DADDY ISSUE KNIFE PARTY EXTRAVAFUCKINGANZA!

I haven't allowed myself to own or touch a knife in several years, due to the fact that when I get drunk I tend to improvise a series of tricks that invariably ends with me applying pressure to my hand in a bar bathroom somewhere.

That all changed today, when my hungover search for shelving supplies at Menards brought me to the knife aisle. I didn't think it was the least bit odd to chuck down twelve bucks on the cheapest, skeletal lookin' pocketknife they had, so I fucking did. Although, once I got in the car, I was able to appreciate the irony of needing a separate knife to open up the goddamn package.

While I sat in the Menards parking lot, attempting to jimmy open the hard-plastic bubble packaging with a car key, and failing several times with a business-like jab to my own stomach, I noticed Gerber's curriculum vitae on the back. Ahem:

In a world gone soft, there are exceptions. There are people like you who still hike, fish, hunt, climb and tackle the tough chores like your father did.

Ha ha ha!! Man, did I ever get lucky! With no prior knowledge, I almost bought the Complete Fucking Pussy Knife! I didn't even bother checking the back to make sure this stupid-looking knife was pre-approved by my fictional childhood, complete with fishing trips with the pops that didn't involve him beaning empties offa my head, or perhaps all of the wood-chopping we did for the $50-a-week mobile trailer his series of comedic failures brought his family to reside at for months.

Gerber, why did I have to play Russian Roulette with my self-image like this? Why couldn't you have named your knife something a little more appropriate? Instead of Paraframe I, why not the "Wood Blaster?" How about the "Assorted Crafts Mutilator?"

Are there any hard-ass lumberjacks on Facebook? Can you stone-colds tell me if this kind of propaganda really works? Do you get an emotional hard-on when you buy a knife? Are you validated when you read the packaging and find out that your grandfather clearly would have given you his barely-visible nod and grunt of approval? Does that bullshit even fucking matter? You pissant?

Nevermind that the cheesy, 3-inch sliptip that I bought doesn't have a molecule of wood or wood-like composite anywhere near it, which would colloquially sort of rule out the knives of yesteryear. I don't think that whatever my forefathers were using to splay their bear carcasses or eviscerate uncouth fools were designed on a computer and carved out of alloys with high-pressure waterjets.

In other news, I bought the cheapest possible power drill that Target sold (not exactly my old man's go-to for testosterone-porn), comfortable despite my long-john shirt that I wasn't being guiltily advised by anyone with a better moustache than mine to piss $300 on a brand-name fucking Torque Miracle.

Go drive your truck into a quarry,
-Jed

PREDICTIONS OF DISASTER, IN FIVE-MONTH INCREMENTS

Well, despite the random arguments, misunderstandings, breakdowns and omnipresent passive aggression, my lovely fiancee and I are still getting married in five months.

I last left you clowns alone with the Internet five months ago, which means that back then, it was ten months until I was getting married, which sounded a lot fucking safer to say out loud and to just sort of ignore altogether. Fuck, I'm gonna get horrible amounts of cancer some day, but despite that, you just sort of assume you're well within the safety margin to keep going out and cold firing up a Camel in the hopes that someone brought their camera out to the bar for a Black & White photo study. No? Just me? Well kiss my ass, I'm narcissistic and my own camera's broken.

It's one thing to say you're getting married in ten months, but another entirely to say, "a little under a year from now", which, when you say it, tends to carry the unspoken possibility of one or more partners getting caught fucking a jar of mayonnaise or accidentally setting the car on fire. A lot can happen, and with "less than a year" you feel like you have more than enough time to put your Man through therapy because he keeps wasting all that money on all that mayo.

Expressing a year-or-less engagement through months tends to bring that nervous quality to the whole project; I'd love to cite specific analogies but so far my brain has gone through "buying an iPod" and "going to jail" and frankly, neither of those provided as legitimate comparisons to the most important day of Amanda's and my life are going to get my apartment key to fit in the lock again. So let's just pretend that I've got a fucking point and move on to the next paragraph.

