Message to Cupid: Get on the stick. Or maybe, get off of it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

I hope that you got all the valentines that you could store without creating a fire hazard. I want to thank everyone for the valentines, the one valentine actually. My friend Suzie sent it by multimedia text message and since I don’t have a text plan, it cost me 25 cents. Oh well, if well wishes cost a quarter then that is a pretty good deal considering what some have cost me. And my head keeps saying: “Don’t go there.”

But I really never understood the value of sending everyone a valentine in class and having everyone send you one. This is especially true when you are in graduate school. Okay, I am just using poetic license here minus the poetry. I never went to graduate school. I started to a couple of times. I got so far as to take the hours minus six that I needed for a second major in political science and then I had to have a minor — history. I went two semesters — this was a year after I graduated with my B.A. — with hopes of being a college professor, you know, one of those academia nuts. Does something need be placed here about macadamia nuts? One never knows.

Love is a many splintered thing. I am just full of them this afternoon. This is not to be confused with my being full of it most of the time.

Valentine’s Day is a day companies promoted to sell flowers and candy, I have heard many say. I don’t think that is so. There are a lot of people out there who see the romance of it all, perhaps all those hopeless romantics who are not quite like the helpless romantics. Hey, you, quit pointing your finger this way! But there is really nothing wrong with Valentine’s Day even though I don’t openly celebrate it, nor do I covertly celebrate it.

I don’t believe that Valentines Day captures the essence of love because I don’t think the collective society is capable of catching Cupid’s arrow right through the old ticker. Individuals can catch the love bug, surely, but not everyone is able. Perhaps it because love is such a deep, personal and so often indescribable emotion, state, sickness, that I equate it to a crowd of people describing an armed robber to the police.

“The guy had a bow and arrow,” says one.

“No he had a bazooka,” said another.

“He wasn’t wearing any pants,” says still another.

“No he was wearing a body stocking and was armed with a slingshot … ”

And so it goes with love.

Lust, on the other hand (huh?) being so heavily invested in the physiological, is another matter. I would really rather talk about the “Lust” word and not in the sense of Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview where he said that he looked upon on a lot of women with lust. I like Jimmy. He was the first president for whom I voted. Getting back to lust, though, many people are hesitant to have a frank, philosophical discussion on lust. One would think that it is surprising how many have no problem — in small groups at least — talking about lust in the bawdy manner that gives the word a bad name. Yes, men like talking about lust. Women do too. But all such discussions usually run toward what they see, at least, as the sordid. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.

Well, I hope I didn’t pluck the romance right out of you and cut it up in 16 slices. Like the song says: “I Want to Know What Love Is.”

Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.  Perhaps, a la Bill Clinton, I want to know what “is” is.