This Ends with a Wedding
Hello. My name is Garrett and I am getting married exactly 30 days from today. I’m a 38 year-old white male. I live in San Francisco with my fiancé, two dogs and a cat. The dogs are overweight, though we have them on a diet. The cat seems pretty average, though I think I’d prefer it if he were fat, lethargic — if he aggressively defied his natural physiology. I’ve lost 15 pounds since I started making an effort midsummer, putting me at 248 at the time of this writing, a mere 13 pounds off my marathon weight of seven years ago. I’m still 6'5'’. There’s not much anyone can do about that. Various chatty cab drivers, store attendants, bar tenders, bums and other gentle citizens often use “Big Guy” as a form of address when we interact.
“What’s up, big guy — spare some change?”
“You wamme to move the seat up for you thayr big guy?”
“What’ll it be, big guy?”
I’ve never identified with this term: Big Guy.
Big Guy.
Big Guy.
Wedding planning tip #43: Portapotties are a pretty straightforward item to rent. They come in four varieties, four flavors, if you will. The most basic unit is the kind you pee in at music festivals and construction sites, a plastic cube with a hole in it and a door, a place of nightmares we’ve all had: getting stuck in one, somehow coming in actual contact with the mounting pile of human feces contained therein. Your wedding coordinator will tell you she can place candles and flowers in it so as to freshen it up a bit, but this will strike both you and your opinionated mother as an insufficient solution, and you will opt for the “High Tech 2/Deluxe Flush on Wheels,” the most expensive unit, two in fact, which costs four times your budget for this line item (you had a line item for portapotties, btw), but like, you’re asking people to dress up for this event — you can’t also ask them to shit in what’s basically a hole in the ground.
In August I had planned to take a trip. My best man and I were going to fly to Hong Kong to have our wedding suits made, then travel on to Japan, where we’d hike up a series of Japan’s highest peaks. It had been years since I’d traveled internationally. I’m actually more embarrassed to admit that than I am the fact that I suffer from a small handful of both psychological and physiological peccadillos that made the trip both logistically and emotionally daunting. But I got up for it: didn’t drink for a month, went on an aggressive diet, exercised daily. I wanted to be my best self for this trip, or at least the best version of myself in years. How many years? Ten? 15? 20?
Twenty years ago I was 18. At 18, at six-feet-five-inches, at 155 pounds — a walking rake, basically, with thick black glasses hugging sunken cheeks — I was anorexic, was cutting myself, was depressed about a girl, was depressed generally. That wasn’t my best self. How about 10 years later, at 28? I’d found some success by then, had the beginnings of a career. Nope, not happy: drinking too much, single, career respectable but unfulfilling, true calling in life seemingly elusive. So then, my best self must be childhood. Hmmm, let’s see…vivid memories…that would be sucking at little league, sucking at football, sucking at girls (no, not that way), finding solace in Soul Asylum. Nope, no way.
A week before we were set to leave, the trip was cancelled. It’s a long story with a boring conclusion, and to protect the innocent I’ll simply say this: Every once in awhile your best friend lets you down. Maybe he has a good reason or maybe he doesn’t, but real friendships are among the rarest and most precious things in life, and the only way you can really break them is to hold a grudge, to find yourself unable to forgive. I wasn’t able to let this one go. I forgave my best man, we moved past it; I’m sure his speech at the wedding will be awesome. Still, I missed out on discovering my best self up there on those faraway mountains. Where else was I going to find it before I got married?
Hey look, here we are.
