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danieldwilliam) wrote2012-02-14 03:27 pm
Happy Valentine's Day
On Valentine’s Day I like to spare a thought for those for whom the day is a curse. So I ask you to join me as I pay tribute to those for whom Valentine’s Day sucks.
All those working in the flower distribution industy. The florists who will be working late, separated from their beloved by your last minute demands for flowers. The long distant lorry drivers stranded hundreds of miles from home by the cruel logic of the Market that means it makes sense to hold what amounts to a flower festival in the Northern hemisphere winter and grow flowers in Africa. The flower growers themselves, their hands torn to bloody shreds by rose thorns and so unable to stimulate the clitorodes of their own lovers.
They have given their flower loving souls for your gesture of romance.
The makers or cards, likewise, with torn and mangled fingers. Paper cut upon paper cut heaped upon their hands. Postmen weighed down with excess delivery. Knowing as they cripple themselves that the only way to make their industry viable is to trade the strength of their backs to the deluded masses clamouring to prove their affections anonymously by card.
What of the workers in condom factories? Press ganged into prophalatic manufacture. Their cries of “But I have a latex allergy!” unheeded as they are forced to check each rubber johny for holes in the dim light of an Eastern European factory until their eyes bleed and the their throat swells up.
Think of the maternity ward staff who even now are having leave cancelled on Hallowe’een.
Think also of the writer of “romantic” verse for these Valentine’s cards. Larkin, Hughes, T S Eliot, Plath, e e cummings These poets, once proud and gay and joyful as words danced from their lips and pens to create and shape the ambiguous truth of love and longing. Think of their dying souls and shrivelled hearts, I beg you.
Roses are Red. Violets are blue. They once wrote sonnets and the occassional haiku.
Consider all those who will lose an eye this year to suspender belt related injuries.
Picture our great Universities. A student hall of residence builst as cheaply as possible from paper and broken promises. I ask you to remember the lonely, single student there, with a looming essay deadline, whose sleep and work will disturbed by the extravagent sounds of her flatmate fucking that guy she met in the Union bar two weeks ago. It wouldn’t be so bad but she’s moved her bed right next to the adjoining paper thin wall so she can see herself in the mirror – or so she says over breakfast the following morning.
Best friends shunned for romance? For a cheap bit of slap and tickle and the promise of something exotic. A best friend is for life, not just for Friday nights.
THE HUNTING OF CHOCOLATE TRUFFLES MUST END THIS VALENTINE’S DAY.
It is both racist and cruel. I don’t care how many people Thornton’s used to employ. No more I say, no more!
Hold in your hearts those who will suffer economically because of your passions.
The lap dancers and strippers, left without customers. The cheap bars and speakeasies, empty. Purveyors of cheap fried food whose offerings will be shunned by couples desperate to impress with an up market dinner for two. Football clubs, tettering on the edge of bankruptcy, their stand empty as their once passionate fans turn their fiery hearts to the lesser loves of their life, their wives.
Think of the children, the poor embarresed children who will have to think about their parents having sex, with each other, in this house, tonight. Those poor sweet children who will have to confront the liquid, squelching, gasping miracle of their own conception and the thought of their own mother dressing up in stockings and giving their father a blow job. For shame. Every creak in the house this night will bring a hot flush to their young cheeks. Every choked off moan a stab of Oedipal confusion.
Hold in your hearts all those who say the Adriana Lima advert during the Superbowl and cried “What the ever living fuck? They’re not even pretending this celebration is hegemonistically heterosexual and a proxy for prostitution.” And then were slapped by their girlfriends for oogling the model in her skimpies on the TV .
Spare a thought for the Roman scholars and theologians who will once more have to field idiotic questions from an ingnorant press about “Who St Valentine Actually Was?” and “Did He Know Jebus?”
Particularly, I ask you to pray or to hold in your thoughts the players of Glasgow Rangers Football Club, whose wives and girlfriends may, on this most commercial of saint’s days, be looking at their paramours reduced financial circumstances through heavily lidded eyes.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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