Vent February 2006

VENT February 2006
By Chris Carney
(Writing as John Coctosnossin)

By far the most challenging day of this shortest month of the year is Valentine’s Day. Whereas Presidents’ Day, a weird amalgamation of Lincoln’s 12th and Washington’s 22nd, has but one proviso… “Buy a new car at Johnny Hairpiece’s mega, ultra, low price car monstrosity. No money down, 10 year/one trillion mile warranty. Buy now and get a free I-Pod.” … Valentine’s Day is much, much more serious.

It’s what I like to call an obligation holiday, from obligation meaning do it or risk waking to find your jumbly bits in a vice and holiday meaning a fun vacation like experience. So you see the problem here. In my book, these two things cannot peacefully co-exist. Therefore I call for a ban, boycott, embargo, injunction, interdiction, limitation, prohibition, proscription, restriction, stoppage and suppression of this holiday.

This is in no manner an attack on love and all its future litigations. Love is great and I want it when I don’t have it. And I whine, complain, spike drinks with dubious love potions and empower various types of voodoo dolls when it is withheld from me.

Yet, if one looks at the history behind Valentine’s Day we begin to understand that automatically correlating February 14th with love is like equating Courtney Love with sanity. (Ooh, fancy play on words) The confusing and convoluted history of this day involves everything from Roman priests, torture and imprisonment, illegal marriages and women being slapped with bloody bits of goat hide. (Hey baby, can I slap ya with my goat hide?)

I therefore propose that we remove Valentine’s Day from the calendar and scrub our collective memory of this day, perhaps using some sorta fancy nano-technology. However I am far from a brave soul, and I am terrified that the powers that be (chocolate and greeting card companies, rose peddlers and those scary diamond folks) will send the industries chief assassin, Cupid, to shoot his arrows into my tender backside. (There’s some sort of euphemism going on here.)

It’s high time that we replace Valentine’s Day (VD as I like to call it) with an altogether new holiday. Therefore I have created HAPPY FUN DAY!!! The world’s first non-denominational, non-cultural holiday. It’s for everyone, be thee black, white or Inuit, Muslim, Christian or Jew, American, foreign or alien (the outer space kind) you can do something fun to make yourselves happy. And we can still buy all the same crap we do for VD. (One Billion cards among other things) So sheath your poison arrows Cupid and go have fun and be happy.

Published in I.O. Magazine February 2006