Popcorn Jack

So I was feeling bored today:

[13:56:45] Michael Westside: i wanna write something
[13:56:49] Michael Westside: give me a topic
[13:56:50] Hannah: write somethign then
[13:56:51] Hannah: um
[13:57:05] Hannah: hmm..
[13:57:19] Hannah: popcorn
[13:57:29] Michael Westside: right
[13:57:32] Michael Westside: give a name
[13:57:39] Hannah: of popcorn?
[13:57:45] Michael Westside: of a person
[13:57:46] Hannah: oh
[13:58:18] Hannah: hmmm
[13:58:29] Hannah: jack abramoff
[13:59:06] Michael Westside: alright
[13:59:24] Michael Westside: im now gonna write a shortstory about Jack Abramoff and popcorn

So that happened. And here is the result. Took 43 minutes to write. I'm getting slower =(

120 calories. That's the average energy content of a bag of popcorn. It was enough to fuel Jack Abramoff for six percent of a day. 86.4 minutes. Three and a half of those minutes would be wasted converting the small and incredibly hard yellow pebbles into white fluffy clouds thought. The instructions clearly states that three minutes would be enough but Jack knew that to be a lie. People always lie. 

He placed the flat bag in the microwave and turned the dial to three and a half minutes. His friends had tried to make him get one of those newer, more fancier, microwaves. One with a showy digital clock and a hundred different pre-sets to prepare food with. As if anyone ever used those. No, Jack preferred the old fashion ones. It reminded him of his youth.

Still three minutes left on the timer. The light inside the box was glowing a sickish yellow, radiation the popcorn, while the bag spun around like a carnival's carousel. Round and around.

Jack turned around and leaned his back against the bench that held the microwave. "Don't stand too close to the microwave" she used to tell him. "The radiation will leak out and give you cancer." Even though he now knew that it was just another lie he still felt a bit uneasy about being so close to it. Somewhere deep inside his head there was a voice going "get the fuck away from that machine." Old habits die hard.

Jack turned around again and just when he did he heard the first POP go off. The bag flinched ever so slightly. Only two minutes left now.

He tried to remember the first time he had popcorn in his life. He knew it must have been when he was really young. He faintly remembers popping them in a large pan. This was before anyone in his family got a microwave of their own so he must have been around 4, maybe 5 years old.

One minute left on the timer now. The popping had picked up a lot now. It sounded almost like firecrackers or maybe muffled machine gun fire. Taken directly from one of those bad war movies back in the eighties  It wouldn't surprise Jack if they actually used the same sound for the movies. It wouldn't surprise him at all.

Only thirty seconds left. The ruckus inside the glowing box had calmed down quite a bit. "Guess popcorn are like rock-stars"  Jack mumbled to himself while standing alone in his kitchen. "Live hard and die young." At that moment he remembered that he had to count.

Counting is important while preparing microwaved popcorn.  You have to go POP one, two three POP. If there's no pop at the end of the count the machine must be shut down. Fast. One second could make the difference between the best junk food known to man and a block of smoldering coal.

The last pop was counted and he launched at the timer. There can't have been more than two, maybe three, seconds left on it. But it matters. "The count never lies." Jack thought to himself while carefully removing the steaming hot bag from the oven.

His wait was done. Wasting another nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds eating the bag of popcorn he now had 73.3 additional minutes. Just over an hour of his life his to do with as he wishes. 

Yeah... I hate being sober.