Pride goeth before the fall...

Strong as I am, as self aware as I am, as powerful, cunning, clever, and analytical and in touch with myself as I might be, I am still not in a position to control of inhibit the baser impulses of my inherent human nature. I find that I am still susceptible to the most basic and intrinsic foibles of my species and unable to rise beyond or above, despite my numerous talents and abilities. A pawn all too easily moved about the bored and made to provide fodder and diversion for the more able upon the board. Such is the plight of this poet. So easily ensnared and beguiled, so simply influenced and by little else than a dancing light of smoldering passion. Oh how grandiose it would be if I could easily and shamelessly embrace the most basic and demure inclinations of my kind, to succumb and allow seduction by all that is against my better instincts. To ignore a lifetime of eye opening and temperance of self, and simply follow blindly the whims of subversion that blow me toward what they hope is inevitability. My pride stings, my analysis is reawakened in full force and unwavering in it's accuracy, following a level of sophistocation and unrivalled ability that has been developed almost zealously over a lifetime of hardship and necessity. It is my resolute and unwavering acumen that brings me solace at all times when emotional sentiment is abhorred, and it is from this mechanism of sorts that I have been lucky and insightful enough to garner some of the most astute and impressive deductions of my time. Despite the almost trite, cliched, and hackneyed mention of it, the truth is that there is immeasurable point of fact in the rhetoric so often extoled by yours truly: Systematic detachment from emotional reaction. Break free of the bonds of emotional servitude that bind you to a behavior you despise and embrace the independence that comes from absolute freedom. Stop finding happiness in slavery, start seeking release and lasting solace in something within yourself and outside the arms of a being only truly capable of betrayal when the opportunity arises. Stop capitulating with the part of you that lusts for satisfaction in emotional fulfillment and start allowing the more logical and rational side of your better nature to influence you. Too often I find the humanity within me too hard to extinguish and unwilling to give up it's compulsion to both nurture and encourage that which the logical side of me screams against in abject agony, the ideation of blind feeling over rational thinking. Cold, calculating, methodical thinking is so often villified because it allows for unspeakable atrocities to be committed but it I feel it is only through such self realization that we can ascend. Forty-six & 2 just ahead of me.

Ideation, expectation, disappointment

It seems to be an nearly inexorable cycle that compels me toward the vestment of hope and in turn leads to overt disappointment. There is an innate and seemingly inherent stipulation toward any measure of faith that it be tested, negated, and ultimately provide punishment for the blind belief. More on this story as it develops

Emotional Enema, Table 2?

The days keep ticking by and with every passing second I find a myriad of emotions to sort through. Things I’d thought sufficiently stuffed down and reasonably well enough forgotten. Instead I’m left to manage my way through overwhelming guilt for actions I undertook and set in motion while blinded by immutable hate and disdain. In addition I’m left deciding if I’m capable of connecting with anyone. The great practical joke being that while espouse the importance of cultivating and making long lasting relationships work by investing yourself in the people you encounter. I’m left burying myself behind layer after layer of emotional armor as a means of staving off the hurt that I find inevitably comes from my investment in people.

Too often it becomes far too convenient for those I let in, those chosen few who have become confidants, to simply pack up and leave when the association proves slightly more taxing than simply offering passing acknowledgements. The self absorbed, lackadaisical behavior so easily exhibited by so many is sickening. I think I’ve finally reached the paramount of my disgust with the dregs of humanity. People too concerned with their agendas and furthering of events to accomplish their goals that they ignorantly destroy others to see their will done. I’m guilty of the sin in a way. My arrogance and pain mixed and blended to destroy the only thing in my life I ever genuinely cared about.

It’s always a bit humorous to me to hear people question my emotional investment in things. Friends, family, acquaintances, you name it there’s been an expectation that I assign some emotional attachment or meaning to it, but sadly I don’t feel invested in anyone or anything. Trinkets that once held great importance are nothing more now than idle objects, devoid of any inherent meaning. My bonds with people aren’t anywhere near what they once were. I’ve become hollow, an actor playing the part of what I should be.

