The curse of the fudge

I'm sorry if I've snapped at anyone this week, but I'm experiencing fudge rage.

Medical science doesn't have a lot to say about this condition, so I guess it's up to me to spread the word.

You've experienced sugar highs? Caffeine rushes? MSG sweats? These are all well-documented in medical journals. But no one bothers much with fudge and its nasty side effects.

This may not be how a doctor would do it, but if I had to describe fudge rage, it would go something like this:

As soon as the last post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich has been consumed, smells of overheated cocoa start spilling out of kitchens everywhere. It is my well-reasoned medical opinion that fudge rage starts in the nose, but it would take a highly scientific -- and expensive -- controlled study to prove my theory.

At the outset, fudge rage puts no one in immediate danger. As a matter of fact, victims of fudge rage are lulled into a serene sense of longing for melting chocolate. This is how fudge rage spreads: first the nose, then the mouth.

By the week before Christmas, when nerve endings are jangling, folks who are most susceptible to fudge rages develop an insatiable appetite for large chunks of fudge of any description -- double dark, peanut butter, with or without black walnuts -- and in large quantities.

I have personally witnessed certain individuals, who shall remain nameless, consuming an entire party platter of high-quality fudge in under 15 minutes. This, dear readers, is the result of the spread of fudge rage to the brain.

Nose. Mouth. Brain. What's next? Is no part of your body safe from, as the French would say, le rage du fudge?

The insidious creep of fudge rage slips into the bloodstream and heads straight for the center of love and compassion: the heart.

What heart, soothed by an elixir derived from the cocoa bean and canes of sugar plus pure butter and a pod of vanilla combined by the alchemy of high heat, would be anything but soothed and calmed when presented with such a compote of curative chemicals? This is not a trick question.

And the answer is simple: No heart, hardened by the grind of life, can fail to be comforted -- soothed, or even melt -- under the purely medicinal ministrations of a well-concocted chunk of fudge.

So where does the "rage" part come in? Two ways: overdose, and withdrawal.

There comes a time during the tug of seasonal forces when all good things, even a deluge of fudge, must end. When this prospect first arises in the brain, mysterious signals skitter off to the heart. The nose becomes a helpless bystander in the battle that is about to ensue.

The mouth ... well, the mouth engages with a fudge-addled brain and begins to spew out signals -- warnings, if you will -- to all who venture near offering the remnants of the holiday candy-making cycle.

"No!" the fudge-raged maniac blurts without apology. Hapless fudge makers -- who, you probably have noticed, rarely eat their own stuff -- go away with hurt feelings.

At this point in fudge rage, the poor sufferer has come to the sad and nearly hopeless point where desire and good sense do battle, rendering mere mortals to pitiful shells of their former happy-go-lucky selves.

As far as I know there is no cure. None. And no one I know has a government fudge-rage research grant.

Too bad. That leaves us with only a couple of options: more fudge, or more fruitcake.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.