Insufficient Lentilation

In which our Hero has all but failed his all but lent and yet the food abides

A brief message from Church this weekend:

Two hillbillies are sitting in their truck at a traffic light when they see the local town’s Catholic priest with a broken arm.

“What happened, Padre?” the nearest hillbilly asked.

“I slipped in the bathtub,” the priest answered, “and broke my arm.”

The first hillbilly leaned back into the car and turned to his buddy: “What the heck is a bathtub?”

And the second hillbilly replied, “How would I know? I’m not Catholic!”

It’s the season of Lent, when Catholics get surly and furtive as we wrestle with the bitter angles of our rationalization, trying to think of loopholes in the rules that we came up with for giving up the thing we wanted to give up as a sacrifice for our faith and only after realized is a major part of our daily life and now we’re trying to pretend we’re happy and don’t need our heroin fix unless we’ve already slipped and are hiiiiiiiigh as a kite. Kind of like a New Year’s Resolution, but with extra guilt and the vague hint of eternal damnation coming from somewhere just out of sight.

So as I do many years, I have opted to give up sweets. But then sometimes circumstance make a candy bar the least awful option for lunch so obviously I can’t give up every sweet. So just gratuitous sweets. Except that I also depend on my morning granola bar thing (Nocturne doesn’t like me calling them protein turds. Well, nobody likes me calling them protein turds, just that for Nocturne I actually try to stop), and it’s really kind of a sugary thing…. so okay. Not all sweets, just the sweets like chocolate and candy. Oh, but I have this package of whatever that’s already open and I have to finish that.

I screwed up the first day, so when a manager was passing out chocolates, I popped one into my mouth and only after I swallowed did I remember I’d sworn off. Then later, I declined a chocolate bar with Hollywood because I was feeling guilty (and now he’s been confused about what I’m allowed to eat and not allowed to eat every since). And then I had a cookie the next week. I was starving, but I could have picked something else. And then I got chips with a meal and it was just a waste to throw those away. And then someone brought in caramelized kettle corn.

All of which is to say that my lent has kind of gone from “avoiding sweets” to avoiding one particular sweet. This particular sweet:

It’s been sitting on my desk since February. It happened to be in the exhaust wash when my laptop melted the graphics card which is why it got melted a little lopsided. But it’s the one thing I’ve managed to not eat. And I really really want it.

Not because I like it, it’s actually a very crappy candy bar. It feels like a very coarse, distorted version of a KitKat, and the only reason I have it is because it came free with a lunch combo order. But it’s the bar I haven’t eaten. It sits here, at my desk, taunting me. About three or four times a day, I give up and decide to eat it. And so far, as many times, I stop myself. Sometimes it’s just a glance. Sometimes I’m holding it when I realize it’s nearly won.

We are locked in a battle of wills. Me, and the inanimate gratuitous sugary candy. I can’t say with any certainty that I know who will triumph. But today the bar is here for me to take a picture.

Today I win, just a little.