Xmastime Loves his Popcorn

You can’t fucking win when it comes to microwave popcorn. Wait to pull it out one nanosecond too late and everything gets burned to a crisp. Pull out too early, you’re left with a million uncooked kernels at the bottom of the bowl. Then you wonder for a second about trying to re-cook those kernels, but decide that maybe not having a job and sneezing into old socks instead of buying paper towels is white trash enough, thank you very much. Before you know it you’re desperately trying to time it, like in “Apollo 13” when they gotta try to perfectly line up with a star and shut the engines off at the exact perfect moment. Gimble-lock. Fuck it up, you skid off the top of the atmosphere and good-bye forever. It’s popcorn; do I need that much fucking pressure? Life’s not hard enough, now I gotta be Alan Shepard?

I loves me some popcorn tho. Crave it at times. When I eat it I can feel it churning in my gut, turning into energy. Just like I tell girls my jizz is gonna feel. I love it old-style, I like it microwaved, I like it in brown bags coated in grease, I like the huge tub they give you at the movies. My #1 right now are those huge bags you get at Wal-Mart for $1. Sumpin bout that popcorn, unreal.

My first memories of popcorn are as a little kid, it would be Friday or Saturday night and “Diff’rent Strokes” would be coming on. My mother would start making a big ol’ batch old style, in a pot on the stove, lil pot on the side melting butter. Did that last sentence break the record for sounding "old-timey?" Maybe? Anyway, me being an idiot, I would never get my bath for the night over with in time to settle in before the show started. Oh no no, that would be the smart thing to do. Me, I’d time it so that as I’m splashing in the tub I could hear the corn popping in the kitchen. Which sounds weird now.....okay, I took baths in the kitchen sink til I was 14 years old. Feel good about yourself now, Daddy Warbucks? Anyways, I could hear my mother yellin I better hurry up, or I’ll miss out on the popcorn. I’d splish and splash, splish and splash, apply cocoa butter aloe vera with sliced almonds while marveling at the sensation of my vas deferens in the water, splish and splash some more, til I knew enough time had passed. Now this is how much of a little faggot I was – I’m come strolling into the room, looking around for the popcorn, eyes wide, spinning my head around.

“Where’s the popcorn?!??!!!”
“Gone.”
“WHAT!??!!?!?” (note to brain: fill eyes with water.)
“You were in the bath. We ate it all.”
“Butbubbubbubut wha!!!!!!!!” (note to brain: fold arms, stomp foot. Invent the Internet.)
“Yeah, well...you’re in front of the tv. Move.”

Keep in mind that this would happen EVERY WEEK, like clockwork. Geez. I’d drop to the floor, a fuming, barely contained raging pile of 6 year-old flesh. I’d stare at the tv for the rest of the night, not blinking, not moving, not speaking to anyone. Eyes forward, totally focused - thinking, of course, this was “punishment” for those involved. Ha! To this day I’m waiting to unearth a whole picture album dedicated to these moments; dozens of shots of everybody making faces etc while my back is turned, staring ahead at the tv. Bunny rabbit ears over my head, maybe a big foam #1 finger, maybe my dad and brother posing behind me with a dead moose. You can see the steam coming outta my ears as they put a cigarette in the dead moose’s mouth and a beer stuck to his hoof, snapshot!

I don’t know what I ever thought I’d accomplish with my attempts at martyrdom. “Gee, look at Greg...pouting and whining so much, why did we have to be so mean and eat all the damn popcorn?!?!?! Why, dammit why!!!...tomorrow we’ll go into town and buy him a rocket ship. Poor kid.”

Same thing whenever I’d get in trouble and be sent to the corner. Oooooooooh, yeah I’d scheme and scheme wait til I get outta the corner, I’ll show them. I dreamed of them answering the doorbell to a policeman holding my tiny, lifeless body in his arms. Noodle arms dangling in the breeze, head tilted back at a 45-degree angle, closed eyes facing the heavens with my little mouth agape. Piece of paper slides ouuta my back pocket; as it slowly floats to the ground we see the words at the top “I Love My Mother So Much: An Elegy in 4 Stanzas” before it settles into the dust. The police officer is barely choking back tears as he tells my parents about the tractor trailer that plowed over me as I wandered out onto the road.

“But officer” they’d weep together, “how could this have happened, why would he have done this??!!” My mother would reach out, lightly touching the patch she had sewn into my rust-colored Toughskins earlier that day. As the officer would slowly shake his head, about to say we would never know for God works in mysterious ways, my death rattle would shake my final words out as I barely raised my head to look at my devastated parents:

“why come...you never saved....any popcorn...for me....”

Total victory!!! As they’d swoon into each other arms sobbing over losing the son that was always SECRETLY their favorite, the one they really liked the best, I would chuckle and sneer. Tough doo-doo. And of course in these fantasies a miracle would occur, I’d come back to life and my parents would be so overjoyed they’d buy me a big black bear to be my number one pal.

See? All this for fucking popcorn.