Cheesecake: part of your healthy diet regimen

    God save me from well-intentioned people.
    I was sitting in a coffee shop, having an interesting conversation about investments, when an acquaintance snuck up behind me.
    "How are you feeling?" he cried, giving that last word a clammy twist. "How's your insulin?"
    The sensible thing for me to do would have been to stand up, draw back a fist, and wordlessly lay him out on the floor, right there in the restaurant. That is what the situation called for. But having trained myself in the whole "...and what would happen next?" mindset of the zen masters, I know that actually doing so, as justifiable and satisfying as that would be, would also be a mistake. What I actually did say was this:
    "What's wrong with 'Good morning?'"
     My point was lost anyway, He fled, all confused and hurt. I might as well have belted him. 
    The hardest part about being a diabetic, after the endless hassle of trying to fill prescriptions, is the clumsy goodwill of the well-intentioned. True, I draw it on myself, by writing about this stuff. I see now why people keep their medical status private. But I'm a guy who writes about his own life. Too late to change that now. I've gotten used to friends announcing, "We'll get together for a drink," and then fix me with a pitying look, and add,  "...and whatever non-alcoholic pisswater this guy is permitted." Or words to that effect. But now, it seems I can't order wheat toast without the waitress raising an eyebrow and saying, "Have you checked the carbs on these babies? Because this isn't the near-bread you have at home..." 
    The Eli's Cheesecake holiday ads went up earlier this month, and in the first flush of joy that washed over me — this must be what commercially viable online influencers feel like all the time — I posted my cheesecake encomium from four years ago, "We will eat the good cold cheesecake, browned by the sun and be men."
     A reader replied: 
     The gift of cheesecake is mainly to myself, but I'll share with the family, 'cuz... tis' the season & all that. I drove over to the "factory" a few weeks ago, because I forgot about the website, plus — free samples! 😋I chose a lemon berry. Sweet Imperfection, which was the most inaccurate misnomer, since it was THE most perfect cheesecake I'd ever had. I brought it to my sister's house for a dinner she hosted, & now I must (must, I tell ya'!) return to get it again for Christmas dessert. I feel a little guilty droning on about all this to a diabetic, but you opened the door, lol.
     Ouch Anna. Yes, I opened the door. But no reason for you to stride through it and slap the plate of cheesecake out of my hand. As it happened, a slice of Eli's original is sitting in my refrigerator, having been defrosted the other day for purposes of writing my panegyric. I just popped down to the kitchen, checked my blood sugar — a healthy post breakfast 113 — and took a heaping forkful: 14 grams of delicious Eli's cheesecake, a half ounce, to be precise.
     A half hour later my blood was at ... 116. The same. Close enough for baseball. I ate the entire cheesecake — 98 grams, about 330 calories — slowly, throughout the morning. That is one key. Portion control. Discipline. Cheesecake is not close to the worst food for my condition — that would be Wheat Chex, which is like snorting lines of Domino sugar. I'm not sure why; cheesecake blends its undeniable share of sugar and carbohydrates in a soothing blanket of cream cheese. It's an indulgence I can afford.

     I can also eat two slices of Lou Malnati's deep dish pizza. You might have forgotten, in all this anti-vax, anti-science, anti-medicine madness gathering force in the land, but Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin in 1921. It's readily available. I take 9 ml of long-acting Lantus insulin in the morning, to cover the day, and if I want to, oh, have a stack of pancakes for breakfast, I can zip in an extra 6 ml of fast-acting NovoLog. Sure, the blood sugar goes up, postprandially, but then it goes down, just the way it does with normal, non-afflicted people. 

    But we digress from cheesecake, and I certainly do not want to chide Anna, one of my favorite readers. Beloved, really. And what has Anna done to earn her special status? Do I have to spell it out? She went and bought cheesecake. Actually visiting the Eli's factory — no quotation marks needed — which I have done on numerous occasions and recommend wholeheartedly to anyone trying to inject a bit of joy into the miserable frozen slog of the holidays. To actually visit a tangible, physical location instead of spending our lives blinking at these non-existent virtual worlds.

    Although. If you are reading this in New York or New Orleans or ... God forbid ... Indiana, the good news is you can still have Eli's cheesecake, sent directly to your door or, better, to the door of a friend or loved one. All you have to do is click here. I've sent the gift of cheesecake and, let me tell you, people are putty in your hand after that. I've had friends look me in the face and say, "Honestly Neil? I don't even like you anymore — you're sort of a putz — and would have broken off all connection with you long ago. But you sent me that cherry-topped Eli's cheesecake, years ago, and, oh my fucking God, I'm in your debt forever...."

    Okay, that's a lie and, frankly, you should have immediately seen it as such. Mere puffery, as the ad men say.  Remember, we're a month and change away from sliding into a four-year slough of untruth, a 1460-day blizzard of prevarication that will test us to the very core. You will need to have a heavy duty BS detector working at all times. And you will need cheesecake in your freezer, and lots of it, as comfort in dark times. As will your friends.

     Look, bottom line. It's $72 to subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times online, and they still constantly put the bite on you for more contributions. And while I of course encourage you to do so, they don't give you any cheesecake at all. Here, you can read my annual output for free, I never beg you to give me money (although ... would that work? Maybe I should start.) I do, once a year, in a creative, somewhat unhinged fashion, urge you to patronize Eli's. You know what is expected of you. Do it now.