My Brother's Wedding.

That kid is closer in age to my daughter than he is to me. That's not my favorite thing to realize. Heck, I remember driving him in my high school car to his parents, he had a baby seat. I remember when he couldn't talk yet. But okay - he's my cousin and we both stood with my brother. Big-Time events involving those who share my surname. My little brother got married and now that's all my siblings & me who've been married at least once.

In retrospect I believe I was made the best man with an expectation that I'd have a lot of longwinded, clever things to say in a speech, but circumstances and the grim reality that I... Talk like Werner Herzog translating Lovecraft conspired against this- which was fine, fine... It was very nice, the whole affair, if ruinously expensive.

I drove back and forth between columbus & Cleveland a few times, rented a car, picked out a nice outfit for my lovely daughter, got a nice hotel room & wore the adjustable, rented pants. And stayed up very late carousing and having a generally genial - if intense time with genial, intense people who drunkenly were curious and interested in my... exotic opinions about theology & life generally. In the end I couldn't give a proper speech, and I felt somewhat worse for it, I have a regret, about it - but it wasn't bad.

Still, when the microphone is put in front of me, I feel like I have a requirement - an honest requirement to tell about something of peculiar, needful substance. But these were sportsfan-businessmen - nobody else present shared my eldritch exotericism & who was I to call into question the validity of their good time by bringing up the fundamental facts of alienation, death and the desperate greed for life that bonds fearful people together in a linguistic bond that seems certain to drive off fear but which, in the end, only invites new fears, new traumas.



In the waning hours of the reception dinner, outside the venue smoking cigars, my brother and I have our fateful discussion, we say those things that are in need of saying, we affirm our lives and accept the things that we have between us and the vastness of things that we will never share and we are contented by one another briefly.
It's our love for others that sustains life, and it is the love of others that leaves us vulnerable, ready to sacrifice all of our fundamental qualities & wishes in exchange for that love's endurance. It is the erosion of this love that we struggle against - that fated, most supreme entropy - which is as inevitable as it is regrettable - that leas us nearer, all the time, to a promised & sought for oblivion. We savor these betrayals as they occur, the self is denied in favor of love and as love wears away we have the resumption of the self to cling to as a beacon - until it is approached and apprehended - but having been once betrayed the self becomes itself an Other - lost to us, a denied and fearful beast, the self, the true identity is never touched, it is an inviolate, lonely animal that finds succor only in final oblivion.