Even though none of the pizzas were truly stellar, we got close and we knew that with a little patience and tweaking and time, the thing would be cranking out gems that would rival the pizzas we grew up eating at Grimaldi's back in Dumbo when my dad was a hungry young prize-fighter and my mom a Russian immigrant and known Communist hiding from McCarthy's hunters.

It may be a few weeks, it may take a year, it may be the next time we use the thing; but we knew we had the hardware and a breakthrough was imminent.

That's kind of how I feel about Phish right now. We're eating good pizza, definitely the best we've ever made at home, but not as good as in NYC. They've got the chops, momentum and energy but they haven't reached the potential that their chops, momentum and energy are hinting at. This isn't a bad thing, it's rather exciting and hearing well-played and energetic shows last night makes me hopeful for the future and the shows are interesting and enjoyable for marking the way on the trip up the mountain.

Oh and tl;dr sorry.