Pour Some Sugar On Me

 

 

In the name of love, I can't get enough.......POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME!!!!!

 

 

If my body is a temple......it's probably located in a bad section of Detroit.  It started out fit and lovely and at some point I apparently decided to see just how much abuse it could take by filling it, over a period of decades, with drugs, alcohol and crap food and beverages, resulting in a sluggish brain and a bulky body that often make me feel older than I actually am.  I'm starting here on my quest for improvement because I firmly believe that everything else that I want to change wagonwheels out from the fact that I feel like shit.  There are places I'd love to go and things that I'd love to do but chose not to because I don't look and/or feel the way I would wish. 

 

You might think that it would make sense to address the drug/alcohol issue before tackling what I'm eating and drinking.  You would be correct, but for the fact that the "law and order" system of Illinois took care of those issues before you guys got here. In 2007  I had a bit of a misunderstanding with the law over writing my own prescriptions.  Who knew they would frown so heavily on what I saw as "eliminating the middle man".  They saw it as a felony. 

 

I got probation and had to go to Narcotics Anonymous which is like Alcoholics Anonymous except for smart attractive people.  At NA they convinced me that I had a problem but they didn't convince me that it was my fault.  I grew up in the 70's when the entirety of the anti-drug campaign was one commercial where they'd show you an egg and tell you that was your brain.  Then they'd proceed to fry it in a skillet and tell you it was you brain on drugs.  I was already on drugs and I knew that wasn't my brain and I wasn't going to be taking advice from someone who was apparently more fucked up than I was.

 

I doubt if those ads kept anyone off drugs.  They probably got a few pot heads out of the basement and off to Denny's for a Grand Slam Breakfast.  I guess that's something.

 

So although my drug use was eliminated and my alcohol consumption downsized I, being the resourceful little minx that I am, managed to continue to abuse my body and mind in a damaging but completely legal way.

 

When I was growing up I developed a love/hate relationship with Pepsi products.  They were the drink of choice in our home.  I loved popping the cap off a bottle of Mt. Dew or Pepsi that had been in the freezer for just the right amount of time. 

 

Not long enough - might as well have been in the fridge. 

 

Too long - frozen and broken....it happened more than you'd think considering the fact that my mother admonished anyone who could have possibly been the offender to NEVER put another bottle of soda in that freezer.

 

I have several older brothers and sisters but they all either grew up in another family or were adults when I was adopted.  The only exception was my sister Jan who sat on the window seat waiting on the day of my final adoption hearing hoping they'd come home without me.  There was a family that lived on the corner, two doors up from us, who had eleven children.  They drank tea, which I found disgusting.  I was sure that at a certain number of offspring you must have to switch from soda to tea (you can't have everything) and was glad that we fell under that particular cut off.

 

While I loved the fact that, on any given day, soda was available to me, I despised the process that had to be endured to make this happen.  At that time we, along with everyone else, got our soda in a cardboard carrier with eight glass bottles that, when empty, were returned to the store in order to get your deposit.  We were much more involved in the recycling process back then. 

My job was to haul the cartons of "empties" from the kitchen in the back of the house out to the car parked in front on the street.  This was an arduous and embarrassing task.  We never finished just one carton and took it back to get more.  The process of return and procure always involved at least a dozen cartons and several trips.  I felt like the whole neighborhood was sitting at their windows watching me through a slit in their curtain and feeling sorry for the Pepsi hauling kid. 

 

 "At least we're not drinking tea!!!", I wanted to scream. 

 

I never felt cooler than when I mastered carrying two cartons by their handles and balancing another two on top of them. 

 

 I was not opposed to carrying cake....just Pepsi.

 

 

I won't even go into the torture that occurred when we got back home and had to haul in the heavier, full bottles with their metal caps that would scrape and scratch you with their jagged edges. (I guess I went into it a little.) Carrying them in was far more work, but whomever took the first load inside knew that we'd be thirsty when we finished and to put a bottle in the freezer......when my mom wasn't looking.

 

I still have a love/hate relationship with Pepsi to this day.  I love drinking it to the tune of several hundred calories per day, but I hate it and myself because I now have the knowledge that not only does it lack anything that could benefit me in any manner, it is doing damage to my health and making me feel mentally and physically sluggish.  I continue to do it anyway.  I started to google "harmful effects of soda consumption" but then called bullshit on myself.  You all know that soda is poison so you are not in need of that information.  I know it and believe it. 

 

Guess why? 

 

Last year I went for a month and drank nothing but water with meals and in between. 

 

Guess what? 

 

I felt FANTASTIC.  I had energy, my aches and pains were greatly lessened and my hair and skin shone like the sun. 

 

Guess what again? 

 

After a month I decided to celebrate with a Pepsi and that was the end of that.

 

Stupid. 

 

So in the interest of giving up soda and cutting back on stupidity I say.....POUR SOME WATER ON ME!!!!!!!

 

 

 

 



 

 

In the interest of full-disclosure I want to tell you that I was going to write this post about my deep desire to quit smoking.  I was going to talk about how smoking was blackening my lungs and causing wrinkles around what would soon become my unkissable looking lips.  I was going to tell you the story about how my Grandma Taylor burned a hole in my favorite outfit when I was three and how my sister Jo got ladybug patches and sewed them all over the outfit to cover up the hole which made it my double-favorite outfit but the emotional damage had already been done and how I now have a very similar ladybug tattooed on my left (just in case that's significant) foot.  I was going to vow to put down the cigs, air out my house, Febreeze my car and start a new, smoke-free life.  But I don't smoke.  I've never smoked any more often than one or two, a few times a year when I'd be at the bar and be drunk enough to forget that I don't smoke.  I was going to have a (very successful) blog and attempt at quitting something that I don't do to buy myself one more week with soda.  So there ya go.