My friend Jon came over last night. Hooray!

Jon and I went to high school together. He and a large group of my friends in high school were a year older than me, and I loved them dearly. Jon visited Sonya and I both our first semester at our respective colleges, and he was a regular in Conway the year after we got married. He even enrolled at UCA for a year, which was nice, having him in town and all. When Sonya and I moved back to Memphis Jon was instrumental in me getting a job where he worked. Mind you, the job was a shitty one, processing film and making prints for a touch above minimum wage for an idiot/asshole named Stan. Still, it put money in the bank and set me on the road to greater things. Jon, Sonya nad I were inseparable for that first year after we moved back to town, but then Jon started working nights - first at another photo lab after Stan the Moron drove his own business into the ground, then at a casino - and we didn't lose touch, precisely, but the contacts became few and far between. I talked to Jon on the phone last summer, but last night was probably the first time we'd seen him face-to-face in two years.

It was nice. He took us out to eat and we gossiped, catching each other up on mutual acquaintances and their sordid doings. Jon is a floorman at the casino he works at, meaning he's one of the guys wearing a suit who hangs out behind the table games, approving large transactions and making the call when there's any dispute. I haven't seen him at work before but Sonya has; Jon looks very good in a suit. Then we went back to the house, drank some beer and visited further, all while watching Emeril Live! Last night Emeril was making Thanksgiving food. It looked good.

Also, Jon confirmed a strongly-held belief of mine. My regular readers may remember that last month I expressed my negative opinion of David, my friend James' brother in-law. David works at the same casino as Jon, and Jon says everyone who works there hates David! You know what they all call him?

This made me deliriously happy. I am so right about this guy.

"He's a jerkoff prettyboy," Jon said, "he's a Tom Cruise wannabe who fails utterly at it. If you see him again you can tell him I said so. Everyone says so."

Ha ha!

So Salon has been running a series of articles about marriage this week. They've been pretty much anti-marriage, actually. I respectfully disagree, with a few caveats.

I like being married. I see my friends who aren't married and I tell you, singleness looks like a great big pain in the ass. If I found myself single tomorrow I think I'd start saving up for a Realdoll instead of dating. It takes a lot of effort and I don't see much reward. Dating, that is.

Then again, I know people who are married who don't seem to have anything in common except for, well, their marriage. This can work well, but it can also lead to nasty infighting when the parties involved realize that the bloom has fallen off the rose and they're stuck with a jerk.

I got married when I was 18. Sonya was 19. Would I recommend people that age go out and get married? Absolutely not. Most of them couldn't handle marriage. I daresay Sonya and I were, at the time, far more intelligent and mature than most people of that age.

We've grown together, you know? Sonya is my buddy. I like hanging out with her. I like doing things with her. She is usually my first choice for a companion when I do something. I can't imagine being married to someone you don't even like to do shit with, or someone who doesn't like some of the same things you like.

And I don't think it has much to do with the family you come from. My parents divorced when I was small, Sonya's are still happily together. I've seen the products of good stable families have miserable (and short-lived) marriages and I know some people whose families fall apart early and often who have good marital relationships.

It's about the two people and how well they get along, really. Marriage is hard - as most worthwhile things are. And it's quite rewarding when it works out. It's almost a crapshoot, really, but the players have more control over the odds than at other games. Being a winner, I think I've got a pretty good system.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed.

Also in Salon today - the voice of Wendy Testaburger killed herself. Isn't that sad? She also did the voice of the mayor and Ms. Crabtree, the bus driver, which I didn't know. I find this very sad.

We had beer last night, and it gave me strange dreams early this morning.

I've had an odd series of dreams lately, all set in a luxurious business-type hotel with lots of meeting rooms, theaters and conference centers. I think there's also a very posh private hospital attached to this hotel. I'm usually rushing around, doing some very important errands in these dreams. It's not a hotel (or hospital) that I've ever been in before.

Last night I dreamed I was at this hotel again. Sonya was with me, and we had been doing some work for Russ, a photographer I worked for in college. We had done everything Russ had asked us to do and we were ready to go to the pool. I wanted to find Russ to see if he needed anything else done before we went for a swim, but he was unfindable. This meant Sonya and I had to go roaming through this huge hotel, poking our heads in various rooms. We never found Russ. It was beautiful summer day outside.

Things got blurry then, and the next clear thing I remember were Jon, Sonya and I sitting at a sidewalk cafe, sitting at a table and drinking beer. The cafe, though, was in front of the old Baptist Hospital on Crump Avenue here in Memphis - not the kind of neighborhood where you'd have a sidewalk cafe. It was a beautiful summer evening, though, with the sunset filtering through the big oaks in front of the hospital. Some kids came along with a huge wrench and opened a fire hydrant, letting it spurt water into the gutter. We tried to chase them away and make them fix it, but some official-looking people came along and said it was okay.

Weird, huh?

The Wife and I are going to the movies tonight. We both want to see Being John Malkovich and Sleepy Hollow, and only one theater in Memphis is showing them both: the Malco Wolfchase Galleria. Two movies in one night? Most normal people couldn't handle that, but Sonya and I aren't normal. You've probably figured that out by now.

The Wolfchase Galleria is Memphis' ubermall, nestled deep in the suburbs, forty-five minutes from Downtown. It's huge, with hundreds of stores and thousands of acres of parking surrounding it. The intersection of Stage and Germantown Road, where the Galleria sits, was a sleepy country pasture until a few years ago when it was announced that the mall would be built. Now it's a pre-fab hell of category-killer big-box stores, cutesy theme restaurants and, of course, the mall itself, hulking over all. The traffic is impossible and the entire neighborhood is utterly soulless.

I used to have to drive by there when I went out to drop a payment off at my insurance agent's office. Their office is remote, true, but the coverage is cheap and comprehensive, a rare and special thing in Tennessee, state of the non-driver. Over the past five years the area has gone from bucolic rural stupor to mud-spattered construction zone to hustling, bustling commercial hell. In their rush to flee the city the suburbanites have taken all the traffic and hatefulness of the big city with them, while Downtown and Midtown grow more pleasant and civilized every passing day.

Ha ha!

[Fruedian Note: While typing the above passage I wrote the following sentence:

"Over the past five years the area has gone from bucolic rural stupor to mud-spattered construction zone to hustling, bustline commercial hell."

I wonder what I'm thinking about?]

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