Ain’t nothing quite like one of the candy-based holidays^[1] to make us diabetics feel real special.

Had a dream that I was pigging out on Easter chocolate like there was nothing to worry about. This happens to me from time to time. I dream that I have gone way overboard in the whole not eating sugar category, usually by having something like the candy bars I miss so much in MASSIVE quantity. Often, for some reason, this involves a period of the dream where I am shopping at a supermarket. Well, that IS where I used to get my chocolate bars (candy bars, for you Americans) most of the time. I used to live for those great “two chocolate bars for a dollar at the checkout” sales. Booya, I am gonna stock up on Coffee Crisps, Skor bars, Cookies and Cream and Cookies and Mint! Damn, I miss my bars.

I’m no saint, I still have The Wrong Thing now and then. But not chocolate bars. Usually, it’s a restaurant dessert and it’s something not too sweet and it’s after a big meal with plenty of protein and complex carbs, so the sugar doesn’t hit my system too hard.

For someone like me, these dreams where I oink out on chocolate are like those dreams that former junkies have where they have gone back on the junk. They are both sick wish fulfillment (satisfying the craving virtually, in the dream world) and a terrible nightmare, because you wake up thinking “oh no oh no, I am screwed now!” and it takes some time for your poor brain to sort everything out and inform you that it was all a dream and you can calm down and relax now.

Of course, it’s not like I was ever a chocoholic (addicted to chocohol) or had a serious sweet tooth or anything, so the analogy doesn’t really hold. I loved the chocolate bars, but I never craved them like it was an addiction or anything. I just enjoyed them now and then, and given the nature of the modern supermarket experience, they are the things I most often encounter and wistfully desire.

Those chocolate bars are always there when I buy something anywhere, really. The margin on chocolate bars must be enormous for them to be able to afford that kind of coverage. If you are paying for something in the mdoerjn world, odds are good you’re doing it next to a lot of chocolate.

And yes, there are times when I cannot help but resent the ease and ignorant joy with which most of the world participates in the glorious world of sugary treats. All those people blithely getting their ice cream and their cookies and their cakes and their cereals and their any kind of pop they want at a restaurant, completely ignorant of how much of society is built for them to enjoy and how lucky they are to not have to dwell in the No Sugar Added ghetto if they want something sweet and tasty and fun.

I suppose that’s true for any disability, really. Most people have no idea how lucky they are not to suffer from depression, either. How lucky they are to feel happy and be able to do things and not always worry about things and hate yourself.

And it’s not like I go around constantly thinking about how great it is that I can walk, see, and have a nervous system that more or less works. I live in a modern country, and so I have a quality of life far better than at least half of the world, even on $8000/year. I am highly intelligent and articulate and have had opportunities others would envy. But I still feel sorry for myself sometimes. We are all defined by our own limitations far more than by the limitations of others, and so we focus on them, and forget to be glad for the ones we don’t have.

Then again, it’s not like we can go around in a constant state of gratitude. We wouldn’t get anything done!

Anyhow, my Easter message for you is to enjoy your sweet treats, and maybe take some time to think of all the problems you do not have and be glad you live someplace with Internet and computers and literacy and shelter to make all this possible.

You could have done a hell of a lot worse in life.

Thought really, they are the same god.

Like I have mentioned before, I have a very strong drive towards the truth. It goes far deeper than a preference or a liking and is more like an overwhelming passion that, at times, borders on obsession and even madness. It drives me on and is the basic deep engine of my constant thirst for knowledge and understanding. I always want to learn new things and then process that information, refining it and eliminating all but the vital essence of it, and then fit that precious piece of the puzzle into the larger understanding of the world that is, in many ways, my life’s work.

Compared to this deep mission, everything else comes second in my life. Material things can be great, and I enjoy my books and my video games and my snacks and such. And I certainly would love to have more money so I could have more fun. But when it comes down to it, everything material is of strictly temporary and functional interest to me. Material objects are merely instances of the objects of my obsession. It is the patterns underneath it all which interest me. I burn with the desire to know, but even more to that, I want to understand. All knowledge, to me, is merely the gateway to the understanding I seek.

