Something borrowed, something blue

People love pageantry. Parades, graduations, the Texas Two-Step: There’s something about us that yearns to participate in, or watch others participate in, formal ceremonies that involve choreographed movements and speech. And if weddings aren’t the most pre-planned, pageant-tastic events in the human repertoire, I’ll eat my cummerbund.

I haven’t been married yet (this is what Charlie Sheen calls “winning”), but I’ve photographed a few weddings, so I’ve managed a sneak peek into what the planning process for one is like. There are physicists trying to get astronauts to Mars who deal with less stress. This is why “wedding planner” is an actual job that people have. If the average Joe and Jane Everyperson had to do it all themselves you’d see a lot more people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, arguing the relative merits of a buffet-style reception the entire trip down.

There’s a new trend in wedding photography called the “first look.” In the past, if the bride and groom saw each other prior to the actual ceremony, it was considered bad luck; the groom would instantly turn into a toad, and the bride would be crushed under a cartoon anvil and totter around like an accordion. Or something. I haven’t been keeping up with the superstitions.

Nowadays couples want the photographer to capture their initial reactions to seeing their lifemates all gussied up for the big “I do.” The “first look” involves contriving a meet-up and having each party follow a specific protocol: Logan turns his back and covers his eyes, Betsy tiptoes up behind him and taps him on the shoulder, and then they have a tearful “ooh” and “ahh” moment which frankly feels weird if you’re a third party watching it all. I mean, I know my job is to capture this instance -- and it’s a great one -- but in a romance novel this scene would presage a bodice-ripping makeout session in a summer cottage hemmed in by azaleas. There’s no way to avoid feeling creepy when you’re wearing a camera around your neck in this scenario.

The pageantry continues with the ceremony itself, a highly rehearsed affair that always feels like it’s moving in slow-motion. That’s not to say it’s boring; just languidly paced. Whenever the members of the wedding party plod down the aisle in that now-standard stutter-step, I feel like rushing over to help them along -- “Gerald’s got a limp everyone, make way, make way!” If everything moved at real-world speed, the ceremony would be shorter than a Huey Lewis song and you’d be dancin’ the Funky Chicken before the sun goes down.

Luckily that’s not the case, because the vows are probably the best part of the whole deal. They warrant the extra time. At a religious gathering the vows are typically ones we’ve heard before, with the sickness and health and ’till death do you part, etc. Nice enough. But it’s a special treat when the couple writes their own vows, especially if one or both of them are unaccustomed to expressing themselves emotionally.

“Hedda, I remember when we met in college. When you managed not to hurl your lunch after doing your twelfth keg stand, I knew you were the one for me. Even now, 14 years later and with a bun in the oven, you really do it for me. Looking into your lizard-colored eyes turns my insides into liquid excrement. I look forward to spending the rest of my life pretending to like figure skating and never telling anyone ’cause it’d make me look like a total weenie. With this ring, I thee wed.”

“Trevor, the five years since I first saw you wearing a lampshade on your head at the office Christmas party have been the best five years of my life. You make sure to freshen your breath with Binaca after eating a basketfull of garlic rolls, and when we’re watching TV on the couch you always lean in the opposite direction to fart. Also, I really like how you pretend to like figure skating. With this ring … oh hell, just marry us, Elvis.”

At the reception, the women get to kick off their foot-busting high heels and the men can finally loosen their ties and drop any pretense of refinement. With the pageantry dutifully attended to, it’s time to loosen up a tad, maybe quaff a few beverages, and make a spectacle by kicking your nephew in the head while dancing too fervently to the “YMCA.” The pressure that’s built throughout the day can finally be released. Sometimes I feel like weddings are really just an excuse to get to this moment -- a floor-rumbling party where you can show your goody-goody sister that you still dance better than her.

It’s interesting to see how people fall into certain categories at a reception, usually based on age. The young people all shake their hips too much and know all the words to the hip-hop songs. The middle aged people ignore their better judgement and dance to all the synth-heavy ’80’s hits while sweating profusely into their expensive clothing. The older folks sit there and grumble, looking slightly lost, but find redemption when the DJ finally plays a big band instrumental from the days of Brylcreem and lead pipes. By the end of the evening everyone’s in a cake-and-champagne coma. There are worse ways to end a night.

Somehow the wedding ritual has evolved into this now-standard format. The newlyweds seem particularly giddy with this arrangement, and why not? They’re dressed to the nines and get to bask in everyone’s love and attention, not to mention their six new toasters. Next time you find yourself at a wedding, though, do me a favor and say a kind word to the photographer. By the time the rings are on all the right fingers, he’s probably on the verge of collapse, thinking about how long it takes to hit the water from the ledge of the Golden Gate Bridge. 

