Love for many of those who place so much stock in this one day is often times just lust or sex misspelled as love. The Greeks have four different words for love - eros being the hot sexual lust-filled version, unlike brotherly love, love for family or friends, or love of something greater than oneself. This holiday is of course named for a 3rd Century Pope who refused a Roman Emperor's decree that his soldiers could no longer marry, wed the couples in secret and was martyred for the defiance for the sake of marital love.
I of course already stated I hate the commercial trappings, candies, gifts, flowers and other paraphrenalia associated with this holiday. I hate all the sap-covered sentiment built up around wanting to hop another person's bones, especially being the chronically lonely bachelor who no decent woman would ever want to even get to know casually in a million years. I hate that some other men have someone of the opposte sex that loves them on that day supposedly more than any other. I hate the apparent fact that God made me so incapable of expressing any version of the emotion celebrated on February 14th, I could scream before committing suicide to escape having to face another round of V-Day on the calendar. And I don't expect to even have a date for the superfluous occasion this year or any other yet to come.
Now that I've spat that bile from my tortured soul onto this page, I should be returning to other topics (such as the third part of historical turning points that ruined America and a related follow-up polemic on why I hate progressivism as a socio-political movement) in the next few weeks during spare time when not working part-time in my soul-crushing call center job. The one thing I do love doing these days, the fiction writing, still languishes as a potential career with any chance of success. So far this year there has been one story accepted somewhere (at a non-paying market's anthology) and six story rejections (sometimes the same story at different places it was submitted) by different paying anthology or magazine markets along with the rejection by Ace/Roc Books about publishing my last self-published work Sister Helena of the Sword. At present, I have two stories submitted to anthologies (one paying and the other non-paying) and three at various paying market magazines, along with my sci-fi space opera Goram - The First World: The Prophecy of Kolab at TOR UK during their recently announced direct submission for writers unsuccessful at professional publication. Based on past experience, these stories and the unpublished first part of my five-volume epic will all most likely be rejected. I'll be the first one to eat my words should any of the pro-rate gigs bear financial fruit (especially TOR UK). But one thing I can say with certainty about the upper echelons of the publishing industry is they have NEVER showed me any love as a writer.
So, this bitter, lonely, anti-celebrity and natural born loser (pissing in his own corn flakes again) wishes an unhappy Valentine's Day to everybody else out there in this lust-consumed world. My February 14th will certain be.