THE MOST WONDERFUL DAY

I think the first time I went to a wedding on my own I was 16. It was a nice service, but perhaps the most vivid memory I have of it came before the ceremony. As several of us were talking as we sat in the pews, one of our party tried to silence us by pointing out our impertinence. "Would you guys shut up?" he said. "Getting married is something you only do five or six times in your life, so show a little respect!"

That's not the sort of introduction to weddings that makes one tearfully sentimental about the ceremony. So it's no surprise that I never really saw the ceremony as "the most wonderful day of your life." After college, when I was going to a lot of weddings, I saw them as opportunities to party on somebody else's bill. After wedding gifts began seriously denting my bank account, I saw them as minor shakedowns. My gift-giving began to assume a touch of the sullen and cynical: I went from giving things such as linens, which were practical, to things such as knives, plates and crystal, which could be thrown during an argument.

Most of all, weddings began to get on my nerves because they were predictable and familiar. You go into church, sit down, watch a parade of evening wear and the dress, (and let's face it, sometimes the clothes are utterly preposterous), listen to a clergyman tell us that "Love rocks!", listen to a few vows that are statistically dubious, cringe if the vows have been written by the bride and groom, watch an exchange of rings, the kiss, the applause, another parade of finery and then the headlong dash to the bar at the reception. The whole thing is so routine that if you strapped missiles to the backs of the wedding party and had Joe Stalin looking down from the balcony, the ceremony could probably be mistaken for a Soviet May Day parade.

So weddings could use a little more pizzazz, starting with the dress. I don't know of a single woman who became a bride by going on dates wearing a wedding dress. So in the spirit of "ya gotta dance with who brung ya," I see nothing wrong at all with a bride getting married wearing a fire-engine red tube dress, black fishnet stockings and 6-inch stillettoes. And in some cases, the bridal march should be "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No."

Of course, we could only get such a happy beginning if we could dial the pressure on the bride waaay down. Honestly, some of them can get so wound up that a lifetime of therapy would only partially undo the damage suffered on the most wonderful day of their lives. For instance, when my mother was on altar guild, she was helping out with a Big Wedding that featured a high-strung bride who made constant and snippy demands. Though Mom did not put the smackdown on the bride, I'm pretty sure she was hard-pressed not to grab a handful of veil and hair and hiss, "I'm sure you have been fondly imagining this day all your life, dearie,, and I'm almost positive you never imagined yourself waddling up the aisle with your bouquet shoved up your a--, but that's what's going to happen if you say one more word."

Let the brides relax, I say. Let them find a way to stabilize their moods, even if that means five or six stiff shots of stability. I see nothing wrong with a relaxed bride being pushed toward the altar in a wheelbarrow, wearing the dress and sunglasses, gesturing with champagne bottle and greeting the guests warmly: "Hi, hi! Thanks for coming, so glad to see you! You like the dress? It's Versace. Oh, glad you could make it! Thanks!"

The clergy also need to step up their game. The "Love rocks!" part of the service is often a medley of the same bromides and platitudes that always wander onto the altar, shake a finger at the young couple or smile vacantly and then vanish like steam. At this point, most guests are wondering what sort of beer will be at the reception. But if the cleric talked about love and threw in such phrases as "if you know what I mean" and "but not like that," people would be a LOT more attentive.

Since weddings are, like I said, minor shakedowns, there should be some means of subtly reminding the guests that they are expected to bring not just a gift, but a really good gift. So I'm thinking preferential seating for the big givers: bedroom suite in the front, blender in the back, cheese grater in the parking lot. That sort of thing. And the bride could enforce it by greeting each guest before the service by saying, "And what did you bring me?"

Some brides and groom like to invite exes to the wedding, a foolish and potentially disastrous decision. I guess these people are invited to show that the bride or groom is sufficiently evolved to be above the pettiness that can follow a breakup. But I say that any ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend should be given a voodoo doll in the likeness of the bride or groom. If we see any odd twitches or levitating or if the groom starts hitting himself during the vows, the truth will come out.


Oh, I have other ideas, such as the Wagner-themed wedding (bride and bridesmaids dressed as valkyries, groom as Siegfried, groomsmen dressed as trees to represent Teutonic forests) But these ideas should be enough to create a wedding that every woman wants: one that people will talk about for a loooooong time.

