Bad News Hughes

DIARY OF THINGS THAT ARE AWESOME
Craig and Allison Get Hitched

So my little brother Craig got married to a wonderful woman named Allison this weekend. I'm still not fully recovered from it all, and likely won't be for some time, but I've got a mess of photos here that I'm going to use to try and recreate the past few days' events. From what I can piece together, it was all very boozy and festive.


They held the event at the lovely Spirit of the Suwannee park, located an hour or so north of Gainesville near metropolitan Jasper, Fla.

Hey, you know what "country jamboree" really means, right? That's code for "there are no black people in here."


Right after I rolled up, my stepmother Flo pounced on me and forced me to drink, like, nine of her Jell-O shots, which this weekend were fortified with just a hint of lighter fluid.


Me and Craig. He's a great guy. Well, OK — that's a lie. Like the rest of the Hughes clan, he's a sociopathic menace. But when Allison is around he's practically like a normal person, everyone says so. We're all pretty grateful.


Me, trying to catch up to everyone else.


Seriously, I wasn't there 10 minutes before I drank three of those colorful little brainsmashers. And, I think, two beers.


They had some meat set up, for eatin'. No buns or bread or condiments or even plates or forks or anything — you just sidle up to a trough and tong that shit in until you get your fill. Efficient.


Allison and Craig, who's obviously pretty aware just how much he lucked out on this deal.






Our people celebrate the night before the wedding with the ceremonial Unveiling of the Pimped-Out Beer Coozies. (It's ethnic.)


It's cute how little kids end up with family nicknames.


The second eight or nine go down real smooth.


Here's uncle Tommy.


He decided to do a little editing on my nametag.


Ah, better. "Get some" — that's what it says on the Hughes family crest. By the way, I'm peeing right here.


We met this guy Billy out there. He had a golf cart tricked out so it'd go 40 MPH, which is fucking rad. Oh, don't worry — we didn't really let her drive it. She had way too much to drink for that.


Ha ha, how loaded is she? Man.


One of my cousins spent the night trying to stab me in the face with a glowstick. More or less successfully, too. Brought back some unpleasant memories of that Digweed set that turned so ugly back in 1991.


See this? Multiply it by 1,000.


It's the family's secret handshake.


Whoah! Bees.


Peeing again.


My cousin Devin looks on in horror as I try to figure out if I broke my camera or not. Turns out I was just drunk.

I passed out not long after snapping that pic. Not before we got Dad to tell a story that I won't repeat here, because he prefaced it with, "If this ends up on your Web site I'm gonna kill you." But it was a great story — it involved him threatening a Puerto Rican with a huge rock, and the punchline was, "So I climbed into bed with you and passed out, and that's why you turned out the way you did. That's why you're warped."


Believe me, I'm well aware that I'm not winning any beauty contests over here, but the next morning was rough. Those Jell-O shots aged me like a decade, each. Somehow, though, they have the opposite effect on Flo. She derives a terrifying, eldritch strength from them. Go figure.


This is one of the reasons why I woke up looking like Abe Vigoda's butthole. For some reason, even though Dad and Flo and everyone had rented out these little elf houses out there that I totally could've crashed in, I decided to be true to the spirit of camping and sack out in the bed of my truck. My head got all covered in weird bug bites, and I can't seem to focus my left eye so good anymore.


My beautiful sister Katie. The first thing I heard that morning was her saying, "Did I do anything crazy last night? Besides the keg stand?"


Me and my brother Neil sat around the elf house for a while trying to parse the previous night's Puerto Rican story, as well as figure out what role this thing was going to play in the wedding ceremony later that day. At one point Craig walked in, but even he didn't know.

"Honestly, we really haven't planned anything for the ceremony," he said. "We've got this Cherokee prayer honoring the Earth and the moon and the wind, and we might make fire together."

After he left, Neil, who wasn't doing so hot either, rubbed his face and said, "Did he just say they were going to pray to Earth, Wind and Fire?"


Uncle Kevin gets a snack.


Eventually I managed to get up and get mobile. Everybody had rented this boss little golf carts to tool around in. This is me and my cousin Crystal, and I think it also just might be the greatest photo ever taken, ever.


We thought this was pretty great.


This is the bank of the mighty Suwannee, and the spot where the ceremony is going to be. Me and Dad spent four hours tracking down everything we needed to assemble that trellis. And by "trellis," of course, I mean, "three fucking sticks jammed into the sand."


How many men does it take to jam three sticks in the ground, anyway? Answer: all of them.


Grabbed a bite to eat and four or five beers at the park restaurant. I was pretty excited by this, until I tasted them. For some reason I had always imagined patriotism to taste good, like a mixture of Bomb Pops, titties and gunpowder. But it turns out it's more like a mixture of wet cardboard and freezer burn.

Also, what the fuck happened to the Gators?


Soon enough they were fixing to do the ceremony, so we had to clean up. They made me use this weird little elf tub, and let me tell you, a 6' 2", 200-pound man trying to wash up in an elf tub is a weird and sad thing to behold. Plus I was already drunk again.


Really, I just can't for the life of me figure out why I'm not having sex with hundreds of hot girls every waking second of my life.


Me and Flo on the golf cart, heading down to the river. You can't see it from this angle, but she just did a Jell-O shot and burst a tennis ball with one hand, just by squeezing it.


This is Barney. He's doing the ceremony. I think he might be a genie.


Here's Neil, dressed up in his best MC Hammer pants.


Cousin Gartley. He's awesome. Someone told me he lives on a sand dune or something.


This was really something. Barney started wailing on that bongo drum and we all chanted some of that Earth, Wind and Fire shit. Craig and Allison started making fire.


This dude was off to the side, too, blowing on that log.


Barney was stoked.


I thought we were going to be there all damn day while they sawed away at their twigs or whatever, but it actually went pretty fast.


I think Craig might have primed it with a Jell-O shot.


Fuckin' hippies.


Hey look, he's got the dog. Fantastic.


Now it's time for the reception.


Neil does the best-man thing, donning the ritual mask we use when we make toasts. Ethnic.


Fuck yeah we got four kegs.


Relax, it's non-alcoholic.


Gartley might want to think about getting that looked at.


You know what these people are doing?


They're having more fun than you could possibly imagine.












Secret handshake.


Me and cousin Nicole. This is where I started having so much fun my brain exploded.






Hey, if I had that physique, I'd show it off too.


Eventually someone brought out the moonshine.


Here you can see Barney go apeshit.


Dad is going to beat someone's ass.




We tried some squaredancing, but everyone was loaded and just kind of smashed around into each other. It was pretty great.




After the reception a bunch of us took the last keg deeper into the woods for a bonfire. I kind of lost track of shit around this point.


We were breaking sticks over each other for a while.


Me and him swapped headshots with those sticks. Pretty sure all my injuries were internal.


Nobody had cups, so we just took turns drinking straight from the teat.


Taken just minutes before unconsciousness.

All in all, we did alright. One fight — Craig beat up one of Neil's friends at the bonfire in an incident that has more versions than Rashomon. And one serious injury — some dude jumped out of a tree into the shallow part of the river and had to be choppered out to the hospital to get his leg bone pushed back in. so, not bad. Three days, one brawl and one compound fracture — the Hughes family beats the odds once again.

Labels: Diary of Indignities