First you get the power, then you get the sugar rush

By Max Stainkamph

Sep 28, 2022

Highs and lows: Homer Simpson and a massive pile of sugar. Deputy editor Max Stainkamph recreated the scene in the *News* office this week.

It only took one. It only ever does.

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One little bean full of sugar and colour and light, and I was off to the races, my mind regressing to the instincts of a child — find all the sugar in the immediate vicinity and shove it into my hungry mouth.

It had been about a year since I’d been in the presence of a packet of jelly beans, and for good reason.

I devour the things like a puppy devours food.

So, when I walked into our office to find them sitting on the food counter, like a drug addict finding a new supply I was hooked.

I took a handful back to my desk, and then when that finished I was up again for another one.

I took five trips to the counter before I realised what was going on, but by then I was hooked and needed to keep going in case I crashed, which I did anyway at 4pm — right when I needed to do a whole load of work.

The sugar high was gone and I was in an elevator in free-fall, plummeting towards Unproductivity-ville, population: me, and I had a sudden, visceral flashback to being 10 years old and having sugar crashes.

I’m 26, and (allegedly) a fully functioning adult.

There’s the temptation to reach for a metaphor about election promises and the first few months of government being sugar rushes (here’s looking at you, Albanese Government), and the slow slide beyond being the inevitable sugar crash.

It’s an easy bow to draw, especially with news that Shepparton’s been overlooked for an after-hours GP clinic by two state premiers because we were promised one by the Federal Government — except the one we were promised will arrive after the new ones?

Also, I said I wasn’t going to churn out political thinkpieces every week and by gum I’m going to stick to that.

There’s a temptation to try to spin it into a discussion about addiction, and how sugar addiction is considered something “a little bit quirky” and how it’s so hard to escape, but I’d rather brush that under the rug lest I have to ask myself questions I don’t particularly want to.

Also, it feels a bit insensitive considering the very real and haunting repercussions of other addictions.

So why write about it at all? To track the folly of mankind through the eyes of one of its most fallible (me)? To make a statement about how none of us are above a li’l snack?

Nah. To quote Marge Simpson talking about potatoes, I just thought it was neat.