Sweet...

It's the morning of January third, a new year, and I'm hereby christening this latest foray into public egotism.  Blog.  Ugly word, isn't it? Thick, viscous, redolent of the verbal upchuck that it is.  If nothing else, I see this little venture as an effort to stretch the ol' mental hams, a way to shake off the dust thats settled in my skull after a holiday season typified by twenty-four straight hours of A Christmas Story and enough Harpoon Winter Warmer to drown six out of eight reindeer.  I'm trying to blog myself awake again, as it were (though usually after I blog myself I get sleepy).  Still, a quasi-anonymous, unread post on the internet is at least a start, right? Baby steps...

And as for baby steps, here's a mildly curious one I've taken for 2009: to get off the white death.  You might know it by one of it's street names: horse, smack, monkeydust, Haitian ass-sweat.  I call the harsh white bitch Domino superfine. Sugar.  Sweet, magical, diabetes-tastic refined cane sugar, shipped from Florida, Hawaii, or the DR to make me fat and rot my teeth.  Awesome.  Really, at this point, I'm just trying to ween myself off the few teaspoons I have in my morning coffee.  I like my coffee black in the afternoon, but in the wee hours I need that little kick of sucrose, and though one or two teaspoons a cup doesn't seem earth-shaking, when your morning habit is up to a full French press's worth, things have gotten out of hand.  So, as a small step towards putting my resolutions in order, I'm switching from white sugar to local honey in my coffee.  I did say it was a small step...

Now, theoretically, a teaspoon of golden, syrupy, blog-ish honey is no better than a teaspoon of sugar, at least health-wise, but hey, do I really need both these legs?  No, the real motivation for the switch wasn't health, but rather providence.  Santa, in his wisdom, left my sister one sweet Xmas gift in the form of two hundred gallons of pure honey.  Or, if not two hundred gallons, then at least half a gallon, which is still a ridiculous, ridiculous amount of honey.  It's five pounds worth, in fact, which is almost the weight of an adult human head. 

Yeah.  That's the real Eiffel goddamn Tower, just to give you a sense of scale.  It's a seemingly unfinishable amount.  Fortunately, honey is the one food that never, ever goes bad, but merely crystalizes.  Ten thousand years from now, after the inevitable nuclear holocaust, after the melting of the glaciers and their subsequent re-freezing, after the scourge of the hyper-intelligent cockroach overlords, the mewling, cancerous, devolved ape-spawn that call themselves our descendants will find this jar in the ruins of Bethlehem, Connecticut, and have spoons of leftover honey to sweeten their bitter lives.

Mock though I may the the gargantuan nature of the honey jar, I am actually quite pleased by it.  The honey, you see, is pure Woodbury honey, Woodbury being the next town over.  Not only is the honey delicious, organic, and curative (honey being a natural antiseptic), but most importantly, it's local.  Though the body-esque lump upon which my head resides may not be able to tell apart the complex polymerize strands of saccharine carbohydrates, the economy and even the environment can: the sugar was farmed as a monoculture and shipped long-distance to me via fossil fuels, while the honey was made by multi-tasking little pollinators a scant few miles away.  In broad, eco-social terms, one helps, one hurts.  I feel good about that, though it may not seem like much.  It is a small step, after all.  But it's a sweet one.