xtcian

8/9/03 I got married!

8/9/03

I got married!

8/8/03 Columbia County, NY (my

8/8/03 Columbia County, NY (my wedding is tomorrow)

I lie here in my new room at the farm, by myself, as a nod to the chastity usually reserved between bride and groom. Tessa is about eight miles away in a bed & breakfast in Massachusetts, and while it offers an amazing amount of introspection before such a huge event, I'm not sure if I particularly wanted to be alone tonight.

Being alone was pretty much what "being single" offers you each evening, a chance to retreat deeper into yourself and wonder where it all went wrong. I lie here after a day of swimming, softball, bowling and blackjack, and think that all of these things are better with someone else in your life.

I am so happy to be free of the burden of finding other women attractive. Sure, I occasionally find some of them "striking" in a purely anthropological way, but the quarts, rods and ampules of affirmation I needed always chained me to the tyranny of insane women at the end of late nights. Rick Maechling drove in tonight, and I was struck at my behavior at his wedding only three years ago, and what a moron I was. I lie here as my last night as a bachelor and all I can think to do is apologize to everybody.

Without Tessa I am bathing in the amniotic delight of my best friends. They are truly who got me here, and when all else was awry, they are the ones that offered advice, distraction and salve. While we were playing cards tonight, I occasionally looked around the room with the distinct feeling that it truly cannot get better than this.

at right, I deal to the big spenders

But here's the thing: Tessa and I are always a partnership on all the big things we do in our life, and we lean on each other heavily to see how we should feel, how we should act, even a gentle word in one direction or another. And here we are, the night before the Biggest Thing, and I feel like I haven't seen her all weekend.

My family is pretty incredible. I feel like I got married late enough in life that they all turned out to be cool, helpful and divinatory in their own ways. Sean didn't have the benefit of a fully-healed family unit when he was first married back in 1994, something we can all offer next year. A lot of things are better now that we all waited.

I can say this, though, ringing clear in my head: I waited long enough, and I am through. Ambivalence being damned, I am ready to walk up that hill and do this thing. By being married, and falling in love, you set yourself up the possibility of tremendous sadness, but I will take that bet. Everyone talks about those last-second jitters, but I can rest tonight under the penumbra of a foregone conclusion.

8/7/03 Columbia County, NY (two

8/7/03 Columbia County, NY (two days until wedding)

atop the hill, rehearsing with Dr. Peter Kaufman

One of the best nights of my life, a rehearsal dinner at John Andrews Restaurant with the kind of toasts I'd never thought I'd live long enough to hear. My friends, and Tessa's friends, are indescribably wonderful, so I am not even going to try. I didn't bring my camera, and the evening defied analysis, so I will sleep now with the peace of absent intellect.

8/6/03 Columbia County, NY (three

8/6/03 Columbia County, NY (three days until wedding)

It is now 6am and I am still up. The farm is in utter disarray, with tents, random construction detritus, and cars. Tessa is at a bed & breakfast until our wedding day, and I'm sleeping in a new room with no lights. I will get through this, and it will all seem utterly fabulous one day. Right?

8/5/03 Columbia County, NY (four

8/5/03 Columbia County, NY (four days until wedding)

Maybe I do ask for a lot. Maybe I am singularly undeserving of any favors curried by the Wiccan gods, and to ask for anything more than mere survival makes me an ungrateful wretch. But listen, o God of Precipitation and Shitty-Ass Weather, I beseech you. Can you PLEASE not make it rain on my wedding?

I've sat by semi-silently as you've rained on each of my birthdays eleven years in a row. I didn't complain when you struck down the tree where I was intending to propose to Tessa. When you took Tessa's mom's house and shoved it down the river, we simply cleaned up and moved on. I spent months in Iowa huddled in the school basement with Miss Norton's 3rd grade class while you scooped up motor homes outside Cedar Rapids.

All I'm asking now is a small break. We had one of the worst winters ever, and the rainiest spring in New York history. For the past week, you have deluged us with storms so bad that only our Land Rover could traverse the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I have PROOF!

This was taken by my brother Steve, who was in the passenger seat. Those waves are hitting the door handles. All I'm saying is that perhaps you've been working WAY overtime and should take a rest this weekend. If you spare Friday and Saturday, I promise not to complain for my next three rainy birthdays. Seriously. I have witnesses.

Respectfully submitted,
Ian Williams

8/4/03 Columbia County, NY (5

8/4/03 Columbia County, NY (5 days until wedding)

I left Brooklyn for the last time as an unwed motherscratcher today, and plan to spend the rest of my time upstate until our nuptials. Plenty of people are already up here: Tessa's mom, my mom, my brother Steve and Tessa's best friend Jason. At this point, we can "backtime" the amount of stuff we have to do for the wedding, and it still puts us about three days after the wedding. I have this project in particular for the rehearsal party that is so intense I can't believe I'm actually doing it. It is in these eleventh hours that we start wondering why we didn't just do this thing in some rental house with a band that plays "Love Shack." I trust it will all make sense in the end.

T had a bit of a freakout today on our contractor, who had promised to have everything done by the ceremony. I'm really happy I wasn't around for that conversation. Pretty much everything looks like several grenades went off; hammers, tarps, clods of dirt and random pieces of lumber litter the grounds like an interactive performance piece.

One thing is done, though - the man shored up the second floor of the barn so that it is level, and the by-product is that we have the perfect indoor hoops court. There used to be spots on the floor that were so dead the ball would literally stop bouncing, like the Boston Garden circa 1955. Now, as long as you give the center beam a wide berth (and avoid administering yourself a sloppy lobotomy) you can actually get a good game going.

Of course, the ironing is this: they took the hoops net down for the reception. What are we, Mormons? That's what happened at church every time No Fun Was To Be Had! I vow to thwart this setback with five decks of cards, a pile of chips, and a night of $1 blackjack on my wedding eve.

8/3/03 Brooklyn, NY (6 days

8/3/03 Brooklyn, NY (6 days until wedding)

It is now officially my last week of being single, and both Tessa and I are so caught up in the minutiae of the wedding itself that we may not have any time to reflect on the enormity of what we are doing until we actually climb that hill and exchange vows. But is it all that enormous? In my heart, I have been married to her for some time, our lives are inextricably entwined, and I have no interest in seeing the cootrage of anyone else for anything other than academic purposes. For me, there have been three, perhaps four other days that were much more important, because it marked actual shifts in my character. Saturday will be a giant party for something that has already happened.

I worry that Tessa isn't enjoying this process at all. She is very - and I mean very - involved in every detail of the wedding and I fear it may exhaust her to the point of sickness. Mostly, she can't do anything half-assed, and strives for so much perfection that I hope some of the guests recognize her efforts, even in things that seem obvious (like the barn floor being flat - that wouldn't have happened without her).

But even she is surprisingly able to drop "producer mode" when the moment calls for circumspection and bathing in beauty, so I have faith she'll have nothing but fun this weekend. She and I have been having more arguments than usual of late, which usually means we're getting something much larger out of our system. Or it just means I haven't cleaned out the car; sometimes it's hard to tell the mundane from the metaphor.