Abolish Valentine's Day
Or, what real love looks like when it's not being coerced
We’ve had a mad rush of new free subscribers around here the last several months. Free subscribers being my second favorite kind of people, next to paid subscribers, who remain my first. (If you care to ascend in my Personal Favorite rankings, that can be easily accomplished by signing on for $5 per month or $50 per year, which comes out to $4.17 a month. Or there’s even the goodwill option of becoming a founding member at $250 or another write-in sum of your choosing, if you’re shooting to be in my exclusive Favorites Di Tutti Favorites club.) But whether you’re a longtime reader, or have only been here a short while, you’ve probably picked up that I have nothing against love. In fact, I’m in ❤️with ❤️, as I’ve magic-marker’ed in my Feelings Journal.
I love a lot of things, and when I’m not too busy letting the news make me angry, I often write about them. I love birds and fish and dogs, which are easy to love, since they don’t talk much. But I even try to love chattier, more problematic bipeds with a love that crosses the big river, as my Comanche ancestors used to say. (I’m not actually Native American, but I love pretending.) I tend to love people even more than Taylor Swift/The Deep State loves rigging Super Bowls for her boyfriend and Joe Biden. More, even, than Marjorie Taylor Greene loves the sound of her own voice. I love both dog people and cat people, liberals and conservatives, believers and atheists and agnostics, the blinkered and the free thinker. Your individual beliefs/preferences cause me no concern, since I do most of the talking around here anyway. I even love the people I hate. I just don’t want them to get too comfortable by me saying something nice about them in print.
But if there’s one thing I have no love for — in fact, I hate it with my whole heart — it is this high crime of a day that rolls around every “Loveuary,” as the Hallmark Channel now calls it. Valentine’s Day is a scourge, a pestilence, a stain on our souls. To that end, I offer you this humble evergreen, explaining why Valentine’s Day should be eliminated, while illuminating what real love looks like when it’s not being coerced by cynical marketing hucksters. Besides, maybe what your beloved really wants this Loveuary is a Slack Tide gift subscription. It’s cheaper than fine jewelry, and unlike a box of chocolates, it causes next-to-no tartar buildup. And now, I give you my Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre:
Like most American males, I try not to think about Valentine’s Day. At least not until it’s on me, like a tax deadline or microvascular angina—unpleasant realities that can only be ignored for so long before the failure to reckon with them could result in imprisonment or death.