Singles Awareness Day, The Airborne Toxic Event, & First Peter (4:8)

 

 

 

Best Experienced With:   The Airborne Toxic Event;   Gasoline

(please right click on the link below to open the suggested background music for this evening’s celebration of both Single’s Awareness Day and Valentine’s Day in a new browser window.    That’s a solid love day tune right there. “They tell me how….you’re married now….oh, my dear I fear I cannot understand how…..FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT.”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7IGWfkYQ8g

As we dive headfirst into Singles Awareness Day, those of us who find ourselves singular through choice, fate, or prison sentence often find ourselves musing and opining on what we would be doing if that “certain someone” found us at the laundromat or on eHarmony.     Singles Awareness Day is also the perfect time to play one-upper on everyone we know.   If a friend buys his loved one four dozen roses, we opine “I would have had three guys build a greenhouse addition off of her living room and populated it with rare African orchids and hummingbirds, but I am sure she will appreciate the flowers.”    If another friend mentioned taking his last first date to Bali to pop the question on Singles Awareness Day, I’d probably toss out the following as a throw away while walking to my car:  “yeah, Bali is OK I guess, if you are not wealthy enough to get to the moon like Richard Branson.”

Love is a ridiculously amazing thing.    Being single is also a ridiculously amazing thing.    Most embrace the former while ignoring the latter.

If you and I were dating and we were celebrating the opposite of Singles Awareness Day together, what would your Valentine’s Day gift basket contain?    Would you need oven mitts or gloves to open it?  Would it scare your neighbors?  Would the basket be bigger than a breadbasket and would it make sounds as you approached it?   Would my gift basket for you fascinate you or scare you senseless?   

As I handed you the basket, I would turn on a 1992 era Sony boom box and crank up the tune you cued up above when you started reading.  Would, in a very poor  voice sing the following Airborne Toxic Event lyrics to you while dancing around like the lead singer in a ska band,  because that is the only way I can dance.   Except for doing certain line dances such as “the sprinkler” and “the shopping cart”, neither of which add to my marketability. 

“And she’ll step away
For a second or two
And I close my eyes
And I think of you

We were only seventeen
We were holding in our screams
Like we’d torn it from the pages of some lipstick magazine
And you’d scratch and turn
And say, ‘let’s burn ourselves up ’til we scream’
Like gasoline”

 

What could you expect in the Valentine’s Day basket?    Were I flush with cash, you could expect to get at least one wallaby.    Were we past the first ninety day dating probationary period, you would get at least a full grown wallaby with a joey in its pouch.

There would be a pair of tickets to the last public Siegfried and Roy Valentine’s Day show on February 14, 2003.   We would use my time machine to go back to the pre-Roy stroke days.  Not the cheap seats either:  we would have princess seating in that pit they used to have there at the Mirage at the Siegfried and Roy Theater.   There are few cooler things in the galaxy than double fisting Valentine’s Day umbrella cocktails, surrounded on all four sides by thousand pound wild animals and animal magicians in tight white, bedazzled costumes…open from throat to belly button.  

There would also be one of the tee shirts below, carefully folded and wrapped in green garland.   This would allow you to fully appreciate the baseness of my humor, while also commenting on (and allowing others to see in public) my self deprecation and humility.   I would intentionally always stand to your left when you wore the shirt.

And there would be tasty, fizzy candy in your basket.

 

And dozens of bottles of cheap wine

 

And more candy.   Colorful candy with other people’s truncated love sentences:

And after you opened your Valentine’s Day basket, there would have been a wildly fantastic puppet show for you in the living room with the cop puppet reading Franz Kafka’s The Trial to the kangaroo puppet.   I’d hide right there behind the couch and do the various Kafkaeasque voices for you to prove my everlasting adoration and admiration for you.

Instead, for 2011, I will celebrate Singles Awareness Day amusing myself to the nth degree and file away the Valentine’s Day gift basket ideas for another year.   I will celebrate it in the traditional Irish Catholic fashion, watching the new Monday night episode of “INTERVENTION” on A&E while eating a delicious and nutritious meal of beef flavored Ramen Noodles and three Trader Joe’s chicken patties.   I’m still going to sing Airborne Toxic Event’s “Gasoline” to myself and will most likely play along on the new Sunlite guitar with the capo on the third fret so I won’t screw up the really, really hard chords.  Because, as we learned through the film Alien, “in space no one can hear you scream”.

Happy Singles Awareness Day and God bless us, everyone.      Those of you with dates, feel free to burn yourselves up until you scream.