The rationalization begins and ends that I’m simply reacting to a change in emotional stability brought on by my sleep patterns being cast into massive upheaval. Sadly though, I’ve been inclined to examine the true standing of it all and I think I’ve found the true cause of my issue. I’m wracked with guilt at having so much figurative blood on my hands that I’m now beginning to punish myself by pushing away and tainting any and all prospects for meaningful relationships. It’s a popular fact that I’m a force of chaos in the world, my sheer presence can make one guilty by association no matter the medium of contact and serve as an almost surefire way to complicate life. Sadly it doesn’t stop there either, I’ve noticed my analytical acumen slipping and I think it’s because so much of it was tied to who I was then that I don’t feel I deserve to have the talent any longer. Where once it was something innate and automatic, I find now that I miss the most obvious and worse yet, can’t draw conclusions anywhere near as well as I once did. It’s like my brains running on mute.

I’ll admit that a large part of it is most likely the breakneck speeds at which my life has run since the old dynamic came to a close, but I don’t buy for a second that it’s the whole story. I’m realizing that I’ve got to systematically deal with dynamics that I’ve recently begun because they’re based around false ideas. I’m not reaching out for the reasons I should be, to invest myself in someone else, to feel happy, or be connected; to benefit from all that another person has to offer. Rather I’m producing these dynamics en masse because they serve to punish me for all that I’ve failed at. It’s idle, it’s sick, it’s reprehensible and honestly no sane person would do it. But I do, freely, self aware, and reveling in all the madness and negativity that will come flowing from it.

I don’t deserve to be happy, not from where I sit. I ruined something that wasn’t mine to be a part of to begin with. The social contract dictates that my feelings are spared for the most part aside from the acknowledgment and clarification of the dynamic, but it doesn’t exculpate me from guilt. I took it a step further and actually put fire to the stake. I torched the whole thing and danced in the rain of ashes. I’m a deplorable human being, capable of the worst transgressions and vile actions imaginable in someone. Serial killers may torture, maim, rape, or taunt their captives but ultimately death is a release and a solace for those tortured souls. I afford my victims no such courtesy, choosing to allow them their lives, and watching idly from the shadows, my tendrils still snaking about as they’re left to piece their lives back together in the aftermath of my involvement in it.

I’m rambling and don’t have a point, well aside from now I’m back to whiny bullshit. Oh well hopefully my readership is down enough that this one will be glazed over and nothing more need be said.

Brace yourself for the Brit invasion! Well, maybe....

            It seems a levee of sorts has broken. A kind of emotional wall that dammed up all of the free floating emotions that once fueled and propelled my ramblings has been torn down and now the stream of thoughts that once permeated my consciousness is again being laid to words. Two posts in just as many days, you guys are going to get spoiled.

            I’m wrestling right now with the demons of the past, the hope of the future, and the wisdom to balance both without sacrificing or endangering either. Temperance is my word of the day, not only because somewhere along the line a playwright decided it’d make a nifty name for their lead character, but also because in this society full of excesses and overt indulgence it’s far too easy to get lost in the pursuit of what we believe will make us feel good.

            Now I get, and I’ve even extolled as such, that there is a biological imperative that dictates that we gravitate instinctively toward feeling good and avoid pain as much as is possible. But when you become so blinded by the pursuit that you lose sight of the intention, or worse begin to sacrifice and prioritize irrationally, it becomes hedonism. I bring this up because for two and a half years I toiled and fought for my own gratification and was heedless of the cost I paid as a result. Looking back, the “death toll” is easy to see, but at the time it counted for virtually nothing.

            More than anything I find myself overwhelmed with a new sense of amorous intention, and I’m unsure how to proceed. It should seem fairly plain and more or less obvious what I should do, but fear, trepidation, and too many phantasms of botched gambits refuse to let things unfold. It’s made even worse by the balancing act that must be undertaken in order to preserve discretion.

            I’ll admit, I’m severely over thinking the entirety of the situation, but I feel it necessary to devote every ounce of cerebral processing ability to it as the feeling speaks of something greater. Only admitted within the strictest confidence, there is an intention to make this count for something more than just an idle indulgence of rutting. That said, the ideation that it could be as grandiose as hoped for, is staggering if for no other reason than because it’s such a massive admission and an invalidation of previous sentiments.

            Okay by now I’m fairly sure a lot of you are wondering what the hell it is I’m talking about. I imagine a lot of you have given up referencing the dictionary and are resigned to the fact this post is more of a mindless rant of some deep seated emotional quarrel, as opposed to a widely approachable topic of discussion. That’s true to an extent. The issue I have with full disclosure at this juncture is that while the situation is more than obvious to those that care to pay attention, I’d prefer not to completely tip my hand is it’s at all avoidable. Should a full explanation be desired, feel free to contact me privately and I’ll be happy to discuss things, and even get ideas.