I am no rationalist or idealist though. The shape of my devotion to my ideal of understanding permits absolutely no shortcuts such as the assumptions that you can deduce everything from pure reason^[1] or that reality is entirely composed of that which we imagine it to be. My dedication to my own search for the truth of things demands the absolute minimum of assumptions at all times. It also demands extremely rigorous standards of logic and a mind that can handle all that work. Luckily, the precision engineering pays off by resulting in a mind that is extremely efficient and precise at its task.

But not terribly good at dealing with all those details of life. The price of having a mind like a telescope is, inevitably, a serious case of farsightedness.

The other god I serve is, basically, an extension of the first : pragmatism. If my drive to the truth is drive by the question What is true? then my drive towards pragmatism is driven by the question What works? What gets results? What is effective? What best unites intent and effect?

To me, results are all that matter. I don’t care about schools of thought, aesthetic preferences, what people would prefer to think or to do, or anything else. It’s all at best secondary and at worse an actual barrier to making things better. To me, any considerations outside those which fall under pragmatism are madness. Doing what you set out to do, to me, is the most beautiful thing.

This is not, of course, a directly moral imperative. That’s a different issue. Whether or not what you are trying to do is the right thing is a moral question. Whether you are going about it the right way or not, whether you are sufficiently focused on the goal or whether you are distracted and side-tracked by things which do not matter, that’s another thing entirely.

That said, to me, it is incumbent on those who wish to effect change in the world to do so my the most effective method possible, without consideration of ego or pride or intellectual habit. To me, if you are unwilling to do what it takes in the service of your ideals and goals, you don’t really believe in them. Or at the very least, they are not the highest priority in your life.

All of this pragmatism and truth-seeking is very harsh, undemanding, and unforgiving, and that is why I call them, rhetorically speaking, my gods. Everything about me is subservient to them and my humanism (a third god? that’s for another article), and the combination of all these factors leads to my dedication to ethics as an intellectual and spiritual pursuit.

It also leads to a certain amount of friction between my pursuit and my general easygoing and affable personality. On a basic level, I just want to get along with people and be a nice fellow, but this deep and ruthless dedication to the truth of things sometimes interferes. I can easily see how others of the same basic intellectual makeup find it easiest to affect a cool, efficient, distant demeanor.

But I just can’t do that. It would be too mean! And boring.

Technically, it’s called “The 160 Greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Quotes”, but when you have 160 of something in a list, you probably have all of them, don’t you think?

So saying they are the greatest is meaningless. They’re also the worst.

It’s occurred to me quite recently that I have never been all that emotionally stable.

It’s not an easy or fun thing to realize about oneself, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it is true. Even far before my current (very long) bout of mental illness, I was not altogether there. Even before my problems with depression as a teenager, I was a strange child who was prone to incomprehensible moods and strange ideas and times when it felt as though reality itself was far away and I was not so much a person but as some sort of alien inexpertly piloting a meat-based space ship around an Earth it did not understand.

I think I have always known this on a deep level, but I kept it buried below the surface of my consciousness, paved under and builts atop and forgotten like the catacombs of Paris, because I had to get on with life and pretending everything was okay was the easiest and most natural and simplest way to do so.

Why? Well, because I was all alone in my own little world. Nobody shared it with me and nobody was paying attention to me at all and so nobody noticed and it is surprisingly easy to ignore something, even something as profound about yourself as whether you spend part of your life half out of your mind, if everyone else is ignoring it too. In many ways, nothing is truly real to us unless someone else perceives it too.

Even something like being half crazy.

It was the isolation and loneliness that did it, I think. It is simply not natural for any human being to grow up as emotionally isolated and frightened and alone as I did. It had a profound effect on me even in elementary school. I think I have taken deep tissue damage from so long in deep cold, and the only reason that fact has been hidden from me for so long is that no matter what it is, no matter how bad it is, when it starts when you are a ltitle kid, you think of it as normal.

As far as I know, on an emotional level, life has always been like this. It’s taken this long in my life for me to realize that it doesn’t have to be like this, and just how badly damaged I am compared to normal people.

