St. Valentine’s Day, more accurately known as STALKER DAY, remains the second scariest holiday founded on a grisly public execution that we celebrate. It was actually St. Valentine himself, imprisoned for his heinous crime of marrying young people, who first discovered the obsessive love that still marks this day. The kind of love that can only lead to anonymous flower deliveries, bad poetry, suspicious chocolates, dead pets and/or endless legal wrangling. An excerpt from St. Valentine’s own diary describes it perfectly:
O Lord why doth they pelt me so with these teddy bears? They hurteth. Canst thou not make them stop? Like, I do not even play the guitar! Is it not enough the Emperor intends to chop off my head?
Well that was then and poor St. Valentine was a sitting duck for every love struck loon within pilgrammaging distance of his prison cell. Thankfully times have changed and today you no longer need to walk for days on end to lavish your true love with unwanted tokens of esteem. With a valid credit card and a reliable internet connection, I am always mere clicks away from properly expressing my undying devotion to that special One who refuses to acknowledge that I exist.
Of course what I’m trying to say is this. At a time when it has become so easy for anyone to unleash their inner stalker, your life may depend on stalker-proofing this Valentine’s Day. I’m not saying all stalkers are killers. Some of them are just people hired to refill shelves at night. Some of them are just Graham.
But keep in mind the corollary, a high percentage of serial killers are in fact stalkers. So what can you do? Well the first rule of stalker management is easy to remember:
When you don’t know the sender, put it right in the blender.
Okay no I just like that because it rhymes. I don’t really mean it. Unless you have a really good blender, it probably can’t even accommodate all those letters and flowers let alone the boiled bunnies. But it does reveal something that is true and that’s this. Stalkers will just keep stalking. They just keep refilling your personal in-shelf, for as long as it is there to accept their parcels of love. So make it clear you don’t want them. Don’t have a shelf. Do not accept. As tempting as those chocolates look, send them back unopened. Don’t unwrap them really really carefully then eat them and wrap the box back up and send it back empty. That’s not nice. Nobody will take those back. Don’t say, can we just be friends? That’s not fair, stalkers generally have no hair or clothing advice to offer, they can’t be your friend. And for that matter you can’t do Star Wars verbatim so what kind of friend are you?
But I digress. In summary… Happy Stalker Day. Maybe just take a different route home today and keep on, keeping on.