I’m gonna be honest here gang, I am about the last person in the world who ought to hold forth on the subject of romance. The only time I have a romantic bone in my body is when…well, I’m not going to finish that sentence because my brother reads this blog (Hi kiddio!) but I think you get my meaning.
Case in point:
This morning I woke up with my face smashed against what I’m sure was once a very pretty carnation (one of my favorite scents in the world is spicy, peppery carnation) before my nocturnal alter ego, Kicky McFlailsalot, got to it. Then I followed a trail of far less abused flowers down the stairs of stately Villa Plumcake which led to a multimedia display of looooove, featuring hundreds of hand-cut paper hearts with “Miss Plumcake & Hot Latin Boy” strewn all over the kitchen, a floral arrangement that is 100% blissfully free of a single Perfunctory Red Rose of Phoned In-ness, and an enormous multi-layered silk-screened sign spanning the entire length of my kitchen.
I, on the other hand, got him a card that had glitter on it and wrote he could use it as an excuse to hug a stripper without me knowing about it.
Ain’t love grand.
What I’m saying is this: I still kind of think Valentine’s Day is lame and commercialized past the endurance of a block and is custom designed to separate the Haves from the Have Nots by method of dopey overpriced flowers delivered in public places (and not by family money and good bone structure, the way Jesus intended) but love, whether you’ve got someone to share it with or not, is a pretty big honking deal and there are worse things we could do than pay a little attention to it.
Love, like rain and chimichurri breath, falls on the just and the unjust alike. You meet someone, you act like you are brain damaged and maybe if you’re lucky they act like they’re brain damaged too and it’s all butterflies and Lisa Frank and then you settle down to the business of trying to be good to each other and not, say, sleep with the SCORCHING HOT TORERO-in-training who was giving you the total glad eye at the birria place across from Plaza Monumental even though you have wanted to hit one of those since you first read The Sun Also Rises when you were 16 and existentialist and hadn’t yet figured out that “damaged” is not the same as “interesting”.
Ahem. Just an example.
Anyone who has ever made it past the training wheels of puberty knows love isn’t always great, or easy or anything close to permanent. I don’t need to tell you that. But it’s pretty great all the same, so whether you’re lucky (and it IS luck) enough to have a partner or if you’re doin’ it for yourself this year, Happy Valentine’s Day.
Here’s to love, romance and pudgy dudes with wings and antiquated weaponry.
Oh, and if some of these fantastic animated interviews from StoryCorps don’t make you cry, you have no soul. But I still like you.