Bullshit dude, bullshit. I once ate a tray of 24 assorted muffins: blueberry, lemon poppy-seed, cranberry apple, banana nut, even bran. Large muffins too, like you’d buy at the bakery, not grocery store mini-muffins. I ate the first five or six out of hunger, and the next dozen I can only attribute to gluttony, but the last half dozen were devoured by determination alone. A part of me wanted to stop— I was full, the muffins had become repulsive, and there was a disconcerting pressure in my chest. The other, stronger part of me knew that if I gave up on that muffin platter I would admit limitation. A limited man can rationalize his every weakness, turn away from every challenge, live his life within the narrow confines of comfort; that’s not how I live my life. But I digress. It took six days for my bowels to move, and when they did I shat a monolithic muffin block so wide it could not be flushed, so dense it would not dissolve with repeated flushing, and so heavy it took two hands to lift. The measure of anxiety, pain, pride and love is indescribable, so don’t tell me I don’t understand childbirth.

I was initially really sympathetic towards the VCJ crowd because of the downright gross pushback they were getting from some users. It sucks when swaths of the community go fully mask-off reactionary on issues they don’t care to be educated on. But the wildly differing attitudes of the two communities made the merger a recipe for disaster from the start. We learned a lot from the clusterfuck.