As a person who’s been single most of my life, I’ve never been particularly bothered by Valentine’s Day. It is what it is, just another day.

I was never one to get worked up about what the day is supposed to be, supposed to mean, should be, what supposedly should happen on it.

Some people fall into a trap of reading messages into Valentine’s Day. They start thinking, “There’s something wrong with me if I’m not in a relationship.” Some people start believing, “If I’m not part of a couple, I’m a lesser being.”

I think that’s self-destructive foolishness. Other people can get upset and bothered when things aren’t the way they think they “should” be; I learned along ago that expectations are the road to disappointment and pain.

Nonetheless, this year’s run-up to Valentine’s has disturbed me.

Over the past couple years, I’ve had a growing disdain for all things romantic, in particular anything to do with weddings or marriage. I’ve grown to loath it, sneer at it, just plain hate it. I’m back to a place of bitterness and anger I haven’t visited in a very long time.

I positively hate watching TV and seeing loving couples, portrayals of loving marriage, new marriage, the lead up to marriage, the aftermath, the honeymoons and anniversaries and pregnancies — any of it. All of it. I hate it and the more I see it the more I hate it.

What is the approach to Valentine’s but one big portrayal of romantic bliss? “Look how happy they are, buy our product and you’ll be happy to.” Whether it’s a kiss beginning with Kay or the latest product from the sex-obsessed minds at K-Y, the propaganda is everywhere.

In normal times, when one of these messages stirs the cesspool in my heart where romance once lived, the sludge settles back to the bottom relatively quickly, leaving me the dirty-brown mire which has come to mark my existence. But at this time of year, the septic mélange is constantly stirred, the anger, bitterness, hate and all their negative kin constantly boil and churn like one big shit stew that never finishes cooking.

In my wildest imaginings, I never thought I could be this old and single, never thought I’d never know love…. And, frankly, at this point, I don’t think it’s worth knowing.

Valentine’s Day can neither come nor go soon enough. It’s a dark-chocolate, explosive-diarrhea smoothie I’m sick of having forced down my throat.

Drink up, young lovers.

And, oh yeah, Happy Valentine’s Day.

As I lay in bed, staring out the window at the full moon, I pondered what I could use to fight off werewolves.

There’s not much silver about the “silver”-ware. I doubt that any of what little jewelry I have is silver. In fact, I’m hard pressed to identify anything in the place that is certifiably silver.

In the old days you could pelt the hairy beasties with quarters and nickels. If you were really good at flickin’ coin, you might break hide or penetrate an eye (”Don’t do that or you’ll put someone’s eye out!” That’s the idea, Mom.), then sit back and roast s’mores while wolfie combusted from the inside out right before your eyes. (Boy, I miss Assembly of God summer camp.)

But the government stopped putting silver in coins. Then it struck me: our government is in the pocket of werewolves! WEREWOLVES CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT!

Anyone who’s seen the fine documentary Werewolf of London knows that Asia has an abundance of werewolves, owing to a rare Tibetan flower that is the only known werewolf cure. Werewolves flood in, hoping to acquire the flower, but only succeed in making lots of silver-sensitive, hairball puking Asians.

What’s less well known is that the Communists captured may of these lycanthropes and converted them to their cause. (Richard Condon’s novel was originally called The Manchurian Wolf. Publishers felt it wasn’t “realistic” enough and demanded a full rewrite. If they only knew.)

As Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, these most hirsute of commie agents infiltrated America under cover of moonless night. One eventually attacked the president. The secret service killed this monster, but not before she bit our commander-in-chief. (Perhaps you’ve heard of Wolf-Baines?)

Due to Johnson’s efforts, werewolfism spread throughout the Democratic Party faster than Marilyn Monroe at the Kennedy Compound. (Speaking of Kennedys, Teddy wanted to pull Mary Jo Kopechne out of that pond, but you know how much cats hate water. He thought this was brilliant till someone pulled him aside and pointed out that werewolves are technically dogs not cats.) With half the nation’s politicians developing a rapidly worsening silver allergy, a bill was easily passed to eliminate silver from most common coinage.

Capitol vending machines saw a dramatic rise in profits. The “Great Society” (for werewolves) had begun.

The removal of silver from circulating coinage was completed in 1970, shortly after Richard Nixon remarked how hairy a Chinese negotiator’s palms were. With a wink and a sly smile he insinuated the negotiator must be an unmarried man. As the negotiator lunged for Nixon, canine teeth bared, Nixon gasped, “You may swing that way, but I certainly do not!” Moments later, he did. (This exchange can clearly be heard on tapes available at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, CA, though few recognize the exchange’s true significance.)

(As an aside, Nixon would have negotiated anything away to the Chinese just to get him near Tibet and his sweaty hands on that flower. He, however, betrayed his friends and allies by refusing to share. Haldeman, Dean, and others were especially incensed. Watergate soon followed. G. Gordon Liddy is not a werewolf. He’s just surly.)

