St. Valentinius...what a complete bastard!

Here we see the esteemed gnostic saint showing us, with his right hand, what all us single people can do on Valentines day.

Well it's that wonderful, magical time of the year again. A time where school children exchange crudely cut out hearts to their not-so-secret crushes, nervous boyfriends hide engagement rings in any number of dinner table ambushes, husbands order their wives a dozen roses and their mistress that expensive necklace charged on the company card (or is that the other way around?)Yes it's Valentines Day: Spring is around the corner and love is in the air. Meanwhile the rest of us, the 'Romantically challenged' as we're known to the politically correct, must once again struggle not to stick our collective heads through the noose or pull the trigger to the pistol rattling between our teeth. When T.S. Eliot writes that 'April is the cruellest month', it's obvious the man has never been single in 21st century North America during mid-Febuary.

So just who was this St.Valentine cat? According to most contemporary leading experts,(which is what I call 'Google' these days), it seems that he was in fact the ancient Roman saint of boxed chocolates, hallmark cards and suicide. Makes sense to me really. However other experts now believe that he was really none other than Valentinius, a gnostic candidate for Bishop of Rome who lived in 143AD. He was a strong proponet of christians getting, as the ancient Romans called it,'Jiggy-with-it' via the sanctity of the 'holy marriage bed'. I believe he not only didn't make Bishop of Rome, but was quickly matyred for the whole "Jesus wants us to knock boots" rap. If it wasn't about him then it could be any of three different Valentines that were matyred. Which makes you wonder how anyone would name their child 'Valentine' at all with that kind of track record. Well whoever it was that got their ass matyred, Pope Gelasius I (Yes the Pope Gelasius I you're thinking of) made Febuary 14th a Feast for St.Valentine in 496.

Of course some will point out that this was really a pre-christian pagan holiday. For example there was Lupercalia, the festival of Lupercus, held on the 15th of Febuary to honor the god of fertility, usually represented as half-naked and dressed up in goat skins. Nowadays if you dress like that, you are most likely not a fertility god but rather a night club promoter here in Atlanta's burgeoning fetish scene.


So for those of you who have a significant other, or at least an 'other' to get you by the next 24 hours. Happy Valentines Day! To those of you who will be, as the french say, 'making the love with my left hand'... hang in there. Some of us are ugly sure. But that's why God made alcohol, convertibles and rophies. Some of us are just a little shy around the opposite sex, and that's why God invented the internet. Some of us are broke, and that's why... actually your pretty well fucked if your broke on Valentines Day any way you look at it. The point is, my fellow Romantically Challenged', is to just take a deep breath, have a cigarette and just scroll by all those attrocious LJ posts of couples who think it's cute to take pictures of each other and post them by the dozen*. By tomorrow it'll be all over and then you can start focusing on how nobodys going to show up to your birthday this year... again.

*-Except for the people on my friends list who do that. When you do it, it's cute, really you're great;).

That drunk lil' bastard....

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