Valentines

It's the thirteenth of February at 8:00PM and I find myself at the grocery store, standing in front of the motley assortment of I waited to damn long to buy my kids cool Valentines cards. Now I'm left with the daunting task of trying to convince the little dears that Dora and Diego are cool cards for fifth and sixth graders to hand out and that a first grader doesn't have to give his teachers a dozen roses. All the cool candy is gone we either get to dump red hot hearts into an envelope or those nasty conversation hearts, "Oh look boys, Nestle decided to experiment with the Crunch bar and came up with a crispy, crunchy, cookie edition covered in dark chocolate, I bet your friends will love these". The Fifth and sixth grader stare at me like I just crawled out from under a lime green 1967 VW Bus, dressed in a tie dyed tank top and bell bottom polyester pants with a peace sign bandanna tied around my afro, the first grader starts to cry.

We fight our way through the crowd of procrastinator parents and wander over to the non-holiday candy aisle. The first grader won't stop whining, I contemplate beating him into a coma with his box of John Deere Valentines...yes, Americas favorite farm equipment company has become valentines and, if you wait until February 13th at 8:00 PM, you too can be the proud owner of a box. We settled on caramel apple suckers, I know, they seem like a Halloween treat but First Graders Valentines box is orange and he used a black marker to draw first grade hearts on it which looked a lot like ugly pumpkins, plus it stopped the whining for a minute.

The non-holiday candy aisle is right across from the beer aisle and there, amongst the desperate Valentine shoppers, were two poor guys who looked like they had stepped out of an episode of
LA Ink, These guys were six foot four, they had piercings, leather boots, tattoos, just the 'Real Bad Boys' to make all my rebel Valentines fantasies come true, and me with out my longed for tattoo surrounded by stressed out kids and guilty parents. Next year I'm buying Valentines when they come out on December 23rd.