Sometimes in my office people leave containers of home-baked dainties to share with their co-workers. In my particular work-area the goodie drop-zone is a little enclave just a few feet away from my cubicle, which is good and bad. It’s good because I can usually count on first dibs on heaps of free, sugary swag, but bad because I am a weak-willed glutton when it comes to free, sugary swag.

The profound lack of will is especially intense when mind-numbing boredom sets in after several hours of daily imprisonment. My cell is made up of grey, padded dividers, in a fluorescent-lit room with staid carpets, randomly placed filing cabinets, and grimy walls made of a synthetic material that I’ve only ever seen in government offices and never looks clean, even if washed with buckets of sulfuric acid. Some have the audacity to call this travesty a “workplace.”

There are several cures for white-collar office doldrums. Cocaine, nooners in the supply closet with a co-worker, water-cooler office gossip, terrorizing underlings, internet surfing, and eating other people’s lunches in the office fridge seem to be the most popular. For me, chocolate, preferably in a moist, cake-like state is my Shawshank Redemption; my escape from white-collar lock-down. But once I start into it at work, I’m done. It’s like Kryptonite to my self-control, which is why I absolutely never, and I mean ever, pack it in my lunch or have a supply at my desk. If I did, I would be a three-hundred pound zit.

“Now, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna bust me outta this here cubicle and eat me some chocolate muffins,” said Morgan Freeman playing me, to Tim Robbins playing my fellow white-collar prison buddy in The Shawshank Redemption.

Instead of chocolate I have stashes of un-consumed herbal tea I’ve been carting around from office-to-office since my first job, along with  granola, and raisins at my desk. I bring a weekly supply of almonds, yogurt and apples in the fridge. I pat myself on my back for being such a well-disciplined, health-conscious guy. That is, until some do-gooder brings a container with two rows of chocolate cupcakes and leaves them on that cabinet just outside my cubicle. Why do people gotta be so fucking nice?

As I walk to the kitchen to get my lunch the delectable scent of sweet cocoa cuts across my face like a sucker punch. Suddenly the nutritious helping of almonds and yogurt I am about to eat mentally mutates into a bunch of cockroaches swimming in a vat of bull jizz. It seems hardly worth the effort to walk all the way to the lunchroom for such a grotesque meal when chocolate muffins are an arm’s reach away.

“No, you shouldn’t have chocolate dainties for lunch. Have your lunch and then have ONE for dessert,” says the asshole adult who weaseled his way into my brain.

He’s been on my case since college, when he honed-in on my predilection for easy stimulation to quell boredom and dread. He knows it left clouds of darkness in my memory that he still fears may lead to a knock on the door from a grown son I didn’t know I had. He only knows how pathetically the story ended, or arrived in the middle to snap the neurotic version of me back to consciousness so he could ruin all the fun. He knows I woke up in a hotel bed fully dressed in my suit, with my shoes still on, with a half-naked woman beside me. Did he make me fall into a deep sleep as she freshened up? Probably. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

He remembers nothing before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1991 when he arrived to find me on the dance floor sharing a champagne bottle, doing the tongue-tango, and dry humping with the ugly-duckling younger sister of a friend who, after I hadn’t seen her for several years, had grown into a beautiful swan and wanted to spread her wings with me. He does not know what magic tricks I must have performed to lure two women into a bedroom at a party and have them start taking my clothes off.

The adult appeared right at the time when the adventures were really about to begin, and said “how the hell did I get here?” His discomfort at having to ask the question compelled me to flee the scene so I could figure it out. Why? Because my consciousness didn’t know how to wield the brush to finish the sublime work of art the uninhibited version of me had so masterfully begun. Once the adult appeared, he returned me to my usual neurotic, dip-shit self; the one who knew no better than to put the paint-brush between his toes and turn a would-be sexual masterpiece into something resembling a finger-painting done by a baby chimpanzee.

That was all when I was young and stupid, when the adult was over-zealous in issuing his warnings. We hadn’t come to a point of trust or agreement on what was in and what was out, ethically-speaking. I immediately amended my moral code to include the following clause: “If – when you are single – for whatever reason, you happen to find yourself in the midst of a threesome, don’t run away.” Of course, I’ve never had another opportunity to put those instructions into practice, but they are waiting on the shelf collecting dust with the library of reports I’ve written for my job, all of them goading me for their total irrelevance.

All that is to spell out why I consider my inner adult a real Cassandra, a spoil-sport who I don’t like, even if he is helpful at times. He makes sure my bills are only a half-month late and intervenes so I only forget about one or two important things in any given week, despite phone, work-email, Outlook, and dozens of sticky notes to remind me. He tells me it’s not okay to let my kids stay up with me until the wee hours watching movies. He locks my jaw shut tightly in those fiery moments when “fuck you!” Is dying to come out of my mouth with disastrous effect. He tells me not to quit my job and become a barista at Starbucks, insisting that reduced-price Cinnamon Dolce lattes aren’t worth losing a regular, upper-middle class paycheque. I wonder.

