I got married twenty years ago yesterday.

I got divorced eight years ago next Monday.

We were the couple that everyone thought was perfect for each other. The couple that had it made. Both our families were shocked when we ended things, because we were never anything but buoyant in public. This wasn't a ruse or a plan or a sham. It was just who we were: we could easily access a superficial part of ourselves where everything was fine even when everything wasn't fine.

And so the apparent happiness was simply a shell to conceal what was really going on, even from ourselves.

I look back at the wedding day and I remember some things very warmly. It's a rare person whose wedding isn't extremely special to them, even if the union didn't go as planned (because they never do). I remember dressing at my best man Ted's boyhood home, wearing grey tails and being irritated because the bow tie they gave me had white grease-pencil inventory markings that were blatantly visible no matter how I angled the tie. Ted's mother took care of that with a ball-point pen.

Since it was Halloween, I and my bride had intended to enter the reception masked, but, as happens with most weddings, we ran out of time before we ran out of things we wanted to do.

We got married in the church I'd attended since childhood, chosen because it had a beautiful cathedral, a wonderful pipe organ and, most importantly, a wonderful organist. Again, going with the Halloween theme, we started with Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor, which the organist played splendidly. He started the music 30 minutes before the ceremony was to begin and each subsequent piece phased further away from melodrama toward something better suited to the occasion.

I got to the church and waited in the back with Ted, who--much to my mother's consternation--poured me a shot of peppermint schnapps.

The ceremony was supposed to begin at 3 PM, but my bride hadn't shown up. I can honestly say that, despite ten minutes late stretching into fifteen, I was never worried that she wouldn't show, and as it turns out, the delay was my wonderful, overzealous little sister making sure she got every possible photo of Claire preparing at my friend Tom's house.

Me, I got ball-point ink scribbled on my tie. She got fawning and photos. But I'm not bitter.

We had decided that rather than simply be present at the front of the church when she arrived, I would walk down the center aisle. I'm not sure what the thinking behind that was, but since she was late, it worked out well--I had a decent, comfortable place to wait instead of the church stairwell.

The organist ran out of music and just started the slow chord progression fills I was so familiar with from so many Sunday services. Some part of me wanted to hear him break into a vamp, like at a baseball game.

When the moment finally came together and I walked down front to await her arrival, I remember being really happy. And when I saw her coming down the aisle, I broke. I didn't sob, but tears just welled and poured from my eyes, streaming with every step until she was by my side.

After the ceremony, we had a long haul to the reception, punctuated by a visit to the hospital, where Claire's father had undergone emergency surgery a few days earlier. The reception was fun, but apart from being chewed out by the caterer for how late we were (she couldn't keep her guacamole from oxydizing), I don't remember much of it. Probably had something to do with the open bar.

So how does something that started out so well, a day that carries so many fond memories, even of the things that went wrong...how does something like that end?

With a combination of a whisper and a scream.

As usually happens with relationships that end, the seeds of its dissolution were planted early in the relationship. We came together very, very quickly, knowing we were going to get married just two months after we met, even to the point where we celebrated a "minus 1" wedding anniversary. But in those first fourteen months...within the first six, really...there were a few things that bothered me that I didn't speak out about. It just didn't seem to be worth bringing up the little irritations, because I couldn't think of a way to keep them from sounding like petty accusations, which I was certain would lead not to anger or fighting but to hurt feelings.

And that was the pattern for the relationship for twelve years, with a little bonus thrown in: after sitting on the petty stuff for months, it would eventually build up to the point where I would blow up about it. Let me tell you, there's nothing that makes you feel sillier than exhibiting enormous anger without being able to explain why you're angry. Every specific "problem" was something she could easily address by saying, "well, then, I won't do that anymore."

What I didn't know at the time was that, despite my demeanor, I was an angry person. There was a lot of stuff in my past that I hadn't handled correctly, and I had a ton of bile and bitterness stored up that I wasn't dealing with--just spraying all over my wife a few times a year.

The arguments themselves were also non-productive, because when I upset her to the point where she cried, it just got me angrier and I stormed out of the room. This was especially bad since what she wanted was comfort, and there I was, leaving, angrier than ever. In my mind, crying was blackmail (even though it wasn't), and even if I didn't believe that, I don't think I could have turned my emotions around that quickly, the way she needed me to.

There were a few times along the way when I went into therapy to deal with some of my issues, and a time when we decided that we were having problems and shopped for some books on marital advice. We gave some of the suggestions a try, but nothing really came of them. One particular exercise had us writing down a list of ten small things we would like the other person to do for us. I had a really hard time with that list because I felt like she already did everything I needed her to, so it became a list of trivial suggestions rather than things I really wanted.

But triviality and triteness were actually par for the course for much of our relationship. The efforts we made to protect our tender spots from each other and to avoid even approaching the other person's tender spots resulted in an immaturity to the relationship bordering on infantilism. The one thing I look back and and really regret about the marriage is being a part of a thirtysomething couple that spoke to each other like children in nursery school. It was stupid, but I never really saw it as a symptom of the problem the way I do now.

