Sugar

I love sugar.
   And I TOTALLY mean in the 'I love it so much I want to marry it' kind of way. I want to go to sleep beside sugar, I want to wake up next to sugar, I want to have sugar peck my cheek when I leave for the day and give me a hug and a soda bottle full of itself when I get home from work. I want to dive into sugar like Scrooge McDuck dives into his money bin. I want to become my own country so I can issue 'sugar certificates' like when US currency was backed by gold certificates. I want to grow sugar cane and sugar beets in my back yard so I can have something to gnaw on when I cut the grass.
   I think you get the idea.
   But sugar doesn't love me. Rather, high-fructose corn syrup doesn't love me. If it's something you need to cut with a scissors in chemistry lab* then it's not really something you need to be putting in your body. Nothing good will ever come of high fructose corn syrup because nothing good has so far. It's alarmingly common to see a line of kids who all look like Augustus Gloop, adults are dropping from diabetes, and there's corn syrup in everything that isn't pulled straight out of the ground and put on your plate. Seriously.
   And aspartame isn't any better.
   Those who've known me for longer than... say... three months know I'm constantly falling off the sugar/soda wagon. Give it up, go right back, give it up, go right back. I have a friend who's been 'quitting' smoking for twelve years and I give him crap about it all the time, but I'm no better. I'm like a heroin addict but without all the neato and unhygienic hardware. We do both have spoons, I suppose.
   So I need to commit, I need to find some reason to give it up for good. The only way food producers are going to stop feeding us poison is if we stop buying poison. And I can't wait for others to take the first step for me.
   Here goes nothing...


* that's how they do it in college, ooze out a length of high fructose corn syrup and cut a nubbin free