            Back to the point, it’s an awe inspiring thing to realize that the better parts of your nature you once thought only elicited by the interactions of a specific stimulus are actually innate and immutable. I’m being forced to recognize that the more admirable attributes of my character are not relegated to memory or simply the result of an isolated influence. For all my posturing at being an irredeemable, sin filled deviant, it would seem that I’m actually more decent than I give myself credit for.

            At this point the course of action is unclear, the future is gaseous and intangible in any form, and I’m bumbling blindly into it, hoping to find something solid to hold onto. To feel the completion once more, to revel in the exhilaration of being whole, it’s a pursuit I’m inclined to undertake with close minded devotion, but temperance is key, and caution is paramount. I fear botching the endeavor before it begins and can’t bear the thought. As such, I’m learning a new behavior as I simply let the universe unfold and am mindful of my impulses and inclinations; wrangling them into submission and finding contentment in going with the flow instead of forcing my own agenda to be satisfied.

            Only time will tell what is to come, but for the first time in a long time, I’m actually filled with a sense of hope, happiness, and anticipation that isn’t tainted by the worst case scenario I’m usually so quick to adopt, and inadvertently enact. Wish me the best, and of course for the astute of you out there, feel free to put the pieces together and comment freely. 

The reports of my death....are probably pretty accurate

So it’s been way too long since I’ve posted anything up and I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of you probably thought me dead, dying, or kidnapped by angry bookies. But I have returned, like a phoenix from the ashes, I’m back. I can’t speak to the quality of this post because I’m unsure of what it will become (I’m not really writing with a clear topic or idea in mind, just more reassuring my audience that I’m alive after 2 months).

To put your mind at ease it has not actually been any aliens or the like that kept me away but rather a lack of impulse to write. It struck me some time ago that I may very well have murdered my muse. I know that sounds a bit melodramatic but let me explain. The final chapter of the Nicole saga has been written. On her three year wedding anniversary I decided to embrace the darker side of myself, the little bit that had been hiding in the shadows for oh so long, and when I did I found the strength I needed to force her into admitting to her husband that she’d had an affair. As to the extent of the aftermath and fallout from that, who knows, but I did it. In doing so a part of me died.

The impulse I had harnessed for so long, the driving force behind my better writing that was done more for catharsis than anything else was snuffed out in that singular action. So dealing with the truth of what I’d become, what I’d found myself capable of, was both sobering a bit disconcerting. It’s annoying as can be to find that you can’t trust yourself. But I’ve since realized that while the action may have been the most depraved and vicious act I’ve ever undertaken, I did invest some of the most pure and intense emotions of love, affections, trust, and honesty to this woman while we were together. So in that regard I don’t feel like such a cad, just more like a man who had reached his breaking point.

Think of it like a drug addict who finds that his drug of choice no longer affects him the way it used to. So off he goes to find a greater high. I had been releasing torrents of raw emotion in such a way as to make them palatable to you, and still managing to find my own catharsis, but it got to a point where it wasn’t enough. I needed to bleed (figuratively) and cut away the last lingering tendons of that failed dynamic and move on to something better. What I didn’t expect was getting so much release that I’d end up contentedly numb. Thus, the site has since sat here collecting dust and remaining silent. I’ve got cleaning crew coming to dust and repaint. Hopefully they’ll be here before the week is out.

So with all of that out in the open, I’m sure the question has become, what has brought me back? What or who has stirred the creativity within me in such a way that I’m back here to deliver a heaping helping of my bathtub mixed fuck sauce? Oh wait you guys are here for the blog, not my fuck sauce. My bad. Nikki, put the bottle down! We’ll have them on sale in the lobby after the show for the low price of only $9.99. Anyway, to answer the question, the thing that’s brought me back isn’t so much anything concrete but rather the return of a great feeling.

