Valentine's Eve at Walgreen's: Last Refuge of the Damned

The next time someone tells me they don't believe in Hell, I'm not going to argue, I'm just going to direct them to Walgreen's on the night before Valentine's Day.


Having just returned, I can assure that Hell is real and I was lucky to make it out.


I reached my inadvertent damnation innocently enough. We were going out of town tomorrow and we needed cat food. They had just enough to last the three days we'll be gone, but I didn't want to return late Monday night empty handed to a house of chattering cats with empty stomachs.


In retrospect, no amount of meowing could have outweighed the trauma of what I experienced.


I knew I was in trouble when I walked in and saw a line of unhappy looking people running the length of the store. "Weird," I thought, hoping the logjam would clear out by the time I got my cat food and found whatever aisle it was they were keeping the deodorant these days (Answer: the one furthest from all the other toiletries.)


When I turned the corner to walk past the card aisle, the occasion behind the crowd hit me and I knew I was doomed.


A line of disgruntled men blocked the aisle, picking desperately at the few remaining card options. A few had even given up on finding a card meant for Valentine's Day, and were picking through the sympathy cards looking for something tender they could adapt without too much marking.


The candy aisle was mostly a repeat of the same, although the genders of the last-minute shoppers were equally mixed, which also served to make the aisle doubly as crowded. In fact, when I finally made it through to the cat food, there was one guy with a red card in his hand and lost look in his eyes giving the Purina just a little bit too long of a look.


But at least he was still trying, which was more than I could say for a handful of guys wandering the store aimlessly, looking bewildered. Two of them carried balloons, along with a look on their face saying, "I really need to get my wife something besides these stupid balloons."


With no other options in mind, however, they just wandered the store battering other customers with their inflatable treasures while they reached unsuccessfully into their limited imaginations. As they stopped to look at picture frames and waffle makers that made animal-shaped waffles, you could almost here them trying to talk themselves into each, before hunching their shoulders and moving on.


"This is the last step before the mid-life crisis hits," I thought.


Equally perplexing were two different set of couples who were Valentine's Day shopping as a couple, at Walgreen's, on the night before Valentine's Day. And in both cases, each partner was loaded up with armfuls of stuff. I think we can safely say that if this is what passes for romance in their household, it's a good thing they found each other.


At one point, I heard a cashier announce to a middle-aged man: "that will be $65.43."  I wondered how one spends $65 for Valentines' Day at Walgreen's. A $20 dollar giant stuffed animal, $10 box of candy and $5 card seem about the only conventional options, but perhaps this guy added some Splenda packets, a can of pasta and some diabetic socks.


Or maybe he went back and bought the cat food.


Finally, after I surfed through the crowd, I climbed over a giant stuffed bear that was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the floor, and stood in line. After I got skipped by a woman with three ill-behaved toddlers of varying ages (she had been someone's Valentine quite enough already, if you ask me), I finally made my purchases and was ready to escape.


"Have a nice day and come back," the cashier said.


"Thanks," I said.


And then I gave my life to Jesus so I could go to sleep knowing I'd never have to see this place again.

Let's Just Get Rid of February

I wrote about the horrors of February three years ago. It's my most-highly read column, because every winter I get hundreds of new page hits from the search phrase "I hate February." Sadly, that fact has not impressed anyone enough to fix the underlying problems with the month.


So I'm going to do keep complaining about it.



February is the worst month of year and it isn't even close.

The weather is cold, the days are short, it doesn't contain a real holiday, and nothing interesting happens in it other than the Super Bowl, which almost always disappoints with boring football and uninspired commercials. And don't even get me started about Valentine's Day.

Other months are bad too, but none quite so much as February. January is too cold, and August is too hot.  But January at least has two holidays, the NFL playoffs, and the tail end of the holiday season. August, has lots of daylight in its favor, and no begrudges you a summer vacation if you just can't take the brutal heat.
In February, your boss still expects you to work extra to compensate for the lost productivity of the holiday season, and it's too cold to go anywhere anyway.

February has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And as I type this I'm reminded that February sucks for an additional reason: it is wayyyyyyy too hard to spell. It has that unnecessary and largely unpronounced "r" as its fourth letter, inserted just to spite all of us. We can't even write about it without it causing aggravation.

Honestly, the month's only redeeming factor is that it only has 28 days. Whoever decided that the rest of the months should have 30 or 31, while February was so awful it should be limited to 28, obviously realized how horrible this month is. But they didn't do enough to stop it from coming back.

Even when it passes, we all know it will still be out there, lurking, laughing under its cold wintery breath until it returns in early 2015.

So I suggest we go a step further than making February the shortest month of the year: we should eliminate it altogether. Really, wouldn't the world be a much better place if we had 11 months with 33 or 34 days each and just got rid of February?

Or we could skip from January to March.
I'm sure some old grouch out there would argue that if we skipped February, March would suddenly just take its place as the month filled with cold weather and short days, and it would be just as bad. But that's ridiculous.  March is much easier to spell.

Besides, I'm pretty sure the skeptics are wrong, but even if by some weird stretch of logic they happened to win on a technicality, we could still solve the problem another way. We could just add 28 days to January. It would make for a really long month, but at least there would be something to look forward to at the end.
As it stands, finishing a month of brutal January cold only to be rewarded with February is small consolation.
We should just get rid of February instead.

And let's get rid of that unnecessary first "R" while we're at it.