The Entenmann’s Voice: How A Chocolate Cake Saved Our Marriage

She told me that she loved me.  The rest of her body told me otherwise.  

I heard the strain in my wife’s voice whenever we had a discussion. Her words were never unkind – but our discussions were squeezed tight at the edges, her sentences chopped off at the end as neatly as a nailclipper clicking through a toenail. Every reassurance she gave me ended with an unspoken “for Christ’s sake” that hung in the air like bug spray, toxic and deadly.

The only time I knew she loved me – really adored me – was when she spoke of chocolate cake.

Now, let’s be honest.  She was right to be vexed with me.  This was during the worst part of our marriage, when neither of us had learned the self-discipline to be kind to each other.  I was a fool, insecure, and grasping – and worst of all, I knew what I was doing yet was unable (back then) to stop myself.  Half of our conversations went like this: 

“Do you love me?” 

“Yes.” 

“…are you sure you love me?” 

“Yes.”  

(A moment passes, during which her whole body braces for the next onslaught – and then) “Are you sure you love me?”  

“For God’s sake, I said yes!” 

“But you sound so angry!”  

Someone once told me that the reason dogs are so happy to see you when you come home is because they didn’t know that you were coming back. Dogs have no concept of extended time, so when you return it’s as if you’d just arisen from the grave, They jump, and lick, and frolic because they didn’t expect to ever see you again!

I was a dog. Every time Gini left the room, her love left with her. When she returned, her love was obviously gone; she had been a fool to marry a schlub like me, and she must have realized it in that twenty minutes, she must have.  I tried not to ask, I really did, but my thoughts rattled around inside me like a pellet in a spraypaint can until the words squirted out, unbidden. 

So I’d ask again. Do you love me? Do you still? How about now?

Her patience waned, and it didn’t help that Gini had grown up in a family where expressing honest emotion = death. She’d had to bury every trace of resentment to stay alive, and so her psyche was a mystery to her. She would deny being angry at me for days on end, then suddenly stop in mid-stride with a befuddled expression to snap, “You know, I am furious at you.”

Our marriage was dying, and neither of us knew how to stop this spiral.  

I didn’t even realize how bad it had gotten until we shopped for an Entenmann’s Marshmallow Cake.

Now, you might think that the biggest sacrifices I’d made in quitting my job and moving up to Alaska to be with my new bride would be leaving my support group of friends behind, or leaving behind my sexy job buying books – books! – for a job buying pencils in bulk for a corporation.  

But I’m a pudgepot.  So I missed Entenmann’s cake.  

Marshmallow Cake was a delicacy that I could not find in Alaska. Oh, they had Entenmann’s prepackaged food product in all sorts of styles – the donuts, the waxy chocolate icing, the pop-’ems – but never the creamy, vanilla-tinged Marshmallow topping. When I was depressed back home, I’d buy a cake and strip the icing off of my Entenmann’s methodically, eating it as if I were mowing a sugary lawn. 

It probably contributed to my eventual heart attack, but damn did it cheer me up.  

So when we moved back down to Cleveland, the one thing that gave me hope was finding Entenmann’s again.  My marriage may be disintegrating, this move seemed like a covert excuse to get me back into the States before dumping me, but hey!  Entenmann’s!

And on the second day in town, my hopes soared when I found a local Entenmann’s outlet – but I quickly discovered that even the factory outlet had no Marshmallow cakes. The local factory didn’t make them.

When I returned home, I was crestfallen, expecting Gini to snap at me for being so upset at something as trivial as a chocolate cake.  But for the first time in a long time, Gini sympathized with me. 

“There, there,” she said, stroking my head. Her voice was as warm as a hug. “We’ll find your cake. It’ll be okay.”

And I realized: Gini had grown up poor.  

To her, in a family that had had to squash their emotions to survive, whining about feelings was stupid.  

But being deprived of things?  That, she understood.  

“That’s it,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s how I need you to talk to me.”

From then on, the good voice became The Entenmann’s Voice.  And when I really needed reassurance, I asked her to use it. 

The Entenmann’s voice was a breakthrough for Gini, because she realized that simply reciting the words weren’t enough – she had to mean them. She thought that I couldn’t hear the unspoken “dumbass” at the end of her comforts – but I could hear her undertones more keenly than words. It took her awhile, but I think she realized that perhaps it was possible to comfort me, if she acted in the right way.

Sometimes, you have to adjust for your partner in subtle and strange ways.  And she worked, and worked hard, at stopping giving me these snippy reassurances and instead recalling the compassion she’d felt for me about a chocolate cake and redirecting that into calming my flurries of emotional distress.

As for me, I realized that if she could sound that way about Entenmann’s, perhaps it wasn’t all lost. There were still vast, untapped reserves of love within her – I was just drilling too deep, taking too many of her resources. 

