There is something about a ceremony that has always disturbed me. Because of that faint discomfiture, I usually avoid ceremonies whatever they are if at all possible. A ceremony is a formal occasion and I do not feel at home with formality of any kind. Ceremonies typically celebrate occasions with traditional rites of some sort; I have never been one for tradition. There is usually hype and lots of hyperbole at a ceremony; I will always shun that too.

When they’re for me, of course, it’s sort of difficult to stay away. I have always disliked weddings, but I attended my own back in 1968. We had it in my wife’s sister’s home because churches, to me, have always been synonymous with hypocrisy. It was performed by a judge who was my father-in-law’s golfing buddy. I wrote the wedding ceremony, rather than use the normal one; the judge mispronounced a couple of the longer words. That was okay with me; it gave our wedding a slight sense of the absurd, which was about how we were both feeling at the time. [George Burns once said “I was married by a judge; I should have asked for a jury.”]

At my mother’s fourth wedding, she was well into her cups; I had to support her down the aisle. The marriage lasted all of a few months and it was probably the last wedding I attended. Since divorce is the predictable end of half of today’s marriages, I see no sense in participating in the farce.

Funerals often push the limits of endurance. I have attended out of respect for the dear departed but, more often than not, I avoid the occasion. These rituals are for the living, not the dead. It irks me no end to see how some families, in the throes of their recent loss, overspend on such things as caskets, headstones, and such. People in the death business make a fortune off grieving relatives. Too often the words spoken about the deceased at the funeral are overblown fantasy. It’s as if every corpse was a good guy and no jerks ever found their way into a morgue or a funeral parlor. What are they going to say about Dick Cheney when his heart finally gives out? “He never met an oilman he didn’t like and he knew how to take advantage of world unrest.”