Inspired by Mike Reed over at Man About Murfreesboro, I went over to The Something Store and ponied up ten bucks for … something. That’s their deal: you send them $10 and they send you something. You have no idea what you’re getting until you open the package.

It’s a brilliant business idea. You buy up surplus merchandise from various manufacturers for what I imagine would be pennies on the dollar, then you turn around and sell it to schmucks like me and Mike who are goofy enough to buy into a marketing campaign that makes it sound fun to throw ten dollars into a hole in the internet. We are living examples of the old saying that “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Mike got a pair of sunglasses, which I think was kind of a let-down for him. But me? I scored. I got this:

It’s a Katita Wind Up Gear Box from Kikkerland, and I think it’s totally cool. You wind it up and it sort of dances around frenetically for a few seconds until it runs down. That’s it, the end, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when I ordered … something … without knowing what I’d get. It’s goofy and cool and totally worth the ten bucks I paid for it.

Oh, and that bit about a sucker being born every minute? Include me right out on that. I checked the price for this little baby on the Kikkerland website. Guess how much? Twelve bucks. I paid ten. Who’s the sucker now, somethingstore.com???

Today is me and Beth’s 13th wedding anniversary. To celebrate the day, Beth is insisting that I refer to her as “Bride” all day long. I’ve agreed to this as long as she calls me “Master.” So far nobody’s getting what they want.

So… How about a story from our marriage? Between us we’ve already told a few: Beth told about her “Fuck you” response to my proposal in Will You Marry Me in her old journal. I told the story of losing my wedding ring on our honeymoon in the Ringwrecked entry of my old journal. In It Seemed It Was About Time Beth talks about finally getting around to taking my name after 10 years. And Beth tells what may be the best story, of our song and the night we fell in love in Have I Told You Lately? But this time around let’s talk pictures.

Look around most couples’ houses and you’ll find at least one wedding photo somewhere. Maybe off in a corner or on a stairway wall or in the guest room, but you’ll find a picture somewhere of the bride and groom back in the days when they were 10 pounds lighter and wore lavender ruffles and had big hair and thought looking like total dorks looked totally cool. But not in our house. There is absolutely no photographic evidence that we were ever married. Oh, there are wedding pictures, they just aren’t here.

Beth’s dad sprung for a very nice, very lavish wedding for us, and everything was beautiful. He spared no expense, and he even hired a photographer and pre-paid the whole picture package. He made sure we’d have more wedding photos than we’d know what to do with, and extras to pass out to friend and family and even strangers. We had the super deluxe wedding package all wrapped up.

The photographer sent over two books of proofs after the wedding. All Beth and I had to do was go through them and pick which ones we wanted him to print. It sounds simple when you say it like that — “all we had to do was pick” — but that task had layers of complexity. Beth’s parents are divorced. Beth’s father and step-mother also divorced. My parents are divorced. There were grandparents from both sides. And we somehow got it in our heads that we needed to create a unique collections of photos for each of them. And then we decided the best way to do that was to send the proofs to each person and let them list which pictures they wanted in their own personal book, then send the proofs along to the next person for them to make their list, and so on and so on and so on.

This still hasn’t happened. After thirteen years.

Every time we drive past our photographer’s office — which is frequently, since it’s about two miles from our house — I point to it and say to Beth “Hey, let’s get our wedding pictures.” Beth laughs (or sometimes ignores me — more of the latter lately) but we don’t stop. We don’t order the pictures. We leave them hanging out there.

I think we’re afraid of them. Superstitious. We’ve been married for so long without the pictures now that we feel like getting them might jinx us — especially now, in Year 13. We’re both halfway convinced that if we actually did bite the bullet and went in and got those pictures, we’d be divorced within the year. So we have no photographic evidence of our wedding. First by laziness, now by choice.

Thirteen years together. We must be doing something right — despite all evidence to the contrary. Or lack thereof…

This is my second Father’s Day without a father. It still seems weird and wrong even now, a year and a half since his death. From time to time I still sit up with a start thinking, “Oh hell, I have to call Dad!” just like I used to because I wasn’t very good about keeping in touch. Then I remember that those days are gone.

I don’t feel sad that he’s gone, really, it’s sort of a sense of… Emptiness? Misplacement? I feel sort of un-anchored without my dad in the world. I miss him. I’ve been thinking of having a memorial tattoo done for him. I have a vague idea for a design, I know where I want it, I think I know who’s going to do it. I’ll probably have it done on or around his birthday at the end of July.

This is me and my Dad the last time I saw him in July of 2006. I think I knew then that it would be the last time. I think that’s why I brought my camera with me.

With my dad gone Father’s Day is now about just me, and I celebrated it with my family. Beth and Zoe gave me a motorcycle helmet I’d been wanting, and Zoe gave me a copy of Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I had given her a copy of Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull recently and we talked about how reading it when I was her age had led me to Illusions and how much that meant to me when I was younger. So it was a really good gift. I’m halfway through it already and it’s holding up well.

Then Zoe and I went out for a ride along the coast. We took this picture in Malibu.

Phase 2.5 of my mission to change careers and get into working in studio transportation is under way … sort of. I’m on a little bit of a … detour? No, not quite a detour — it’s more like an access road paralleling the main highway. I’m traveling right next to the road I want to be on but there’s a fence separating me from it, but a few miles up the road there might be an on-ramp.

I’ve landed a long-term driving position on a major production, working with exactly the people I want to get in with — only I’m not on the call sheet, so it’s not a union position. So I’m on a union show — sort of — but I’m not getting my days toward union membership. I know I’m being cryptic and weird about it but I can’t go into any more detail about it than that.

The cool thing about it is that I’m meeting people who can (and I think/hope will) help me down the road get to where I want to be. It’s a stupid easy gig, too, and the paycheck beats Unemployment. The downside is that what I’m doing is a little impersonal, almost “don’t make eye contact with the bigwigs,” but the relationships I’m making more than make up for it. On the one hand I feel like I’m sort of just marking time doing this and not making any progress, but it’s putting me in the right environment to pay off later. A big part of getting lucky is being where the luck is.

Here’s a couple pictures from the set. This is one of the things I’ve always liked about working in production — going to places you’d never see under normal circumstances and getting paid to be there.