It's all about how you spin it. You tell someone else you're getting married in less than a year, they immediately relax and continue to spend their delivery tips on Xbox "currency" and hair product. You tell someone you're getting married in ten months, they go into a week-long fugue where no amount of constructive organization is going to bring back their previously lauded schedule. Now they've gotta sell their cat for dancing shoes.*

*My wedding will in fact feature dancing, despite my congenital lack of balance or coordination. It will also feature chairs, which I recently found out I was paying nearly $300 for despite the fact that they'll only be in my possession for literally an hour. If I had a van, I wouldn't have this problem, but more importantly, if I had a van, I'd run over the motherfuckers who sent me that invoice.

Now! Let's come back to right now, where that previously imaginary amount of time got lopped in fuckin' half and now we're in a mad dash to send out invitations to relatives I either forgot existed, or simply don't want at my nuptials because they still think "nigger toe" is an appropriate moniker for those big cashews you find in cans of mixed nuts.

Tomorrow Next week month: we arbitrarily piss away hundreds more dollars because our florist/DJ/photographer/chair-bastard called to let us know that they exploded/died/overslept!

I'M YOUR PROBLEM NOW

Originally posted a couple weeks ago, taken down for humorous repairs, and immediately forgotten about.



Since the engagement, one of the prominent personality flaws I never had a chance to approach has been the fact that I'm a colossal fucking slob with no efficient means of taking care of myself. And, up until dating her, my idea of "me time" involved finding a cleanish shirt beneath a score of dirty socks and empty cigarette boxes and getting drunk enough times in the week until I ran into a girl whose standards and last name had completely escaped me. This isn't to say that I still have some horrifying, unchecked libido; indeed, I no longer have a libido that isn't now sated by coffee. But I am still a complete slouch and I recently had a chance to get re-acquainted with that scene.

With my future wife away for a couple of days on business, my role within our budding household was to make sure the place wasn't condemned upon her return, and to try to get the better amount of my shit out of my old house transferred into the apartment. Since the details of my moving are, at best, completely fucking boring and a logistical disaster, we're gonna skip that whole scene and just go straight to the part where my daily routine effectively dissolves without a feminine influence.

I never thought it was possible for me, me, to so quickly abandon all of the traits of bachelorhood that I initially thought were cheeky and irrepressible. For instance, one time I lost a drinking contest to a friend (who, incidentally, is also engaged now, and I wish I had a tertiary anecdote about that funny enough to work into these parentheses) and woke up an hour before work saturated in what could only be urine and vestigial booze. That was fucking hilarious! Especially when I found out two days later from the growing ostrich egg on my brow that I had apparently head-butted a toilet during the ill-fated evening.

To come back to the point, within a half hour of seeing my fiancee off, I had already found success in tearing off a half square-inch of my own toenail, only to spend another ten minutes examining it for potentially cancerous or awesome developments.

It seemed that, left to my own devices, I was still capable of completely moronic and brainless acts. My first action was panic: ain't no way this chick's marrying me if I'm face-fucking my own foot at 2 in the afternoon. But after roughly an hour of masturbating without needing a Privacy Curtain™ or for it to be three in the morning, I managed to collect myself and strike up a battle plan.

That lasted a scant couple of hours: after accomplishing what I told myself was a herculean amount of rearranging and positioning boxes full of my belongings (a metric ton's worth of drunken bar coaster epiphanies and coat hangers), I went shopping for essential foodstuffs and supplies for the rest of my moving operation.

As far as I know, there are only like four situations where a person could legitimately include the following items on his grocery list:

1. Cheap rope
2. Duct tape
3. High quality garage bags

I also intended on buying a nice knife from the hunting section, for cutting boxes and whatnots, and was secretly happy to find out Wal-Mart apparently no longer had a gigantic glass curio full of such items. I was already stretching my calm, not-intending-to-murder-and-chop-up-a-child demeanor with the register girl as it was. And I realize as I write this, I'm also stretching my calm, not-providing-a-conflict-of-interest demeanor for all of my fiancee's colleagues who are reading this and making me feel uncomfortable. P.S.: Get the fuck out of here!

Now that I had what I needed to streamline my moving endeavor, I realized that I was going to be by myself for a couple of days and would need shit to eat. It was then that I realized I was legitimately depressed, not because I had to wipe my own ass for a short period of time, but because I actually missed my fiancee. It's moments like that that let me know that I'm not simply falling ass over teakettle into a legally-binding agreement to give someone half my money for the rest of my life.

