Tales from the Wedding Altar

So, as of today, I have officially been married a month.  That would be at least thirty days, for all of you who have 28 or 29 in the pool.  Sucks to be you!

And in celebration of being married to my former Lovely Fiancée™ and current Trophy Wife™ for a month, I give you, as promised, random bits and pieces from the warped recesses of my mind.  Or as I like to call them...

Snippets, Stories and Dark, Nefarious Secrets Written in Code on the Back of a Wedding Invitation:

* * *

It's kinda funny, watching the awkward glances of everyone when your introduction song at the reception begins with, "Let's make this complicated, thinking is overrated; we're busting out of this shitty little town" as everyone realizes that your eighty-plus-year old mother is among the attendees.   To be fair to us, however, Nothingtown is sort of our song.  it was the first song I played for my Trophy Wife™ on guitar.  So now you know.  And knowing is half the battle.

G. I. Joooooooooe!

Also: do you realize how hard it is to find good wedding songs when the prospective husband and wife are most into the likes of Green Day and Breaking Benjamin?  Our first dance song was "Little Moments" by Rob Thomas, which was sort of a concession on her part, because she was originally thinking "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)", and my thought was that particular song had become so cliche over the years that it was almost two-dimensional.  We were going to have that as the song for our last dance instead, but the reception sort of just mellowed its way to an early close, so we sort of never really had a last dance.

I felt kinda bad about that.  I even offered to sing it to her while I [content mercifully deleted] on our honeymoon to make it up to her, but she politely declined.  

By kicking me.  

Multiple times.

* * *

Speeaking of awkward... yes, there was that first dance.  

I would love to tell you that we had a very good excuse for looking like we had all the rhythm of a pair of recent prosthetic leg recipients.

I would also love to tell you that we don't ordinarily dance with all the grace of flightless waterfowl.

But those would be lies.  At least in my case they are.  I don't deny that I am painfully white-- like, blinding, dazzling, Raised-From-The-Dead Gandalf Robes white-- when it comes to rhythm.  The only way you could have less rhythm than me would be to just step onto the dance floor and immediately go into cardiac arrest... and even then, there's a fair chance that you will flail around and flop to the ground with more rhythm than me dancing.

Now, my Trophy Wife™ has rhythm.  I know this for a fact.  But suffice it to say that having rhythm in a pair of jeans and a tee is a far cry from having rhythm while wearing a dress that gives you the mobility of a toddler wearing a sixty-five pound backpack. Srsly. Before my wedding, I had always wondered why paratroopers always wanted to be so quick to unhitch from their chutes after landing.  Now I know.

And knowing is half the battle.  G. I. Joooooooooe! 

* * *

After four months, the cat has finally begun to recognize me as its Nemesis.  

For a long while, it treated me as a logical extension of the Human Who Poo-Poohs Anything Bad I Do As Instinctual and Still Finds Me Adorable, or the Smaller Human Who Has Allergies To Anything And Everything Beneath the Sun and Who Nonetheless Insists on Clinging To-- and Sleeping With-- My Highly Allergen-Ridden Ass.  

Now it has slowly excised me from that and now has begun to rightfully recognize me as the Human Who Absolutely Loses His Fucking Mind and Chases Me With Pruning Shears or Small Appliances When He Finds Me On The Furniture.  This is a good transition. You can sense it now, in the early mornings, when I come downstairs for work, and it hears noise from its resting place, and curiosity overcomes it.  It makes its way downstairs and slowly creeps into the living room and sees... me.  

And there's that moment, when it realizes that it is the only other living thing in the room, and that it wants to be anywhere else in the house except alone in a room with me.  The fear is there.  It is palpable, in the air.   Like the tension in the moments just before something horrible happens and the buckets of red paint start flying in a slasher flick.  

So when I take a step, no matter what I'm doing-- and whether that step is even toward it or not-- the creature bolts like I've set its metaphorical nuts on fire with conductive static electricity.

Now, if I can just instill this sort of mindset in the children, I'll have it made.

* * *

Ahem.

Yes, that above is what we in the profession call a "joke".  It is a "take" that is not supposed to be taken "seriously."

Please remove yourself from your huffy moral high horse or I will be forced to sic Jesus on you.

What?  I mean, surely, that's got to be a Born-on-Christmas perk, right?  There has to be something to offset the years of massive suckmonstrage from getting combo presents, after all.