Even as a kid in elementary school, I would have this periods of feeling highly disoriented and disconnect and disassociated from reality. I can clearly remember days when during the walk home from school, I would be in such an acute emotional state that nothing seemed real and it almost felt like I was fading away inside myself, or like I was a deep sea diver and reality was at the bottom of a cold cold ocean. I would have trouble focusing on anything and the walk home would seem like an eerie dream because I couldn’t really feel my surroundings at all. Not over the screaming inner void.

And even if I had realize how wrong this was, and how badly I needed some kind of help, and even if I had somehow plucked up the nerve to try to ask for help in a household where I was largely expected to disappear and fade into the woodwork and pretend I didn’t exist, I am not sure I would have been able to put into words what was happening to me in a way that makes sense to anyone.

Mom, I don’t feel right. I feel lonely and scared and like I can’t stay connected to reality. I feel so cold sometimes and I get bullied at school all the time and I am so very alone and so very frightened. I get so scared it’s not even fear any more, it’s something else. I need help, Mom.

Maybe if I had been able to say all that back then, things would have been different. Hindsight.

At least this insight helps explain why I am so incapable as an adult. I have been very ill for a very long time and it’s no wonder that I am not real good at coping with reality. I have, in essence, had a lingering undiagnosed untreated malignant debilitating illness for most of my life. It is hard to imagine how much damage this has done, or how badly it has warped my development.

I am lucky to be as sane as I am, considering.

Which turns out to be my thick and pointed head.

I have been mentioning that game trading site with the really stupid name lately, and how I have been waiting for a game to arrive via it, a game called Red Steel 2.

Now I didn’t just pick that title out of a hat, or just decide I liked the name, or whatnot. When I saw the game listed as available on that game trading site with the really stupid name , and it looked like it might be a game I would like instead of most of what is available there, namely stupid sports games, kids’ games, hunting games, and other lame games…. I immediately popped open a tab to one of my favorite Web resources, Metacritic, and looked it up there.

I checked out the score, read reviews from both pros and the site’s userbase, weighed the options and how many of the precious 650 points I got for turning in my precious Twilight Princess it would take to make it mine, and decided, what the hell, I’d give it a shot.

But somehow in my careful research, I managed to completely miss the highly salient fact that the game not only supported the new MotionPlus addon for the Wii, it actually required it.

And I… don’t…. GOT ONE.

So I spent two weeks chomping at the bit for a new game that I cannot actually play. It just sits there, taunting me with its promise of cool and stylish sword and gun style combat in a freaky looking sci fi cum Western setting, with robots in dusters with katanas and other cool stuff.

And now I don’t know what to do with it. I could just list it back into that game trading site with the really stupid name , put it right back into the system, and get my points back. But then I would have to wait for someone to request it, then pay for the postage and the envelope to send it to them, then wait for them to confirm that they received it, and only THEN would I get those precious points back. It’s a lot of hassle and a bunch more waiting, and I am not in the mood for either. Plus, I am growing increasingly disenchanted with that game trading site with the really stupid name and its lousy selection of games that are actually available. Seems like most of the users have the brilliant idea that they will trade crappy games nobody wants for points that will get them the cool games they do want^[1], and hence, the games you can actually get (as opposed to those great games you tell them you want) are largely very lame.

How lame? Barbie themed game lame.

Presumably, if the site had a much larger userbase, it would work better. Or perhaps it works better for the PS3 and the 360, which have a lot more keen and hardcore gamers using them and hence attract a larger userbase that is computer savvy enough to find the site and use it right. Maybe it is just us Wii users who find the selection a tad low end. I don’t know.

But I am not eager to extend my involvement with that game trading site with the really stupid name any longer than it takes to get my Twilight Princess’ worth of games back from them, and putting Red Steel 2 back into the system would do just that.

I could take it to Gamestop and see what meager pittance they offer for it. I have been trying to avoid their fell clutches, as someone who lives in the lap of poverty like I do has to try to get the most value out of these games he can. And I in general don’t trust those places not to rip me off, honestly.

