Obviousky I didn't say it very well because I thought I was trying exactly what you said
LOL! Well, there's how schisms get started!
Why I think we are both talking about is walking and chewing gum at the same time -. We can experience more than one thing at once, with one hand feeling pleasure and the other feeling pain (though there are probably better examples).
Okay, I might be able to go with that. And, in lights of that then, I might be able to see your "ice cream in prison" metaphor. I was using the flavors of ice cream to demonstrate the "flavors" of pleasure: euphoria, joy, excitement, orgasmic, etc. You, I think, were using the ice cream to demonstrate that we can experience pleasure tinged to various degrees with pain. Correct me if I'm mischaracterizing your position. If that's it, I can acknowledge that. Our goal, if you will, is to try to increase the pleasure side of that ledger and minimize the pain side.
The tricky thing is that Epicurus recognized that not feeling pain in itself is a pleasurable feeling. Which brings me back to the ideas of balance and homoeostasis as pleasure. This seems to me to be Epicurus's "health of the body and serenity of the mind."