* * *

We got our wedding pictures back from the fine folks at Cheeky Chic Photography, and I was surprised to note that the professional photos were very beautiful.  Cause, for starters, a great many of them had me in them... and that usually does not equate to anything near beautiful.  

But moreover, the pictures gave me an insight to what it looked like in the bridesmaids' suite as they prepared for the wedding.  And it was nothing like I imagined.  And I did imagine it.  I mean, there was such a big mystique about the whole thing-- I couldn't even see my Lovely Fiancée™ the day of the wedding.  I couldn't sleep at our house.  I had to confab with her clandestinely just to make sure we didn't arrive at Blanton House at the same time.  Hell, she was worried that when I called her I was tempting the fate of our marriage or something.  So i could only imagine what was happening in that room across the hall from where I was changing into my tux.

So, like I so often do, I filled in the blanks.  My Lovely Fiancée™ had been indoctrinated, I decided.  By some sort of shadow cabal.  I even had a name for it.

The Cult of the Bridesmaids.

Insert musical sting here.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I found that the pictures were actually pretty tame.  There were absolutely no scenes where my bride-to-be was eating a human heart or dousing herself in cattle blood.  There were no pictures where she stabbed a young Cosmo model to signify her dismissal of the norms of dating and her ascension into the realm of married life.  There was not a single picture of her prancing around in her never-mind-thats in a paean to the Fertility Mother for asking for a prodigious womb (or, more hopefully, forgiveness for agreeing not to have any).  

I did not see her, her maid of honor Jennifer, or her daughter (our junior bridesmaid and now my stepdaughter) Journey, or Chloe or Hannah (the ring bearer and flower girl, respectively) or even her friend Shannon (who was there helping the girls do their hair) tossing chicken bones and runestones to augur what our marriage would be like.  There was no carving their names into lead tablets to bury beneath our flower bed so that I would be crippled if I tried to start an argument, or doing up a doll made up of bits plucked from my hairbrush to make sure I didn't bolt from the ceremony.

I was bummed.  It would have been a rare slice of life, like a National Geographic exposé into the women's bathroom at the local bar-- the one they gang up to enter.  But it was not to be.

Sigh.

Of course, you know, the photographer was female, too.  She might be sworn to secrecy, too.

Hmmmm.  Perhaps the Cult of the Bridesmaids lives on.

* * *

I'm apologizing, right here and right now, to my lovely Trophy Wife™ for anything I said aloud while we were waiting for her to come down the aisle.  Seriously, I'm a nervous talker.  You wouldn't think so, as often as I'm quiet, but apparently-- especially in front of a large group-- I just apparently feel like something needs to be said.  

So we've-- we in this case being myself, my best man Bob and my brother Dennis, the third groomsman-- stepped up to the front of the assemblage, and are standing there as the processional music begins, because it's actually nearing half an hour past what the wedding was slated for.  And the music plays through once.  I am not concerned-- I know that most brides have last-minute issues, and given the way my wife's hair usually causes her grief, it would not have surprised me to hear that her hair had to be talked out of a suicidal streak by feeding it ice cream and shots of Jagrmeister.  So I'm exhaling, I'm mellow, I'm at peace.  

And the music begins again.  And we stand there, joking around a little, and beginning to feel a little on the awkward, goofy side.  

And then the music begins again.  Now, bear in mind, we did not pick little two-minute waltzes for the processional themes.  These were fullblown orchestra pieces.  Three times.   I'm losing it...  I'm starting to nervously talk about how it was like this at Gen Con, too...

Hey, honey, we have a 10:00 game, and it's 9:25.  Just sayin'.

Honey, it's 9:35.  Don't wanna rush you, but we do kinda have to drive downtown, and park and, you know, walk.  

Honey, it's 9:50, and instantaneous travel won't be perfected for another twenty years yet.  

Honey, just take your time and let's try to make the 1 PM panel discussion, because we obviously didn't really want to play that game, anyway.  

(An aside: see, one thing I have noticed now that we've been married for a little while is that if we are going to arrive anywhere by any sort of scheduled time, I am going to have to stretch the truth by moving our supposed arrival time up by about thirty minutes, because I can see now that if we're not made late by hair or makeup or traffic or the kids, it will be by life in general.)

So yeah, by now I'm yea close to the line of freaking out.  I'm beginning to look at my watch and wishing I had my e-cig with me, and wanting to strangle Pachelbel and his fucking Canon, and am about a step away from telling Bob to go retrieve her.