When any of us enters a new dynamic or relationship with someone we really adore, even if it’s someone we’ve admired from afar for a while, there’s generally a sense of anticipation and hopefulness. A kind of trepidation that things will work better, will be better than before. A kind of unspoken promise that the universe has altered the rules ever so slightly and we’re not doomed to repeat the same mistakes. For most of us, the feeling comes and goes almost as quickly as it shows up. We embrace the feeling, most often without realizing it, and then fall into the grind of day to day living, our significant other chasing away the feelings of loneliness and isolation, and slowly but surely we begin to reconnect with the world. Before long we’ve got a permanent plastic grin on our face, and we’re reveling in all of the innate beauty of the world, farting rainbows, shitting unicorns, and unable to be less than six inches off the ground at any time. But when the feeling, the novelty if you will, passes, the world begins to return to the normal luster and intensity of the attraction is gone. Life is no more harsh that it once was, but because we’re making the trek with someone it seems less vicious and only when the dynamic ceases to be does the universe begin to seem like it’s singling you out for condemnation and retaliation. Almost as though a penance for your happiness is due and the universe has decided to foreclose on you.

The reason I bring it up is because right now I’m assailed with those who’ve been in relationships for any length of time, bemoaning how they want to break out and live their lives. See the world, find fulfillment, be unchained or unburdened by the expectations of what it is to be attached. And on the other end of the spectrum I’m bombarded with those who’ve lived the single life for so long that they’ve begun to actively pursue, almost desperately, anything they can get their hands on to fill the void.

Now it wouldn’t be so bad, but it seems that on both ends of the spectrum the issue is that everyone is looking for what’s been lost, the passion and the fire that comes from a new relationship dynamic. We’re barely aware of what it is when we have it and once it’s gone, we can’t work feverishly enough to get it back. So we mire away in the discontent, masking it with the joy we feel in the relationship, reveling in the happiness of the other person, but our hearts slowly begin to want more and more for that feeling.

Now I’m not saying that all relationships get like this, just that an implied understanding for the ones that do work, is that the passion eventually goes away. Nicole told me once that my passion for her would burn out eventually and that we’d end up in the same rut she was in with her husband, because nothing lasts forever. But my counter then, and now, is that unbridled conviction, devotion, and unwavering passion in the face of all obstacles can and will maintain if there is understanding of where it comes from.

From where I sit, the primary issue facing most relationships is that the love within is based on the ideal of who the people are, not the reality of who they are. All the honesty, disclosure, and confiding will only serve to show a measure of trust, but it doesn’t truly convey who they are. To bare one’s soul, to lay everything out on the table and express all feelings in that moment, everything from lust, discontent, satisfaction, want, affection, joy, disillusionment, betrayal, you name it, the feeling should be conveyed regardless of the detriment to the other person’s feelings. Not brutally, but honestly. Too often the kid gloves go on for fear of losing what you have, so many fights, discussions, arguments, and disagreements are choked away before they begin and then explode into massive episodes when the boiling point is reached.

Telling someone about Nicole is great for disclosure. Relaying all of the things I did, the lengths I went to in order to keep her happy and make it work, is testament to my feelings for her, but to truly show what kind of person I am it’s the things I do every day, and not just for her, but for others. Gestures that have no expectation of recompense or compensation, advice offered without judgment, and a genuine intuitiveness and understanding of the nuances that makes the person you’re with feel that they truly are the most important thing in the world to you. I know first hand that it’s not hard to produce this kind of behavior. Just listen, pay attention and respond with honesty about what you think, feel, or believe.

I know a lot of this probably wishful thinking, clouded reasoning, or even just a pipedream behavioral expectation, but it does work. I’m testament to that fact. So really I think it just boils down to the simple fact that if you’re miserable do something to better your situation and if you’re content take a second to realize and make note of it so that if the feeling begins to slip you know what to fix. 

Break the bonds of servitude to thyself

Emotion, it’s capable of giving us the strongest senses of happiness, or the most overwhelming depths of sadness and despair. Most of us spend a lifetime trying to control the emotions that drive us, reeling in our anger, or discarding our fears as irrational responses to things, but for some we reach a point of being so in control of our emotions that we lose touch with the very thing that makes us human.

Driven, soulless and incapable of feeling anything even on superficial levels we regard all life with a passing fascination but no appreciation. On the other hand we allow certain emotions to overwhelm us for a myriad of reasons and the impetus’ that are responsible become either infamous or glorified for what they do. Depraved venerations for things so sick or vile that the mind reels at how such a travesty can exist.