Ailing autos

After 65,000 miles, the car started gently moaning, like a middle-aged ex-boxer forcing himself out of a recliner. After 70,000 miles, it began to whine. At 72,000 miles the noise became so loud it was hard to hear the Scandinavian power metal blasting from my speakers, and at that point I had no choice. It was time to take it to the mechanic.

Mechanics intimidate me. Most of them have never worn tights during a musical production of “Cinderella” (like I once did), they’ve likely not allowed their girlfriend’s buddies to paint their nails in jolly blues and greens (ditto), and I’m guessing a vast majority don’t spend their spare time watching animated Batman movies alone (me again). Maybe I’m stereotyping, but lug nuts and lilting falsettos don’t seem like they mix. Unless there’s a lost Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about replacing a carburetor.

Fear of these manly men complicates an already unpleasant situation. Nobody likes to have their car repaired. You lose time, you lose money, and you lose sanity fretting about the diagnosis; if you’re like me, you hope the ailment isn’t terminal so you can keep speeding in the travel lane and filling your passenger footwell with Burger King wrappers. You can’t do those things without a car.

Waiting for the mechanic’s assessment is eerily like loitering in the hospital to await the results of your Uncle Mortimer’s biopsy. The stakes are lower, but you go through many of the same motions: the hand-wringing, the pacing, the biting of fingernails if that’s your thing. Then the diagnosis comes, and for certain people -- i.e., me -- this can be a tricky situation to navigate.

See, I know nothing about cars. Zilch. I know they go fast and that the windshield keeps bird poop from smearing my glasses, and that’s about the size of it. A mechanic could easily exploit my ignorance by making up fictitious ailments, like a worn-out vector rod, or a jammed exhaust defibrillator. This is why, when he’s explaining the problem, I always make sure to nod vigorously and keep my arms crossed over my chest; this connotes confidence and understanding. Coincidentally, I also drop my voice about four octaves. This is trick number 476 in my upcoming self-help book, “Faking Manliness.”

My garage always asks my permission before going ahead with any repairs, but really, what choice do I have? Commuting to work on a skateboard? I live in Biddeford and work in Portland. Unless I can find a team of 12 reindeer all jacked up on angel dust to pull my sorry butt along, I’m gonna have to go ahead and have that worn out crapdiddle gasket replaced, thank you very much.

That means getting a bill for service, though, and that’s another area where they could potentially give you the royal driveshaft. Since I don’t know what half these parts are to begin with, it stands to reason that I also have no idea how much they cost. My car’s transmission could be made of solid gold and blood diamonds and cost $6 million for all I know. With the internet, this is probably less of an issue than it used to be; the standard price of an auto part is a click or a swipe away. Regardless, an unscrupulous mechanic could tack some extra dough onto the labor portion of the bill to make up the difference. In some alternate version of reality, perhaps it’s conceivable that it takes a team of 60 people and half a million bucks’ worth of elbow grease to rotate the tires on a Honda Civic. Try me, I’m gullible.

Certain people develop an interest in cars at an early age and know them inside and out by the time they hit puberty. These are your practical-minded people, the folks who can tie complicated knots, and cure earaches with a few drops of honey and a box of matches. I am not one of these people. I learned enough basic life skills to be able to go out in public without alarmed pedestrians calling the police, and then I pretty much called it a day. So yes, like Pauly Shore’s short-lived movie career, automobiles are still a mystery.

Luckily, even a clueless twerp such as myself becomes less clueless and twerp-like as time goes by. The longer you’ve been a car owner, the more you learn about which parts need replacing and when; you absorb this information through an osmosis backed by sheer necessity. Now in my mid-30s, I’ve driven more cars than Dale Earnhardt. Three have been totaled in road-rumbling wrecks (none of them my fault), three have had their engines die while in heavy traffic, and one lost its power steering because a hydraulic pump got sheared off during a blizzard. I don’t drive my cars into old age. I destroy them with a thoroughness most people can only achieve with the hammer of Thor.

That’s Charlie Brown-calibur luck, but with it comes a feeling of being battle-tested and wizened. Just the other week I had my mechanic suss out the source of my Hyundai’s interior whining and discovered it needed a new timing belt. The dealership had estimated the cost to be about a thousand bucks’ more than it actually was; I know this because I shopped around to find the best price. Sounds simple and common-sense, but when you’re in a dark room flailing, you’ll grasp at anything solid to feel less adrift. With the timing belt fiasco, I realized the room isn’t as dark as it used to be. Small rays of understanding are slanting in through the cracks. Only took three-and-a-half decades.

Which means, of course, that my next encounter with the mechanic won’t be quite so intimidating. I’m still dropping my voice, though, just to be careful. If I start emitting a “Cinderella” vibe, it’s pretty much over.

