No, not weed or the song by Black Sabbath (although both totally rule). I’m talking about the herb often called sweetleaf and more properly named stevia that I’ve recently started using it as a substitute for sugar.

I’ve been on a zero-sugar diet for the past week and will be continuing it all the way to till Monday of next week—fourteen days in all. Zero ice cream, fruit, chocolate, alcohol and grains of any kind. It’s not as bad as it sounds but not exactly fun either. Not being able to have that nightly glass of wine or bit of chocolate is especially depressing.

I’d been reading and hearing about stevia for a while now and had once tried some in powder form in some restaurant that I ordered coffee in somewhere. I found that while it was pretty sweet (about as much as artificial sweeteners), it had a weird aftertaste that was similar to saccharin. This aftertaste, I was told, was mostly due to the base powder used to bond the stevia extract and make the granules and if I didn’t like it, I could get the stuff in unadulterated liquid or syrup form.

So, last night I got to try it in liquid form via a bottle purchased from a Whole Foods. I made some coffee and put about half a dropper’s worth into my mug and found that it was definitely a lot smoother than the granulated version. It tastes somewhere in the middle of sugar and honey. I really liked the stuff, enough to pick up a bottle of the syrup form to stow in my desk at work. The syrup seems to taste even sweeter to me and I find that I need even less of it to sweeten things.

This morning, I killed a few minutes reading up on the plant. Here’s some factoids I thought were kind of neat:

• Japan currently consumes more stevia than any other country; it accounts for 40% of the sweetener market.
• An extract of stevia can be 250-300 times sweeter than sugar.
• Stevia extract contains zero calories, zero carbohydrates and a zero glycemic index.
• For centuries, the Guaraní tribes of Paraguay and Brazil used stevia, which they called ka’a he’ê (”sweet herb”), as a sweetener in yerba mate and medicinal teas for treating heartburn and other ailments.

Anyway, tree-hugging herbal-freaking hippie I am not. But, I do really like this stuff and it beats putting refined sugar or the artificial stuff in my food and drink. Not that I’ll stop eating sugar, but it’s a pretty cool alternative.

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.