With the Republican Party firmly in their hairy grasp, the removal of silver from American coinage was inevitable. (A small amount was still permitted to be minted “for collectors,” just to keep the public at large off the scent.) Subsequently, silver is far less common in American households today than at any other time in our history, leaving us virtually defenseless from lycanthropic attack.

And that’s how werewolves took over our government.

Toward the end of the story, Hartman suggested to the man that in another country he could well be alone and fending for himself. The old man replied:

And I would ask myself, “What’s the use of having a family if when I need help I get shooed away like flies from milk?” What kind of family would that be?

I have some supposedly “Super Christian” relatives who could well ask themselves that question.

Indeed, “What kind of family would that be?”

I wrote the original draft of this article in March of 2009 — nearly a year ago. The opening paragraphs read:

It’s not a matter of writing but not posting, which I sometimes fall into — I haven’t been writing at all. Period.

It’s not writer’s block. I think of plenty of things to write, I’ve simply let them flit away. And while it’s not unusual for me to stop writing for 2 or 3 months on occasion, this is something altogether different.

(As a free aside: anyone who tells you “there’s no such thing as writers’ block” is full of a bovine byproduct which prize-winning gardens find extremely nutritious.)

What happened to me? What drove me from the keyboard, the blank piece of paper, the written word? If the title of this blog article didn’t clue you in, allow my younger self from a year ago to do so:

I got my heart broken around the mid-point of (2008). Over the last two years or so I could have had no more graphic a demonstration of why I gave up on romance. I tried to “hang in there, baby,” tried to “soldier on,” even limped into September, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t go on-line at all for nearly 4 months. Didn’t even turn on the computer for nearly three months. It had become a source of pain I meant to avoid at all cost. Even now I am trepidatious at venturing into cyberspace. There’s no call for it. I assiduously avoid anywhere she might be. I know she has no intention of contacting me in any way. But still. That instinctive shying away, as if to avoid touching a deeply bruised area, remains.

She broke my heart, she broke my blog. (She broke a lot more, but that sounded like a pithy title to me….) I don’t blame her. It’s all on me — as usual. If I was any good at this stuff, I wouldn’t be 40 and single. My mistake was answering when hope knocked. The biggest mistake of all was loving to begin with. (I’d like to think if there’d not been history between us, I wouldn’t have fallen for it… but I know what a fool I am.)

Looking back, it seems ridiculous that “I couldn’t take it anymore,” ridiculous to have feared the computer, to have not even turned it on for months… but there it is. And here I am… still thinking of things to write but doing nothing… still dreaming futilely… still wondering what I can ever do to be all right.

As I concluded a year ago:

Though I have started turning on the computer again, and even dipping my cyber toe into the bit streams, writing is something I have completely fallen out of. If only love were so easy to leave.

Eat as much pork as you can. We have to stop these bastards.

The house usually seems to split into two groups, with one group being considered by the bulk of viewers to be “good guys,” and the other side villains. A third group doesn’t fully align but either floats back and forth as the power shifts or tries laying completely low and under the radar.

Here’s how the house is divided and my predictions for each house guest (as of 7-28-09):

“Good Guys”
Braden (already gone)
Laura (already gone)
Casey (no doubt he’s going this week)
Jordan (probably get evicted)
Jeff

“Evil Doers”
Ronnie (definitely will be evicted; I feel like he’s going next week)
Jessie (definitely will be evicted)
Natalie (definitely will be evicted)
Chima

Floaters:
Lydia (definitely will be evicted)
Kevin (definitely will be evicted)
Michelle (probably get evicted)
Russell

The ones without predictions are the ones I’m not sure about at all. Since I’m not positive they’ll get evicted, and can’t even say they probably will be evicted, I suppose that means I expect they have a great shot at making it to the end.

As of now, I would expect the final two to be Jeff and Russell. Other possibles: Chima, Michelle, or Jordan.

UPDATE 8-7-09:
Now that Ronnie is gone, I expect Jeff to use the Coup d’état and put Jessie and Natalie up together (for no other reason than that is what I would do).

I knew then things weren’t looking good for Shyamalan’s career. His latest film The Happening also isn’t out yet, and already the mocking has begun, as evidenced by this poster, defaced by anonymous wits in NYC:

(photo by wellohorld)

Or, as this review of The Happening by Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club states:

M. Night Shyamalan used to have a vast army of fans. Now he has a dwindling network of apologists. The former frightmaster’s descent from wunderkind to embarrassment has been unusually dramatic and public…

Why? Well, first his films are bad. The only (supposedly) good thing about The Sixth Sense is the ending — and I figured it out from the previews. (Really, have you people never read a ghost story that you couldn’t see that coming?) They all feel the same: soaked in dread, self-important, and more ponderously paced than a 36-hour child birth. It doesn’t help that like his films, the man himself is dreadfully self-important, strutting around as if he’s God’s gift to film. About the only good thing I can say about M. Night Shyamalan is he has some skill at crafting a story, but he comes up short in practically every other area I can think of.