I didn’t know how to stop my quavering fears, but that Entenmann’s voice told me that I had to before I lost that, too.

These were both tiny steps for us. The Entenmann’s voice didn’t magically fix everything, but they expanded our vocabulary and laid a groundwork that we could work with.

Eventually, I had to learn that relationships are based on objective results, not internal struggles.   Gini was being stressed because I was asking her Do you love me? Do you love me still? every three minutes, nobody fucking cared whether I had really tried hard not to ask at Minute 1 and Minute 2. My internal struggles didn’t matter – what mattered was that I didn’t ask at Minute 3, either. Eventually, I learned to go an hour without asking (though it was pure agony), and then four hours, and then eight hours.

Now, sometimes I can go a whole day. It’s been almost two decades since those tumultuous first days of our marriage, and I’d like to tell you my fears have disappeared, like a good storybook  – but truth is, old scars never completely heal. But they’re manageable now.

It’s an ugly truth, but it was there all along: If I wanted Gini to stop thinking less of  me for being weak, I had to stop being weak. All the words and redefinitions couldn’t change a character flaw.

But the other night, Gini was working on the computer and I walked into her room. She checked her email, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with fears of Anchorage. I had a worry about a really stupid issue – the kind that had been answered definitively years ago. Asking her for reassurance on this thoroughly-settled conflict would be the dumbest possible thing I could do because I knew she loved me, that I was an idiot for asking, that any sane person should just walk away and stuff this fear deep inside.

But the words came out, insulting in their pure distrust: Do you love me? Do you still? How about now?

Gini stopped in mid-typing, then stared at me with concern…. And her face broke open in the most wonderful smile I’ve ever seen, the most loving thing that I think I shall ever witness in my time upon this planet. She held her arms out to me and put my hands on her shoulders so that she could look into my eyes and tell me yes, yes I love you, and you’re not a fool for asking. You’re my hero, Ferrett.

That was the Entenmann’s voice.  

It was also the power of our love reignited after we learned to be good to each other.  Through cake.  

And so when people come to me because they can’t stop fighting, the first question I usually ask is, “So what’s your Entenmann’s cake voice?”  That voice is probably not cake-related (unless you are a pudgepot like me).  

But there is often a tone in your voice that your partner needs to hear when you’re upset.  Some people call it a “love language,” but that’s often nebulous, because it’s not really a language so much as it is finding the channel to compassion when you’re being inconvenienced.  

You may love them.  Speaking love in a way that they can hear it is a separate skill. 

But if you master that art, it is a sweet, sweet dessert indeed.  

Requiem For A Cow

If you’ll recall yesterday, while gaming, a cow saved my life. This brave cow followed me into a bandit camp and kicked the bandit leader to death.

This, thought I, was the kind of cow who sought out adventure.

So I made a vow: I would shepherd this cow along with me through the rest of the game. Me and my cow, in the snowy wastelands, fighting evil robots together. The dream team humanity has strived for since time immemorial, fusing the powers of mankind and a cow.

The cow was, it must be said, tricky to ride. He lurched in every direction, refusing to stop, and lowed sadly at every slope. Rocks I could jump up easily scared the cow, and if I went too fast then he’d gallop eagerly past whatever I was aiming at – so I had to trot everywhere, slowly, across the landscape.

Was this the sacrifice I must make for my mooing friend? So be it.

I named him Snowpoke.

Now, I was worried about protecting poor Snowpoke during battles. The upgraded enemies in the DLC pack were kicking my ass, and I was terrified of my cow becoming steak.

That was, as it turned out, the least of my worries.

Because during the second battle, against two epic fire-breathing monsters I ran into, it turns out that Snowpoke had a short memory. While I was dodging and firing arrows and drinking healing potions, Snowpoke… kinda forgot he was my friend. Apparently his friendship spell wears off if you don’t mount him for long enough, kind of like a bad marriage.

So I was fighting for my life when Snowpoke charged me, joining in the mayhem, with me screaming, “SNOWPOKE! NO! REMEMBER THE GOOD TIMES?!?” And that battle became twice as hard because I had to not only shoot at monsters but make sure not to kill an enraged Snowpoke.

Fortunately, Snowpoke had a mild form of bovine ADD, and while the two fire-monsters were hell-bent on my death, Snowpoke got bored mid-battle and wandered off to a slope to eat grass. So I re-befriended him again, and we rode together happily.

And while repairing another robot, I noticed that Snowpoke had his own character: one of his horns had been knocked off. It was an oddly jaunty look, which I loved, so I took a picture.

That poorly-snapped picture, my friends, turned out to be the only memory of Snowpoke I’ll ever have.