HOME, SWEET HOME (SORT OF)

In a sense, I can say I am from nowhere. My surname is Anglo-Irish, an amalgam that disqualifies me from crying during "Danny Boy" or cheering for Manchester United. I'm a third-generation native of Florida, a rootless state without an identifying cultural icon -- unless you think hustlers and drifters fit that bill.

But people need a sense of belonging to something, a sense of home. So for better or worse, I feel an intense connection to my hometown of Winter Park, Fla., and believe me, it's not the easiest of love affairs. Winter Park is like Gene Tierney or Vivian Leigh -- a beauty that can seduce with a glance, a glance that also says, "Oh by the way, I'm one crazy-ass bitch, too."

Winter Park was a society backwater for most of its history. It is situated on a chain of lakes just north of Orlando, and in its early days its resort hotels were the winter homes of well-to-do Yankees. Legend has it that when a member of Atlanta society went nuts, he was exiled to Winter Park. After all, one can't have family pretending to be Napoleon in the Piedmont Driving Club, but one also can't have family languishing in Waycross.

Winter Park never got over its early exposure to money, and money is what defines it now. It is a suburb of arriviste McMansions and older lakefront estates, of high-end eateries and retail stores (for some reason, Park Avenue has become a Mecca for wine bars; if you're looking to become a well-heeled lush, here's your town). Years back, the town placed signs at the city limits that read "You are entering Winter Park. Please drive with extraordinary care." Some wag changed one of those signs so it said "You are entering Winter Park. Please drive extraordinary car." Many people felt the second sentiment was closer to reality.

I guess we should have seen that one coming back in the early '80s. While I was home from college one Christmas, I noticed that the police department was sporting a couple of new patrol cars. Of course, just not any cars would do for the police department of Winter Park. These were no Fords or Chevies; one was a turbo Saab and one was a turbo Volvo. Upon seeing them for the first time, my father wondered whether the Police Department would complete the snob appeal and get an unlisted phone number.

Is there trouble in paradise? Are there comforting tales of bourgeois misery, of people learning that money can't buy happiness? Of course, but I'm not going to bring any of them up here. This is a humor blog, and there's nothing funny about such stories. But a friend's experience is somewhat illustrative of Winter Park's affluenza.

My friend owns a black cat that attacks its tail. He wanted to help his cat get over this strange affliction, so he took the cat to a veterinarian in Lockhart, a rural community in central Florida. This vet's recommended treatment reflected the straightforward thinking one might expect from salt-of-the-earth types: cut the cat's tail off. Naturally, my friend wanted a second opinion, so he took his cat to a veterinarian in Winter Park. This vet had a completely different diagnoses: The cat was "depressed" and needed to take kitty Valium. Really. I guess if it's good enough for the owners ...

Going home, as I did last week, is usually a bemusing and dizzying experience because Winter park changes so much each year. What is comfortably familiar one year is gone the next, usually replaced by something more attractive and less charming. And sometimes you don't know what the hell the new is. During a cell phone conversation, my mom wanted me to find out what sort of business had replaced a bank that had been at the corner of Park and New England. Once I got to the designated corner, I had no idea what had usurped the bank. I found curtained and darkened windows and a vague sign. Design firm? Art gallery? The notice on the door saying that the bar opened at 4 p.m. was a pretty strong indicator that the business was a restaurant, but in Winter Park it's quite possible that it was still the bank -- and it was just moving in a new direction, image-wise.

But not everything that is lost is to be completely lamented. The house where I was raised was itself razed. Gone. Not one brick left standing upon another. And that was a small loss. That house was functional -- it kept in air conditioning, kept out the rain and prevented neighbors from seeing those unfortunate moments when the Family Parnell was springing for each others' throats. But aesthetically speaking, that house was a sullen insult to architecture and was once described by my father as "a perfect example of the s-------t of everything." So it was not surprising to see it being replaced by a palace that took up both our former lot and one next to it. But all the cool oak trees that had been there were gone. So was the dogwood tree, the camellias and the azaleas. There would be only the splendor of the new house where ours had been. It didn't look like there was room for much else. And I thought that a shame.

But that's life and that's my hometown. And however weird or material it gets, it will always be home.

THE GREAT OUTDOORS

For century upon century, man's relationship with nature has been a wellspring of the sublime. Countless paintings, poems, symphonies and other works of art have been summoned forth as man has gazed upon the brooding, seductive, majestic Other.

But even nature can slip on a banana peel and fall on its ass, and it usually does so on the Outdoors pages of daily newspapers.