(Another aside: I laugh at some people who chose their best men without considering the fact that they may actually have to perform the old, traditional best man rituals, such as bringing the prospective bride to the altar (in chains if need be!) and protecting the groom long enough for the wedding to go off without him receiving a knife in the gut.  I think these things out.)

And I have no doubt he would have done so.  He might have picked up every one of the bridesmaids and brought them out in curlers, and if I remained alive to our fiftieth anniversary, I would have never, ever, ever lived it down.

But fortunately, none of that happened.  At that point the bridesmaids arrived and the imminent cataclysm was narrowly averted.

* * *

Finally (for now), I want to bring up something and, again, let you take it with the grain of salt most things that I say are taken with.  I do realize their place in the grand scheme of things, and I do know it is not only a necessity of wedding decorum, but a polite thing to do.  And yes, we are still working on ours, so they will go out to each and every one of you.  But still:

Thank-you card writing is fucking murder.

Seriously, decorum is that you do not type a thank-you card, you handwrite it to properly show that it means that much to you, and to allow the recipient to know that you did not do a mass writing in Microsoft Word and only change the appropriate lines where necessary.  You personalize it; you leave a nice personal message to the recepient telling them thank you for showing up at the wedding, or for the gift, or anything of the sort.  You have the freedom to be creative.

So I started writing them with my lovely Trophy Wife™ a couple weeks ago, before the fan and the shit started shaking hands and forced us to put off a lot of things.  And I immediately found out two things:

A) My hand muscles are not nearly limber enough for long-term penmanship.

And, B) when I write, I am most notable for not knowing when to shut the hell up.

So an hour and a half in, my hand feels like I've been playing racquetball with it, using a lead-filled ball.  My fingers are contorted and tight and achey and completely fucking unused to writing anything longer than my name.  And I feel like such a spoiled little wuss kid in detention, shaking my hand every sixth or seventh word to get feeling back in it.  

I look at the writing on a couple cards I've done with a practiced, artistic eye: it starts out in my nice, tightly rounded and beautifully legible handwriting at the top of the card, and then slowly it work its way past teenage "have better things to do than write this report" penmanship, until it finally devolves into cuneiform by the bottom.

So, I would like to point out to anyone lucky enough to get a note from me... that thing at the bottom that looks like a sea monster should actually read "Thank you again!"  Or some variation thereof.

And yeah, we'll get those out soon.  Promise.

Hopefully sooner than my next blog.

Bli$$

So the wedding date has been officially set for about two weeks now, and I’m starting to think seriously about calling it off.

Let me try to keep people from becoming apoplectic by saying I in no way mean the marriage itself.  Oh, hell, no.  I’m all good with the being married thing.  I don’t think a lot of people realize what an unbelievably lucky bastard I am finding someone who shares a great deal of my likes, overlooks a lot of my faults and quirks, and seems-- oddly enough-- to find me enjoyable enough to be around that she wants to keep doing it.  Finding her was almost certainly the best thing that’s ever happened to me, quite possibly even better than finding ephedrine, and I have no intention of fucking that up.  No way in screw.  And I should point out that I’m not just saying that because my Lovely Fiancee™ reads this blog… although, if it wins me brownie points with her I won’t turn them down.  (As a male, I need to build up my reserve of those as quickly as possible, because I will spend the rest of my life calling them in when I inevitably do something stupid, drunk, pigheaded, or a combination of all three.)

What I’m talking about is the wedding.  As in the ceremony, and the reception that comes with it.  Look, no one wants a dashing, romantic, bigger-than-life wedding for his wife-to-be more than me.  No one wants the big, lavish, decadent Renaissance/Medeival themed celebration for their wedding more than I do.  Or to be correct in my verb tense, no one did, until the realities of things came into it… realities like, say, the ratio of “How Much Money We Have” to “What Anything Costs”.   To put it mathematically,  A ![] <  B   (or in other words, How Much Money We Have is ridiculous fuckloads less than What Anything Costs).

This sort of thinking first reared its head when we were looking for a photographer.  My understanding was that a photographer was someone who shot pictures.  In other words, like you or me, only with much more expensive cameras and equipment, a well-trained eye and a helluva lot more practice. 

And then I saw what they charge, and I realized that some photographers are artists.  Because no one else but an artist would have such a fantastical vision that I would be willing to pay $2300—on the low-range side—for someone to shoot pictures of me and my Lovely Fiancée™ on the day she becomes my Lovely Wife®.  (Quick moment of true story: We are very fortunate in that my niece referred us to a pair of photographers whose work is extremely good, and whose price was not only fair but did not make my insides crumple like a wadded-up toilet paper ball when I heard it.  So let me clarify, not every photog has a price package like that.)

