in which Pooh Bear shows his teeth.

"And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized." Acts 9:18

I have to tell you all two things. First some of you may know this already but to a great many who knew me when i was younger, particularly ladies of whom i am greatly fond, i was known as Pooh Bear. Yup brown, fuzzy, pantless, huggable loveable old bear. A monnicker i adored and kind of was uncomfortable with at the same time. The other thing i have to tell you is that I am a mutant. Like..an x-man. My mutant power has always been the ability to never really see whats happening. You say TORNADO! I say, Gentle Breeze. Then i wonder why my house is suddenly two towns over. It doesn't really make me useful in a battle against magneto or racist senators, but i think somehow it's protected my psyche for 30 plus years.

Truth is truth though. I want to see the truth. I can handle the truth.

The strange thing about being on this crusade to course correct my life is that the process keeps revealing things to me. I have, almost hourly, little epiphanies that make so many pieces fall into place.

For instance did you know that when you eat sugar it makes you mental and then you crash? Well i knew that too. But I didn't really KNOW that. Suddenly i'm eating super nutritious foods with nary a trace of sugar. I'm walking through life with this fantastic flow of energy. I feel connected to Source, not just in it but of it. I'm moving through the store where i work like a shark in water, slicing this way and that, never stopping. I'm more productive at home, not that you can tell by the state of my bedroom, but my living room and kitchen have benefitted from this new level of energy and fuel efficiency i'm getting from my sugar free lifestyle. Even then, even with all this newfound super speed and predatory focus i still didn't really KNOW about the whole sugar buzz thing until one day, on my "cheat" day i had a doughnut and a can of soda.

its just that my knee kept hitting the bottom of the table and i really couldn't figure out why. I should go do air squats that might fix it. nope it's still hitting the bottom of the table. Like, over and over again...oh i see i'm bouncing my leg up and down like a coked out used car salesman trying to get his first sale of the week on the last day. I don't DO that. I'm not a leg bouncer. Thats for UPS drivers and people in the military who are always on watch. I'm chill like gezpacho.

oh...sugar. THIS is what a sugar high feels like. Wow, this is uncomfortable, i feel kind of out of control. I should go home and relax and watch mythbusters.

(moments later...)
There we go. Just chillin' on the couch with my best girl (my dog cadi). Oh that does sound interesting i wonder if you really can't eat a tablespoon of cinnamo-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzz-on...wait, why is it the next day?

That crash is killer and instant. It wasn't an oncoming storm or a wall of force i could brace for. it was a ninja. It just dropped down out of the trees and decapited me with a katana made of delicious delicious 7-up.

I'm sure everyone thinks, well yeah...duh.

But heres the thing...why didn't this happen to me before? Why didn't i have this pcp like madness followed by a deep sudden nap of uncomfortable contortions before? The feeling i had after eating that sugar wrapped- deep-sugared in polyunsaturated zero trans-sugars sugar...after napping was this blah kind of ...eh, now what? And that was how i have felt FOR YEARS!

YEARS! DECADES really.

I wasn't Chill, i was exhausted! I was distracted. I was confused. I was the personification of ennui. all the time.

So shouldn't eliminating sugar make me kind of...drag ass? I mean if i had no energy before WITH sugar shouldn't taking it away pretty much entirely just drop anchor and drag me to a halt? Well yeah, at first i suppose it did. But see, it turns out my body, like probably most human bodies, is kinda awesome. I eat food and i get energy, and if I eat good food, i get good energy. Sustained, bountiful, energy. And My normal, it turns out, is Shark! And all these years i've been letting sugar take that from me, letting it convince me that my normal was two-toed sloth. The constant stream of sugar, chemicals masquerading as sugar, less sugarry sugars all conspired with my insulin to make me....

I mean, my vitality! I can't imagine what i could have accomplished with a fraction of the energy and assertiveness and confidence simply not being a comfortable chairs distance away from sleeping has given me. Sugar stole my vitality. I gave sugar my vitality.

And I'm taking it the fuck back.

The other day i was flirting. This lady was walking her children through the process of choosing Gelato from our carefully appointed Gelato case. Now it's ice cream- the kids can handle this, so while you have to stand there and since you have very lovely ...uhm...well, just attractively proportioned..uh...there is no icecream metaphor for boobs...oh cones! no- too crass. Anyway you're hot and i'm going to flirt. flirt flirt flir- oh snap! who is this guy?

Turns out the husband was over checking out the soup and i got his spider sense tingling. Not the tingling i was going for but, I'll take it. Another new perception...this guy percieves ME as a threat.

I'm not threatening, i'm Cory. I'm harmless and gentle and live at pooh corner, oh bother stuck in the hunny tree. CANT SPELL HONEY! But wait...no hunny...no sugar...no doldroms. My eeyores have gone on vacation to someplace sunny, or cloudy, whats an eeyore going to do on vacation anyway? Fine- vacation to walmart where at least they can see embroidered portraits of themselves adorning many many articles of clothing. Why aren't i wearing pants?

Digress-

Moral implications aside of flirting with a married woman (to which, i think there are none, flirting is good slightly dirty fun and it makes you feel nice to do it, and hopefully the flirted feel nice being flirted with and that all parties involved see the line and are respectful of it), this was a fundamental change in the way people deal with me.

All it took was a tiny bit of awareness, of energy, to build confidence. To make me feel like i'm participating and not just watching.

I can't...I cannot...in anyway express to you with words what this means to me. I am simply dumbstruck. and i'm a wordy muthafucka.

I see why, now, i've found things difficult that so many others take for granted.

I see how, and THAT, my body functions. That the physical entity of me is just like everyone else. I'm not poorly designed. I'm not peculiarly flawed. I'm not a victim of genetics. I'm not the model that got retired. I'm a perfectly designed force of nature. I'm a shark. A cuddly, pooh-corner kind of shark. But a shark none-the-less.

I see now that what you think is normal is often times just all you know and there is so much more waiting for you.

I see that when you let yourself work correctly the things you think are weaknesses become strengths.

I see that when you fix one thing, you begin seeing ways to address an endless web of other things.

And I See why sharks always look like they are smiling.

Next Issue: Attack of the 5 foot Hoagie