A place rather pretentiously called The Canadian Brewhouse (Bre Whouse?), as if there is only one, managed to get my business last night via two great words that go even better together : FREE PEROGIES.
That’s right. All Skip The Dishes orders in March are elegible for free perogies. And as it turns out,. it’s not some rinky dink little package of like six token perogies, like I thought it would be.
Nope, it’s a package of at least twenty of them, with chives and optional bacon bits. It’s enough to cover a whole dinner plate.
So hey, Canadian Brewhouse…. well done. I am eating your delicious perogies as I type these very words. YUM.
Actually. the perogies are just the loss leader that got me to check out their Skip the Dishes profile. What sealed the deal was they had DONAIRS.
Most of you who are not from the Maritimes region of Canada have probably never heard of donairs. They are basically specially seasoned meat stuff into a pita pocket, with a lovely creamy sauce, and I adore them.
Luckily, while I was going to VFS, the Mediterranean place a few doors from school turned into a place called something like the Donair Dudes, and so I got to have my first donair in decades from there.
But even though it said “Real Halifax style donairs!” out front, it wasn’t quite the same. This being the West Coast, it was still basically a falafel joint, and while I loved being able to get tabbuleh on my donair (damn I love that stuff), the whole thing had an air of healthiness and sensible eating habits that just doesn’t go with the donair experience where I come from.
I mean, the side dish to a donair shouldn’t be hummus.
It should be PIZZA.
Or fries. But this is Canada. the most French fry eating nation in the world (per capita) I think we can assume that everything either does or can come with fries.
The donair I got from the Canadiabn Brewhouse last night was more like it. Not only was it an enormous quantity of meat wrapped in a pita thick enough to stop a bullet. it came with fries, or in my case, poutine.
In other words, CHOLESTEROL CITY! I can afford to do that very occasionally because, despite my dubious diet, I have never had a problem with fat or cholesterol levels because I have never eaten a lot of fatty foods.
I’m a carbs fatty. not a meat fatty.
So last night I had a lovely meal which was both delicious and nostalgic. Among the many things I miss about my East Coast home, the whole Greco chain ranks highly amongst the things that are not people.
One thing I will never miss, though, is this goddamned ad.
That thing used to be on heavy rotation in the Maritimes. I would hear it like five times during a single episode of Voltron.
And so if you think that slogan is obnoxious hearing it ONCE….
And now it’s time for one of those seperator lines.
Reality is a Poison
And the purest water has no fish.
Been pondering the toxicity of the defenseless mind tonight. As you know, the subject of the necessity of a capacity for self-delusion in order to maintain a stable mood has been weighing on my mind lately.
Also, the subject of my complicated sentence structures. But whatever. I ain’t no Hemingway and my thoughts will never be short and punchy.
Anyhow, like I keep saying, I am convinced that some capacity for fooling oneself is needed if one is to be sane. That’s because sanity is dependent on the individual receiving a certain minimum level of a number of emotional inputs, and the mind therefore needs the ability to generate these inputs for itself when tney are absent.
And not only to generate them, but to do so in a way that is invisible to the conscious mind’s rational error-checking processes and thus immune from correction.
Now there are a lot of ways this kind of subconscious underwriting of mood can manifest. For example, a person might have a powerful a priori belief in themselves that requires no external verification.
In other words, some people believe in themselves just like out culture tells us all to do, without worrying about what others thing.
Others might anchor their mood in the love and affirmation they get (or got) from a very important person in their life, like a positive parent.
But by far the most used source for this sort of shoring up of mood is religion.
In religion, people can find whatever emotional inputs they need in a system which, at least in the thee big monotheistic religions, overtly and consciously denies the need for proof, or evidence, or anything other than itself.
Religion gives people a lot of other things for people, of course, like moral guidance, community, a cosmology (oy), and so on.
But its main function is to provide those emotional inputs that are lacking in a person’s life in a way that does not require justification.
Lonely? Jesus loves you.
A moral struggle troubling you? Ask your rabbi to help.
Scared? You are safe in the protection of Allah.
Absolutely any kind of deep emotional need can be met through “divine intervention”. Religion must be, therefore, both unchanging (for stability) and protean (to adapt to the needs of the individual worshipper).
The best religion, therefore, is one which has a stable set of broad based beliefs that can be adapted to as many situations as possible. Thus, the fundamental beliefs never change, and the official intersecessionary only needs to provide said interpretations.
It’s not that easy, but it is that simple.
But then there’s poor ignorant schmucks like myself, without a trace of faith in their lives and with plenty of emotional damage that could really use the exact sort of counterbalancing influence religion can provide.
Where other people have love and faith, all I have is antidepressants.
And it’s not the same at all.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.