But it is a sick world we live in, home to things and people, actions and ideas that can lift or compel us to the highest levels of achievement or bring us to the darkest reaches of the abyss we all hide from within ourselves.  The most jaded among us seem immune to the agony of having our dreams crushed, but then there are those who cling to the innocence of naivety and, either by choice or inability to see anything else, continue to see the world with eyes that color it as something wondrous and beautiful. It is those poor ignorant souls that find enjoyment, contentment, and revel in happiness afforded to only a select few. For far too long, so many of us have toiled in jobs we are unsatisfied with, relationships that have long ago grown stale or unfulfilling, friends that no longer complement us as people and do nothing to help us grow, familial ties that we maintain out of some warped ideation of duty or honor, and lives that hold no sense of intrinsic value.

We wear plastic smiles, sport clothes we dislike, say things we don’t believe or understand, drink or eat things from places we have no stake in, and stare down the barrel of immeasurable scrutiny should we cast off any of these behaviors, and all because group thinking dictates that all of this is good. We start out life as blank slates, clean and pure of all sin and taint but as we grow up and collect one experience after another, the instinct for acceptance coupled with the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure demands that we mold and adapt to what others ask of us, and before we know it, a single compromise has become millions, a mild conceit has degenerated into countless vices, and when we look in the mirror we have no true sense of who stares back at us behind the eyes we see.

They say that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. There’s a measure of skill involved in being able to reading someone’s eyes, to look at a person and see the who they really are. A good sales person can read body language without realizing they are doing it, but someone who can read the eyes knows so much more than what someone will buy. They know hopes, dreams, wants, misery, discontent, joy, happiness, fear, trepidation, passion, remorse, and a slew of other things, but too often lately my penchant for reading people has left me disheartened and disenfranchised with the human race. I look at the people around me, the people I’ve known for years, and I see dying fires of passion. Somehow these people who’ve not necessarily had great lives, but most of them having lived in far better times than I, have become withered soulless husks of what they were. I look at the people, these individuals that I’ve bestowed the title of “Friend” upon, and from their actions, their words, their behavior, and behind their eyes, I see people too consumed by a world that cares nothing for them, too crippled by their petty unfounded fears to connect or relate, and I feel a great deal of sadness for what our world has become.

Someone I held very close once told me that the best thing about me is also the worst. I have an unrivaled passion and that passion is overwhelming to others. But to see so many who have not just less passion, but more often than not, no passion at all is depressing. People so afraid of their emotions, of the things that drive them, compel them, touch them, the very things that remind them they’re alive exist as affront to everything we have the potential to be. A woman trapped in a relationship she’s too afraid to leave, too apprehensive to commit herself to emotionally, indulges in one sacrement after another to convince herself she's happy and committed. But her quiet discord causes her to reach out to someone else, rationalized as nothing more than an attempt to feel alive and contented, she accidentally produces an emotional attachment. The fear of having to admit not only to everyone else but mainly to herself that the relationship she’s in publicly is crafted on empty sentiment becomes so debilitating that she tries to turn off everything she’s feeling and move blindly through life, hoping to never have to face the demons she’s created by living the lie. But try as she might, she remains inexorably bound to the only man she’s ever known capable of touching her heart and her sol (not a typo).

A woman having made the investment in a relationship of everything she has to give, unwaveringly loyal to her love. The impetus for this behavior and blind allegiance stemming from a previous act of betrayal that she works feverishly to atone for and in so doing she trivializes an unexpected dynamic she inadvertently cultivates with someone besides her lover and the connection she shares with this person she sees as dirty, dark, and shameful choosing to ignore the emotions, to refuse acknowledgement in any form of the emotions she feels all in the hope that it will go away. Espousing hopes of platonic contact but each attempt is made little more than drivel and Again she remains a slave to the emotions she believes herself to be in control of.

A woman who finds happiness for the first time in her life and in that moment sees the world for something other the bleak and dreary existence that has encased her for so long in recent memory. It begins as nothing more than mindless rutting, two bodies conjoined at the hips in hopes of finding the next plateau of pleasure and release. Slowly it changes, a fluid dynamic made solid and volatile by the introduction of something too powerful to control, love. A silent acknowledgement made for what she feels, a verbal expression with wanton hope and anxiety behind every word, and the response that is all too devastating to keep her eyes dry. But she tries to remain strong, holding to hope as her life raft, making every second count toward the day when those feelings would be reciprocated. And then the silent death knell of finality as those hope are choked away, but a strong spirit is not so easily killed and love doesn’t die, it consumes and controls, it makes slaves of us all.

