Time to put a little fire in your blood, a little heat at your equator, and to sharply inhale when your heart kick-starts with a flutter! Yeah, you could get all those things from a bottle of scotch, but this is Valentines month – the cue for stupid Cupid’s annual 15 minutes of fame! C’mon now, you’re not too old, too hurt, or too far removed from the culminating passion that dictates and controls the survival of your species. So man/woman up! Dare to believe again in fantasies, hope a little, and feel the burn. Dreaming doesn’t have to be accompanied by snoring.

Couple years ago I Sullygrammed a DUAL Valentine to all my readers, some may recall. One part was to practical people and the other part to diehard romantic idealists. I was driven to it by guilt because my frequent writing about never giving up on dreams always provokes a trickle of laments from both breeds. The laments are complicated, but it boils down to this: the practical people who write me are unhappy but resigned to what they see as an inevitable decline of passion in their black-and-white lives, and the romantic idealists are frustrated in their search for that technicolor “someone” who inspires their desires.

So I wrote a Valentine to each type, praising the benefits of their separate takes on love and life.

But what I really wanted to achieve was to make everyone love themselves. Nothing worse than trying to be what you’re not. Moreover, being a romantic idealist is not an indictment of ordinary living any more than being practical refutes the passion of a romantic idealist. They are just polar opposites in terms of expectations and imagination. Converting from one to the other is possible but depends on whether you fear the negatives more than you want the positives. Or to put it another way, after metamorphosis, are you a caterpillar or a butterfly? 

Of course you recognize which persuasion I favor. No doubt about that. If you’ve ever found and fulfilled your romantic ideal with someone, you know you cannot disenfranchise them from your core being. They become indelible whether destiny is seized or not. So it was hard for me to make a convincing case for a conventional life and I remember one particular email telling me how hypocritical I was. After all I wrote about magic and reaching for stars, how could I pretend that inaction and faint-heartedness were anything but a waste, they wanted to know. Thing is, I believe love is self-proving. If you have to ask for it, it’s too late to receive it; and if you demand fidelity, you’ll never really have it (and if you understand that, you are probably a romantic idealist). Neither passions nor dreams can be commanded as if they are trained pets, and I’m sorry if my words could be cherry-picked to imply otherwise or to empower one strategy for love over the other. 

So this year I’m just going with wishing everyone their maximum dreams. You know what you want. So bare your breast and shut your eyes while fat-boy takes aim and…TWANG! 

Damn…I was facing the wrong way again. Ah well, love hurts. But my heart is already beating like a drum roll for the splendid new editions of my novel CASE WHITE! Hardcover and trade paperback copies arrived in time for Valentine’s Day to join the e-book version. Like many of you, I still love the solid feel of a beautiful book in my hands, and this is coffee table stuff. Plus, I know the author. Plus + plus, the reviews have been awesome. Hope you’ll give it a look (free sample here): https://www.amazon.com/Case-White-Thomas-Sullivan/dp/1941408842/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Phantom blue snow is throbbing in the moonlight outside my window as I write this. So serene. You’d never know the world is seething with ill will. No Cupid’s arrows there. The barbs flying in the wake of a tumultuous year are tipped with flaming hyperbole and distortion in all directions. Makes you think the ill will is less about facts than feelings. Good will is also all about feelings. Maybe we each have to throw our switch from negative to positive to change the feelings before we can truly see the facts.

By Jing, instead of a dual Valentine, maybe I should send a dual end-the-duel message. Something politically neutral, like…

To Republicans/Conservatives: When resistance feels it’s been heard and understood, the door may open for it to listen and understand you. That’s the only way to TRULY win a war. Intimidation, mob mentality, ignoring the rule of law, brute force, propaganda – that’s how you win battles…but lose wars.

To Democrats/Liberals/Progressives: When resistance feels it’s been heard and understood, the door may open for it to listen and understand you. That’s the only way to TRULY win a war. Intimidation, mob mentality, ignoring the rule of law, brute force, propaganda – that’s how you win battles…but lose wars.

OK, same advice and I could’ve written it just once. But we’ve learned to tune out half of who we used to be and we’re in the habit of skipping over whatever fits the other side. The old journalistic motto, “All the news that’s fit to print,” has changed to “all the news is print to fit [an agenda].” Please don’t shrink yourself into any media narrative. Source your information as broadly as you can. We will get through this, America. “In order to form a more perfect union…” Remember that? Gotta start thinking about ourselves as one nation again, can we agree on that?...TWANG!

This month’s photos below: #1-4 the mists of Crow-Hassan; #5 Rick Skarbo likes his seafood fresh; #6-8 hiking with  Mickey Magic; #9-11 sun and snow at Elm Creek; #12 my daughter Colleen is very artistic as the composition in this photo of my grandson Seamus shows. Love the implicit metaphors that can only come with an artist’s reflexive eye in a fleeting moment. There is the glass separating two worlds – age and youth, innocence and the machine, and the wonderful benevolent smile of the Zamboni driver contemplating perhaps himself a half century ago. The impenetrable glass is a barrier against going back in time and the motion of the Zamboni renders the driver a bit blurred and insubstantial, as if age is already consigning him to eternity. #13 And, oh, I love this one, a commuter reading my new novel CASE WHITE.