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<\/a>It greatly improved the moment I ditched the braindead corporate florists who would (for example) print onto the card not the poem I’d slaved over for days, but the fucking instructions to the florist on where to insert line breaks<\/em>. It got even better when I discovered Sweatpea’s<\/a>, local artisanal geniuses who were not only willing to hand-transcribe my ditties about oral sex, but who also sought out context-specific cards to put them on. (Their custom arrangement this year involved, I kid you not, a bouquet of juvenile triffids with a pineapple at the center. I have been warned against eating any of it.) And of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a partner that you still want to send valentines to<\/em>, after more than a decade of breathing each other’s sweat and pheromones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of which changes the fact that Valentine’s Day remains, at heart, a sleazy corporate scam designed to shame people into spending more money than they should on chocolates and overpriced collections of severed plant genitalia. Those wondrous and intimate elements in which I revel exist in opposition to\u2014in defiance of\u2014the crass manipulative substrate beneath. For the past ten years or so, those elements have been more than sufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year, though, is even better. Not just because of Sweetpea’s SFnal pineapple; not just because this year’s poem involved sex mods in Skyrim; but because of something I never thought I would see while ever I drew breath:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blindsight <\/em>Valentines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I may never meet SingingWhalebone<\/em>, or ein_j. <\/em>Both hail from Russia; SingingWhalebone<\/em> is at least familiar (she’s all over my gallery). I do not know ein_j\u2014at <\/em>least, not by that name\u2014beyond their online self-description as a “consulting exorcist”, and an apparent fondness for cats and manga. [Ed. Update:<\/strong> turns out I do<\/em> know ein_j after all, but as simply “ein”. A couple of his pencil sketches adorn the Gallery.] But the two of them got together and conjured forth the glorious, whimsical, and satiric bounty you see here. They sent it via an intermediary, because they are shy. (At least, that’s what the intermediary tells me; for all I know said intermediary has them tied up in the basement and is forcing them to draw for food. Maybe the intermediary works for Disney.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n