MARRIAGE IS WHEN WE ADMIT OUR PARENTS WERE RIGHT: I was talking about marriage with a friend of mine who writes the aforementioned "The Phone Rang" anonymous blog, and then I came across this old article about the pending divorce of Gavin Newsom and Kimberley Guilfoyle. Oh, wait, that's because I was looking at this Page Six article about how Bill Hemmer is now dating Guilfoyle. Hemmer, who went to my college, who my wife apparently once smooched, and who I used to see at the Mt. Lookout Tavern during my Cincy days, back when he was just a cocky sportscaster and I was a very uncocky nightime banquet setup supervisor at the Omni Netherland Plaza. (I was jealous then. Am I still?)

It occurs to me that one of the reasons I didn't much like Nick Hornby's latest, A LONG WAY DOWN, is that much of it has that same sort of careening-downhill feeling of my previous paragraph, as if the writer is riding along in a rickety soapbox derby car of idea fragments, rather than driving a high-performance sedan full of wisdom. Which is to say, it felt careless, instant, almost bloggy.

But back to the marriage thing. Check out that Newsom divorce article. Whoa. Basically sounds like they're getting divorced because they just can't fit marriage into their schedule/lifestyle. Bummer. I believe in gay marriage -- and Newsom has been perhaps its most famous advocate in recent years -- but I don't think he's such a great poster-boy for the institution. For me -- for ME, people, not for everyone -- but for me marriage is about establishing a firmament for a family, committing to build and maintain a solid foundation for something that will grow larger than the two individuals who "seed" it, so to speak. All the rest of it -- moving in together, registering at Crate & Barrel, etc. -- is just housekeeping and pragmatism.

While marriage may be born of eros, or romantic love, it seems to evolve quickly into something more, into something that, in my undereducated and simple worldview, is more akin to what most religions aim at -- it becomes not just romantic love, not just passion, and not just the custodial love we associate with families and old people, but unconditional love. Boundless. Timeless, even. Through our relationship with our communities, our children, we actually do enter into something that's connected to the eternal, to time everflowing, etc.

Perhaps this is a better way to express my "feel the burn" sentiment from my previous post, eh Laurel?

Marriage is a North Star, and we married people are astronauts intent on making a landing there. How about that?

Or, in the case of Newsom-Guilfoyle -- and how to say this without seeming snarky -- well, maybe these two thought they were just going on a car trip to the countryside, and once they realized they were leaving Earth's atmosphere, once the suits got a bit warm and constricting, they asked to be dropped off at the nearest terrestrial singles bar.

If I had an editor, a benefactor, or some goddamn purpose to my writing, I could be dangerous. Or at least an unrivaled metaphor machine.