VALENTINE'S DAY

Today is Valentine’s Day.

I prefer the pre-adolescent view of this odd glitch in the year’s topography: those little candy hearts with “I love you” and “be my own” imprinted on them (I don’t know how they did that, by the way). I remember sending valentines to everyone in class, and to getting everyone’s valentines. We didn’t know what we were faking. We thought it was something teen-agers and adults did, fell in love, sighed and sang, danced to sad music, wrote strange letters full of poetry. We were too young for the concept of “bittersweet,” and took our milk chocolate straight and creamy.

Later, when we thought we knew love, we were even less informed. We hadn’t learned about the “terrible otherness of people” and about the inevitable, groaning, tectonic shifts of spirit under the lace-rimmed valentine hearts. We didn’t know how dangerous passion could be because passion was our daily bread. We were passionate about Elvis and Bardot, Corvettes and dragsters, the Team and the flag. We didn’t know there were passions so different from pop-wonder.

As a boy I’d seen a hundred copperheads, walking in the woods and along streams. Oh, another copperhead. Then one day I saw a real copperhead, glorious in color and mesmerizing in pattern, beautiful and ugly, fat, flat-bottomed with wicked walls of perfectly elastic muscle mounting to a clean ridge of spine, with a nasty, squirmy rat tail ungraceful and incongruous at the end away from that broad, merciless, uncaring, cold-blooded strike-head. I stared. The copperhead, storing sun heat aboard a flat rock in a small stream, sensed me, its busy and intelligent tongue flailing the air in tiny strokes. Naturally, I ran. I didn’t run: I fled, a rout, a headlong retreat from reality. But even as I levitated up a near-sheer bank (already a hundred yards from the careless monster) the hundreds of copperheads I had casually witnessed fell in a broken-ice, shattered image to become . . . water snakes.

So when I discerned that love was different, dangerous, toxically powerful, uncompromising of plans or friends or intent, it was too late. The passion was much too powerful for my frail balsa wings and I crashed disastrously. It was not a mighty crash because my soul was not very large. It was mostly a folding up of paper-thin illusions, a crackling more than a crash. But I’d met passion, so all the flirtations and romantic notions dropped in the same broken-ice shattering to become . . . sweet little valentine hearts, “I love you,” “Be my own.” Available in bulk or in cellophane bags.

And later, more times than I’m comfortable specifying, I ignored the reality of love, insisted on the Disney version, crashed, burned, crumpled, destroyed many good components in a careless life. Because I was careless about the best things in my life, cavalier, as if they would always come, replacing themselves with even better wonders. My God, it’s taken me so damn long to see anything about this business of living. I lost, more than once and more than twice, the most precious things I’ve ever held, and it is a conscious, weight-lifting effort to forgive myself for my lack of respect.

So today is Valentine’s Day. And when I recognized the day in the morning an old song blew through my head like a draft:

I'm through with love
I'll never fall again.
Said adieu to love
Don't ever call again.
For I must have you or no one
And so I'm through with love.

I've locked my heart
I'll keep my feelings there.
I have stocked my heart
with icy, Frigidaire.
And I mean to care for no one
Because I'm through with love

But even if I don’t know life better than a passing nod, I know myself. I know I’ll be looking for that strange sickness the rest of my life. Knowing how dangerous, poisonous, corrosive, ungovernable and unforgiving it is, I’ll walk right up to it and smile like a yokel, hoping to be loved by Love.

There’s a cruel old joke about a miner heading for the saloon. His partner says, “Are you gonna sit down at that poker game again?” A shrug, a nod. “Hell, don’t you know that game is rigged?”

“Yah. I know. But it’s the only game in town.”

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

For a supposedly bright man, Himself has a weak spirit and a haphazard tendency to delusions. In many ways he shouldn't be allowed out on his own.