Dead Animals and Other Priorities

While half the world sat in front of a television weeping into cheap sparkling wine over two strangers they’d never meet exchanging vows, I was outside in the sun eating dumplings. The correct choice. It will always be the correct choice.

The royal wedding was a Friday. People wore paper crowns unironically. Grown adults cried at images of a woman in a dress walking slowly toward a man in a uniform. There’s something genuinely interesting buried in the sociology of all that sentiment—projection, longing, the need to locate meaning in ceremony—but I wasn’t in the mood to locate it. I was in the mood for pork and sunshine and absolutely nothing else.

For the record: I ate a lot of meat that weekend. Fried dead animals in serious quantity, which is how a long weekend should go. I ran through a garden sprinkler with my arms spread wide, nearly drowned my phone in the process, felt nothing but appropriately wet. At some point I touched myself. No one else was going to—this is one of those pieces of life advice that shouldn’t require stating but apparently always does.

Also: shave your balls. Just as a general standard. Beat up a subway bully in your imagination, then beat yourself up for still having the imagination of a twelve-year-old. There are children out there who need to be introduced to good taste before it’s too late, and that work doesn’t do itself. The next generation of readers for this journal has to come from somewhere.

They’ll be divorced eventually—everyone knows this, even the people crying at the screen—and when they do, nobody will remember the dress or the hymns or the commemorative mugs. All the ceremony will collapse into lawyers and tabloids, and the people who skipped dinner to watch the livestream will have nothing to show for it. I had the dumplings. Small victory. Completely worth it.