too cool and likeable

good question, anon! probably the writers' room thought of this and then realized that stewy would be too jealous of rava to have a civilized conversation with her

Shane finds himself wishing for the hundredth time for some magic ball to tell him exactly what to do. Exactly how many calories to eat. Exactly when to eat them, and how quickly, and what exactly they should be composed of: how many grams of protein, of iron or fiber or fucking carotenoids. Shane barely knows what a carotenoid is but he read somewhere that they’re associated with lower risk of cancer and now there’s not a meal that goes by without a part of him wondering if he’s optimizing his beta-carotene intake. Exactly how many hours of sleep to get, how many pounds to lift and by which muscles and on which days of the week, how many supplements to take, when to get sunlight into his retinas and for how long. Are his neurons sufficiently myelinated to prepare him for healthy aging, and if not, what should he be doing differently to get there? He eats fatty fish two times a week but maybe it should be three. Or does three put him at too high a risk of mercury poisoning?

His body is a physical machine, and all physical machines operate deterministically. Inputs and outputs. It drives him crazy that there’s no manual – that he can’t flip to a Troubleshooting section and look up this specific malfunction. FAQ: What to do if you can’t stop thinking about food? Answer: Take exactly this many milligrams of vitamin B6 to increase dopamine production and rebalance the mesolimbic pathway, or whatever, Shane’s not a fucking neuroscientist but maybe he should be so he would know how to fix himself. There’s gotta be an optimal number, an optimal procedure.

God, it would be so nice to be a robot. None of the messiness of sensations or emotions or uncertainty. Shane tried voicing this to Ilya once, and Ilya had laughed, not meanly, but gently and tinged with a bit of concern. It’s a horrible sound, that laugh, because Shane knows what it means: I love you, but you’re broken. And then Ilya had slid a finger languidly down Shane’s bare chest, over the ridges of his abs, down, excruciatingly slowly, until Shane was squirming, and he’d held his hand just inches from Shane’s cock, and said, “Really? No sensation? That is what you want?” and Shane had whimpered. “No feeling?” Ilya continued. “No pleasure?”

What Ilya doesn’t understand is that pleasure is not simple for Shane. Feeling good always has its downsides. With the pleasure of drunkenness comes hangover, stupidity, cirrhosis. Food for pleasure leads to bloating, diabetes. Even sex – and it’d destroy Ilya to know that Shane thinks this – even sex with Ilya… it’s… wet, sticky, and achy, and as much as Shane loves taking Ilya’s cock, it’s still work to actively suppress the part of his brain that wants to know when was the last time Ilya showered, is there any chance he’s picked up some disease, not that he’d cheat on Shane, god no, but like, there are airborne infections, there are germs on toilet seats, and he wouldn’t know, and he’s fighting to stay hard but then sometimes his skin feels like it’s crawling, and when Ilya asks if he’s okay, he of course says yes, but this is what he means! Wouldn’t it be so much easier to not feel! Even pleasure is overrated.