Valentine's Super Hell Misery Fest

Well, fuck. Alas! It is that time, day, of year again.

Just as you were finally contemplating your rise from beneath the wretched metaphysical duvet of seasonal affective disorder (which isn’t even a real thing anyway) and general existential despair, ready at last to point yourself like a tremulous squinting flower towards the approaching sunshine of spring; over the hill comes striding, with obvious prejudice and malice of aforethought, the behemoth annual horror of duty-bound romance and whining solitary misery that is Valentine’s day.

That’s right. It’s a bad thing. As if you didn’t know. It is the day when the cultural vulgarity under which we constantly strive is led with a cloying forlorn corporate grasp, constructed of all our most squidgy and piglety little feelings, to reach into our chests with horrid clammy fingers and brutally pull out our souls. Formed, of course, as the treacherous shards of ice we have long taken them for, they are then thrust back and forth all day under the banner of soppy wuv, in and out of our chests lacerating the black voids where our hearts used to live.

I'm just kidding of course! We’ve never had hearts. (wink smiley)

Whether you are bonded tightly by your own wilfully unsighted sense of preservation into a crumbling relationship that would fail under inspection even to comprise an honest husk, or are simply embarrassingly, tragically and pathetically lonely as usual, the day offers a species of misery to everyone. It’s nice like that. Even those happy lovers in the first flushes of lust and love have the pleasure of anxiety attacks over what level of gesture to make and how much is indecent to under or over-spend. Cool.

Be it a regime of mutual disappointment and horrible forced crow-footed smiles or simply that so-charming experience of every half-an-hour or so reflecting with the semi-emotional mind’s hucksterish idiocy that ‘Oh! It’s Valentine’s Day!’, as though you’d forgotten, and enjoying the immediate association and reflection toward tonight’s plans for boxed solo-spaghetti and copious perverse masturbation that it kindly brings.

Perhaps this is all saying more about the author than anything, though my tongue is a little in my cheek (masturbation aside) though it is far from original or unique to voice these sentiments about pre-packaged, bartered notions of romance and a long-ago contrived day to sell greetings cards and teddies, any more than it is to criticise the daily mail for being disgusting and secretly fascist. Both matters have long been an open secret anyway. 

So do I, we, need to take a long hard look at my/ourself? Do we need to have a good strong word? Perhaps, just perhaps, even to the jaded, the day doesn’t have to represent a long litany of subtle agonies. There are two positives for the day that must be confessed if the subject is to be treated at all fairly. The author reserves the right to previous paroxysms of imagery, whatever conclusions may follow to be contrarily drawn.

1. The New Relationship - These lucky couples of wet-behind-the-ear romance, be they young or old, no doubt for the most part receive upon Valentine’s Day a resurrection of the intended spirit (panic and anxiety aside) and for this we may simultaneously bless their little cotton’s and spit upon them with outraged and infinitely jealous contempt and longing. The point being, they have done alright out of it and probably had a lovely time. Good on them. Anxiety about form and performance isn't so bad, it's a nice kind of anxiety. Sort of. At least there's a pay off, hopefully a revoltingly sweaty one.

1. This is the real one, the idea that Valentine’s Day may serve as a reminder to us of the possibility of Romance. The idea is sound, just not the application of a day in it’s dedication. May it be a reminder to what romance is not... expectation is anathema to romance and we all fucking know it. So just... store it up, make a mental note. Not two weeks before (expectation) nor two weeks after (the Valentine’s wake will spoil it)... um so basically just not the month of February except for the perfunctory in the middle. Let it inspire you for another occasion, honest and true, that otherwise you may never have slow-wittedly come to conceive. You big softy.

So there we have it, not all bad in the end. But if you are in one of those fortunate scenarios, where all the unwieldy explicit bitterness of prior strikes you as rather pathetic, and you are perhaps even further gladdened at your own fortune as you set off to spend a wonderful evening of genuine candlelight romance, flickering-flame-light-framed(tm) lovemaking, and as myriad delicate shades of joy as the lonely could yearningly conceive... well... enjoy it, I suppose. You damned swine.

Spare a thought for the loveless, I might say, but I think they might best spare a thought for  themselves and perhaps follow edict two from above. Make a little romance in your life, you can do it. Go on. You have a whole year until this appalling day comes around and gives you a vicious slap round your porky chops again. Be you boy, girl, man or woman, get in there quick. Doooo it. Maybe it is easier said than done, Lord knows, but otherwise we both know this is precisely who’ll be sinking back beneath the blue depths of their duvet cover-coloured dreams and waiting for the season to change, not the elder states-person couples, whatever barren repetition of trite affections we may uncharitably wish upon them. 


So in your case, get on it, stupid!

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Thank love for friends! And too my Nan, who often sends me a card. Respect where it is due, ardently filling in those yawning gaps between Love’s more fantastical failings and fancies.