With that poignant little thought flopping around somewhere in the back of my head, I heartily threw a sixer of Smithwick's and a sixer of Guiness into the cart. Along with it, because, fuck Earth, I included a giant case of bottled water, and a giant case of V8 housed in cute little aluminum cans. My next stop was the freezer aisle, where I chucked in a shitload of salisbury steak TV dinners. I also threw something like twelve cigarette butts onto the street and sidewalk today. The moral of this paragraph is that I'm a hilarious alcoholic, and you fucks down at the park need to stop bothering me about the environment.

A sixer of Smithwick's and one salisbury steak later, I was torn in my affection towards my fiancee's cat. On one hand, I desperately wanted to gain his trust and unsolicited affection. On the other hand, he's a mincing little whiner and the only thing keeping me from choking the buttery-sweet little life from his face was the fact that I didn't know off the top of my head where I'd get a similar-looking tabby without launching into a hilarious, Ben Stiller-esque madcap race against time.

Naturally, upon her return I had accomplished none of the things she'd politely asked that I do, and she summarily claimed the V8 for herself.

THE GIFT REGISTRY: PART 1

Despite being incredibly hung over and plagued with moderate diarrhea from eating about half a bag of Doritos today, I was stoked to take a trip out to Target with Amanda and set up our gift registry. A gift registry is where you attempt to completely ignore the gnawing guilt of forcing your entire family and social network to pay attention to you by asking them to also buy you expensive shit that you want.

I'm sure this is another concept that I never knew about thanks to hard drinking or rap music or whatever. I was vaguely aware that people got gifts at weddings, but it just made sense to assume that it was a bunch of irrelevant crap that you wouldn't have put in your house if someone paid you. To find out that we get to spend an afternoon running around a store with a cool little Star Trek laser-tag thing was like finding out that the mole on my back was not only benign, but was actually twenty dollars crumpled into a little ball.

Registering is completely awesome, but was hard at first to get into. I come from Circumstances growing up, so I've long been accustomed to not ever getting cool shit from anyone but myself on a bipolar Sunday paycheck-blowing spree. When people buy me things nowadays, I immediately become paranoid that they're buttering me up so that I'll be distracted when they shoot me.

Having said this, the first solid fifteen minutes of perusing saw me ignoring things I wanted that cost more than twelve dollars, getting pissed off that we should scan camping equipment because "people are gonna think we're assholes", and pretty much just acting like an all-around twat.

The high amounts of tension I'd managed to create were successfully defused, like a chintzy plot device in a P.T. Anderson film, by a coupon I found in the baggie we were given by the ineffectual blond Guest Service Employee. Archer Farms was kind enough to give us two free fruit smoothies down at the cafe, just for coming to Target for our gifting needs. As I previously mentioned, I was hung over, and aside from some room-temperature garlic bread and a handful of Cool Ranch Flavor Explosion I'd been running on empty.

On a side note, I must secretly miss the unglamorous stigma of alcoholism I used to enjoy, because I apparently don't bother to even rehydrate after my one typical weekly visit to the bar. I just kind of loaf around and address my beershits when they come.

BACK TO THE STORY: It was to our dismay, however, to find out upon arriving at the cafe that the ineffectual blond Cafe Employee was new and couldn't process our coupon. Since I'd made a royal fucking scene about desperately needing a sandwich, Amanda decided she wanted a smoothie anyway. Not to be outdone, I ordered my sandwich with a smoothie as well.

As it turns out, Target secretly hates people who get married. Archer Farms smoothies fucking suck. We had a choice of Wild Wildberry Wildness or whatever, and some coconut bullshit that made me want to puke just from looking at it. Anything with "Wildberry" in its title is usually a nebulous flavor anyway, not often legitimized through the real fruit that bears its namesake. For Archer Farms, that apparently meant taking slush and draining a colossal tin can of Government peach syrup into it. I used to fucking love Government peaches, so I was quick in identifying which part of my already shitty childhood was just ruined by Archer Farms.

