Me and my dude have a relationship.  Been together close to 19 years, if I got that right.  But we never got married, because a bunch of reasons that were not wholly clear to me until now, when the plan is in place.  We’re gonna make it official October 13th.  This is important for reasons of legal protections and whatnot, and also to get what we deserve, which is recognition for this thing we got.  But, this is kind of a bad time.

We have little money and incredibly few family and friends, we aren’t going to reproduce, and we’re not young.  Marriage as popularly conceived heavily leans on those things.  It’s to have a day of expensive shangri-la decadence?  No.  It’s a way to celebrate the merging of two families and sets of friends in a great big… there’s a guest list of officiant, wedded, and three other people.  It’s a way to make holy or legitimate the birth of your… nope.  It’s two wacky kids starting life together as…  nope.

If you put this question to the masses, the usual answer is “don’t bother” or “just elope.”  But our self-respect won’t let that stand.  We deserve a genuine ceremony, not scratching paper with ballpoint pens under fluorescent lights in an office space.  The thing is this – as you take away all the things of marriage as currently conceived, either because you can’t afford them or don’t want to do them, what do you replace them with?  Eventually, you have nothing left, and have to reinvent marriage from scratch.

One could wonder how we ended up with so few friends and family.  I have the stereotypical broken home, my dude just had a single mom from generation of socially maladjusted people who couldn’t stay married or get married in the first place, half of whom are now dead.  My dude has health problems that have him socially isolated, I just don’t feel the need for friends outside of my most important few, and I let the others all drift away.  I don’t think about this most of the time, but it does have us looking like a pair of quasimodos living on a blasted margin of human society.  A wedding of monsters.

It’s kind of darkly funny.  I had an internet homie read one of my unpublished novels and she said it struck her as incredibly wrong the main character didn’t have a lot of friends and family, a community around her.  It never occurred to me to write that for her, because I don’t think of life as having a lot of people in it.  A little failure of my imagination.

ALL THAT’S TO SAY,

I am trying to reinvent the wheel of Marriage between now and October 13th.  Any suggestions that don’t involve additional invites or thousands of dollars may be welcomed.  The officiant is my brother, the witnesses my father and my dude’s mom, and my home boy Jeremy.

Ideally my bro will leave his daughters at home because they are about 6 and 4 and would almost certainly misbehave – less of a problem with a wedding crowd to disappear into than it would be in our tiny condo living room.  But he might not have a choice but to bring them and not his wife, so having her tend them is not a workable solution at the moment.  Maybe Jeremy can play croquet with them on the dead grass behind nuestra casa.

Meanwhile, what do we do or say at this thing?  How to make it feel like a ceremony instead of an awkward tea party of people who don’t know or necessarily like each other?

I’ve been pondering ritual magic.  My dude once had a hallucination as a small child, possibly a seizure, where he saw a small donkey go into his house.  He pursued it but could not find it.  In studying demonology, I found there’s a demon called gamigin or samigin (plus many variant spellings) that is sometimes depicted as a small donkey.  This tells us, if there’s anything in occultism, Sammy Gene is my dude’s patron spirit.  Who is mine?  I find Acar from the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum interesting.  Also our house is full of random arthropods, and Acar helps you control those.  Lambes, on the other hand, has male pronouns, appears as a woman, and causes people of all sexes to fall in love with the conjurer.  So much higher queer points.

Anyway, Acar and Lambes did not have Ars Goetia-styled sigils so I had to make up my own.  Sammy’s is as depicted in ye olde grimoire’s tho, save an update on the name.  How do you like me now?  Or as some transphobic catholic tweeter once famously said, This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation.  Revel in the annihilation of Man as the image of God.  DESTROY.  Plot designs of death.  Disfigure the face of Man and Woman.

But still, one of the invitees -somebody we have to live with- is christian, so overt hostility to god jeezups is not gonna do.  I’ll just slip these bad boys under the rug.  Feel like I’ve lost track of the purpose of the post.  Back to business…

Invitees show up at small condo with tiny living rooms and dining rooms in which to hang out.  There is a back yard, which is not fenced off from our closest neighbors, but possibly also a place to be.  We have some minor refreshments and chit chat, then

THE INVOCATION

Some kinda preamble to the marriage.  Normally middle class people would feed everybody foie gras on platinum spoons or something, I don’t know.  I feel like we should try to fill ten to thirty minutes with this, whatever it is.

THE UNION OF QUEER PEEPS

Some kinda marriage.  Normally an able-bodied dad walks a daughter down an aisle, I guess a man gets escorted by a home boy?  Then a preacher says jesus is cool, asks if we wanna do some slam poetry vows, then asks the do you do you, then it’s I do, rings, mandatory public display of affection, and you are forcibly escorted out of the building.  I’m not sure how we’ll do this at all.  PDA would be super-awk outside of a chaste smooch.  Even standing for the ceremony is kinda dubious in our small space and general comfort.  I feel like the run time for this should be ten minutes-ish?

POSTAMBLE

If we were outside, we stay outside for a minute to do some kind of a thing.  If we were inside, we go outside, because one of the things my dude is into is getting confetti chucked at us, but he doesn’t wanna clean it out of couch cushions.  Normally the woman one of us would chuck flowers at some nerds, then we get rice bukkake’d.  I don’t know, this could be pretty short.  Oh yeah, and my dude is cool with cutting a cake together, so this could end in a dining room, perhaps.

EVENING ENTERTAINMENTS

I just don’t dig board games, for the most part.  I like scrabble but that’s because I’m better than average at it, and people don’t love losing to me, and I don’t wanna give anybody a bad time.  Uno feels low stakes and foolish.  Penny ante poker?  I don’t know.

After that I think we’re good.  Any ideas?

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