I’ve had one of those generic lousy mornings, complete with the shitty night’s sleep, the late to work action, the forgotten lunch on the kitchen counter and the misplaced cash. So, exhausted, tired and lost amidst wires, ink, chaos and a vague, general malaise, I broke my usual dietary rules and ate a doughnut. Glazed. Two of them, actually. Shh, don’t tell.

I gave up about 90% of the sugar from my diet about five months ago. I stopped putting it in my coffee in the morning. No more candy, except for the occasional piece of dark chocolate. No ice cream, cookies, nothing. Over time, I’ve allowed the occasional exceptions, but for the most part, I’ve been really good about abstaining. It helps that since I’ve cut so much sugar out, my tolerance has dramatically dropped. A few bites of chocolate has me OD’d, sweating, dizzy and feeling I like just did time in a wind tunnel filled with airplane glue. Those days as a child, when I would devour ten to twelve candy bars for a post Halloween breakfast seem like a distant and hazy mirage. I am now a sugar wimp. Call me Mr. Goodbar’s bitch.

So now I’m sitting in my Cubicle of Doom, desperately fighting the effects of two oversized glazed doughnuts, wondering what the hell I could have been thinking to do this to myself. I’m standing square at the crossroads between blowing chunks all over my monitor and passing out, face-down on the keyboard. My brain is contemplating hanging itself from my spinal cord with a suicide note taped to the medulla oblongata. My eyes are fighting a cage match against each other to see who can hold the monitor in focus the longest. For every word my left hand picks out on the keyboard, my right hand’s on the backspace acting like Godzilla in the streets of Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to whole sentences of gibberish and half-formed, semi-drooling thoughts. It’s kind of sad to see.

However pathetic my current situation may be, it can’t hold a candle to last night’s experiment with Kava Kava.

Some time ago, when quitting cigarettes and hitting that frenzied state of withdrawal where you want to rip your skin off, staple your eyeballs backwards and dance the tarantella till you die or someone says it’s okay for you to smoke, I’d tried using Kava Kava to quell or at least lessen the suffering. I picked up a bottle at a health food store and popped something like four or five of the capsules. It helped, I think. Or if it didn’t, I was at the very least too fucking high to notice the difference.

Last night, on a whim, I popped three capsules and sat down to yet another Zatoichi film (someday, somehow, I will have watched them all, dammit) to see if anything would happen.

Very shortly after, I found myself high as fucking hell, head cocked at three o’ clock, with the beginnings of a decent drool as little leprechauns goose-stepped back and forth in my stomach. I had the schizoid desire to jump up and do massive manic jumping-jacks while simultaneously taking a nap. While it was not entirely unpleasant, it was more than a little unnerving and in my advanced age and much more pasteurized lifestyle, I’ll probably refrain from taking it again.

Over the past 4 years, daveb as slowly been weaning various bad habits out of his life. Some happened on their own, like quitting weed and drinking to excess. Others, like quitting cigarettes took herculean efforts. For the past three days, daveb has been struggling with his latest project, quitting sugar and starch.

Now before you label daveb as one of those miserable, monastic bastards with no joy in his life, understand that he wants to be able to do everything for a long time to come. However, he has a bit of a nervous and addictive personality, one that attracts habits that will likely put him six feet under sooner than he’d like. His thinking is, kill all of these “habits”, like drinking, sugar, smoking weed, etc. so that once you have them removed from your life, you can reintroduce them in sane and measured amounts. Moderation, people, it’s the new black for daveb. He envisions going back to Vermont for vacations, getting off the plane and immediately cracking a beer, a candy bar, a bag of Fritos and a huge-ass blunt with a cigar for later. Other drugs and snack foods would be highly welcome. After two or three days of wretched, blurry debauchery, daveb would wipe the greasy crumbs from his eyebrows, hop the plane back to NYC and back to the normal lifestyle.
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