I left work a little early today, so the fiancee and I could zip down to one of the county administrative offices and procure our marriage license. There's nothing like the clumsy oafishness of bureaucracy to kind of kill the whole mood, you know? It's like watching a romantic movie with your loved one, the lights low and the wine half-gone, and all of a sudden your flatulent brother-in-law wanders in and asks for ten bucks.

But what are you gonna do? We fought the awful downtown traffic and made our way to a Eastern Bloc-looking building looming unattractively over 4th Avenue; it was the kind of building that Tom Wolfe would go out of his way in order to primly vomit on it. At the last moment, we also realized that Our Modern Government required that we pay in cash and CASH ONLY--$54--because apparently, credit cards are a little too racy for Uncle Sam to deal with, and as for a personal check, screw you buddy, we're not those pussies at the IRS. We don't trust you. So we did a quick cash-check.

We had about thirty bucks between us. Of course. I noticed a lonely-looking ATM sitting in the cheerless vestibule, and was immediately plunged into clammy sense of gloom, because it couldn't be a normal ATM, one that actual people would ever be moved to use, no, it was from The Bank of Great Neck or something like that, where nobody banks, least of all in Seattle, and of course it was going to gouge me stupid, being a non-Great-Neckian banker, and on top of that, my bank was also going to gouge me later for being the kind of hopeless schmoe who has been reduced to begging some hick machine from the fiscal sticks for a couple of tattered twenties. But I had no choice.

Then we went into the licensing office, which I noted was also where you got your pet licenses. Handy! And kind of sinister and subtle; the implied question seemed to be: "You guys look kind of stupid. Are you sure you wouldn't rather get a dog?" But on the other hand, the public employee there was genuinely helpful, even when we immediately displayed our vast incompetence by filling in the bride's info in the groom's fields and vice versa. Feeling purest form of dumb that can only come by failing to correctly fill out a government form, we asked for another; she looked at it and said, "No problem, people do that all the time." She scrawled in the margins the correct genders, and I thought that they were uncharacteristically malleable about the whole thing. I wondered if for kicks, they sometimes made other marginalia: "Groom is a silverback ape." "This couple was resoundingly ugly." And then it goes into the permanent file. What's anyone going to do about it?

But of course we got it, after a silly affirmation--complete with raised right hand--that we had not lied on our forms. This struck me as less than rigorous: we couldn't even fill them out correctly. Did she even check the form? No. I could have wrote that I came from Barsoom, Mars. In fact, next time, I will. You know, when we go back for the dog license. I imagine they will greet us like old friends: "Look, it's the resoundingly ugly couple!"

That's not true, of course. The fiancee is quite stunning. And me, I'm pretty good-looking for a Silverback ape.