Happy(?) Valentine's

Retrospective note: "Contrarian" is probably the wrong term and probably is an insult to true contrarians. However, I also refuse to engage in revisionist action to change this error. Therefore, I recommend, for the context of this post, that you understand the term "contrarian" to mean something to the lines of "rebel without a cause"

A Contrarian's Journey Through This Day In History:

Today is Valentine's Day, the feast day of St. Valentine, a priest and physician who was martyred about AD 270 in Rome, and the tradition of exchanging greetings of love on Valentine's Day is based on the legend that Valentine had signed a letter to his jailer's daughter, with whom he had fallen in love, “from your Valentine.”

Contrarian Action 1:
A game of solitaire left unplayed (Addendum: I refused to think about painting myself white in line with the order from the Queen of Hearts).

Contrarian Action 2:
At 3:10 this morning (the analog equivalent of 270 military time) I read about Ann Hamilton's installation, tropos, having a nonverbal atemporal imaginary dialogue with her solitary myein (figure) sitting amidst 5,000 square feet of horsehair, ritualistically burning printed lines from a book. Abelard and Heloise was as far from my mind as possible as I consumed an English muffin slathered in marmalade from a jar that I did not replace on its shelf, an action displacing the moral implications of Alice's fall in the rabbit hole. I had unwritten dialogues of an event already passed, stifling an unspoken desire to re-enact the love letters stuffed into a crack in the wall in Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I let the thought decay in my mind and found philosophic justifications to pretend it was not a loosely framed perversion of the romantic passage. I slept most of the day and awoke to picked out all the songs with the word “Love” in their titles from my ITunes library and thought about how I was missing Rufus Wainwright’s “The Origins of Love.”

1989: Fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie
On this day in 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa and offered a bounty for the assassination of author Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses (1988) Khomeini denounced as blasphemous.

Contrarian Action 3:
I ate grapes, random handfuls of them, thinking about how "grape" was the word "rape" whose p had done an about-face, whipped out its sinister curving phallus and stood menacing the cowering four letter string (four a death-related number in Asia) while reading about violence against women reminded of fatwas levied against raped Pakistani women.

Contrarian Action 4:
I took a short bike ride to Barnes and Noble, asked a random employee to recite the word Love, and flipped idly through Salman Rushdie's Shame. At a completely unrelated and inconsequential moment, I grab his Satanic Verses and leave my kitten-saliva drenched fingerprints smeared over the cover's butterfly grinning back at me with its mimetic markings, whose terror was not by its visual nature but the fact that the glossy, digitally manipulated paperback binding killed its butterfly's innate natural ephemerality, pinning the most stereotypical manifestation of the creature onto its RGB dot-matrix cover. This was a butterfly on digital steroids, framed lovingly by the cover artist, but with a mixture of the kind of detached, objectifying love an entomologist has towards his specimen, the love Warhol had for Marilyn as he screened her colors slathering gaudily on her TV-novelty-consumer-ravaged face. I had two Siamese Fighting fish in my backpack, wrapped in three layers of paper bags, paper bags reminding me of lunch feeling vaguely guilty about having coveted the Salmon sushi earlier that day. In a healthily uninformed manner, earlier that day I had not even thought about “Salman Rushdie.”

1946: The first general-purpose high-speed electronic digital computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was demonstrated to the public by its creators, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John W. Mauchly.

Contrarian Action 5:
The thought of an electronic stereo system sends shivers down my spine.
At about 5 PM today I ate a small crabapple patterned with streaks of pain, as if it had been dislodged from Gregor's back in Kafka's Metamorphosis. How I detested Gregor's family.
I damaged my lower back on New Year's Day, of my own inebriated volition.
In my mind I am ritualistically pulling out every mention of Gregor's family from their spine outwards to invert their fleshy forms, forming dissectable exoskeletons out of their conceptual contours.
I promptly forget the passage.
I was not thinking about Eckhart.

1929: Members of Al Capone's gang of bootleggers massacred a rival gang run by George Moran in Chicago during the Prohibition era.
Contrarian Acton 6:
I placed two Beta fish together into a teal blue Kush herbal tonic bottle and they seemed to coexist peacefully until one hour later I returned to find their limbs scattered at the bottom of the bottle. It was grotesque and terrifying. I put the bottle out of my sight, tried to deal with the nauseating horror by trying to convince myself that it did not happen, and made no immediate attempt to separate the fish. They were not fighting anymore. The frosted glass obscured their forms.

Corollary (Prohibited Anti-contrarian Action):
I crack open a bottle of Blue Moon, light up a cigarette with a menacing black lighter imagining the aftertaste of an Al Capone cigarillo. The yogurt covered raisins I stuffed in my mouth to distract myself left me with the uncomfortable sensation of chewing on raw fish flesh. I drank no other form of alcohol today and stared at the Hurricane Cocktail mix, not thinking about how the art of bartending was born from the Prohibition period.
Me not speak easy all day.

1920: With the establishment of woman suffrage in the United States, Carrie Chapman Catt formed the League of Women Voters in Chicago.

Contrarian Action 7:
At 7:20 P.M. I half napped through A Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time with my Anthropology group project abstract, “Colonizing the Beauty Myth” resting on my crotch. I was thinking about death but not about the death penalty.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent for the telephone.

Contrarian Action 8:
I don’t own a telephone nor an answering machine.

1779: Captain James Cook was killed by Hawaiians in a dispute over the theft of a cutter.

Contrarian Action 9:
Set afloat a couple tremendously banal, dare-I-say-kitsch, cliché/idiom-saturated conversation about love and being in the same boat feeling somewhat bitter about being single on Valentine’s Day. I continued aforementioned banal conversation in an email sending a Hallmark-worthy message about how I “ride the vibe of an unimaginable amount of romantic occurrences.”

1766: Thomas Malthus, the English economist and demographer best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and should be checked by stern limits on reproduction, is believed to have been born this day.

Contrarian Action 10:
Today, I feasted upon an amount of food equivalent to satiate two members of the American population (or twenty members of the Sudanese population) while conveniently ignoring the article in the school newspaper about Plan B being offered in the Health Center.

Final Contrarian Action:
I am posting this entry at 11:59 PM on February 14, 2007.


Love,

Me.


P.S. Historical timeline from Brittannica Online.