In early 2025, I dreamed I was a professional wedding guest—not a guest of honor, not even a plus-one. More like emotional drywall. A freelancer of festivity, dispatched to limp nuptials across the land to ensure they didn’t collapse into the dead-eyed purgatory of a DMV lobby.
I had one suit, perpetually wrinkled, in a shade best described as regretful charcoal. It screamed, “I belong here, but please, God, don’t hand me a microphone.” My sole obligation? To present the bride and groom with a Styrofoam tray of raw hamburger. Apparently, in the twisted logic of dream-world symbology, true love is best commemorated with shrink-wrapped ground chuck. Forget champagne. Forget cake. The holy grail of marital bliss is beef that bleeds on the gift table.
Between gigs, I squatted in a beachside apartment that hovered between quaint and post-apocalyptic. Pajamas were my uniform of leisure. My diet consisted solely of dry cereal eaten by the fistful while I absorbed wisdom from The Three Stooges. Every episode felt like a philosophical fable: three idiots trying to fix a pipe, failing catastrophically, then assaulting each other with blunt tools until the problem either resolved itself or became someone else’s.
Meanwhile, the world decided I was some kind of wedding oracle. Strangers wandered into my apartment at all hours, begging for advice on florals, favors, and whether it was socially acceptable to DJ your own reception. I ignored them. Moe was about to electrocute himself with a toaster, and I had priorities.
Then came the call—from my boss, the high priest of ceremonial meat. His voice was steeped in the weariness of someone who’s officiated more parking-lot elopements than he cares to admit.
“Keep up appearances,” he said, grim as a man reciting his own Yelp reviews. “Smile. Hand out tips. Make people believe in romance.”
I glanced at the hamburger on my counter, still sweating onto the Formica like it was contemplating its own existential horror. “Gotta go,” I muttered, suiting up, grabbing the beef, and heading out the door like a dead-eyed courier for the Cult of Matrimonial Carnivores.
This was my fate: a never-ending circuit of awkward receptions, clinging to the delusion that my presence—and my lukewarm ground beef—might ignite the dying embers of love.
Once the bouquet was tossed to an empty dance floor and the mother of the bride cried in the restroom, I’d retreat back to Moe, Larry, and Curly. My companions. My priests. My lifestyle coaches.
Until one night, it hit me. As I watched Curly get his head lodged in a vise grip for the 117th time, I said aloud, “This can’t be my life.” And right then—bam—the TV flickered.
Walter Cronkite appeared.
He looked directly at me with that father-of-the-nation disappointment usually reserved for presidents and felons. “And that’s the way it is,” he intoned, like a man handing down a divine verdict.
“No,” I whispered. “There’s got to be more than hamburger diplomacy and Stooge theology.”
Cronkite sighed. “I’m sorry. That’s just the way it is.”
And I woke up. Alone. Two a.m. Christmas Eve. The living room reeking of uneaten cookies and fading ambition. My only comfort? The faint echo of Cronkite’s voice as it dissolved into the darkness like the aftertaste of a bad decision.
Cinemorphosis 
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