I could stick it on eBay. I have never sold anything on eBay, just bought stuff, so it would be a first for me. Should not be a big deal though, and then I could get something like a reasonable price for it. But checking on eBay, that ‘reasonable price’ would be, at best, around 15 bux.

Doesn’t seem like I have any truly good options.

Right now, I would trade it for a really good back rub.

No really. It does.

Takes around 15 seconds to get going but it is SO worth it. That’s freaking hilarious.

Obviously, this goat is a big fan of the WWE and Stone Cold Steve Austin.

When last we left out intrepid band of heroes (namely, me and my friends) we were caught in a dilemma : stuck there in Denny’s with a band of mamasitas and their banging, shrieking brood, and denied the option of switching to the front of the restaurant by a loud crowd of playoff watching Canucks fans.

What were we to do? We didn’t really want to get up and leave and go find another restaurant. So Felicity did a perfectly natural and reasonable thing : she shushed the loud little ones.

Then we hear a voice from that table saying “Excuse me, did you just shush my baby?”

Aw shit. Now it’s on.

I had heard of this happening before. People angrily defending their right to be terrible parents by letting their children be extremely loud in public. And I had been dreading the day it would happen to me. Before last Friday night, it had come close to happening to me, but it had never quite landed right on me like that. Now there I was, in the middle of it.

Like I said in part 1, my main worry is (and was) my ability to keep my temper under control under stressful situations. I am mostly a fairly mellow and easygoing fellow, someone who believes in going with the flow to get along and letting people be themselves. It’s how I am and how I like to be. Mostly.

But one thing that really brings out that fraction remaining from that “mostly” is rudeness. I have my own sense of what is proper behaviour and what is insensitivity and rudeness, and when someone really violates that sense, that is when you are mostly likely to see my more fiery and confrontational side come out.

It often comes as quite a surprise even to those who know me, because like I said I am mostly friendly and mellow and harmless and relaxed, so to see me suddenly be All Up In That with someone is rather a shock.

So now the word war is engaged between our two tables, with me and my friends exchanging verbal volleys between tables. Our numbers were roughly even. Of course, we’re smart intellectual types. Which helps a lot less than you would think.

I don’t recall exactly all that was said. I have this weird thing : when I shift into Action Mode, I often have trouble remembering much of what occurs later. It’s very freaky, honestly, and kind of scares me. All I can think of is that I spend so much time in a more contemplative frame of mind that those rare moments when I switch into the Be Here Now mode leave the little note-taking elements of my mind all in a tither at the sudden change and they don’t know how to index the memories properly.

It’s not something I like to think about.

Anyhow, so I don’t remember all that was said, but I remembering yelling something like “I can’t believe that it somehow missed you how wrong this is. This is not normal. This is not how babies are supposed to act. ” and “Just because you don’t hear it any more doesn’t mean that nobody else does. ”

Anyhow, the skirmish was fairly brief, and concluding with us just getting up and walking out of the back up to the front, where Felicity stopped to get information from the manager of that Denny’s on how we could complain to the Denny’s head office about this whole incident. At this point, it was up in the air whether we would ever come back to that Denny’s, but we certainly weren’t planning on staying or paying for the drinks and appies Joe and I had already consumed.

The manager was very understanding, and told us that it was Denny’s policy to never ask someone to quiet down their child, and we understood that and were not blaming the Denny’s people for the whole thing at all. They have always been really great to us, but there was just no way we could put up with this insanity. I honestly feel bad that they got caught up in this at all. They’re great people.

But as we are talking with the manager, a funny thing happens. The Baby Mamas get up and leave on their own. And a few minutes later, the ringleader comes in, contrite as can be, and apologizes to us, and shakes my hand and everything. Turns out she’d had a very bad day (to say more would be indiscreet) and she was very sorry for what she had said.

Well. Hell. On the brink of defeat, we won. Instead of us leaving and never coming back, we ended up staying and having our usual Denny’s meal without incident. The manager even gave us half off the cost of our meals as an apology for the whole thing.

