Question about being the best man at a wedding, never been to a wedding before; will do best answer....?

If you can swing it, making it a surprise by "kidnapping" him would rock. Talk to his boss and see if you and your buddies can kidnap him about an hour early from work. Then you guys can just rush in, grab him and go. Just show up with whatever clothes he needs to change into. As far as the earplugs, it would be a little weird I'm not going to lie but I 100% agree with you. It is your hearing and even if you get poked fun of a little bit now... when they are all 50 and wearing hearing aids it won't be so funny. As far as having a drink with him... here is what I did once. I quit drinking once for a while but a lot of my friends didn't. I didn't want to tell them because then if I started drinking again I was afraid they would all give me crap about it. So here is what I did. When we went out to a bar or something, I would try if at all possible to be the one to go up to the bar and order the drinks. I would order a non-alcholic beer like an O'Douls or something and ask the bartender to put it in a beer stein. If it was somewhere that had a waitress at a table, I would just plug it with my tongue to make it look like I was drinking and then swap my full beer with someone when they looked away. Not too many people question a newly full beer. If it was a private setting like going to someone's house, I would go get a 6 pack of bottled beer with twist off caps, preferably some beer that no one else drinks or knows what it tastes like. I'd swap the beer with non-alcoholoc beer and put the caps back on. Then if someone wanted one of mine or took a sip they usually wouldn't like it but they didn't know the beer anyways. That wouldn't work well with BudLight or something because everyone knows what that tastes like. That is going REALLY far but it worked super well. If you don't want to go through all of that, I would just tell your buddy that you really don't enjoy drinking but that in no way is meant as an insult to his upcoming marriage. If he can't respect that he is a jerk anyways.