Because I wasn’t thinking. I should have Googled, I know. But it was muscle memory – I’d fast-travelled so many times before, skipping across the tedious landscape to just get to my next quest marker, and the horrid truth became apparent:

Cows don’t fast-travel.

I hunted through the camp, realizing with horror that I had left Snowpoke behind, then reloaded every last save I could find in an attempt to find Snowpoke – but Horizon Zero Dawn, alas, didn’t think Snowpoke was worthy enough to save.

Snowpoke was lost in the icy wildernesses, with one horn hanging off, probably to be murdered by asshole adventurers like me.

But no. Snowpoke was more than just materials to be scavenged. Snowpoke was a pet, with a personality – a fuzzy-memoried, ornery personality, to be sure, but he was my pet and I loved him.

Now he’s gone. And my memories are all I have left.

Oh, I’d like to think that he just wandered off, and found a herd, and settled back into his everyday life. But that’s just not Snowpoke. Snowpoke had kicked a bandit to death, man. Snowpoke was a *warrior*. And I know that Snowpoke is now stalking the mountainsides, sneaking up on bandits, who are all like “All right, we’re gonna ambush these villagers – what was that noise?”

Then an angry, angry “moo.”

Then bloodshed.

Then silence. The silence of a bovine ninja.

Rest in peace, Snowpoke. You earned it.

Rest In Peace, Snowpoke. This was a shitty picture, but… I thought we’d have more time together.

Feeling Twitchy About My Twitch-Stream

“I am actively grumpy that I cannot watch you fighting more robot dinosaurs,” said Fox.

This was after a visit where Fox had spent their evenings curled up by my side, watching me play Horizon Zero Dawn – which, to be fair, has a story so good I had to fill them in on what happened in the plot after they left.  And it was nice playing convivially – some of my fondest moments with my daughters have been spent kvetching as one of us plays the game and the other provides sarcastic color commentary.

So I set up a Twitch account and did a stream with Fox last night, which was epic in its own way – I befriended a robot cow just to demonstrate to Fox the newfound skills I’d gained in Fox’s absence, then got into a ridiculous boss battle where I was running through a bandit camp to get away from this mortar-lobbing motherfucker.

I darted through a doorway – and there was the cow.  Standing there idly, but perfectly positioned to block the boss’s entryway long enough for me to swig a few health potions.

“I love you, cow,” I muttered – but then it got better.

The bandit tried to follow me, and the cow kicked him.

I immediately stopped in wonder, watching the bandit try to match firepower with my cow – and Fox was like, “Why aren’t you firing at the bandit? He’s open!” and I was like, “GO, COW!  THIS IS YOUR MOMENT!  MAKE THE MAGIC HAPPEN!”  And I drove back the bandit until the cow kicked him to death.

As I said on Twitter last night, “A cow saved my life tonight in Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m now adopting this cow and riding it everywhere. It’s too noble to roam free and get murdered by assholes like me.”

So that was a moment, and I could see sharing that sort of fun with more people.  I’m mouthy, and animated, and I think I’m funny when I comment on games.

But I think it’d be fun at a small scale.

I’m not necessarily good at small scale.

See, I have two bits of wariness:

First, I know how awful it is for the professional Twitch streamers, the people who start chasing an audience, because by all accounts it becomes a soul-draining process.  “People like long streams,” the guides say.  “Plan to play for at least four hours!  Play the popular games!  Engage with your fans to become a star!”  And I honestly don’t know what sort of expectations people have for Twitch streamers, but it all sounds very gruelling.

Second, I say I’d stream just for my own private amusement, but long years of practice has shown this is something I am utter shit at.

“I’ll just dork around on LiveJournal” – years later, I’m blogging merrily for an audience of thousands.

“I’ll just retreat to FetLife and blog privately about my sex life” – years later, I’m discussing sex to an audience of thousands.

“I’ll just do silly stuff on Twitter” – years later, I’m Tweeting for an audience of thousands.

And in each of those circumstances, I’ve noted my own output becoming more performative as the audience accumulates – not unbearably so, because otherwise I’d quit, but every time I’ve seen that quiet calcification as I start pondering what my audience will think.  I start writing to wall off potential misunderstandings, close off portions of my life that I don’t want strangers dissecting, debate whether I feel like writing something that I know might become controversial. It’s not terrible, but it does change the experience.

I’m used to that with writing.

Gaming has been unalloyed until now.

And I wonder: If I start streaming on a semi-regular basis, will I eventually start to feel weird if I game without streaming?  How will the experience transform if I pick up enough regular watchers that it affects my habits?  Will I start playing during “prime-time” hours, or pick games that are more stream-friendly, or – as is most likely – alter my habits in ways I’ve never even considered before?

Will it make my life better?