But he didn’t let me be as young and stupid as I could have been. Now that I am old, I am feeling a little wistful about the good times I could have had. He has kept a veil of fear in front of me, I suspect. He doesn’t seem to trust fun and wanton depravity in small doses. He believes regret is worse than reckless abandon and masterfully intensifies the volume of past regrets to frighten me away from the types of reckless abandon that are actually worth doing.

So when all I want to do is douse my mid-life malaise with a fistful of chocolate muffins, he is there, as usual, to rain on my parade. I am so tired of his logic, his high-minded principles. “Suck it, inner adult! I’m gonna get me some sugar,” I said to myself that day.

I tore the lid off that bin of muffins like a grabby-handed teenager getting the green light to go past second base for the first time. “Why are these bras so hard to unclip?” I thought, with a bizarre look on my face. I grabbed, squeezed, and tugged at the tray of muffins without rhyme or reason. Like Michael Douglas in 1990’s classic Basic Instinct – when it was still considered mainstream and acceptable to depict sexual animus with rapist violence – I lustfully ripped the fancy-pants off those cupcakes exposing their raw, sultry bottoms. Before I knew it, I had three undressed muffins in the palm of my hands, reeling with anticipation. I gritted my teeth and said “I am gonna eat the shit out of you!”

Remember when everyone thought Basic Instinct was so edgy? I always thought it was totally lame and douchey, especially this scene when Douglas tears the clothes off and basically rapes Jeanne Tripplehorn. If men have doubts about what everyone means by “rape culture” this movie, and countless like it of the era are a place to start looking. Cultural criticism aside, I do tear into my cupcakes much like Douglas tore off Tripplehorn’s clothes. At least with cupcakes nobody, other than my waistline, gets hurt.

But then a thought emerged. “Who made these?” I wondered if it was the angry lady from the first floor who hates her job so much the plants in the office wilt a little when she trudges past them, smothering them in her misery. She always smokes at the entrance to the building, forcing everyone to pass through her toxic cloud of negativity and death. I doubt she’d bring cupcakes for people, unless it was a revenge-plot and they were laced with hemlock.

I gave my head a shake and took a deep inhale. Neither the container nor the muffins smelled as though they had been sitting in a whiskey bar the night before. Angry lady didn’t make them. Instead, tidal waves of saliva crashed into the back of my teeth. The twinge between my legs blossomed as my palate readied itself for the rapacious muffilingus it would soon perform to satiate my sugary supplications. Every breath I took suspended all worries or cares about anything woeful in my life. I figuratively stroked my axons and dendrites to the scent of the palate-porn in my hands. I felt like Al Pacino staring at a mountain of cocaine in Scarface.

Tony Montana, slouched before the powdery stuff of his undoing. I know how it is mang. They gonna have to kill me too, if they wanna take my muffins away from me.

“Isn’t it customary when treats are left for everyone to take just one, Edmund?” said that cock-blocking adult in my mind.

“Um, who’s that talking? Sorry, wrong number,” I said, feeling clever.

And then I stuffed those babies in my mouth as if I’d been stranded for three weeks by a plane crash in the Alps and my last meal was my seatmate’s thigh. “Oh. Oh. Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout. Uh-huh. Yep. Oh baby, don’t stop going down. Yeah, like that. Let me show you how …”

Okay, so the adult was partly right. The shame didn’t feel great. I began to wonder if there was a hidden camera. Maybe there was a pen-thief in the office and they’d been been installed to catch the culprit pilfering paper clips and purloining post-it notes. I mused about the things I often do when I’m alone in the office without thinking of the possibility I’m being filmed.

Most days I pretend to kung-fu shit-kick the Director who, usually between 9:53 and 11:22 at night blackberries a tasking for a report so “urgent” it’s due by the end of day – despite the other “urgent” thing due at noon; a decision obviously made on the shitter when his mind is at its best; when path-breaking new ideas that will conflict with previous ideas already set in motion flood out of him, unimpeded by the meddling reason and expertise of others more knowledgeable. Other times I’m plucking my unibrow and marveling at the Chia Pet-like growth of my nose hair, or changing into my cycling gear to ride home for the day.

Sometimes when I am naked while changing at my desk I like to jump around a little. As a man, I want to know what it is like to have my balls really free at the workplace, to have my scrotum momentarily liberated from the iron-fists of big-wigs who get off on squeezing it every day with their arbitrary deadlines. It’s a refreshingly transgressive, if slightly sad way to ennoble an anodyne, powerless white-collar existence. If you want to try it, I recommend you confirm that the mousy, introverted co-worker is not at their desk before stripping down.

“You’re a bad man, Edmund. You need to grow up. You probably would smother a litter of kittens after a bad day, wouldn’t you? You steer your car to run over those cute, fluffy bunnies running across the road. You are a gluttinous child,” says the adult, chastising me again.

To quote Joe Pesci from Goodfellas, “Hey adult, are you bustin’ my balls over here?” You know Joe, I think he is bustin’ my balls. Again. I think he thinks I’m a clown. I think I amuse him. Why don’t you, me, and De Niro grab some shovels and lime, line the trunk of the caddy with some plastic, and take the adult for a “little drive” upstate. I work hard to pig out on muffins, and I want to eat them without that fucking wise guy busting my chops about it.