kloiterra

ceremony the first
Day 1 - it was friday; shave day.
tomorrow would be brad's wedding day.
as it was my first official ceremony, of course i needed a superior shave, so i loaded new blades in my double and single edge razors.
it took a while to learn, but i know how to shave.
we all make mistakes. i loaded the single edge blade carelessly, with one corner of the blade sitting on top of the guard instead of behind it. i made a couple passes below my left eye and one in front of my left ear before i realized something was really wrong. the result was what looked like a cat scratch on my face. rookie mistake.
it only took 4 hours to drive to the resort, where i'd be staying in a 3-bedroom cabin with brad, em, some couple i didn't know, and a couple of em's bridesmaids. i found the resort entrance long before sundown.
nobody had reception on their phones at the cabin, but i didn't think that would be an issue until i got there and discovered that in the maze of frighteningly narrow, winding dirt roads and half-flooded low-water bridges, there were dozens of these huge cabins all over the place and i had no idea which one they were in. also, brad got a new vehicle, and i'd never seen it. i made one wrong turn and had to turn around, then half-crashed some family's party before i finally found a couple of kansas license plates parked in front of one of the cabins not 30 yards from the river.
there were some guys sitting on the deck in the cabin next door and i asked them if they knew about a wedding party. they didn't but they said they'd seen two guys and two girls go into the cabin i'd parked in front of. those guys looked like soccer hooligans to me. i walked over and knocked on the front door and this almost-too-skinny blond girl opened it, smiled, reached for a hug and said "heeeey, so glad you made it!" it was em, and for a second i honestly didn't recognize her. granted, it had been a year since i'd seen her last, and i was never really around her all that much to begin with, but she'd lost all the baby fat and more. looked rather unhealthy to me, but anyway, after a split second of utter confusion, i played it off with cheese--i was all pointy-fingers and "heeeey," as i entered the cabin, took that hug from em, and met jerry and june, the other couple that was staying there.
it wasn't what i expected, and it looked like they'd been there a month or more. the place had two bedrooms with king size beds downstairs, and the upstairs was one big room with two more king size beds and another full bathroom. it was completely furnished with satellite tv, decorated, and brad and em had taped pictures of themselves and their friends on the the fridge. they'd been there since wednesday. we sat on the deck, caught up over cold ones and eventually the bridesmaids started showing up.
first to arrive was LT, all pretty face and beer gut, rocking a perpetual coin slot, the one that em described as perfect for me. after she joined us outside, the other bridesmaid appeared in the cabin through the window. we'll call her paris...stereotypical too-much-makeup bleach blond, maybe an eating disorder, with a boyfriend who was somewhere else. her friends described her as 'kind of shallow,' but she seemed nice enough. when it came time for sleeping arrangements to be assigned, the two couples took the bedrooms, leaving the two beds upstairs to two bridesmaids and the reverend. paris claimed to have a boyfriend, so i jumped in the huge bed with LT, assuming it would be another of the many times i'd slept in the same bed with a woman and done nothing, and that's pretty much what happened. it would have been easy to play the we-both-just-went-through-breakups card, but i didn't. instead, she flirted with me like a 6-year old on the playground does; with mild violence. until 4am, i struggled to gain hand control while she proceeded to give me the worst battery of purple nurples i've ever endured. it was worse than the jackassery that occurs in high school wrestling. still, there was a giddy excitement that made it fun.