How Kevin Bacon’s home phone number came to be written on my hand a couple weekends back is a long and unsettling story.

But regardless, for the duration of Saturday and Sunday, those 10 digits stared up at me as I went about my daily and nightly routines. It was there as I stretched over the Kinvara crowd to grab my Guinness from the bar, it was there as I unfolded my Sunday newspaper and brewed a pot of coffee, it was there when I put the light out at bedtime.

I had forgotten about it by Monday, until it caught my eye as I steered the truck through traffic at work. By then it was faded, barely legible, and I realized I hadn’t written it down anywhere else.

‘What are you going to do with that, anyway?’ my friend Brennon asked.

I had no idea. I vaguely recalled that Bacon had played a prison guard once. That’s all I knew. I couldn’t even name one of his movies.

So I had no reason to call him; I wasn’t a fan. I considered phoning him under the auspices of an interview, but even that wouldn’t work. I didn’t have anything to ask. If he wanted to call me, so be it. But I wasn’t about to call him.

Famous people play a role of enormous proportions in our culture. Their pictures adorn our streets, walls, magazines and televisions. We talk about them to our friends, chattering about Brad Pitt’s beard or Angelina Jolie’s sex life. We go to Hollywood to gawk at their incredible mansions and then we sneer privately when they get picked up for shoplifting (or worse, we actually feel bad for them). We identify with movies that claim to encompass the human experience in just under two hours. And we base our lives around the media we imbibe.

Our reverence of the media is akin to a religious fervor, as if Julia Roberts projected onto the big screen is an act of inexplicable magic and our idols are consecrated for life after some slab of initial success. Then we expect a level of behavior tantamount to saints; and then we cry uncle when they screw up when Nick Nolte is arrested for DWI or Robert Blake for murder.

Fans give celebrities too much credit. We pretend they can do something other than look pretty. We invite stars to host our conventions, we ask actors about the injustices of war, we have pop idols bringing food to starving refugees. It’s good-natured, certainly; it’s just sad that we’re more interested in famous people even when they don’t know what they’re talking about than real people who have points. But celebrities matter more than the common person.

Our whole culture is star-struck, and then we wonder why children imitate the media. Adults, people that should know better, die by imitating media content. Remember all those idiots who liked that football movie so much they laid in the middle of the road as a reaffirmation of their manhood?

And while it’s been growing obvious that more and more children are being raised by the media instead of their parents, lobbyists and politicians and self-identified ‘experts’ have it all wrong when they blast the companies that release objectionable rap music, or the directors of violent movies or websites that distribute pornography. The parents are to blame; they’re the ones that leave their kids alone in the house with a cable and a Playstation.

Remember Tipper Gore’s anti-music campaign? All those Washington mothers that blamed music for corrupting their children? I would’ve been a messed-up kid too, if I’d had the Gores, or any of them, for parents. Politicians shouldn’t have children. And not just them anybody who leaves their kids in the hands of media, without supervision, doesn’t deserve them in the first place. Say what you will about all the backwards yokels who insist on protecting their Montana land plots with guns and ammunition, but Jesus, at least they’re family-oriented. And they’re not boring.

The only thing worse than when the public puts a star on a pedestal is when the star does it himself. When the actor or author or rapper buys into it and thinks he’s better than everybody else. When the football star gets off on a drug charge while some poor regular bastard gets 10 years. When egotistical maniacs in the spotlight start behaving as if they’re above the law. And when they really are.

Now I keep Kevin Bacon’s phone number in the back of my desk. I won’t ever need it. And I’ll probably never call it. But it’s a loophole in the barrier between me, a Regular Joe and him, a Famous One. He’s just like everybody else in my phone book now, and if I want to talk to him, it’s just 10 digits away.

I’ve just got to figure out what to say.