To George and Susan on Their Wedding Day

This is not the toast I gave, but the toast I wrote before I was convinced that this toast was better absorbed through the eyeballs than the auditory nerve.  The actual toast I gave will follow on a later date.  Following that, I may give a lecture on how to give toasts, depending on how these two posts are received.*

"There's been a lot of talk about the definition of marriage lately. *Pause for laughter*  People have argued this til the boring end, and yet I do not stand here to speak about the definition of marriage.  I wonder about the meaning of marriage.  What does it mean for two people to stand in front of their friends and family and declare that they will be married.  What does it mean in this world, in this time, for two people to be married?

We hear no end of suffering, we see no end to bloodshed, we see no peace among the disparate groups of humans on this planet.  Misery seeps through our lives, infecting every aspect.  Cynicism rots our core until we can no longer raise a hand in aid of another.  What does it matter that two people wish to join their lives, to entwine their fates, in the face of such utter hopelessness, despair, and cynicism?  What can we do as witnesses, but bear the silent burden?

Bear with me, folks, this does lead to a point. * Pause for nervous laughter.*

When two people stand up to be married, they are defying the naysayers, the broken ones, and the fearmongers.  Two people who love each other enough to stand in front of those they value most in the world to say "I love you, and will hold your heart above all else in this world" are expressing defiance.  Defiance in the face of despair, hope in the face of suffering, and romance in the depths of cynicism.

Marriage is the ultimate rebellion.  Marriage is punk rock.  Marriage is a middle finger held up to an uncaring universe.  Marriage is a defiance of the unending wave of terror that floods our lives from all directions.  Marriage is a beacon of warmth, love, hope, and romance in a threatening world, and we witnesses will always be ready to remind you of this day.  This day when you stood in front of all the people who matter to you and said, "I love you, and take thee to be my partner in all things."

* Received has always looked like a misspelled word to me.

Obfuscations

I have played a lot of games in my life. As a child the games were more pedestrian in nature, involving the simple purchase and sale of properties and moving your piece around the game world, contained completely within the bounds of the playing board, with the goal of comaplete and total financial ruin of your brothers and cousins. I have played games strangely based on expressions of rage-inducing empathy during the play, particularly at moments when you had just screwed your opponent-brother out of any chance of winning. I have even played a game loosely based on a mutual experience of strategy and skill, but invariably devolved into a game of how many fake rules I could coerce my opponent-brother into obeying. We played card games, the rules of which are equally as impossible to remember now as then. Many relatives lost all hope of playing a friendly game of anything with such a diabolically cunning mastermind, or so I saw myself when manipulating rules to suit my hand. Go fish! became an all out struggle for supremacy, the opening moves full of subterfuge and bluster while the endgame was strikingly more physical.

As I grew older the games became slightly more unusual as did the rules sets. Games involving legions of monsters marching around a strange hexagonal universe were enjoyed as much as games wherein the pursuit of success was secondary to hampering all chance of success by your fellow players. The supplied rules sets became far more complex and the simple lies and coercions of the past were insufficient to secure a victory, as even I was utterly flummoxed at times by the inherent systems of this era's games. I learned to become one who would take the time to learn all of the rules and then pursue aggressive means of enforcing penalties upon my brother-opponent. When questioned, I always offered to let my opponents read the rulebooks, but when the rules set truly approaches book length, most will simply give in rather then settle down with a cup of tea and an afghan and peruse an arcane tome for clues as to why my legions could move against a box tile, but his could not. It had something to do with native lands. I learned that masterful cheating must always seem reasonable, and yet still leave your opponent completely hosed.

Given my rather flagrant history and flamboyant imagination, you might think that I developed a habit of crafting intricate new interpretations of rules all working to a singular goal: total domination of my brother-opponents. Sadly, the elder brother-opponents had many more years of experience in game-rule manipulation and younger brother-opponent quickly developed and interesting defense: apathy.

I began to move to games that had no measurable means of success and even more rules. Rules that required multiple books, with actual spines. I found myself reading more and more, learning combinations of rules that could work to my advantage and yet still be completely within the legal realms. There were many such games and many such days spent attempting to redefine victory not against some loathsome creature sent forth from the bowels of imagination but victory against the very imagination itself. I collected playing aids in the form of multitudes of dice, in the hopes that certain dice would gain me certain advantages in play. I became superstitious about color, shade, and warmth of my dice. If I could not successfully manipulate the rules to my advantage, then I would manipulate my playing to my advantage. All the while having no appreciable idea of the goal of these desires.

I played an uncounted variety of sword and sorcery games, and even more uncounted versions of these games. I played Western games, involving playing cards and dice. I played science fiction games, the more deadly to my character, the more I enjoyed them. I learned one constant among all the games I played: more books means more rules. Eventually, the human mind would reach a storage limit and carefully compartmentalized rules sets would become jumbled and slowly mingle in the mind of the players. Rules would meet over drinks, share a dew laughs, stumble drunkenly to a room in the hotel upstairs, and then awkwardly run out a few hours later, only to discover the following month that a new rule was growing inside. A rule that made rather a lot of sense when you think about it, I wonder why we hadn't been doing that before. It was in these spaces that I learned to allow my fellow players to breed rules, as they were far less likely to find fault with me if they had written the new rule. Could I really be blamed for buying the new handbook? After all, it was their idea to read it. I gradually moved away from manipulating rules to wholesale manipulation of people.

Despite this rather...miscreant behavior of mine, I like to think that I only wanted to have fun. To that end, I knew that there were some games that should be avoided at all costs. Some games had rules sets from which there was no recovery. fulsome once tried to interpret set of rules from a venerable institution that were an attempt to simulate a realistic system of combat against popular, fictional aliens. The designers had forgotten two things: nobody cares much about realism when the creatures you are shooting at explode acid, and that a mind is a terrible thing to lay waste. fulsome currently resides in a lovely, double-width refrigerator box in Berkeley, California.

Monday's Penny Arcade inspired this post.