Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
Everybody keeps asking how it felt, so: It wasn't a blur. We did get to eat. My uncle, the retired minister who officiated our ceremony beautifully, didn't even call anyone the wrong name-- an amusing occurrence at previous weddings of relatives. Thank you so much to the bride's parents, and to every family member and friend who made it to scenic Des Moines, Iowa, to offer support (all those who were there in spirit, too!). It was particularly wonderful to drive away after our little post-reception party while some of our buddies-- great people from high school, college, and New York, most of whom had only just met-- lingered in the parking lot exchanging hugs. Yup, I'm a softie.
For six days, my wife (!!!, etc.) and I kinda worried (only half in jest) someone might be more inclined to pull us over, ding our doors, or at least think we were oil baron fucktards because our rental Pontiac Grand Prix had plates from my mother's native Texas instead of from some famously nice state like, well, Iowa. Is this heaven? While on our honeymoon around Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, we hiked up mountains, rafted down rivers, and saw marmots and elk and a dude walking a wolf on a leash. Not even a husky or an akita, dudes. Then, after we lost our car keys near the end of what turned out to be a 10-mile hike, a tale of clumsiness I was prepared to take to my grave, our "fellow Texan" happened. Oh sweet Irony. (Nottingham vs. Bear, other Texans: Hugs!)
Yeah, but the one thing I held back from doing before the wedding, I really should've done. I came up with a playlist for a pre-ceremony "brunch beverages" half hour (to which the girl added the Clientele's "I Want You More Than Ever" for extra length, a good choice even though she assumed I'd be too busy to notice; of course I noticed), and I also planned our prelude, processional, recessional, and first dance (plus managed to passive-aggressively nix a last-minute suggested parental dance involving "Wind Beneath My Wings"). I didn't come up with a comprehensive play list for the DJ because (a) I knew I'd obsess over it for months and never get anything else done and (b) the DJ was a friend of a friend of a friend and I wasn't supposed to act like a big-city know-it-all. The only flaw in a perfect day: He started to play the Midler tune instead of our selected first dance. Afterward, he played the Midler tune anyway. Then he played a bunch of mid-tempo '70s rock, kicking off with a little Kenny Rogers number, effectively clearing the dance floor until a younger relative recommended he play Motown (which we'd asked for many times over the previous weeks) (his response during the reception, apparently: "You mean, like Wild Cherry?"). My hilariously footloose high school buddy Brian unfortunately had to head back to his grandma's in LaCrosse.
They do have newspapers in the Rockies. "Umbrella" is not "just about perfect" (shouldn't we expect a tad more from perfection?); it's a hook. Then again, I don't remember hearing much of the pre-2006 summer songs mentioned in this article (in real time, anyway) even though I was still an actual person back when they I guess dominated the summer. Hey, look, Tom already wrote something kinda great about this! What's especially weird about the article, though, is a cheap Al Gore/global warming joke (even Bill Maher, no stranger to easy jokes, quips how easy these are in his new HBO special). The almost always on-point Kelefa (can I call you Kelefa) writes, "Al Gore's worst nightmare: 52 weeks of summer."
Dudes, if I may, an aside: Either we agree with virtually every relevant scientist and accept global warming as a serious problem, in which case such a joke is awfully silly. Or else we disagree, which is awfully silly. (Third possibility: Editors inserted the gag to meet the paper's Gore joke quota.) In any event, reducing the issue of global warming to whether or not you think you like Gore is a key strategy among reactionary types. If you're inclined to say, "Chill out, weirdo, it's just a joke," you might not realize yet what's been happening since the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s, exacerbated by FOX News. Blowjobs, inventing the Internet, "earth tones", windsurfing, gentlemen with expensive haircuts. Rather than dispute the facts, right-wing talkers (and often mainstream journalists) bypass voters' rationality by reducing candidates to convenient punchlines-- which are then picked up by vacuous, nominally liberal punchline-repeaters like Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews, or even hard-news reporters like the Times' Kit Seelye, who then might attribute the lines to "late-night TV hosts". There's your ManBearPig, Trey and Matt. You let me down. One time.
Our rental car came with free XM Radio-- the Alamo advantage. It's pretty much the cable TV of radio, in a YouTube and DVR age. We did hear a bit of good stuff ("Lipgloss", "Stuntin' Like My Daddy", "Buy U a Drank", the one twiddly guitar bit in Creed's "Higher") amid a lot of extremely terrible stuff ("I'm Going Home", "I'll Stand By You", anything by Linkin Park, the rest of Creed's "Higher"), but I don't think there's anybody who tunes into the '90s channel during a Nirvana song who sticks around for "A Whole New World". The '60s, '70s, and '80s channels were worthless, too. No P4k-y stations on the dial, despite AOL's two (as of 2003!) Internet indie-rock radio stations. A day or two in, the only station we could listen to without switching channels in disgust (despite the occasional lame New Country crossovers... y'all, Travis Tritt ain't interested in bein' politically correct!) was Track 14, Bluegrass Junction. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. BEST NEW MUSIC.
*love*
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