The Daily Chao

And obviously, because I’m sitting here, writing about how you should get wasted on a couple’s holiday, I haven’t been in one of those “But I celebrate you every day” long-term relationships in a while. But I do read a lot of novels about unhappy marriages, and whenever a fictive couple talks about the last time they had sex, it’s always like, “the night of the Johnson’s party.” You guys: You don’t have to wait for the night of the Johnson’s party. A bottle of bourbon is like a “To Me You Are Perfect” sign she can put in her face.

How do we solve this? Maybe a city should take ownership of the holiday, the way Chicago has with St. Patrick’s Day. They can dye the river crimson, thrilling local Goths while terrifying disoriented old people. Bars can sell pink beer and magenta potatoes. And the next day, we can all have a good collective freak-out when we momentarily forget about all the food coloring we’ve ingested and cry in the bathroom because, oh god, there go our kidneys.

It wouldn’t be shirking tradition, exactly, because it’s often been speculated that Valentine’s Day was originally created by church leaders to subsume a heathen holiday that found Romans getting hammered and beating each other with animal hides. I would rather get trashed and slapped with a hide by Maybe-Greg than receive something in a velvet box.