And, what was most important to me personally, my friends congratulated me on my articulate defense of our cause. That really meant a lot to me, because I often don’t know whether I am doing well or not, and I need all the affirmation I can get.

I did good.

So thus endeth our tale of battle, loss, and victory. Our faith in Denny’s and humanity is restored, and we retain our Friday night meeting spot.

Feel weird to win. I’m not used to it!

Tis a story of deeds and battles, good and evil, right and wrong, and a struggle wherein all seemed lost and the forces of good were in retreat when victory came at the last moment and all that is good and right won the day, fair and true, with no further contest.

It’s also the story of what happened to me and my crew last Friday night at Denny’s.

My friends and I have a habit of going to Denny’s for dinner every Friday night. Save the Denny’s hate…. it’s good simple food at a good price in a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere and the staff there are super nice and seem genuinely happy to have us there every week. As far as I am concerned, that makes it golden, and you can take all your “Eww, but it’s Denny’s” bourgeois pooh-poohing, roll it in chipotle and artisan bread crumbs. and shove it up your Moxy’s.

So last Friday, April 15th (tax day for you Yankees, just another Friday for us lucky Canucks), it was me, my dear wonderful roomie Joe, his boyfriend (and soon to be roomie) the gentle and helpful Julian, and that internationally recognized source of beauty, charm, and 80’s cartoon nostalgia, my best friend, Felicity.

Usually we make the scene in the general vicinity of 8 pm (we’re late eaters), but due to various little factors like my needing to cash a check and Felicity’s lessons running late, we actually didn’t show up till more in the vicinity of 9 pm.

Joe and I arrived first, and settled in to wait for the others. We had settled in to our usual table way in back, near the extremely fake fireplace in the back left corner, and were sipping our drinks and pondering appetizer choices when in through the door came the restaurant goer’s worst nightmare : a gaggle of young mothers with (dramatic STING) babies.

And whaddaya know, the minute they sit a few tables over from us, the little demons darlings picked up their utensils and began rhythmically banging them on the table.

And their gaggle of young mothers were, of course, completely ignoring this and chatting on merrily as if nothing unusual was happening.

Now my friends and I, we’re nice people. Sweet guys. Sensitive, intelligent, caring people. (and yes ladies, 3/4 of us are gay. Figures, doesn’t it?)

But we’re nice quiet people. We are quiet people who like quiet places where we can chat and hang out and enjoy one another’s company without having to compete with, for instance, loud music blaring. One of the reasons we have been so very loyal to this particular Denny’s is that they completely buck the trend of musical ubiquity and have their music at a nice comfortable background level. This means a lot fo us quiet sensitive bookish types.

Obviously, then, extremely loud little ones who, you might be interested, soon began adding piercing shrieks a random intervals to their percussive performance, are just not part of the program. Joe and I were sitting there, our emotional temperature rising with every erratic and irregular burst of banging and shrieking.

But neither of us are quick to anger or fond of confrontation. Quiet, bookish types, remember? But we knew that when Felicity showed up, things would escalate. Because while nobody is really fond of noisy shrieking ill mannered babies, it is definitely A Thing with my dear friend Felicity, and we knew that she was not likely to take this situation as passively as we had up to this point.

I was worried. Not about Felicity, but about myself. Part of what makes me a little reluctant to get into it with strangers is that I don’t always control my temper well once I let it loose and I was afraid that if it did become a confrontation between our party and the Pretending We’re Not Moms crew, it would turn into a whole huge screaming match and someone would end up in jail or some shit.

Probably not a rational fear, but there nonetheless.

So anyhow, Felicity shows up and is, of course, unwilling to accept the status quo. I don’t blame her at all. At first, the staff suggest that we move from the back room to the front lounge, thus putting the entire restaurant between us and the noisy klatch of maternality manque’.

But no! As fate would have it, that very night was also the night of a Canucks playoff game, and so the front lounge was full of loud hockey fans just itching to raise a ruckus every time someone scored a goal. That was not an option either.

So there we were, caught in an intolerable situation. What would we do? What COULD we do?

Well, you’ll just have to tune in tomorrow to find out!