As many of you regular readers know, when I go to work out, I mostly read tabloids (anything to avoid breaking too much of a sweat) and was saddened not by Brittney Spears' behavior -- the poor dear has lost her mind which happens to the best of us (although I have to say, I'm glad they've stopped running pictures of her without underpants -- dear Lord, how much does one need to know?!), but those crazy kids Marilyn Manson and his now ex-wife Dita Von Teese (a Michigan girl with a burlesque show) are fighting over the custody of their cats. If the self-proclaimed follower of Satan devil-boy and his ungodly beautiful goth wife with a figure that I would kill for can't make it work, then what chance do the rest of us normal folk have? Of course, celebrity has never been linked with stability in marriages except for the much-vaunted love of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. And are break-ups contagious? Sort of. One of my favorite books, Uncoupling, is about how people who are unhappy in their relationships start seeking single friends and divorces in groups of friends tend to lead to more divorces, hence the pariah effect as soon as you're single -- your married friends start to fear you and what you represent.
So I'm getting my dose of schaedenfreude at the gym and wondering what makes a marriage work. My friend Mark used to say, If I do it again, one of us is going out in a coffin. Very death do us part and dramatic, and I love it. My one true marriage in life has been writing, and like every good marriage, it's frustrating and beautiful and perfect, and I think about it all the time and can't conceive of a time I'd give it up. I'm never looking for the back door or any door. It is the door. And I like the idea of the coffin and marriage -- so long as you're not living in one and suffocating to death.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"It's a lonely stage we been goin' through/ Don't get up, I can find my own way to the door." Jerry Jeff Walker
Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: Viva Terlingua! Jerry Jeff Walker
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Saturday!
37 days until The Sopranos airs!
7 comments:
Hello!
This work is very good, thank you
Coffins are a fifty-fifty proposition on the Sopranos. Half go in a box and the other half are put to sleep with the fishes.
My marriage lasted 16 years, 17 if you count the year we lived together before. But it was over long before it actually ended. Much longer and I think I'd have gone out in a coffin.
One good thing about being married to your writing that is very similar to being married to a man is that you will always et the last word in.
I have been married for over 50 years, been thru sickness and health, being very well off and being less rich. It has been one roller coaster ride at times but I would not trade my four "novels" for a Pulitzer Prize.
"one of us is going out in a coffin"
From Mark's mouth and into my vows.
Back in the mid-90's I used to have the odd and occasional drink with Manzer. He struck me as kind of shy, very geeky and more than a little baffled by the fame-thing.
I have an operating theory that the nature of celebrity makes genuine human relationships possible. I mean real, can't-go-to-the-market, stuttering-fools-acting-crazy celebrity, the kind you can't turn off by walking outside the comics convention or whatever.
Humans are interactive creatures, and being surrounded by people wanting something from you 24/7 is isolating. In that sense Britney, Manzer, et al are actually less human. Like those cardboard cutouts at the video store...
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