That said, here’s the thing.  I’m an artist, and if I charged someone $2300 dollars for 20 pieces I made totally from scratch starting with a blank piece of paper, I would expect someone to punch me right in the nads.  It's not that I think photography is terribly easy-- quite the opposite-- or that I think it has any less artistic merit than drawing with pencil on paper… it just seems really freaking expensive to pay more than the down payment I made for my car when we’re already covering the event itself, event setting, costuming, makeup, and in most cases, booze. 

So that sort of explains my response to this sort of price quote, namely: “For that price, do we get his and hers oral sex?”

The part that galls me is that I have been told that this is actually very competitive pricing.  (My response to that was, competitive with what, heart surgery?) 

As an aside, I have made my thoughts known on other sites about artists and prices.  Being an artist myself, I would find myself very hard pressed to charge anyone more than $75 for any piece I made.  And I realize that strikes a bad chord with people... I've heard the rejoinders siding with artists charging arms and legs before: “But that’s their only means of income,” or “but they have to cover the price of equipment” or “but they do such high quality work!”  To which I say, Tom Clancy worked an insurance job while writing his first three books, and McDonald’s hires daily; if what you do doesn't make enough to cover the bills and you need the supplemental income, then you really need to do the math.  (Besides, you’re an artist!  Who cares if you demean yourself?  Demeaning yourself in the name of-- for the sake of-- art... dammit, isn't that what’s expected of us artists?!?)

Here’s my thinking.  I work a somewhat menial job that requires me to remain a little active; causes me at least a slight bit of stress; and in which I have to deal sometimes with inane questions, people who do stupid things, and a lot of laziness and politics-- same as just about anyone else who works anywhere in blue-collar/low white-collar places.  And like many other people, my job is not what I’d prefer to be doing, even if I like it.  At said job, I net somewhere in the area of $90 a day… maybe as much as $150 when I’m pulling overtime.

So maybe you can understand why my blood pressure spikes like the jab of a syringe full of adrenaline to my chest when I see that someone is suggesting that them shooting pictures for somewhere from five to eight hours is a competitive rate… and that competitive rate just happens to be the equivalent of me working my job for a month.

And you know, I could even understand-- and maybe even get behind that-- if the photographer were the only expense.  But according to the numerous checklists I’ve looked over, the photographer is barely the tip of the Titanic-Killing-Iceberg that is the modern wedding and reception.  In fact, the photographer is the stuff that falls on the deck and is just enough to chill the drinks.  The average—yes, average­—cost of a traditional American wedding is $22,000.   

Twenty.  Two.  Thousand.  Dollars.

It hurts to fucking say it, let alone consider paying it.  Hell, I  paid $22,000 for my car only when you added in the insane annual high-risk percentage rate and the fact I’d be paying on it for six solid years.   That’s 1/6 of the price of my not-yet-built house!  Holy scrod, it’s no wonder everyone opts for common-law marriages anymore!   Or a JoP or Vegas deal... License, check; blood test, check; bam!  Thank you, have a nice day-- it's the Home Depot of instant gratification wedded bliss, and it's cheap!

Fortunately, my Lovely Fiancée™ realizes what a cash-strapped bastard I am, and as such has mostly gone along with me on certain ‘budget cuts’ that I have suggested for our wedding, including making the reception a pitch-in, holding the wedding at a retreat center (it’s a pretty retreat center, though!), and having our wedding and reception music on an mp3 player and speaker system rather than hiring a DJ or band.  Alone, that’s cut us down about $4500, which can instead go to the sort of trivial things that we might otherwise have to eschew; things that make a house truly a home-- like, say, food or heat… or walls. 

She’s holding firm on some areas, however, and because this is her special day as well, I guess I can’t begrudge her those things.  So I can probably get by without finding old wedding napkins, crossing out the names and writing in ours.  We don’t necessarily have to see what wedding cakes go unclaimed at the bakery and haggle for a reduced cost.  We can decorate the tables without re-using last year’s Halloween decorations.  

But I think we’re still going to look carefully at some of my ideas.  I mean, who needs rice when they can toss pouches of freshly shredded credit card applications?

FOOTNOTE: Lovely Wife® is a registered trademark of Anonymous Moron Enterprises, and is only used for purposes of demonstration.