Ratatatat

When I wrote this column in August 2001, the advertising department of my newspaper was outraged. That surprised the hell out of me: I'd meant to outrage the reporters just as much. Oh well.
-----

Civilization as I knew it was nearly blown apart by popcorn.

Who really thinks food is a force for good? Granted, in prehistoric times -- or so the scholars tell us -- hunger bred cooperation: Heroic hunters strode forth and slew the ill-starred woolly mammoth, hacked away manfully at its massive carcass, and dragged all they could carry home to the grateful clan.

But when, at the dawn of the 21st century, the great popcorn behemoth willingly spills its guts in the company cola room, life at the ... grows nastier and more brutish.

Your trusty daily newspaper, sad to say, is riven by serious social divisions. In one corner, you have the prosperous day-siders, with their well-coiffed tresses, sleek suits, shiny shoes and assigned parking spaces. Then there are those of us who labor by night, too often clad in the ratty and the recycled, hungry at every turn, and likewise angry and snarling.

Yet the two classes aren't quite as divergent on Fridays: The so-called communal popper makes our upper class shed much of its thin veneer. When the less favored among us stagger in after a gruelling, desperate search for a place to put our ancient and bedraggled vehicles, we see the unmistakable signs of the day-siders' animal frenzy: the greasy tracks, the sad shards of popcorn kernels, trailing here and yon across the hallowed newspaper's otherwise sanitary halls.

Night-siders trudge upstairs to the break room to see a popcorn desert, all kernels of civilization now wiped away. Grrrr.

I'll admit it — I can be a professional malcontent. Every week, I sowed seeds of revolution among my peers with three simple words: "Out of popcorn"; I buttered the night-siders up with an image of the new popcorn age to come under my brilliant leadership, and they oozed gratitude and awe.

'We needed a giant showdown, but how? I liked the idea of sneaking in early with a large paper bag and, while no one was there to witness, looting all I could for the cause. But "while no one was there"? As if! — those vultures circled constantly.

So, Plan B: Try blackmail. I slithered up the stairs for some subtle reconnaissance in the Friday midafternoon. A gaggle of well-groomed women circled the popcorn altar, with crammed, overspilling cornucopiae in hand. Pretending to study the contents of a soft-drink machine, I aimed my quivering ears outward, ready to pick up any damning statements that I could quote against them.

Curses! Foiled again! The only clear sound I picked up was a resolute munch, crunch, chomp. Then all of a sudden the group scattered, and the plundered popper came into full view. Wait! It wasn't quite empty. I gathered up one of the pathetic paper cones still remaining and started scraping away at the faux-yellow remnants inside.

I'd come, I'd seen, and I was ready to start snarfing. Mindful only of that, I danced down to my desk with my trove of kernels, kernels that perhaps had seen better hours, but ones I could still sniff happily; I could still glory in my prey and in its inevitable surrrender. And then I looked up. Right there, staring at me with a bristling sense of betrayal, were the righteous and rabid have-nots of the night-side copy desk. Through the grim silence, I could hear their thoughts — I was a popcorn quisling.

But as my nose and my gaze was drawn back to my prey, I could feel the world well lost. I buried my face in popcorn and gave myself up to private ecstasy.