PANIC IN SWEET TART PARK (SELF-REFERENCE ALERT):

Those of you who have been through the process, either yourselves or with a loved one, will be aware that one of the steps required of addicts is that we: Admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Well, over the past several weeks my incorrigibly nosy Wife and Kids have noticed the omnipresence of bags of sour candy both half-eaten in my desk drawers and empty and hidden under other trash in the garbage can. After a series of interventions I have acknowledged that I am powerless before the seductive might of the new Sour Twizzlers in particular. So I have begun a truly courageous cold turkey campaign to break the cycle of gluttony and despond.

Suffice it to say, after four days I'm jonesing like Sid Vicious on a bad day and it has started to scare the young 'uns. To the degree that the Daughter last night scored me a bag of Peach Rings when her Mother took her shopping. Of course, I hate peach and so suspect this was a ploy by The Wife to make me think help was on the way while denying me the tangy taste that I'm so desperate for.

At any rate, I went to Wal-Mart to get a kid's birthday present for a party this weekend (big ups for the Lego Indiana Jones collection). I cleverly avoided the food section altogether, but forget about the candy gauntlet they make you run to get to a register. As always, they had about a quarter of the cashiers they needed (where are all these supposed job-plundering aliens when you need them?) and the wait was interminable. I stood there, the colorful bags of sweet and sour manna just taunting me, drool puddling in the aisle ("Clean-up at register 7!"). It doesn't seem adequate to say that my resistance was super-human--after all, Superman is vulnerable to Kryptonite while I stared down my weakness and spat in its eye. It seems not at all unlikely that people who witnessed this demonstration of willpower rushed home to tell family and friends.

And just then, like the heavenly beam that illuminated Jake Blues, there shone forth a confection that could not rightly be called a sour candy, though even a Darwinist would have had trouble classifying it as a separate species. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:

Clearly, no one eating a bag of these bad boys could be accused--at least not justly--of having succumbed to temptation.