I’ve thought for years the best thing Shyamalan could do is stop his two years between films nonsense, stop trying to be the next Alfred Hitchcock, and make several different genres of films in one year. The man needs to make a musical, a slapstick comedy, maybe a crime drama. It would go a long way to expanding his abilities and informing his other films’ outlook. As it is, he just keeps recycling the same crap over and over and audiences have been onto him for the better part of a decade. I don’t even bother watching his films anymore. I just look at spoilers to confirm I once again correctly guessed the ending.

But I’m not holding my breath for any self-discovery out of “Night,” as he likes to be called. He’d first have to acknowledge that perhaps he’s not the genius mommy always told him he was.

Yes, people are so over M. Night Shyamalan. Too bad he’ll never be over himself.

I concluded that article by writing:

…can you deny George “I can hardly be bothered to show up for National Guard duty” Bush talks tough about war? If you do deny that you’re beyond hope. If you can’t deny it, which is he: fool, fraud, or both?

Wednesday, President Bush gave an interview to the Times of London expressing regret over his “tough” talk. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric,” he reportedly said. He further said that such remarks as “bring them on” and “dead or alive” could have wrongly “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

You can, “you know,” imagine my blank, dumbfounded stare at that last one.

So, I only have two questions: Did Bush take McCain’s backhanded rebuke to heart? And how many wars do you get to start and still be considered “a man of peace?”

Some of the theories I’ve heard:

• Gamblers had the fix in so they could win.
• Bookies had the fix in so they wouldn’t lose big.
• The other jockeys conspired to box out Big Brown, not caring who won so long as it wasn’t him.
• The horse was suddenly taken off steroids, thus explaining away both his previous good performances and his last dreadful one.
• The horse just didn’t give a f**k.

On and on it goes.

Come here, I’m going to tell you the real reason Big Brown lost. Get close, I need to whisper, we wouldn’t want the conspiracy theorists to know the real reason, would we?

Big Brown lost because… he lost.

Simple, isn’t it? There’s a saying in football that on any given Sunday anyone can win. What that means is, it doesn’t matter who is supposed to win, it doesn’t matter who is better on paper, on any given Sunday it is up for grabs and anyone can walk away with it.

Big Brown lost because… any given Sunday, baby. Any given Sunday.

You need to understand: There is no such thing as a sure thing. Nothing is absolutely, 100% guaranteed.

If Big Brown had been the only horse running the Belmont Stakes, a Triple Crown win still could not be guaranteed. Even a horse running without any competition could break its leg right out of the gate, its heart could explode half way around, it could suddenly develop agoraphobia and refuse to set hoof on the track. Even in that seemingly guaranteed situation, there is still the element of doubt, no matter how slight, that the horse will never get to the finish line.

Though something seems 99.9999% locked up and assured, there’s still that .0001% likelihood of it not happening, and sometimes that .0001% will hit. Playing the percentages just means you’re likely to win, it doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to win. There’s no such animal. Take it from someone who’s seen that .0001% come up more times than would seem possible.

Any given Sunday, baby. Any given Sunday.

 
After spending the last four years crawling up W’s backside to be declared his heir apparent (seems you don’t have to fool all the people all the time, just enough to get yourself nominated), John McCain has this to say about cowboy politics in one of his latest campaign ads:

“Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.”

Okay, he’s trying to position himself as being knowledgeable about war in a time of war, but who is this ad directed against? It’s not damaging Obama; Barack’s not swaggering around with the proverbial “big stick” or waxing rhapsodic about dodging bullets in Bosnia. Hillary “I’ll level Iran” Clinton isn’t a legit target. Is he trying to distance himself from the president? A little late for that. Even intimations of “God told me to make war!” won’t get him to reject that fundie endorsement.

“Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.”

Pretty strong denouncement from someone who wants to spend another 100 years in Iraq. “That was taken out of context!” Yeah, right. McCain might not be wearing boots, but he’s got a “Yee-ha!” in his heart.

About all I can imagine is he was looking in a mirror when he said this, a little tear drop in his eye, a lot of self-loathing in his gut. It’s obviously a cry of self denouncement. “I’m a fraud! I’m a fool! Don’t vote for me!”

If that’s the case, give the man what he wants. Vote Obama.

I’m being facetious. What I think he’s trying to get across is, “I know about war and how to make it, but I also know enough not to be foolhardy about it. I’m the guy we need right now, without any worries of starting wars everywhere.” But it is poorly phrased, and not well thought out. At its heart is the idea he won’t make “unnecessary” wars, but G.W. didn’t think any of his saber rattling or wars were unnecessary either.

Sorry, John, no amount of appeasing words to pacify skittish voters can wipe the stink of Iraq or George W. Bush off you.

And to those who might take exception to the title of this article (including possibly Sen. McCain himself, who apparently can’t see meanings in his words beyond his initial intent), can you deny George “I can hardly be bothered to show up for National Guard duty” Bush talks tough about war? If you do deny that you’re beyond hope. If you can’t deny it, which is he: fool, fraud, or both? Because…

 
“Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.”