Sex Pistol

It's a cosmological and chronological coincidence that this, my designated writing day henceforth known as THURSDAY happens this year to fall on the feast day of Saint Valentine of Rome. If you don't know the story of the person behind the legend, Valentine of Rome was an actual person. He was born Aug. 28, 1986, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, to Frank of Rome and his wife, Teri of Rome (née Peterschmidt). Valentine was an unremarkable high school student in 2002 when he met and fell in love with Jessamyn Vanderswaele when they were paired together in a mirror exercise during the drama elective he was forced to take because the computer drafting class was all full. He eventually found the nerve to declare his love for her, at a very high volume during lunch period on a Wednesday, under the fluorescent multipurpose room lights, near the Powerade vending machine, and about four inches from her face. He risked it all to proclaim his feelings, he would have found out in retrospect, after he woke up from the medically induced coma following the savage beating immediately administered by Jessamyn's boyfriend, a judo enthusiast of some note.

Meanwhile Frank of Rome was something of a visionary, taken immediately with the market potential of the new-ish "internet" so-called. His previous ventures into autogyro-balanced two-wheeled stand-up motor scooters and a combination music player/portable telephone had been frustrated by being decades ahead of their time, limited mostly by the lengths of extension cords. Continuing to tinker, he realized there was an untapped potential in the "electronic mail" system that might allow for the conveyance of information beyond simple text. After several false starts, including drawing directly on the computer screen with wax pencils, he enlisted the help of a gaggle of neighborhood 11-year-olds who showed him how to encode and display graphical imagery combined with text in a variety of themes and colors, fit for any occasion.

As you can imagine, this immediately drew the attention and the ire of both the greeting card industry and the U.S. Postal Service, who conspired to strangle the "e-card" idea in its crib. They recognized it as the existential threat that it was to both of them. The obvious and best strategy was for them to conspire to kidnap the comatose son of the inventor of the e-card and force Frank to give up his dream. This daring and subtle stroke was pulled off the night of February 12, 2002, with only eleven members of the hospital staff and security personnel killed or wounded as the USPS-Hallmark strike team shot their way out with an unconscious body in tow.

The best investigators could figure in the end is that sometime during his captivity Valentine awakened from his medically induced coma, well before he was out of danger. His body was abandoned before any demands were even made and found March 3 in the walk-in freezer of a Bart's All-Nite Hoagies just outside Mt. Lebanon. In his fist they found a note containing his last words, reading "HEY JESSAMYN I THINK I WILL BE FREE ON FRIDAY IF YOU WANT TO MAYBE HANG O" followed by a trailing off pen line.

The ending, as we all know, was bittersweet. Valentine has of course been immortalized as a saint (by first-ballot voice vote) and the date of his death, Feb. 13, was almost declared a day to be celebrated in recognition of embarrassing public declarations of affection (wanted or otherwise). It ended up being Feb. 14 because of some clerical missteps amongst the ancient Vatican bureaucracy, which nobody bothered to fix once they realized he was Episcopalian.

The Postal Service has been of course punished for their role in the tragedy, priced out of existence by the unstoppable tidal wave of zero-cost electronic messaging. The greeting card companies, well, they had to settle for a whole other day dedicated to the exchange of sometimes slightly humorous cards that maybe rhyme and are decorated with lots of hearts. Valentine may have his revenge in the end however, as few people realize the ruinous cost of red inks.

And on top of everything else, that's how we get the famous saying "Valentine's Day is just a fake holiday made up by the greeting card companies," which is traditionally spoken right before our spoon first breaks the pristine surface of our pint of Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche and we start binge-watching Bodyguard in Netflix all by ourselves.