These pages normally run in the back of the Sunday sports section and exist solely to reaffirm man's place at the top of the food chain. They are crowded with photos of hunters and fishermen proudly displaying their trophies, such as luckless fish and deer they have caught or killed. Oh sure, there are stories about hiking and other non-bloodsport activities, but in general the Outdoors pages are kingdoms of the dead, ruled by sportsmen.

With nature already reduced from an Emersonian wilderness to a theater for manly pastimes, layout editors and copy editors now step in to provide the comedy. You see, Outdoors pages are often seen as nuisance work by people who only think about guns and hunting when a reporter is 45 minutes late with a story that hasn't been run through spell-check. Thus the pages can be hastily thrown together by people completely unfamiliar with the subject. The results sometimes go awry.

For instance, at a paper where I used to work we ran a story eulogizing a champion fisherman who had been killed in a plane crash during the past week. We found a great photograph of him holding a aloft a massive bass that he had caught, and he was beaming with triumph. We made that story the centerpiece of the page, meaning that it was given special display type known in the biz as a hammer. A hammer is usually a two or three words that a general tone of the story, whether it be witty, somber or whatever. Unfortunately, the hammer placed under this photograph said "A tragic loss." And indeed it was, but it was not a widely known loss; not many people (generally speaking) had heard of this fisherman. So the only immediately recognizably dead thing thin the photo was the fish. And it appeared that the paper was devastated by its passing.

At times in the past, I have longed to take a more deliberate approach in sabotaging the Outdoors page -- not because I have any sympathy for the animals or antipathy toward the sportsmen -- but rather just because it's there. We've had several hunters send in photos of themselves posing with their deer-head trophies arrayed about them as visual evidence of their prowess. But to me, that looks like a Vegas singer posing with his backup vocalists. I once soooo wanted to say in the caption that one such photo depicted a hunter who had rigged the deer heads with hinged jaws and tape players so they could provide the chorus when he wanted to sing "I Ain't Got Nobody." I also wanted to say that one hunter was using his trophy sort of as a ventriloquist's dummy ("Say, Bob, do you remember all the fun we had when you shot me?") and entertaining small children at grade schools. Or perhaps the deer head could be made to recount its killing: "I thought I was the king of the forest, and I had escaped many lesser hunters with ease. But as I roamed the woods that fateful day, I was seized by an unspeakable dread. I knew then that Jerry Smith -- the Jerr-beast as we call him -- was nearby. If I fell under his rifle, there was no hope. Then suddenly I knew I was in his sights, and I tried to flee. But his aim was too pure ... ." Or Something like that.

I mean, really, deer hunters have done so much recently to rig the game in their favor -- they might as well just take the final step and start chaining deer to trees -- that a deer trophy ain't what it used to be. So it might as well serve another purpose.

But what I really regret is not getting this photo in of a hunting dog gone bad.


(And if the image isn't showing, then bear with me for a few days until I get back into town to fix it.)

Anyway, next time you here the song of the wild, but it sounds and feels like something being played by a kazoo orchestra, fear not. It just means an Outdoors page is being designed somewhere.

****

Here's a shout-out to Hannah M. Thanks for the comments, and remember that copy editors have a genetically encoded sense of grievance that is quite acute. Don't give into it.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

This past week I have been sick with a cold, and the only creative work I have done has been a productive cough. So I decided to update the blog this week by reaching into the dim past for an online column I wrote last year. Given its woeful hit count, I'm sure its new to many of you. So here it is: (It was originally titled "The Gray, Squeaking Torrent")

When I heard an unfamiliar clatter in the kitchen counter late one windy mid-December night, I thought it was Santa, as any grown man might think. But then I remembered that St. Nick was not due for two weeks, and he doesn't usually come in through the silverware drawer. I chalked the noise up to the wind and went back to sleep.

The next morning when I went to get a spoon, the multitude of droppingsI found in the drawer gave me a good idea of what had disturbed me. Only a rat would be gross enough to leave its droppings in someone'ssilverware drawer.

My initial reaction was swift and medieval: "RATS!" I thought to myself. "Filthy, plague-bearing rats! As soon as the health officials hear of this, they'll come and brick me up in this apartment and leave me to die a horrible death alone with nothing but low-budget porn to comfort me in my most desperate hour!"

All histrionics aside, I knew a rat in the apartment wasn't good and that I would have to evict it. But I didn't truly know what kind of struggle had been brought to my door until I went to work. There, as I tried to deflect accusations of sloth and squalor, I heard this from co-worker Jake: "You're about to tread a dark path, John."