Bath whiz

When I was about two years old my mother snapped a photo of me in the bathtub making goo-goo faces at a rubber ducky and wearing a plastic bucket as a hat. I say this A) because I wanted to write the creepiest opening sentence ever, and B) because that may have been the last time I was ever happy to be taking a bath.

Kudos to you if you can do the whole bath thing. I can’t.

The reasons for this have changed over the years. Back then it was an irrational and childish fear of sewer monsters coming up out of the drain and nibbling on my toes like little flesh-colored Skittles. These kinds of ideas just sort of pop into your head at that age; one minute you’re happily pruning in a sea of bubbles with your toy boats and submarines, the next you’re clinging to the side of the porcelain tub with the “Jaws” theme running through your head. If the murderous clown from “It” had oozed through the spigot and taken a chomp off my thigh, I would have found this completely logical. That happens when you’re two.

Grow up a smidge and you start to find adult rationalizations for these vague fears. Sewer monsters are no longer a concern, but they don’t need to be. They’ve been supplanted by a fear of nature’s Tinkerbells, the ubiquitous microbe. Anxiety over microbes in a bath is nearly as asinine as getting the Boogie Monster jitters, because microbes are all around, on and inside of us all all times. They coat our stomach linings to aid in digestion, they loiter in our eyebrows, and don’t even get me started on the colon, a microbe metropolis with its own economy and highway system. (All signs point to one exit. Zing!)

Microbes don’t stand much of a chance in a hot bath, especially if you’re like me and prefer scalding water temperatures that in time could dissolve the metal tumblers in a combination lock. Yet the fear persists. Spend any amount of time in a bath and you can see the water turn the dirty eggshell color of an old refrigerator. This is filth that had previously been muckled onto your body, which means sitting in a pool of uncirculated water is the equivalent of soaking in a bacterial frappe. The temperature may rob the bacteria of most of their their bite, but surely a few hearty survivors remain, doing microscopic backstrokes in the oily dirt-and-sweat cocktail sluicing around your wrinkled bum.

In other words, baths are gross. I base this on exactly zero scientific evidence, but hey, that’s what makes it a phobia. I’d just rather not take my chances.

Showers, though -- showers are divine.

No pools of stagnating water. No dirt particles floating around your puckered belly button. Just a high-pressure jet of steamy goodness blasting you about the face and chest, banishing all filth into a steadily emptying drain -- and drowning any sewer monsters in the process. If there were more time in the day I’d happily loiter in the shower for a solid hour, emerging only when my skin turned the color of boiled lobster.

Water pressure is paramount. It can make or break a shower. Too little pressure makes the whole endeavor feel weak and ineffectual; it’s like standing under a dripping tree branch after a spring rain, vaguely pleasant but ultimately unsatisfying. Too much pressure, on the other hand, is practically impossible, unless you’ve got the kind of shower head used to clean circus elephants. You know the force of the stream is perfect when it’s just shy of physically removing your head from your body.

Solid shower pressure can have an impact on whether your hair looks normal or like a limp cluster of spaghetti noodles. This is no longer a concern of mine, of course, since I made the decision a long time ago to shave my head bald, thereby ridding myself of the hassle of a thinning hairline; better to look like someone’s big toe than a meerkat with radiation poisoning. But I remember when hair was a daily consideration. In order to attain the fluff necessary to cover my scalp, I needed good shampoo and solid jet of water, something with enough physical force to shock my fickle follicles into obedience. Otherwise it drooped lamely on my scalp and looked sad in some way, like someone had just delivered some terrible news. “Sorry, Jeff’s hair, but you’ve got six months left to live.” That wouldn’t have been far from the truth.

Transitioning from baths to showers made me feel weirdly grown-up. There are clearer rites of passage, like my first shave, or my first make-out session under the bleachers during a high school football game. Still, there’s something to be said about abandoning the bubbles and Aquaman action figures in favor of a good standing wash. I’d slide open the opaque shower door and step out into a room choked with steam and feel about 10 years older, ready for all the trials of adulthood. Wrapping myself in a towel at the age of 9, I was ready to do a round of taxes and haggle with a mechanic about the price of auto parts. Nevermind the fact that I still sounded like Mickey Mouse taking huffs off a helium tank.

Baths are supposed to be sensual experiences at this stage of life, with scented candles peppering the room and Barry White’s creamy nougat voice rumbling from some faraway stereo. Maybe there’s nail polish involved, if you’re so inclined. I just can’t get over that icky feeling, a sense that something isn’t as it should be.

I could always force myself to take my first bath in years in order to confront my fear, but something tells me I’d snap, and the first person to find me would behold a gibbering ninny, slinging nonsense while wearing a plastic bucket as a hat.