A man, too far jaded and embittered with a lifetime or torment, anguish, disappointment, and the burden of having grown up too fast, finds miring in silent pursuits of pure intellect to be the only thing close to fulfilling. Isolated from everyone and everything, he finds emotional solitude to be in his best interest and seeks virtually nothing in the way of connection or attachment. Lost in his thoughts, blinded by the persona he portrays to the world as a means of guarding against the scars that run far too deep, he awakes one day to find that his single minded endeavors have landed him in a position where a bold new world stretches out into the infinite before him. But he tries at first to control the emotions he’s still attempting to identify and process, his entire being having been awoken with the touch of this new creature, this angelic being that suspends a halo with horns. Choosing to embrace the emotions, to revel in them, to experience everything they offer, he foolishly makes decisions that will haunt him long after the glow of the halo has faded. For far too long, immutable misery is colored as just suffering for unrivalled happiness, the textbook mindset of the insane. For every deplorable action there is a logical explanation that requires not so much a leap of logic but a level of analysis that would seem to imply that this man knows more of the woman to whom he’s attached that she knows of herself. The sad part is that it might be true. But he suffers unimaginably, toiling in an agony that can only be described as making hell seem like heaven, and all because the emotions he once pushed away, once ignored and controlled, have returned. Ignited by a passionate fire that burns more brightly and powerfully than the sun, those passions overwhelm and consume him, exerting an inescapable control that refuses to let go and only tightens it’s grip the more ferociously he fights to escape it. He is made a willing slave to his own feelings, forced to balance his love for a woman too confounded by her own emotions to think clearly, and the man’s own ideations of love and affection.

We are all at the whim and mercy of our emotional selves, unable to break loose, get free, or even act outside of our sentimental natures. We fight too savagely to control what we feel and end up being slain by the feelings we combat. None of us is truly ever in command, ever able to truly let go, to escape the haunting feelings that linger long after the apex of tangibility for our emotions has gone. But our ham handed machinations to subdue those ghastly reminders of things felt before, lead us to addiction, to alcohol, to perversions of atonement, to rationalizations too weak to hold up under analysis, and to unyielding subjugation to the part of us that remains unwilling to forget.  To all of you, I posit this challenge; take control of your emotions by being honest about what they are and why you struggle so fiercely to contain them. Catharsis is only an admission away. 

A day late and a dollar sh...wait I have exact change!

So I’m a couple days late with this, but I promise you it will have been worth the wait. For those of you like who were more inclined to pay homage to Singles Awareness Day instead of V-Day, I’m guessing that Sunday was a massive shit storm of the popular media, society, and almost everyone around you (if you went out in public) flaunting how miserable and single you are. As always I’ve prepared a not so conventional analysis of the day, its meanings, customs, and the people who partake in them.

So February 14^th has somehow become synonymous with romance. I should amend that and say that it’s been proselytized as being synonymous with romance. It’s the one day of the year when even the most macho and chauvinistic men on the planet can lower their guard and shower their special lady friend with love and lavish gifts. The singular day of the whole year when love blooms and couples grow closer together, partaking in romantic outings, dining on exquisite meals at fancy places, doting upon one another, sharing in the company of just being a couple…or so the story goes.

From my perspective, the entire holiday is a manufactured pile. It’s the one day of the year when any asshole with a platinum card and five minutes can come across as Don Juan by showing up with flowers and chocolates. I’m sorry to say, but from where I sit, making dinner reservations, having flowers delivered, and having an actual conversation should not require the pretense of a Hallmark holiday. Valentine’s Day is a complete indictment of the decent treatment that guys like me dish out at every turn. It’s a day when the cheesiest and lamest plays in the book become something more than a Hail Mary pass and the women that date these insensitive pricks eat it up wholesale.

I’m sorry, I know the shit works, but it’s cliché. It’s a standard of the holiday and the behavior that you’re supposed to do something nice and romantic. This in itself I have no issue with because I’m all for people exercising an excuse to make a grandiose gesture of love or affection. Hell I use to actively seek them out. I use to relish any opportunity to endear myself further to my love and show just how thoughtful I could be. Now don’t get me wrong, I know that some of you out there feel you’ve got the perfect man. But do me a favor, before you go decrying me for insulting people or things I supposedly know nothing about, ask yourself this question, did you do something with your significant other that you would not or could not have been able to do on any other Sunday of the year?