Language like that always gets my attention, and I asked Jake to tell me more of this "dark path." He described his own battle with rats and did so in a manner that made me think he had become a little unhinged by the intensity of the struggle. Think Quint from "Jaws." He said that in terms of gluttony and filth, rats surpassed even my college roommates. He said that they are persistent and filled with sinister cunning. Worstof all, they are legion. Kill one and a hundred will take its place. In short, I was about to grapple with a tenacious enemy, and I was likely to become so obsessed that I would make Captain Ahab look as tranquil as a Buddhist, and any weapon I used to fight the beasts — up to andincluding a flame-thrower — was justified.

I wasn't quite ready to embrace the scorched-earth tactics that Jake suggested. I just wasn't ready to turn my apartment into a free-fire zone. I decided I would stay calm and take a measured approach.

Which didn't last long. While I was being calm and measured the rat was making itself cozy in my apartment. It was helping itself to my bread and amusing itself by shredding my paper towels. It was raiding my garbage and eating the pickings on the counter. Had the rat one day emerged from its hiding place wearing a tiny bathrobe, carrying a backscrubber and whistling a jaunty tune as it went to shower in my bathroom, I would not have been surprised.

And this was beginning to gnaw at me. The sanctity of my home had been violated, and I hated that. I hated thinking that an animal many links down the food chain was thumbing its nose at me. I hated finding evidence of its scavenging. I hated hearing its loathsome skittering inside the walls. And slowly, I was coming around to the obsession tha tJake warned me about. I was alert at the slightest noise, thinking itwas the intruder. I was involuntarily waking at dawn, one of the times when rats are at their busiest. I dreamed that my apartment was floodedby a squeaking, gray torrent. And I was cleaning my apartment daily with a thoroughness that would have made Howard Hughes look like a frat boy. But I wasn't over the top yet.

Until New Year's Day. I came home to watch the later bowl games and, while getting a beer from the fridge, I noticed a cabinet door above the counter was open. As I began closing the door, the rat burst out of the cabinet with all the subtlety of Bonnie and Clyde leaving a bank. It made its getaway behind the stove, leaving behind the remains of two slices of bread ... and one seriously brassed-off tenant.

(To everybody who has heard this story before, this is how it really happened. The rat did not fly around my apartment wearing a jet pack and brandishing a ray gun. So I embellished a little. Deal with it.)

That did it. The rat had to pay with its life. Not even a written apology could save it. With relish, I began considering just how to kill the brute. My first wish was to imitate "Caddyshack" and use plastic explosives shaped like friendly creatures. But explosives might bring an instantaneous, painless death. What about bringing a natural predator such as a python or a hawk into the apartment? No; it might get cocky after devouring the rat and cast its eyes on bigger game — like me. Poison? Too impersonal. Snap trap? This had potential. The idea of therat getting a little blunt-force trauma pleased me. Snap trap it was, then.

After buying a trap the Wednesday after New Year's Day, I raced home to check it out. I tested the spring action several times, and each timethat I heard the POW! of the trap I threw back my head and laughed sinisterly. It was go time. I baited the trap with peanut butter (several people warned me that rats are clever enough to remove cheese safely from traps, so, unless I wanted the rat to die of gout, I should use peanut butter), and left for work, confident that my adversary would soon be scampering down Glory Road.

When I came home that night I found ... nothing. The trap was nowhere in sight and neither was there a dead rat. There was only one conclusion: The rat had taken the trap and made it a trophy. I felt defeated. The future that began unfolding itself at that momentwas a grim one. I saw myself sitting on the couch watching a football game ... next to a 6-foot rat that keeps ordering me into the kitchen to whip up more nachos. And get it another beer while I'm in there.

But suddenly my eyes caught a gleam of something that had fallen in a window sill, and that gleam parted my gloom. It was the trap, and there beside it was the sight my eyes yearned to see: my foe, utterly vanquished. The rat was dead — as in bent-into-a-U-shape dead. Normally,I'm not one to gloat over a dead animal, but in this case I couldn'thelp dancing and yelling, "Oh, yeah! How does that peanut butter tastenow, bee-otch?!" My housemate and I gave the rat the ignominious burial it deserved — the garbage bin — and I slept that night more soundly thanI had slept in weeks.