Pokébarf

So there’s this game for mobile phones called “Pokémon Go,” and I’m pretty sure it’s a signal that the endtimes are finally here.

In case you’ve spent the past month making wicker baskets with mountain Sherpas in a Tibetan village, the game involves following your phone to real-world locales in search of the titular Pokémon characters, most of which look like the offspring of an obese housecat and a flying squirrel. When you find one, you look through your phone’s camera at, say, the mailbox on the corner of Main and Elm, and on your screen, you see the Pokémon superimposed over reality -- his virtual hiding spot digitally revealed. After that I’m a little fuzzy on what happens. I think you capture him or something. I’d look it up, but I don’t give a steaming turd.

If that description of the game only makes half-sense to you, don’t worry. It’s a mark of your sanity. Judging from the sheer masses of people who have embarked on this virtual treasure hunt, sanity is in short supply these days, supplanted instead by this latest digital annoyance. It would be one thing if you looked through your phone’s camera and it superimposed Scarlett Johansson’s face over everyone else’s (especially mine), but no, game developer Nintendo has other things in mind. Like making sure nobody ever makes eye contact again.

Before employing my few remaining linguistic skills in ripping Pokémon Go a new one, I have to admit that not everything about the game is entirely odious. It’s been quite the hot topic at my office lately, with more than one parent reporting that the app has helped them bond with their children. I can see that. As a child I was among the original users of the NES, Nintendo’s first home video game console, and I remember being particularly close to my mother around this period, as she developed an obsession with Super Mario Bros. that bordered on manic. In fact, if I’d been an adult back in 1988, I might have been concerned for the psychological health of a woman whose chief hobby, for a time, was chucking radishes at egg-regurgitating ostriches.

The parent-child bond isn’t the only benefit, it seems. Since the game involves finding these critters out in the real world, reports are that adults and children alike are chucking their sedentary lifestyles and doing a lot more walking. It’s not often that a video game inspires physical activity; usually they promote just the opposite. In an old-fashioned game of word association, the phrase “video game session” makes me think of cold basement couches, stray pizza crusts in half-empty Papa John’s boxes, and a Mountain Dew bottle so large you could dress it in a coat and hat and take it to a screening of “Finding Dory.” Stepping outside and feeling the sun on your skin feels like a step in the right direction.

That’s a pretty weak comfort, though, because buried in the promise of increased physical activity is the knowledge that we used to trek outside under our own desire and will. We didn’t need to be chasing down fictitious characters to catch a breeze on our collective faces.

By “we,” I mean “people of a certain generation” -- those of us who grew up with video games but weren’t dominated by them, who could put down “NBA Jam” to go play on the swings without feeling withdrawal headaches. Those old gaming consoles were married to our television sets, so when we went outside, we were cut off, forced to interact with the world by crumbling dead leaves in our hands and poking at bugs with sticks. It was no-frills, but it was reality. Not the virtual kind, but actual, tree-bark-and-grass-blades reality.

This is what smartphones take away from us. Pokémon Go is just the latest manifestation of a larger problem: the virtual world’s encroachment on our non-virtual selves. The internet is a wonderful thing, not least of all because of the convenience; in five seconds flat I can be watching video of naked people rolling around on a giant chocolate cake, all of it set to major-key banjo music. That’s pretty special. But the internet used to have dividing lines. It required a giant computer with a connection piped in from the wall, and when you got up to go to the bathroom -- or to work, or to school -- it couldn’t follow you there. You were restored to a world of physical things that you had to look at and touch.

Now the ’net’s in your front pants pocket, along with the naked cake people and all the rest. All boundaries have dissolved. Pokémon Go is the perfect illustration of that: Pedestrians are getting hit by cars because they’re hunting down cartoon characters. Muggers are planting “lures” to draw players to sketchy areas to strip them of their valuables. Just the other day, the president of Massachusetts General Hospital had to issue a memorandum to all of his employees, requesting that they stop playing the game and focus on treating patients. You know, that minor annoyance.

I liken the game to cigarettes. It may give you a pleasant sensation at the time, but quit altogether and you’ll feel a whole lot better.

But is that even possible now? To date I’ve resisted the urge the buy a smartphone, but like the internet itself, they may one day become necessary, as integrated into our lives as socks and underarm deodorant. It’s part of a larger trend of human and machine melding into a singular being. Forty years from now I’ll be the curmudgeonly old man railing against the evils of neurological implants, saying things like, “Back in my day, we had to Google things with a computer!” Hell, give me a tweed jacket and an underweight cat and I’m halfway there already.

If you play the game, do me a favor, ’k? When a cartoon critter manifests itself on my head or at my feet, just leave it there. It’s a new game I’ve invented called Pokémon Go Away.