You know, there are times when it's easy to be cynical. Baseball players break records only to reveal that they've used performance enhancing drugs to achieve their Herculean feats of strength. Police officers routinely break the very law they purport to serve as they grow weary of the Sysyphian task of putting the same bad guys in jail over and over and over again.

Even poor Cupid isn't immune. February 14th strikes us in the face with a media barrage that has all the Hallmarks (tm) of a feeding frenzy of consumerism, the accountants of the big department stores staring at us with a "Shark in the kiddie pool," grin.

And we yuk-yuk along, buying the candy and the flowers and the jewelry--don't get me started on the diamond commercials to which no human male in the history of the penis-dom can live up to--just to tell the one person in our life that makes the world a little better that we love them, a sentiment which we should be expressing every day.

So being a cynic on Valentine's day is not only easy, but I'd like to say that it's almost too easy.

Whaddaya say we all take the high road this time.

Tell the people we love that they're important to us with a kiss.

Show the members of our families--whether they be blood related or not--that we love them with our words, not some pre-printed piece of construction paper embossed with someone else's words for a mere $4.95 plus sales tax.

Give your heart today, not a box which happens to be heart shaped.

Love can save us from a terrible, terrible world. Let's not cheapen that with false sentiment, but celebrate it with all the passion and truth and wonderment it deserves.

Just because the sharks are circling, it doesn't mean we have become their lunch.

Tell someone special how much they mean to you today.

It costs less than a card, but it lasts far longer as well.

Joseph Haines, signing off from The Edge of The Abyss.