kerouac says

sorry about the blog death. it's not final. i'm just having a hard time making it not be a chore, these days. there's a lot to do, and when it's finally over for the day it's beyond me to make the catalogue-ing of it interesting.

i'm in the burbank airport, waiting to see how the stand-by goes for the replacement for my delayed flight. it's the first hassle of the california trip, so maybe i should count myself lucky. we'd found three yucky apartments and one nice, do-able one when the folks from the housing office finally returned my call. they have something nice for us, but we can't move in until october. it's a nice apartment for way less than we'd pay normally, but i really was looking forward to this being handled when i left town, not jumping into a new stew of decisions about changing our exit strategy. anyone know where we can housesit for the last two weeks of september?

also, we got here late because i had an amazing, technicolor food poisoning experience the day before my supposed departure. days later, either my stomach has shrunk or the bug is still working some mojo, because i can't seem to eat more than half a cup of food at a time. yesterday i ate half a scrambled egg, a third of a green salad with lemon, and half a clif bar. this cannot be right. cross fingers.

you know what else? when i wake up every morning, the first thing my brain turns to--and i mean immediately, like someone un-muting a television--is a re-hash of the wedding. and i hate this about myself, but i'm examining it to see if it passes muster in hindsight. the answer is always yes, and after a few hours awake, there's never even a question, but still: like clockwork, it makes the wake up call every time. it's a bad recipe.

for the record, the ceremony i had was the best getting married i could imagine, so i'm not sure what this is about. and if the party was different than i'd hoped or imagined, it was so full of good things that Awake Me finds the anxiety silly. maybe part of the insistent re-counting is an effort not to forget, to make it present even though it's happened and is no longer yet-to-come, to reassure: it happened, you were there.

my mom and i had a pretty good time together out here. she's aging, and sometimes it's a real shock. without the distraction of the wedding, it was particularly noticeable. the sadness it induces has to do with nostalgia and fear of eventual decline, but also that the querilousness (that's not spelled right), the argumentative bent and the tendency toward social posturing are enhanced, elevated. older mom is less fun. this is sad. i suppose like anything else, you make a superhuman effort to hold on to the good stuff.

i know, but i wasn't ready to talk about it yet.

i realize that the rest of the world has moved on from my wedding, but i still think about it an awful lot. i figure that's my due. it was so unbelievably happy, despite a slightly discordant note at the end when a good friend tore my dress and everyone left at 11:30 (sunday night! what were we thinking?).

the whole thing started out good and got better. we did the 14/48, absorbed love and congratulations from friends old and new (although, for the record, i got a couple seriously dog plays), and then went back to olympia for some relatively restful days. we got sleep, did a few tasks, and generally enjoyed my family and didn't freak out. we drove back up to seattle the thursday before the wedding for a shower, and then it all started.

a few minutes before everyone started going down the aisle, someone--no idea who--asked me if i was ready. and i kind of laughed, because ready just doesn't seem to apply. of course i'm ready, and of course i'm in control of the situation--if i suddenly decided the whole can of corn was a bad idea, i could have walked away. but what got me in the moment was that there simply wasn't a way to make it go slower. or pause. clocks just go forward. the music starts, and then no matter how long you'd like each second to last, it gets over at the same astonishing rate.

there are individual, crystalline memories sort of floating in a happy miasma. the little hole in kaufmann's suit shoulder, the face i made when chris's ring wouldn't go on, how i couldn't wait to kiss him and accidentally started early, how i'd forgotten about the bells i asked everyone to ring during the kiss and i actually thought for half of one of those fleet seconds that it was the sound of us kissing. i was worried that i'd be too wound up about the enormity of the day to really be present--that i'd just be sloppy and teary and would weep from my sheer inability to countenance joy and nostalgia. instead, i smiled through the whole thing. afterwards i worried that maybe it had been too casual, but the feeling of really being there, of a wide wide lens, of superpresence--i think it just bestowed a preternatural calm on messy weepy me. i told this to my dad, including my fear of the casual, and he said, i think the word you want is authentic.

that's kind of a messed up word, but that's what it felt like. like i was there, and it was real. and things were so unexpectedly beautiful--i couldn't believe what we'd pulled off, everything and everyone looked so good . . . it was really as good as i hoped it would be. it was also exhausting, and for the last forty-five minutes of the reception i was that three year old kid who is just too tired and i felt like there was sand in every part of me, but apart from that, wow. it really was blissful.

so was the honeymoon. more later. with pictures. for now, though, i really think that this may be the thousand words that best describes the evening.