Being about the origin of cherubs as instruments of failed relationships
So! Valentine's Day, huh? Am I right? Huh? Yeah! Hearts! Flowers! Candy! Ha-haaaaa, ugh. Now that it's safely past us for another year, I gotta question. Whether you're a dyed-in-the-wool romanticist, all luvvy-duvvy boo-boo kitty nummymuffincoocoobutter, or a hard-nosed, bitterpants, my-heart-is-a-black-cinder, Gothy/Emo Morrissey mumbleynose, there is one thing we all wonder about: What the hell is up with all those cherubs?
These little winged refugees from a Van Halen album cover are always seen flitting about with bow and arrows at the ready, intent upon riddling some poor innocent sap with their barbed shafts of lurve. Okay, first of all, who's arming these flying menaces? Listen, I know that in Russia, love makes YOU, but here in America, you need to be at least 21 years of age and require a permit before you're allowed to own a projectile weapon. Unless you're talking Nerf weaponry, in which case, there's a little warning story for you to hear elsewhere on this blog.
Second of all, doesn't it concern anyone else that these ambulatory celestial rats just kinda meander around dispensing their own brand of indeterminate matchmaking, with no apparent brief or mandate as to which two people might actually be compatible?
Location: San Francisco. Seen sitting across from each other on the local transit, a man and a woman, each absorbed in their own little pursuits. He's into multiple piercings, facial tattoos, hardcore thrashgrindsloppunk, and, curiously, needlepoint. She likes Jane Austen, bob-do's, O magazine, and the collected works of Shostakovich. In floats a frisky little cherub with sheer simple-minded perversity on its face. Twang! He's gut-shot! Twong! She caught a hot one to the neck! And now it's all over. Somehow, these two are now doomed to try to mesh their individual social, familial, professional, philosophical, and emotional worlds together, and heaven help them both. I give it two months.
And third of all, speaking of heaven, do we even know for sure that these things have divine backing? Tiny mutant wings and a bioluminescent cranial light source do not the beatific make. So we're talking either infernal origin or mad science. I'll tell you which I'd prefer.
If I were an undersexed over-brainy nerd/dork type with full government funding (I've got two of those covered already; guess which two!), this is what I'd do. Under the guise of Valentine's Day, I'd release into the unsuspecting populace droves of genetically-engineered flying babies, outfitted with Olympic marksman-level sharpshooting skills, the very latest in miniature sniper technology, and the pheromone-sensing knack for finding two people cosmically unsuited for each other. Then, having embedded the both of them with light-bent heat-seeking projectiles containing a potent cocktail of pair-bond selective-antigen orgonetropevores combined with sophisticated tracking nanobots, these Cross-pollinating Heuristic Explore-and-attack Recombinant Uncanny Blasphemies (or C.H.E.R.U.Bs) would keep tabs on the resultant hook-up, break-up, and wash-up pattern that typically occurs over the succeeding couple of months, weeding out the chaff from the wheat until at last my perfect mate rises to the top of the heap of broken, disillusioned, ready-to-settle-for-less women, and I STRIKE!
The question you have to ask yourself now, is: does this pattern sound familiar to you? Have you gone through this experience already? Have you lowered your standards to the point where they're already met? Now you know. Oh yes... you know.
So, yeah. Valentine's Day, huh?
It was late last night in the red barlight
And she looked all right
Oh no
She had a slutty kind of appeal and there was definitely something to her
And you could think of friends of yours who if you knew if they could they would do her
She had a dirty sock kind of appeal
Oh God, NO
-- "Billy's", The Billy Nayer Show
