There are two halves to this duplex, and from the beginning a gentler, more quiet branch of humanity, wearing conservative Sunday School clothing, is gathered in one half. I greet them upon entrance and departure, but apparently tonight is about the wedding going on in the other half of the building, where a huge hypocrisy is being discussed among the guests: why is it that we host weddings, invite dinosaurs (velociraptors and tyrannosaurus rex mostly), fail to have enough fresh meat on hand, and then wonder why wedding guests get eaten? This is a trendy set of people here and the collective social hypocrisy of inviting large, cold-blooded reptiles to a wedding and failing to provide enough meat and then pearl-clutching about a few wedding guests getting eaten—well, THAT is the new awareness everyone seems to have on their mind and there is just no denying the newly acquired social wisdom. It’s all so obvious as to be denied at your peril, and people have moved on to the best way to make sure large truckloads of fresh beef can be made available at several different places in your typical garden wedding. At this particular wedding, I don’t see any dinosaurs at all, nor do I think they have been invited, but if they were invited, there would be ten foot tall stacks of fresh beef everywhere.
I say goodbye, to both the trendy people and the Sunday School people, and the narrator begins talking about an ancient dog sled tradition somewhere in Alaska. There is the master sled, and a companion sled and usually a celebrity of some sort pilots the companion sled, but this year it all nearly ended in tragedy as the celebrity pilot, an NBA basketball player, was forced to kill a large bear in order to survive during a blizzard. I see the skeletal claw of the enormous bear in the river before me, awe-struck by it size and potential brutality — and then I wonder, in the dark of my bedroom: is this dream worth recording?
