A day with sugar

Richard
A day with sugar
April 25, 07, Starbucks

This is one of the first pieces I wrote about “my sugars,” as I refer to my blood sugar levels. Later I used the prompts to explore diabetes, something that floats in and out of my thoughts all the time. I have a chronic condition, but I’m not ill. Who am I in the altered mental states of low and high sugars? Not myself or, indeed, myself?

Years ago in England I had a green lizard. Somehow, sugar was spilt into his terrarium, just a teaspoonful scattered on a rock. He came rushing down from his tree limb and licked away furiously. After that he refused his regular food of wriggling mealworms, waiting for his next fix. It never arrived, and he starved to death.

I am that lizard today. I buy a glazed doughnut and devour it fast and secretly in my office. It sends my sugar soaring. When it gets to 300, I take a load of insulin, but I’m tempted not to. I want to let the substance do whatever it wants with me. I want to have lizard thoughts: slink around and lick things and stare with wonder at mysterious shadows looming above me. High and low sugars induce fantasies, among them the notion that your pancreas produces insulin. I leave the office and test my blood in the car. The count is still over 200. I take more insulin, and then I’m no longer the lizard, making a break for freedom.

What happened in my body has played itself out in the West’s hunger for sweetness, a bloody history mixed with slavery's past and our obese present. People have been willing to sacrifice their lives and take others into bondage to maintain the supply of sugar—this substance that delivers pleasure at the same time rotting our organs and moral compasses. Can Splenda save us? I think Splenda is implicated in my donut hit. A month or so ago I took up my girlfriend Laurie's habit of putting artificial sweetener in my tea. I think it created the craving, and the craving led to the donut. I blame Laurie, although the lizard does not.