Ultimately, the relationship ended almost as quickly as it started. I began to reach for some things I wanted to do--chiefly, making Progressive Dinner, my movie--and I found that I didn't want Claire anywhere near it. I'd taken on the feeling that she had too much control over my life and, by God, I wasn't going to let her have this, too. It was an irrational reaction rooted in my perception of how things played out between us, but it was a legitimate irrational reaction, if such a thing exists. I might as well have been screaming "stop smothering me."

At the same time, I found myself falling for a woman I met around that time. I fought it as much as I could, but I also gave into the allure of the friendship I had with this woman. And that's all I'm going to say, because while she was a factor, this wasn't about someone else coming in and breaking up my marriage. I definitely wielded my own sledgehammer in this case.

So now, coming up on eight years later, what does it all mean to me? Simultaneously a whole lot and almost nothing. There were some very hollow years for me in my marriage...years during which nothing seemed to change, years that seem now to have gone by in just a few minutes, with me exactly the same, emotionally, at the end as I was at the beginning.

By contrast, the last eight years--the most insane, tumultuous eight years I've ever lived--are all vivid in my memory. I can play out mental movies of thousands of events from those times.

I believe it's because, once I got out of the marriage, I was forced to grow up...sorta. I had to start handling my own baggage rather than continuing to stow it in a dark closet and pretend it wasn't there. I had someone to turn to to allow me to avoid myself for a long, long time. Once I got divorced, I didn't have that luxury any longer.

I'm rarely in touch with Claire, anymore. I sent her an email more than a year ago and got a cordial response. No venom, but no warmth, either.

Neither a whisper, nor a scream.

Almost two years ago, I was in a situation where I had to fire an employee I didn't want to fire. Events being what they were, I just felt I had no other choice. He was a very good worker--it was a question of whether we could work together under the circumstances as they were at the time.

As soon as I fired the employee, my boss turned around and re-hired him, placing him elsewhere in the company.

Today, I ran into the guy who used to be my boss, here. He barely looked at me as he brushed past.

Considering it, I realized he was in a very similar position to the one I was in when the guy I fired was re-hired: because of differences in our approach to the job, he felt I was an unmanageable employee; I got all my work done ahead of schedule, but I did a really poor job of looking busy when I ran out of stuff to do. This frustrated him to no end because he never seemed to be able to give me enough work to keep me busy every hour for which he was paying me. He even went so far as to tell me that if I missed time for whatever reason, he didn't want me making it up.

When my contract ended, he was only too happy to take back my badge and access card, get me to clean out my desk and get off the premises.

Six weeks later, I came back to the same building, working for a different manager. I still have the same problem staying busy enough, but now I'm working for someone who better understands my work ethic. He's not doing any better at giving me more to do, but he recognizes the value in having me be 100% ready to do whatever is required of me, even if he can't keep me busy as much as we all would like.

Along the way, I heard a story about what happened when I was given the new contract: the boss of my previous manager knew the quality of my work and wanted me back because I was a proven, capable resource. She was asked, "Well, what about his previous manager, X? He doesn't seem to want Don back." Her response was "X works for me."

She was overriding him pretty much the same way my boss had overridden me.

From my perspective, it's not a good or bad thing. It mostly just feels strange to be on the other end of a similar situation.

My baby's got a blemish.

This morning, I went to pull out of the garage and, looking back to make sure I was clearing a roommate's car, grazed the fender against the doorframe.

I really hated the sound it made, but I was a bit too paranoid to get out and check when I needed to be at work, so I waited until I got to the parking lot.

It's not as bad as I feared, but it's not "no big deal," either. Primarily, I took latex paint off the doorframe. That should scrub off fairly easily. But in the middle of the paint is a ding about three inches across, and the front bumper cover (which is plastic) got pulled free of its attachment to the fender.

I anticipate both of them will be fairly easy to fix on my own, but, still, all this because I was paying more attention to a car I was nowhere near hitting than I was to the front end of my car as I came out of the garage.

*sigh*

In the midst of the ridiculous publicity surrounding Larry King's powder-puff, all-holds-barred, pull-all-punches interview of a certain recently-incarcerated hotel heiress, this lovely little tidbit got lost:

Famed publicist Liz Rosenberg, whose clients include Madonna, Liza Minnelli, and Cher, told the [Los Angeles Times] that she had been unsuccessful trying to get an iPhone for Cher. "Doesn't winning Oscars, Grammys and Emmys entitle her to move to the front of the line?"

Liz, Liz, Liz...are you even listening to yourself? Or maybe that's the problem: you've been hyping these celebrities for so long that you're actually starting to believe what you say about them.

I haven't seen a publicist put her foot so firmly in her mouth since Terrell Owens' publicist Kim Etheridge claimed that her client had "25 million reasons" not to attempt suicide.

Do you have to be a certain level of sycophant to become a publicist? Are you required to hand over your integrity the way airline passengers surrender their scissors?

Seriously, what's wrong with these people? What event from their past warped them to the point where they see celebrities as gods walking the earth, where they see money as the key to happiness?