strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Mar 26 06: tie me up! tie me down!
Next weekend we’ll be in England watching our dear friends Peter and Robin get hitched. They’ve been together for 20 years, and so the opportunity to see them make honest gentlemen of one another, with all the legal honors and rights and responsibilities associated therewith, will be a real pleasure. (They insist on not calling it a ‘wedding.’ They are, in their words, being ‘conjugated.’ I can’t decide whether this sounds very dirty indeed, or just seriously geeky. I like it either way.)
At any event, preparations for the trip have begun. The suits have gone to the cleaners; I had to break down and admit that I was no longer 29 and ask the nice Korean lady could she please let the waist out an inch. Today the beard got its every-three days trim, and while I was at it I spent some time sharpening up its edges. (Beards are like one of those low-growing ground cover plants, thyme maybe, or vinca. Given the chance, they creep out of their assigned beds and begin to take over.) And then I got to go shopping for neckties.
It’s a good thing I don’t have one of those jobs that makes you dress up all the time, because I would turn into a shameless dandy. Instead, I am an unemployed writer-editor-Mac tech-game designer guy, with a minor in a capella singing, so shirts with buttons were about as dressed-up as I ever had to get. To compensate, once or twice a year I go someplace like Charles Tyrwhitt and buy a snazz new tie. Then I call up my friends and demand that we go someplace schmancy for drinks. Today they were having a big crazy sale so I got two! Two ties! One is all purple and blue and stripy (the tag says “lilac funky stripe”) and will be good for a spring wedding, I think. The other is this seriously red number, without color variance but subtly textured. I will look rather sinister and bad-ass in it. Sinister and bad-ass is great, but not what I’d want for a wedding, so that one will stay home.
It is a good thing to play dress-up every now and then—and what better excuse than the wedding of two worthy folks? None, I think. This will be fun.