When I've had friends they've mostly been homosexuals or social misfits or losers or all of the above, and therefore I've only been to one wedding in my life, that of a friend of mine from work, a work friend. This was years ago, in San Francisco. What a sweet and charming young woman she was, I forget her name. Sweet and amiable people usually give me the creeps but I genuinely did like her. Nice smile, gregarious but not so much that you wanted to punch her in the stomach, full of interesting and quirky observations, without coming off like a "personality." She brought me back a nifty ashtray from North Africa, a circular object that looked like Barbara Eden might be living inside it, or that might contain the cremains of a beloved pet. We could have become real friends, who knows, but she got married so that was basically that, as those things usually go. Why would I want to hang out with a married couple, especially a pair of newlyweds? What could be a more annoying spectacle than a couple of twenty-something newlyweds, either cooing and nose-wrinkling and inside-joke-snickering at each other right in front of you (sickening) or trying really hard not to, in consideration of your feelings (appalling, mortifying, patronizing)? You can be married or not married but you can't be married and conspire to act like you're not. No one can pull that off for long. The married unit cannot pass as two individuals. I might never have become closer to her, in an outside-of-work kind of way, but her engagement and subsequent marriage made it a certainty that I would not. The truth is that getting married made her more interesting to herself (briefly) and markedly less interesting to everyone else (permanently). I didn't just invent these principles, they are ancient and immutable laws. Everything that brings you happiness and joy distances you from other people. Misery does the same thing. Nobody knows you when you're down and out. Misery may love company, but not familiar company. But don't worry, the ordinary blandness of day to day life provides plenty of room for reassuring intimacy between people who are neither happy nor sad about things which are neither important nor interesting. Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee. Everybody has a heart, except some people.

Anyway, I had moved on to a different job by the time the marriage happened, and she invited me and I took my friend L, a good sport. The ceremony took place in the Rotunda at the Palace of Fine Arts, amidst Bernard Maybeck's pretty ruins. As vows of fidelity were solemnly exchanged between two people who were too young and foolish to have any idea what a psyche-shredding sacrifice such a vow at that age entails, I kept thinking how funny it would be if the big quake hit right at that moment. That's something you tend to do in San Francisco when your mind wanders, picture the big one occurring wherever you happen to be and imagine the terrifying consequences. The reception was at a Nob Hill hotel and we got hammered, naturally, because it's free and those things are as awkward as I'd always imagined and you need liquor to get through it. I mean there were toasts and everything, people clinking glasses to get everyone's attention, it was really too much. L and I ended up stumbling up California Street toward her apartment, laughing our fool heads off, carrying centerpieces. For some reason we were given centerpieces as parting gifts. I don't know if it was just us or if everyone got a centerpiece. Maybe we looked like we needed something pleasant in our lives. As we lurched up the hill we looked like hysterical drunks who'd just looted a flower shop during a blackout. I think we did drugs that night and went dancing. That certainly seems reasonable.

This was supposed to be about gay marriage but I never got around to the main point. There probably never was one.