fred

I had something of a nauseating, ego-obliterating weekend.

It's cliche and predictable, but...
never will I drink again.

It was strange.
A week ago an old friend of mine who I hadn't kept in touch with for a while leaves a message inviting me to his wedding.
This is pretty shocking because the guy is the perennial bachelor skirt chasing debaucher.
Let's call him E. He was a roomate in college.

I spent the next week trying to get ahold of E but can only end up leaving messages.
I'd like to catch up with what's going on with him but can't. For over a year we haven't even had talked, it's only been a series of leaving a message every few months.
I had no idea who he's marrying or why.

So I go to the wedding not knowing what to expect. It's at the catholic university near where my parents live. It's the same one I used to ride my bike around when I was 11 years old.
So in this very formal elaborate church there's the wedding. It turned out to be a girl I'd seen E with last year, so not a new one.
She doesn't look pregnant. He seems strangely not that happy to see me.
It's ackward and tense but I sit through this elaborate catholic ceremony.

Afterwards it's even clearer that E doesn't want to talk to me.
This is a strange feeling to see someone you hadn't seen in over a year and they're treating you like a stranger.
He picks up a baby from a stroller, his kid.
"Hey I didn't know you had a kid!" I exclaim.
"Uh.. yeah... Oh hello Mr. so and so, blah, blah.." This is even wierder.
He goes about with no explanation or acknowledgement.

It was time to go to the reception down near the bay. Right there, I could have just left and be done with it. I felt totally dissed and considered calling it a day.
But, I figure it's not every day someone gets married and out of curiousity I was hoping for more of an explanation on what was going on.
I considered not drinking but didn't choose to abstain. That would be a mistake.
At an open bar in an ackward puzzling situation I started to get down. I found one of his friendlier buddies that I knew and started to ask questions on what was going on.

The baby was born 4 months ago. She was supposedly on the pill. She was taking them but still got pregnant. Her proof is that "look all the pills have been taken out." Two days before the C-section they get legally married.

E is a really interesting character. In some ways he was totally different than me in a way that nearly awed me. He was very outgoing and could pick up at least one or more girls a week. Yes this was sleazy, but also impressive in a way. Myself, I have no game but I lived vicariously.
E had his own kind of lingo. He had what he'd call "the team". This was the collection of females that he picked up from bars, school or the beach. One might be a one-night stand with more potential, another might just be a "hottie" that he was interested in, or more likely they were onto him being a total snake.
If they got to be too much trouble he'd "have to cut them from the team".

Another thing about E was that he had true charisma, meaning that you knew he was a total ass yet it was still amusing and endearing.
I'm giving one side of it all though. This is the same guy that would by all appearances look like a jock, but then you found out that he needed glasses after reading Lord of the Rings ten times over in sixth grade.
He spoke fluent russian. He sat in front of the TV all weekend rooting for the Oakland As.
He could engage you in a conversation about the knights of templar or some other obscurity. He was flat-out drunk.

Sometimes he appeared like a buffoon but once you got to know him he had a real intellect that he seemed to try and hide.
He was by any account a drunken womanizer but all along he never lost his catholic beliefs.
He had a jolly kind of personality but underneath it was a smug arrogance.

So anyway ten years of aimless debauchery seem to have caught up to him. I have no idea what he thinks or feels about this.
I have a few ideas on why I got the cold shoulder.
I never fit in that much with him. Maybe they think I'm queer because I stopped hanging out with him on his endless rounds of boozing and skirt chasing. His group of friends was one or more of the following: drunk, politically conservative, cocky, competitive, into sports, into picking up women and treating them like shit.
Out of all those I could only say I was a drunk and when that ended it was none of the above.
E considered himself the center of everything. He wouldn't call you, you'd call him. He wouldn't visit you, you'd visit him. The only exception would be pursuing women. One time he drove to Alabama to be with one girl. That lasted a couple of weeks.
So when I stopped calling and coming over it wasn't like we both lost touch with each other it was much more my doing. I remember one time I got tired of having to call him and then get flaked out on so I didn't call him for two weeks. He acted kind of wierd when I later showed up.
To be around him you'd have to put up with his good-natured smug flakiness where he could bail out on you or expect to go to him but it was a one way thing.

I think largely he's just embarassed about the whole thing. The same guy who would talk crap about other guys getting married to woman voluntarily was now roped in.
A proud independent individual caught by fate. In a woman's clutches like some kind of karmic justice.

So anyway I drank way too much. I felt and acted like a total oddball. It was a bummer to be shut out since I used to be able to have long conversations about things that were going on in our lives.
I had been meaning to catch up with him on all the crap that I'd been through the last year but I guess there's no point in that now.

Yeah, so I got really drunk, and then later I puked a couple of times. And then I was hung over all day and rehashing what happened over and over.
I'm feeling better now though.
Putting it all into perspective actually I feel a lot better.