You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Making your own wedding ring.
Really? Is this the key to matrimonial success? Are we Navajo Indians twisting sage brush into wedding bands? Are we South American Swamp People braiding river grass into a crown of wedlock?
Nope!
Trust me. If that formula were true, there would be a whole lot less pawn shops in America selling wedding jack for pennies on the dollar.
Somewhere in the Bridal Magazine of the month there is a mathematical equation that arbitrarily sets the homeostatic level for love.
I don’t subscribe.
But according to the Madison Avenue social elitists:
You should spend about 3 months salary on an engagement ring.
I’d say THAT and a knock in the head will get you a KNOCK in the head.
I say take that 3 months salary, get on a long boat to nowhere and explore the world. Use that money to buy some flip flops and board shorts. Make sure you have enough citrus to squeeze into your beers of the world. Get some SPF 35 and dark glasses. Don’t shave for 90 days or till you can’t stand the itch. Learn to surf and dance with an island girl who knows no English.
These 90 days will super charge memories that will last forever, unlike a gold wedding ring which might end up melted down as fillings for African children.
But apparently some crazy guy in Scotland didn’t get this vital wedding 411.
DATELINE: BRORA, Scotland.
It’s here that a gold prospector spent a year sifting through Scottish rivers for enough precious metal to make an engagement ring for his girlfriend.
That’s right, the guy stands in rivers, like a human salmon, wading against the current and conventional wisdom.
The die hard groom-to-be is none other than George Maciver.
According to published reports, Maciver travels for two hours, three times a week, to remote rivers in the Scottish Highlands to sift enough gold to make a ring for his fiance.
That’s 6 hours a week. 24 hours a month. 3500 hours in two years. Tom Hanks and a volley ball needed less time to turn a port-a-john into a life raft and return to civilization.
The man says it is OK because he met his fiance on a panning trip. That makes sense like Cats – the musical makes sense.
This guy says he is panning for love. What is love? Is love standing in a raging torrent of a frozen river wearing more insulation than a North Pole seal? Is it collecting microscopic granules of metal day after day, week after week, like a snow ball that grows so big it has its own electro magnetic field?
And if the river doesn’t drown him, and if the winds down blow him away, and if the harsh sun doesn’t melt him like a candle in the Sahara, then can his love really endure?
It sounds more like a new survival show produced by Mark Burnett than a real guy who is literally building his own wedding band.
I can see the promo now: Panning for Love. A reality show where lovers show their affection by fashioning items out of mud and muck and things that pool at the bottom of shallow wells.
Panning for Love. coming this fall to TNT.
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” the bride is quoted as saying. “It symbolizes our whole relationship perfectly. George is such a romantic.”
That’s all fine and dandy, but how much will all that matter when this matrimonial panning expedition hits the rocks?
You think that Mrs. Gold-Panner is going to care whether Crazy George spent 2 years standing in a frozen stream, all hunched over, collecting granules of love a few microns at a time?
No. When things go bad, she’ll take that ring and melt it down into a door stop. Hours and hours of self sacrifice for a love bigger than one man will be reduced to little more than gold fillings for some Englishman’s rotten teeth.
When this marriage implodes, and half of them do, George will wonder why he has arthritic hips and knees and a broken heart. He’ll also wonder why he has no money, no gold, no house, and gets to see his kids occassionally on the weekends.
Maciver, who made 156 trips carrying a heavy bag of panning equipment, described his project as “tiring work, but definitely worth it.”
Tell your lumbar it’s worth it when your marriage sinks faster than Titanic my good man.
The couple has yet to set their wedding date because Maciver has yet to find enough gold for a wedding band.
My advice George. Go to the river and then never look back. Take your pack and your pan and your well intentions and dump it in the stream. Take the gold you have and cash it in.
Go to Bangkok and create your own version of the hangover II. Put a kilt on it, bring a bag pipe and enough Ale to keep ya from getting home sick. Use that gold to buy all the love you were going to be missing the moment you said: I DO.
Hey Georgie Porgie. Sookie love you long time.
How long?
How much wedding band gold you got G.I?
All I am saying is – I am skeptical of marriage. I certainly don’t know that panning for a wedding ring is going to enhance your chances. Panning is certainly more creative than going to the mall or the local pawn shop to express your love.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps that is why George and Mrs Panner are getting along so famously – because they are never home together. George is always gone, in a stream up to his ass in white water and golden possibilities.
Will it buy him love?
Battle lines are drawn. Only time will tell.
And that is crazy.™