As drugs seem to be on the rise in the country today, us Generation Xers are wont to harken back to a simpler time, our childhood in the seventies, between the reckless indulgence of the sixties and the almost ubiquitous consumption of drugs of either prescription or illicit varieties that seems to infect our current society.
It is an idyllic dream, to be sure, but we had our drug, we had it in a complex combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. I twas available cheaply, often freely by the pushers who would hand it out by the boatloads to feed our addictions.
The drug was sugar, and it flowed on the streets like hashish in an Amsterdam coffeehouse. They loaded it into our breakfast cereals, our peanut butter, everywhere they could and we consumed it in mass quantities. It fueled our Saturday morning cartoon sessions in the guise of Captain Crunch and as we sallied forth to wage war on our enemies in those vast open fields and those forts made of discarded cardboard boxes and furniture, we did so with paper bags chock full of our drug of choice. When we didn't have it we would scour the dumpsters for soda bottles and haul them to the grocery store to collect deposits and put our money into the vast array of 3 to 5 cent candy that would lay before us. It was an innocent time.
On Easter Sundays, we would eat our weight in Marshmallow peeps; on Valentine's Day, we would feast on conversation hearts even while grimacing at the sappy valentines of the young girls who sent them to us (while winking out the other eye; we didn't want to be seen as "not manly"). On Independence Day we would supplement our nitrate fueled adventures with mass quantities of the frozen stuff in the form of popsicles, ice cream cones and the like. Carnivals, fairs, and circuses would see us picking large quantities of the drug spun out attractively on a paper cone, a choice serving of the drug we would also choose while ogling primates at the local zoo.
Halloween then was not Halloween now. We would pour forth out of already overloaded Pontiac station wagons into waiting neighborhoods with monstrously oversized garbage bags to store our loot. Those were the days of full sized candy bars, no Halloween curfew, and no religious tracts to sully our special day. Oh, we'd get the skinflint, allright, who would toss in an apple or a pencil, but most of the time it was REAL food, including the oh so sumptuous homemade cookies with 5 times the sugar of the already oversugared store bought variety and enough transfats to stop the heart of a rhino.
Christmas was just as special. There was no need to hang up stockings, but we did anyway, even though we knew Christmas morning would see the sugar cartel make a special trip to our house. For the small price of a dozen cookies and a glass of milk, our dealer would load us up with enough sugar to tide us over until school returned, when we could then begin making deals on the playground.
And then there were pixie sticks. Oh, those special infusions of sugary goodness. No nutrition to muck those things up, just mainline those suckers for an immediate sugar high. And mainline we did.
Yes, we were crackheads once, and young. And we suffer a lot of health problems now for it. But writing this, and looking back reminds me that it all was worth it.