For better or worse, the explosive sugar content from the smoothie got me back on my feet and into a scanning frenzy. If all goes as planned a year from now, I'm going to be the proud new owner of so many different pans and wine glasses that the fact that I can't cook for shit and hate wine won't even matter, because it'll be mine. Maybe when I have kids I'll have something to menacingly wave at them when they're being shitty, while half-heartedly telling myself that one of them might make us rich when we're old.

BLOWING A BUNCH OF MONEY ON PLACES YOU MIGHT NOT ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO GET MARRIED AT

The purposes of this blog are as of yet unclear, even to me. The whole point, even though I inaugurated it while drunk (a common mistake), was to accurately and vividly describe how planning a wedding is a colossal pain in the ass, and the only saving grace is that I'm marrying someone who's anal retentive and loves compiling binders. Unfortunately, the only truly loathsome thing I've experienced so far has been giving people money that doesn't actually exist yet. I mean, that can be kind of fun, but only when you're ordering CDs from mail-order companies or pretending to pay your hospital bill.

Since my fiancee and I have a budget of shit-fifty and don't endorse the high concept of dowry, we're essentially planning and financing this wedding ourselves. But we still want to have a party that all of our family members, crappy or otherwise, will remember for at least eight months.

Despite Amanda's superb planning abilities, we scheduled our reception "consultation" before anything else, most notable being the ceremony that's supposed to take place beforehand.

Thanks to the sure footing and stout disposition of Holiday Inn's events planner, Jeanne/Jeanie/Gene (?), we locked in a decent site for our reception, where our family's legendary exploits in alcoholism can find a new home.

We are now $300 poorer, however, and not necessarily the better off for it. It was from booking the ceremony site this weekend, at a location I don't feel comfortable disclosing but I'll tell you this: The kind of place you'd drive fifteen minutes out of town to have brunch at with your Great Uncle Patrick and his new wife, Ambyr, will often also hold weddings. We are okay with this, even though I fucking hate Patrick.

We were set adrift in a sea of half-promises. There are two sites available to get married, but we don't get the really cool one for our ceremony only unless nobody else books, whatsoever, for the next 10 months. If I have to get married in a parking lot behind a mid- to upper-crust orthodontist, I fucking will, but I'd like to think that if I pay early enough, I get to personally ensure that I don't have to share the reception hall with chintzy lounge singers and smarmy convention-going executives named Dave or Bryant.

I was going to fast-track this article to the very end where I give you my Andy Rooney morality bit, but I realized I don't have one. I can't wait to make upwards of 15% of our investment back in cash and gifts a year from now, but a small part of me can't help but feel regret that my forefathers didn't develop rich mafia ties at some point.

GIVE 'IM THE HEATER, RICKY

Yay, congratufuckinlations. Thank you so much, Google/Blogspot, for making years of web design completely useless by throwing a "CREATE NEW BLOG" button above the one I already made with you. I'm so glad that my old co-worker buddies from my dish washing job inadvertently got me into drawing bullshit on people for money, because it's suddenly become painfully clear exactly what I won't be doing to pay for my future children's insulin.

Anyway, if you didn't come here from The Land of Broken Dreams and Punched-In Bathroom Walls, this is an experimental blog I "created" with the singular purpose of loosely and unfaithfully documenting my engagement, along with what I'm assuming will be at least a year or so of marriage.

I have finally sold out; I have finally fucking thrown years of otherwise decent writing into the trash by even considering doing one of these. But the zest for writing never truly dies, and while I consider theme-consistent blogging to be a complete mockery of legitimate writing, I don't really have much opportunity anymore to yell at Interweb strangers without a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and the unfortunate habit of sleeping with women whose last names I can't remember.

So feel free to keep reading, or eat shit and die, it's really your call. I do promise that at the very least, despite the mewling sentimentality, I'm going to describe my fiancee's vagina in glorious Twainesque detail. I'm also counting on a grace period of about four days before she reads that last bit and gets her deposit back from the hotel we're having our reception at, summarily pawning the ring I gave her and skipping town.

DISPARAGING VAGINA REMARK UPDATE: Love conquers all, and apparently I'm still getting hitched, but I'm going to have some really colorful questions directed at me when her family learns how to spell my last name. Thank god it's a Norwegian fucking mess that no more than five people have gotten right since before I was born.