Living in dread of the Splenda secret police!
I am a compulsive thief. Whenever I am in a restaurant or Starbucks, I always pilfer a few extra packets of Splenda, Equal or Sweet 'n Low beyond what I immediately need, furtively stashing them in a shirt pocket and taking them home to be hoarded for future use with tea, espresso, or cocoa. I never actually purchase artificial sweetner in boxes at the market. Why should I when I can so easily steal and accumulate them?
But I have been worried of late. I think I have been under surveillance. I suppose a case is being built against me. The other night at 3 A.M. during a snowstorm, I heard the rustling of branches against the house and what I imagined to be a knock at the door. I was terrified. I felt like a person under suspicion in Stalinist Russia. The Sweetener Unit of the KGB (Sakharpol) was about to knock that fatal knock and drag me away manacled to the Lubyanka, never to be seen again.
Over the next few months a case would be built against me, documents would be drafted, confessions would have to be signed. With K, the main character of Franz Kafka's The Trial, the charges were unspecified, the accusants nameless. With me, on the other hand, the charges were very specific...the illegal and wanton appropriation of sweetness from restaurants and kophe shops, all evidenced by months of photographic surveillance. I was destined to perish in some grim Gulag in the Siberian tundra after my case came to trial.
After I woke from my delirium, I felt a surge of righteousness, a sudden need to make restitution for all my malfeasances. I will begin to do it today or tomorrow morning after coffee. I pray it is not too late and that the mean men in black leather jackets will not already be awaiting me outside my door. I have no defense. My guilt is not sugar-coatable. Nor can it be artificially sweetened.
But I have been worried of late. I think I have been under surveillance. I suppose a case is being built against me. The other night at 3 A.M. during a snowstorm, I heard the rustling of branches against the house and what I imagined to be a knock at the door. I was terrified. I felt like a person under suspicion in Stalinist Russia. The Sweetener Unit of the KGB (Sakharpol) was about to knock that fatal knock and drag me away manacled to the Lubyanka, never to be seen again.
Over the next few months a case would be built against me, documents would be drafted, confessions would have to be signed. With K, the main character of Franz Kafka's The Trial, the charges were unspecified, the accusants nameless. With me, on the other hand, the charges were very specific...the illegal and wanton appropriation of sweetness from restaurants and kophe shops, all evidenced by months of photographic surveillance. I was destined to perish in some grim Gulag in the Siberian tundra after my case came to trial.
After I woke from my delirium, I felt a surge of righteousness, a sudden need to make restitution for all my malfeasances. I will begin to do it today or tomorrow morning after coffee. I pray it is not too late and that the mean men in black leather jackets will not already be awaiting me outside my door. I have no defense. My guilt is not sugar-coatable. Nor can it be artificially sweetened.