The peace was short-lived, however. At 6:36 a.m. several days later, I heard a familiar thrashing about in the trash and then the loathsome skittering. And I remembered: kill one and more take its place. The battle had to be rejoined, but my bloodlust was spent. So I put down poison, hoping that would bring a final end to the saga. After about six weeks of peace, I am ready to declare victory and say that my apartment is rat-free. Otherwise, I can only shrug and be grateful I have someone to come home to. Or I can get the plastic explosives.

NOT EVERYONE IS A CRITIC

I stared at my executive editor's e-mail to me with a mix of revulsion and horror, as though I had come into work and found the carcass of a slaughtered dog dumped on my desk. "Would you mind," my boss asked, "critiquing Sunday's paper?"

Writing a critique of the newspaper is an odious task to me, and I have done everything short of going into witness protection to avoid it. I have no desire to make myself a lightning rod for my co-workers' discontent by passing judgment on their work. In my worst imaginings, I see a Telegraph reporter (usually Travis or Heather) reading aloud my critique to the rest of the metro staff like a Nazi storm trooper fanatically denouncing communist literature at a book-burning. I then imagine the metro staff falling upon me with full-fledged mob rage.

So I had to get out of writing the critique. Or at least writing one that would get me torn limb from limb.

But how?

I figured the best way to get out of a difficult task is not to pout about it -- that just makes you seem like a malcontent in dire need of a transfer to Waycross -- but instead to embrace the task with both arms. And screw it up royally. See, if I did that, I'm not a bad attitude; I'm just a poor schmuck who tried "but just doesn't do critiques well." Not a firing offense and not something that would even be a blip on a review.

One thing I grasped upon was that perhaps the critique didn't have to be in verbal form. Maybe I could critique the paper as a street mime. Get all done up in white face and a striped shirt and then do that "I'm up against a glass wall" thing. But given the general public's rightful hatred of street mimes, that would probably get my ass kicked just as surely as trashing my co-workers would.

Hula dance was a possibility. It doesn't provoke the knee-jerk violence that street mimes do, and it does tell a story. With gentle hand movements and a swaying motion I could say something like:

The heavens flash on and on
the heavens flash on and on
The rage of goddess Pele can be heard
because the 1A centerpiece is a farming story
and its main photo is a circus bear juggling

Effective, perhaps, but I scrapped that idea, too. Me wearing a grass skirt and coconut top is a beatdown waiting to happen.

So guessed that I would have to use words, after all. I thought about using haiku:

Photo of kitty
casts sickly sweet pall on page
kill photographer

That had the advantage of weirdness along with the disadvantage of playing to a weakness of mine: I can't resist offsetting the delicate with the coarse or brutal, two items I definitely did not want to fling at my co-workers.

Maybe, thought I, I should run the critique through the filter of a much better writer, but a writer whose style was so mystifying that nobody would know what the hell I was talking about. Yes, only Faulkner would do.

The old woman sat waiting in the early morning cool on the front porch of the house that the father of her father's father had built, the old house that was redolent of honor and sacrifice and valor of soldiers and a cause that was long past yet ever present and she waited for the paper that would recount the things past that would never be again, yet would be sanctified in print and so taken away from the vices and weaknesses of men, and she waited until she was rewarded by the indolent thump of the paper upon the porch (never meeting the eye of the delivery person, a person whose family lineage disqualified him from acknowledgement) and she picked up the paper, feeling its coarseness and heft and looked down upon it to see "Sewage main bursts into geyser downtown."

But this, too, sinks from its disadvantages. To write like Faulkner, you would have to read a lot of Faulkner, and that is something I will only do at bayonet point.

So maybe Hemingway would do. I like Hemingway.

The Macon Telegraph is 180-year-old paper and is said to have a circulation of 58,000. It's slogan is "Invite Us Home" and its lobby is dominated by a 6-foot, papier mache golden eagle. Nobody has ever explained why anybody would invite a 6-foot, papier mache golden eagle home. The inside of the building is a place where journalism breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. The breaking part happens when reading stories like downpage schools story on 1B, a story so poorly written it recalled the hopelessness of a luckless fisherman.

And so I tried to write as Hemingway would, but after the 10th or 11th drink I passed out at my desk and then had a lot of explaining to do to my boss.

Thus, I had to play it straight. I had to say what I thought, good and bad, and then sign my name at the end. And so I did, proudly and firmly, typing K-E-I-T-H D-E-M-K-O.

See, I can weasel out of almost anything.