If the answer is no, then you have no case. And just so we’re clear here discounts, coupons, offers, deals, and bonuses don’t count. My stance is simple, if the guy you’re with is truly a romantic and you as a woman gravitate toward that kind of behavior, then you either need to find someone who does it in different ways every year and just count the days from one V-Day to the next, or find someone who will do it on a whim and in new and exciting ways. You might love the guy you’re with but if he’s an insensitive dick that’s more out of touch with your feelings than Glenn Beck is with reality, odds are your relationship is on life support and you need to start looking for a donor.

The entire ideation of a single day set aside to be a romantic, caring, nurturing, and loving individual is a slap in the face to the men that do it every day. The rationale behind it all is maddening too, because the preconceived idea is that if I a guy goes all out for his lady, makes her feel romantic, loved, tender, cared for, valued, and safe she’ll sleep with him the minute hormones take over. I know at this point most of you women are preparing to argue steadfastly about the men you’re with being worthwhile human beings, but let’s cut the crap and just get to it here. The guy you’re with is, most likely, a shill. He follows the same play book everyone else does. If you don’t believe me, perhaps I can prove it mathematically.

Now I’ll grant you this is really the way it works for men, and woman freely welcome the feelings that these ham handed gestures engender because they actually seek out the treatment. Men and women are wired very differently in that MOST men, equate almost everything to how likely is the action to get them laid, fast cars, big houses, good jobs, alcohol tolerance, flashy clothes, reliable friends, I mean the list goes on, but really if you boil down all of the pretenses and the stories, you begin to find that it’s all really an image that is constructed in a way to make the man seem way more attractive. MOST women, on the other hand, want to feel safe, secure, wanted, coveted, and sexy. Even these very blunt and thoughtless gestures of dinner for two with wine and roses, while very trite and cliché do little, if anything to actually bring two people closer together.

I mean the chocolates are a staple of V-Day and really what purpose do they serve? Most men by this time of year are just starting to feel more amorous toward their women, as the pounds they packed on over the holidays are finally beginning to shed as a result of New Year’s resolutions. In addition, most women are always planning months ahead and have already begun to note the calendar as to when beach season starts and they’re aiming to fit into a bikini one size smaller than they could the year before. Now we add the sex factor. The guy hasn’t had any good tail in months, the Super Bowl is over, his lady is losing pounds, and he thinks he just might be in the mood for an all night cram session, with a little help from some blue pills mind you. So he takes it upon himself to anything and everything he can to make his lady feel as horned up and wanton as possible.

The tried and true staples of the holiday come out with full force. Chocolates for their euphoric effects (dollar says most of you didn’t know they did that), flowers with a shallow message about love or beauty and making abstract comparisons to her, and then a dinner at a restaurant with a sweet deal for two people, an open table in the right time slot, and just close enough to your place where you can be a couple glasses of wine to the wind before the night’s festivities begin. All completely unoriginal, and sadly, almost guaranteed to work.

Well the morning after it goes back to business as usual. The guy wants to be woken up via blowjob, his lady is expecting him to remain a sweet caring guy, and by 9AM they’ve come to the realization that she is neither a sex kitten, nor is he the Casanova she took him to be. So my question is, why go through all the trouble of putting on the song and dance if nothing changes. If a relationship is stale, it’s stale. Gifts, dinners, and even the most romantic gestures of jewelry, horse drawn carriage rides, walks in the surf of the beach, and even moonlight poetry all come down to useless actions with little meaning behind them, if they’re only done because of the holiday. It’s like making it a point to contact lost friends around the holiday season, it doesn’t mean anything if you’re only doing it because of the holiday.

Amid riding out the obligations and imposed expectations of the holiday, most couples are no better for it, and that is what is truly sad, it’s like wedding anniversaries. They don’t mean dick unless the things you’re doing to honor them are bigger than anything you could do on any other given day. Taking her to dinner is one thing for V-Day or anniversary, but pick a random Wednesday, send a limo to her office with a dress she mentioned she liked and shoes to match (don’t be afraid to get her friends in on it for sizing and style help, trust me they’ll jump at it) and take her to a romantic dinner, followed by a beach trip or a carriage ride and instead of going home to have sex just spend the night holding each other. To most men it might sound gay but let me tell you that this kind of thing, being done with no outside impetus aside from just general want, is the quickest way in the world to not only bond very deeply with the woman you profess to love, but also to break yourself of the habit of behavior where every action is intended to lead to sex.