Love, Anti-Valentines, and Friends For Life

I couldn't let my least favorite holiday go by without some comment, so on Valentine's Eve, here are some thoughts on this "holiday." Many of you are probably surprised that I don't like Valentine's Day. After all, I've said many times that only love will heal this planet and that the healing must begin inside us first.


I still say that. And I also say I don't believe Valentine's is a day of love. It is a day to get stressed out over love, to give it a financial value, to make one person happy and another one sad when you choose who gets the best valentine. Remember when we gave Valentines at school? There was always one or two of the really cute girls and guys who got the fancy, elaborate valentines. Their bags overflowed with unrequited love.


Meanwhile, the rest of us looked at our mass-produced bits of paper and said screw this, I'm going to hang out with my friends and practice unconditional love to fight against this injustice. And we did. And we grew up hating Valentine's Day, no matter how many cool, elaborate valentines we got from admirers, lovers, partners, husbands, wives, and all the mixture of love, sex and paying for it dearly clubs we belonged to.


I fell in with a bad crowd in high school. We protested against war. We became vegetarians. We listened to music that stirred our blood and bodies to create a sexual revolution that changed forever the roles between men and women in this country. We began to talk about and write about and sing about things that mattered to us like overpopulation, pollution,the strip-malling of our hometowns. And we redefined love to mean something that was genuine and not bought, felt and not enforced, and celebrated instead of feared.


During that time one of us created the first anti-valentine, a work of art on bits of paper and cardboard and even tin foil. We exchanged these little gifts of love with each other on Valentine's Day, no matter what the relationship or gender. We gave each other these gifts as a way to express that we loved each other, we appreciated each other, and that we understand a very basic concept: lovers come and go, but friendship is forever.


Each year since then many of us have continued to exchange these anti-valentines. And truth be told, one of the major reasons I became a Cafepress shopkeeper was because I fell in love with their anti-valentine designs. It was the one place I could go to see how others were reacting to the enforced day of love. I saw at once that not only was my little group far from unique, we also had many friends in the world who thought the same way we did.


This year I made this design. I bought it for myself and wear it a lot. It's a sentiment that always brings a smile to my face and it also pokes fun at the whole idea of dating, valentines, and the ridiculous idea that we should only express our love for each other one day of the year. Enjoy!

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Love, Anti-Valentines, and Friends For Life

The Value Of Friendship

In the last couple weeks filled with holidays that focused on family gatherings, there's always this small bit of sorrow in me that I didn't have those joyful memories. I come from the original dysfunctional family. It was dysfunctional in so many ways that I can't even begin to describe it here. I tried to write a book about it once. I even finished it. It's in a drawer along with other memories that are worth hanging on to for the educational value: love letters from old and dead relationships, long expired student identifications and driver's licenses and other bits and pieces of officialdom that have been replaced by the digital age, photographs of a youthful me that I'm always surprised looked kind of cute. I always saw myself as painfully ugly then. How perception changes!

What isn't there are many family pictures. We never took many. Most of the time we were too poor to afford a camera for more than a few weeks at a time. It lived mostly in the local pawn shops of whatever town we were in at the time. And film cost money to buy and develop. And who wants a record of domestic violence, alcoholism and poverty as mementos anyway?

Yes, my childhood sucked and I've had to spend a lifetime climbing out of it. But then as now there was something that kept me from taking one of my father's weapons and blowing my head off with it or one of my mom's happy pills that would let me sleep forever without waking up to them screaming at each other, and that was my friends.

There is an old saying that you can't buy friendship. This is probably because you can't put a price on it. Friendship is truly priceless. When I think of my childhood, it is filled with memories of friends who sheltered me, helped me talk through my anger, fear, and tears, who held me instead of hit me, who accepted me no matter how bad a person I thought I was and who saw me as beautiful no matter how ugly I thought I was. They kept me alive.

As I grew older I moved a lot and finally found a place to stop. I chose the place because of the people who came into my life in this place. They were the people of my childhood, the open and accepting arms, hearts, and minds. From the beginning they sheltered me from the other elements in the community who saw my vulnerable neediness and looked for ways to exploit it.

Some did and they live in the memory drawer with my family pictures. But the ones who are outside that drawer taught me that love is stronger than hate, tolerance is more powerful than bigotry, and love means being there when you are needed. That is why for this holiday like many of the others, I spent it with my friends. It's going on a couple decades now and it's because of them that the wounds are finally starting to heal.

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The Value Of Friendship