Ideally, I’d just do what I see N.K. Jemisin and some other authors doing, which is “Hey, I’ve decided to play tonight, tune in if you want.”  But I’ve always been, perhaps, hypersensitive to the idea of being courteous to an audience, and I know that’s too deeply ingrained for that to change. I know I’d be like, “Well, I played for three hours on my own, they don’t know what’s happened, maybe I should catch them up – or maybe I should just play all the time…”

On the other hand, as mentioned, it was convivial. I like playing games. I like making snarky comments. I like swearing (and holy fuck, do I swear a lot when I’m gaming).  And, to be what’s apparently becoming a plus in the Twitch community, I would never break out the N-word while swearing.

So I guess what I’m debating – as I occasionally mull over in entries like this – is whether it’d be a good thing or a bad thing to start playing for an audience of any size > 1.

Because gaming’s fun.

And I’m not sure whether this would be more fun or less fun.

(You may note that I have not given out my Twitch handle, on account of I’m not sure whether I want to do this.  If you’re good enough friends with me that you know my email address and we’ve held a conversation somewhere, feel free to email me and ask for it.  And yes, whether you feel comfortable enough to email me is part of the equation here.)

So How Do YOU Self-Soothe During A Panic Spiral?

My therapist and I discovered that I have precisely one methodology for fixing my panic spirals: finding a problem and obsessively hammering solution after solution into it until I solve the problem.

I actually owe my career to this.

Because for me, writing has largely been my way of coping with stress. Am I breaking down because I’m breaking up? Well, here’s this story I’ve been thinking about writing, but the worldbuilding doesn’t hold together – so rather than worrying about the argument I’m having, I will instead retreat into engineering better imaginary worlds.

And I *will not stop*. My wife will tell you – if my book has a problem in the third act, I’ll sometimes spend a solid two weeks pacing the basement, unable to focus on anything else until that problem is fixed.

Which is, in its way, a superpower. Is there a bug in my program at work? I’ll sit in the tub, relentlessly going over the code logic, until I figure out what happened. Did we cross wires and get into an argument? I’ll analyze that conversation fifty times until I can figure out precisely where things went off the rails.

The Solution Spiral has become an axiom of my life. And it works. I mean, there are times when those two weeks spent crushing it in the basement have led to my best novel, and a new book contract. (That would be my time-travelling Wes-Anderson-Meets-The-Fifth-Element soup battle novel “The Sol Majestic,” available for preorder this fall, don’t miss it.)

But when a problem is so big that I can’t fix it, I enter into a panic spiral – and this one tool becomes a detriment.

Because often, there *are* no good solutions.

PROBLEM: This person you love dearly isn’t someone it’s healthy for you to date.
SOLUTION: Either break up with her, or break down.

I don’t like either solution, so I’ll enter into the Solution Spiral for days at a time because there must be a third option. (HINT: Sometimes, there is no third option.)

Or, more commonly:

PROBLEM: I said something stupid on the Internet again that I didn’t mean to say.
SOLUTION: Apologize and clarify as best you can, accept that some people you respect deeply will now dislike you.

Man, do I not like either solution, so I’ll enter into a tizzy of “THIS MUST BE FIXABLE” and spend sleepless nights envisioning the perfect essay that will repair my self-damaged reputation. (HINT: When you fuck up, there are often consequences you cannot undo, and sometimes the best way to become a better person is to remember that pain you caused yourself and others, and use that to forge a vow to do better.)

So basically, for small problems, I can retreat into fantasy worlds and use my obsession to plot better stories. (Yes, I know, that’s pretty much the entire concept behind my ‘Mancer series – escapist obsession turned to magic – did you think it wasn’t autobiographical?) And for mid-sized problems, I can actually fix them with obsession, given time.

But my therapist has pointed out that my one-fix tool leads me to break down when I’m facing problems with no easy solution. And she asked, “What other solutions can you devise?”

I’ve been thinking for a week, and got no good solutions. I’ve tried meditation on numerous occasions, but my thoughts are like a whirlwind when I’m in a panic spiral (though there’s the possibility that I haven’t been trained to meditate properly despite going to two Buddhist classes). Videogames help, but I don’t always have a game that I like enough. Cuddling helps a little, but it’s unfair to ask Gini to hold me all night for minimal gain.

Basically, I don’t have the tools necessary to calm a panic spiral. And so I ask: What have you found that worked?

I’ll make one caveat here: if you don’t have panic spirals, please don’t give your solution for a problem you don’t have. I want first-hand workable solutions from people who do experience this, not theories or “I had a friend”s. (But if you’re generous enough to point your friend here at this essay to ask ’em to weigh in, great!)

But yeah. I’m 48 and it’s time to find new solutions.

What helped you?