Lost in Translation

What blogs? you ask, if you don’t mind my conjuring you up and dropping you seemingly in mid-paragraph. Present company excluded, those would be Another Cycling Forum, since retired except for the slowly expanding l’image vidage collection, and Not Another Cycling Forum. Clearly I like forums, even when they’re not. I’m intimately familiar with the software, and prefer how threads work to posts on a more typical blogging platform.

This is a confession: I finally fell into Facebook. Not that I’m really getting anywhere with it. Few of my Friend requests have been RSVP’d.

I still don’t do Likes in lieu of social intercourse. Viral vids give me the hives, too many emoticons a case of eyeroll. Most sorrowfully of all, not everyone finds reimagining pivotal scenes in Shawshank Redemption conducive to carrying on a conversation. (To keep that little photoshopping project from having been a complete waste of energy, I cc’d it to Twitter, to be absorbed into the public commons in the fullness of time.) So far it’s been most useful as an outlet to vent my insomnia.

Where to next? Having placed myself in exile from all the forums in which I’ve ever taken up residence, I may have finally reached a social media dead end: the dreaded Zero Club, where everybody knows my name. Even Medium.com, with its almost perfect interface, offers no solace: who needs sad stats floating on the screen in silent rebuke?

As a kid I spent five years delivering the paper (these links will give you some local flavour). Wednesdays were thickest with ads, Thursdays thinnest. Saturday mornings coldest. The most replayed mental video clip of my young life was an impossible shot from the street to a postage-stamp sized porch which was surely a mile away. My final tally was 2 broken windows and countless dented aluminum doors. I never left them on the lawn, though that would have been quieter.

It started a lifelong fascination with the press.

The paper was staffed by a talented photographer who made a lasting impression. He was allowed to spill acres of beautiful black ink over countless spreads. He left around the time colour was arriving. It was never the same.

Lately I’ve been writing for the media I used to damage property with. They don’t have a big budget for this sort of thing; in fact I’ll be making about what I made as a paperboy.

[Approaches podium, Hi my name is Sam and I’m a sugar addict, etc.]

Well, I knew the day would come. I even cold-bloodedly planned for it in various fantasies, most lately involving peanut-butter fudge.

To take my mind off the impending crisis I went shopping yesterday. I saw many wondrous things, including designer jeans at an early stage of de-evolution

For £240 I’ll be happy to tear you a new one

Creative writing majors have to make a living too

and a jacket so hideous it was surely destined for the emperor’s new closet.

“We have a pair of jeans that would go nicely with this.”

More to the point, I saw things like candy corn with sorbitol, and brownies with pure goodness, and dusty triple-decker fudge at the Winter Wonderland.

Santa throws himself in front of what is presumably a good girl to save her from a ravenous beast

These things I did not buy. What I bought were mince pies for my wife, who treasures them but only if they do not contain glucose-fructose syrup, aka high fructose corn syrup or close enough. GFS-free pies now seem rarer than hen’s teeth.

Mmmmm, teeth. Perhaps the dental hygienist can remove those unsightly stock image agency watermarks

From Wholefoods to home on the train I alternately watched bad sf on my smartyphone, napped fitfully (“Today is a good day to diet” Star Trek addicts meet in the hall on Wednesdays), and dreamt delicious dreams.

After 109 days—satisfyingly over 100, otherwise clunky—it felt time to take the next step: normalcy. [Note to self: this is not normal.] I may be able to survive without sugar, but I cannot thrive. Long lingering looks at forbidden fruit are enervating. Too much hydration is wasted on saliva.

I had a Roots & Wings organic mini mince pie. “10% of profits donated to childrens charities” says the box, but I wasn’t thinking of the children.

Approximately to scale

Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

[Walks out a free man.]

[Takes a symbolic 12 steps to the podium.]

Hello. My name is Sam, and I’m a sugar addict.

[Pauses for “Hello Sam.” The sympathy in the air is palpable.]

It started when I was a child. Candy bars bought with paper route money. My grandmother’s peanut butter cookies. Easter baskets with chocolate eggs as god intended. The dark bounty of Hallowe’en. Coke or Pepsi (depending what’s on sale) guzzled at all family functions and regularly in between.

Pepsi sadly couldn’t teach the world to sing

You wouldn’t know it to look at me. Always running around or riding my bike, I sweat it off as fast as I can suck it in. But true addiction is born.

Sugarface

Fast forward to early adulthood
Still eating crap, still mostly getting away with it. I’m in deep.

Words would be superfluous here

Later…
My wife gets a job at an ice cream shop in Brooklyn. Needless to say it comes with fringe benefits. Chocolate dipped sundries. A gummy menagerie. Ice cream by the pint. Bassetts butterscotch, OMG. By conservative estimate I gain 35lbs. I could blame my metabolism, but really, who’s kidding who.

Scale says what?!?

It’s a mad mad mad mad world
We move to the UK. Not long after arriving I decide to go vegetarian (thanks mad cow disease) then vegan, also cutting out refined sugar, if not sugar substitutes (hello agave syrup). The weight falls off… then over the years, creeps back up again, though not as much as the Bassetts era. I take up bicycling in a big way, which helps. From time to time I binge. I’m never again clinically obese, but I am clinically annoyed with myself.

OK you made your point

Three months ago
After one big sigh too many I completely stop eating foods with added sugar. I’m not obsessive about it—compromised condiments, for example, are allowed on the table—but anything that can be unambiguously labelled a dessert is verboten.

The first few days are headache-ridden. I rough it out. Soon I settle into a routine. This involves savouring everything I still allow myself, which is plenty, and not giving in to psychological hunger for empty calories. As long as I’m at it I cut out snacks and keep a food diary, giving myself a reasonable caloric allowance for my activity level.

Fudge loves you too

It’s not really that hard. It helps that I often tell myself it isn’t forever; one day I will have fudge again. It’s just that today, then today, then today again, is not that day.

My pants (after 20 years in this country I still can’t quite bring myself to call them trousers) loosen their grip around my waist. No wonder, a stone and the better part of another stone has disappeared, who knows where. I’m no whippet, but I’m fighting trim. It feels good to be here again. Whenever my resolve weakens I hike up my pants and think, well, not today.

I’ll always be a sugar addict.

Thank you for listening.

[Sits down without a glance at the table of biscuits and root beer. They don’t go together anyway.]