The Hodgepodge Flurry of Forces Running My Life

I won't bother mentioning how many times I've lost the battle with sugar since I last posted here. It's too humiliating. And it's even more humiliating to have to describe this push and pull as a battle with sugar. Sugar.

Sugar is not heroin, crack, alcohol, gambling, nicotine, kleptomania, etc. etc. It's me against sweet things to eat. What a complete pansy I am. Poor poor widdle Candy, she's having a rough time walking across the board of the Candyland game without falling down and shredding her face on the steely splinters of peppermint sticks.

As you may have gathered, I'm a bit repulsed by my own inability to just do what's healthy for my body and to shut the fuck up. But no. It's a drama. Save me! I'm on the edge of a cliff, about to jump to my diabetic death into yummy Milk Chocolate Bay.

One of the stupidest sugar-intake freak-out low points of the past few weeks: Nutella. Me and Nutella. Never heard of it? It's next to the peanut butter at the grocery store. Made of chocolate and hazelnuts, ground up to make this smooth, creamy, sinister, decadent, spreadable, spoonable best treat in the galaxy. I bought a jar. A jar has 10 2-tablespoon servings. I ate the jar in 2 nights. I bought another one. I ate half of it. I saw the error in my ways. I knew I couldn't just toss the jar in the wastebasket or the trash bin outside because I would toss my pride to the western wind and crawl in like a weasel and get it out and start up again. So I opened it and poured in some apple-green Dawn dishwashing liquid. Like I had to kill it. I had to slay it. Like it was one of those mythical many-headed snake monsters and you cut one head off and another grows back.


There are people in the world with serious problems. At church this evening, someone asked for prayer for a friend of hers who has just been diagnosed with lung cancer, and has been give four to six weeks to live. Yeah. Imagine it.

So there is no reason at all to whine and whimper and freak out over the fact that I need to stop eating sugary, poisony things that are going to make me sick. And there is no reason to make a big deal of it. Right?

But here's the thing. Take my comforting little habit away from me and there's nothing left between me and, uh, me. If I can't flip my head open like a Pez dispenser and ram a half pound of chocolate down into my anxious tummy, I have to stay where I am, in the life I'm living, and just deal with it. By the way, if I get any more cliche in the next 30 seconds, please, someone push the big eject button that will jettison my little house, with me in it, into the outer regions of the Milky Way. Fuck. Milky Way.

OK, never mind what I was saying. I'll sum it up. Ready?

I'm tired of struggling. Fighting the same boring, frustrating, mind numbingly repetitive repetitive repetitive battles, fears, hang-ups all the time. Give me something new and interesting to fight. Not life-threatening. But maybe a fresh fear of penguins. Or an obsession with those tiny little collectible spoons from all over the place, like Nag's Head, North Carolina and Bugtussle, West Virginia. Or make me yearn to travel the length of Route 66 on a unicycle.

Give me something.