The Valentine's Day Heist - Thought Leader

Yup, Valentine’s Day is coming up again this month, that rip-off of monumental proportions only eclipsed by that fat-guy-in-a-red-bodysuit scam that comes conveniently around bonus time. Am I the only person who worries that being a Santa Clause in a mall would be the sweetest gig for a paedophile? Excuse the pun, but it must be like Christmas for every Saint Nick Paedophile as a procession of otherwise very protective parents spend hours in a queue so that they may deliver their little angels to sit on a perfect stranger’s lap — just because he is wearing a red bodysuit and spots a fluffy white beard. It’s paedophile heaven!

Jeez, I digress! The point of this here piece is to speak about the financial rip-off of these holidays and the characters used to squeeze every last cent of your hard-earned money from you through manipulation and guilt-tripping.

Santa: Overweight white gentleman who fondles kids while posing for pictures in malls all over the world. I think Santa has man-boobs or is it just my overactive imagination?

Cupid: An overgrown pink man-child with bat wings carrying a bow and arrow of love.

The Easter Bunny: Is a fluffy bunny that digs up your back garden to hide chocolate eggs so your little ones may dig them out again in a hunt of some sort. (They call it a bunny, but I think it’s a horny rabbit).

Saint Nick and the Bunny — who make you feel good about parting with your money are OK — they are for children, but the marketing creatives thought they needed to get at the teenagers and adults too, so they created Valentine’s Day and that fat man-baby with wings, Cupid.

And it is funny how most of these characters are so closely linked to Christianity — Saint Nick, Saint Valentine, Cupid (a girly Angel) — what’s up with that?! It should disturb you enough for you to start asking some tough questions, but you don’t. Like the drone that you are, you literally buy into the madness.

Anyway, what made me think about these annual rip-off intervals was that another one is just around the corner. I got an email this morning from a florist, offering a very convenient service over the internet as far as you being looked on as a “thoughtful and loving person” is concerned at Valentine’s Day Heist time. They were reminding me of the imminent, unavoidable arrival of St Valentine’s Day and warning me that if I have any aspirations of getting any game in 2010, they strongly suggest I buy as much of their wonderful range of over-priced, useless garbage as I can and distribute it to anyone that I would like to maybe in the future have relations with (and any hot female I think may vaguely know of my existence).

This will be a sign of my love and affection and will vastly improve my chances to breed.

The range, an assortment of expensive (beautiful) things that will undoubtedly:

Wilt Immediately. (flora)
Never be used. (furry handcuffs)
Be thrown into the trash on the 15th. (stuffed animals)
Not fit. (edible knickers)
Not be appreciated. (kitchen appliances)

Fat chance of that my friends! I am not buying anyone anything! They have had the last of this fat boy’s money!

Nope, this year I roll with the rest of the reasoning people who shun this farce of a “holiday” and on St Valentine’s Day I shall not be on a date or away for the weekend or anything of the sort. This Valentine’s Day I will be cleaning out my wardrobe and sending my old stuff to a charity. Yes, some overweight, homeless man is about to have a sweet Valentine’s Day with the all the stuff I will be sending.

Valentines Day: it’s a pressure situation, isn’t it? The marketing spin has been done so well that you feel compelled to react; even if that reaction is venting on a blog and stating categorically that you will have nothing to do with such a farce under any circumstances whatsoever.

I have firsthand experience of the Valentine’s Day squeeze and the consequences of mine and my friends’ actions were dire, well mostly for my friends, not I. You see, when me and my buddies were about 16 and the pressure to impress our maidens at the time was even greater, we came up with a doomed Valentine’s Day Heist plan to fund the dates that we would have to go on with our girlfriends and the presents we would have to buy them. Long story cut short, it ended very badly for all of us. Three were in the slammer for the Valentine’s weekend and I escaped merely because my mother suspected something was amiss with my request to go to a party on that particular Friday night.

That is what saved me — the rest of the gang had a very harsh time in the holding cells of the CR Swart police station for the whole weekend, which is altogether a bad place to be for any 16-year-old boy. Now that I look back, I realise that this was probably the one event that made sure that my career in crime ended before it had begun, the stories my would-be accomplices told me made sure I hung it up before it started and decided that maybe this whole education thing was the way to go after all.

Needless to say we were all dumped by our respective maidens for not pitching for dates and not sending stuffed animals and heart-shaped, cheap, inedible chocolate.

That sums up my feeling on this day of love.

I rest,
The Sumo