Sweets

I just ate pumpkin pie. Specifically, a pumpkin pie. How did we get dessert out of something so slimy and foul-tasting? Who stuck his hand into the pumpkin and thought, "Yes. Definitely. Pie."

Welcome to the wonderful world of sugar.

I'm a sugaholic. It starts at breakfast with Cookie Crisp, part of a nutritious breakfast when served with other, natural food. I also eat Dolly Madison donuts, which double as cereal if you pour milk over them.

How come we eat donuts for breakfast but not, say, cheesecake or cotton candy? I'll start the day with anything up to and including Toxic Waste-e-o's. Frosted.

The addiction began in grade school, when I discovered Fun Dips -- packets of sugar you eat with a spoon MADE OF CANDY. I bought Dinosour Eggs from the ice cream man, who circled the block like a pusher. I would chase him down the street behind that sign reading, "Slow Children." Maybe we wouldn't be slow if it weren't for all that junk food.

The ice cream man also peddled "fun-sized" candy bars, but if you ask me, fun size should be when you need a ladder to reach the top.

Speaking of which, my mom used to place the cookie jar on top of our fridge, where I couldn't reach it. I could, however, open the hallway closet and grab the step ladder. I still remember when, in a frenzy, I knocked the cookies off the fridge.

The porcelain shattered in slow motion, and a strange calm washed over me... It had been a good life, one filled with passion and joy, tender bonds, and finally one irretrievable error.

My mom decided against murder, and by high school I was snorting Pixie Sticks. One day I'll end up in a diabetic coma and the doctor, having exhausted the options, will end my life by shouting, "Hey! Kool-Aid!"

I do eat normal-people food, but only as a pretext for dessert. And for the record, no, I cannot "just eat fruit." Fruit only angers my need for chocolate. So it goes.

Waist management has become an issue. It's hard to run the treadmill with fudge on your breath; your brain doesn't know what to make of it. Thank God for the dangling carrot cake.

In my refrigerator is a mirror strategically positioned to scare me straight. Would you believe that it's working? Now, without even thinking about it, I close my eyes and grope my way to the pudding snacks.

Sometimes the cupcakes call me from the pantry:

"Jaaaason...Cream fiiiillling, Jason..."

One year I quit cold turkey, because I have no problem with turkey; but then I tried to quit sugar, and by Day Two I was in the bakery thinking, What is sugar anyway? Doesn't everything, including broccoli, eventually break down into sugar?

Before long I was back to pumpkin pie on the basis that pumpkins grow out of the ground, and what could be more natural?

"You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!"

"All right! Health food!"

Dolly Madison makes purple pie sludge. Purple is a fruit, right?

Last month I went the other direction and plied myself with sweets, hoping to find bottom. Thirty-five Almond Joys later, I could only pronounce the word "meh." Which echoed in the toilet bowl. Sometimes you feel like a nut.

I don't care anymore. I would rather be a happy DayGlo marker than some scratchy ballpoint. If God wanted us to be thin, sugar wouldn't taste so good.

Some say that it's nature to obsess. In the distance a lab scientist is recording the hypothesis formally... The rats choose chocolate nine times out of ten, but they always feel guilty about it later.

The doctor says my stomach will rot; the shrink says my mind will rot; Dolly just wants to elope. And it's a tempting offer because only she understands the blood-bending bliss of eating your 35th Almond Joy, sick but not sick enough. Never sick enough.