Not to bum you guys out,
but I was very, very resigned to living in the gray.
I was-- After what I went through a couple of years ago,
I was just going to-- I'm gonna live in the gray,
and I'm just gonna raise my daughter alone and try to put--
Focus all the joy and adventure in life on her,
and give her that life. I will merely exist.
I'm not gonna hit joy again,
but that's fine, I can still exist.
That's okay.
And then, I met this poem of a woman
who relit the sky,
and I just said, "I'm going to run at love again."
If you see love, run at it!
-Run at love if you see it! -[applause]
Trust me, run at love!
But...
the one thing that was weird
was I was very, very tense and nervous during the wedding.
And the reason was...
'cause nothing went wrong.
The wedding was perfect, and that made me very--
The reason that made me tense and nervous
was because, when I was teenager,
I worked as a wedding DJ on the weekends.
In Northern Virginia,
I worked for the last DJ company
that still used cassette tapes.
Well into the '90s.
Long after CDs had taken over the landscape.
Our boss was like,
"These tapes sound great.
They sound as great as--"
These tapes were ten years old.
They'd been played 700 times apiece.
And he's like, "It sounds like the band is playing right there."
Yeah, it sure does.
It does sound like the band is playing right there,
if right there is "they've been buried under a mile of rubble."
Yes, it does sound just like they're right there.
But we were the cheapest game in town, so we could underbid everybody.
So we got all the shittiest gigs.
All of our gigs were shotgun weddings and forced retirements.
We were the ambient music…
for rage and despair.
That is what…
we really were.
"Hey, did your daughter's boss at Sam Goody knock her up,
and now you want her first dance at your wedding
to be 'Almost Paradise' sounding like…"
[hums "Almost Paradise" melody] ♪ Almost paradise ♪
[sings mumbled lyrics]
[mumbled singing]
[continues mumbled singing]
[muffled singing]
[mumbled singing]
"That's right.
Our songs'll match the sound of the scream trapped in your throat, Dad!"
So, every weekend was just this parade of horrors.
And the other DJs I worked with, these guys in their 30s and 40s
who were trying to justify the cul-de-sac that their live was...
would lay their bullshit justifications on me, the dipshit teenager
in the Chess King suit.
They would dump it all on me.
And they would say shit like, "You know, Patton,
a little bit of, uh, DJ wisdom.
A little bit of DJ lore.
You might not know this…
but, uh…
if something goes wrong with the wedding,
that means that marriage is solid.
A little bit of DJ lore. You might not know that, so…
When you think about it,
we're kind of doing a beautiful thing here."
[laughter]
"We're building the foundations for lifelong romances. That's what we--
That's what we do here.
You could almost say we're love wizards.
We're love wizards."
And I bought that hook, line, and sinker!
So, now I'm at my wedding and nothing's going wrong.
It's beautiful, and I'm the one guy going,
"Should I punch somebody or…
I wanna be with her. Should I take my dick out?
Or-- I don't know what to do. Like… something should go wrong."
It took me till the reception to go,
"What the fuck were they telling me? That was bullshit!
There's no DJ lore!
They were just trying to justify
the fucking horrible shit that we had to witness every weekend."
All those marriages were--
Those marriages didn't last a month after we did those gigs.
We were not love wizards.
We were divorce necromancers.
That's what we were. Yeah.