Movie-theater popcorn
Why is the popcorn coated with a yellow sulphurous sodium-hydroxide
salt-peter concoction whether or not you order butter with it? It's like
that yellow powder coating is their way of making it impossible to consume
the popcorn without buying a huge 4-dollar wax-paper cup full of icy-cold
(mostly ice) sugar cola to wash it down with.
The combination is most unpleasant. Especially if you order butter. If
you choke down a butter-sodden bitterly sodium-encrusted handful near the
top, you can wash it down with a flood of
caffeine cola. If you time your gulp just right, you can thwart the
saltpeter after-taste before it fully registers. Then
the caffeine jitters begin to take hold. So you pretend that your agitation is
due to the mayhem and excitement on-screen, and begin nervously and
compulsively ingesting popcorn at increasingly frequent intervals. You
hope that the sodium-laden salt-lick will form a caffeine-absorbing buffer
against the sugar-acid-caffeine content of the cola. You also hope the
popcorn is hot (hot-buttered popcorn?) to offset the bone-chilling
effects of your mostly-ice ice-cold cola. So you eat several mouthfuls
of salty popcorn without benefit of beverage until you are so gripped by
sodium that you reluctantly reach for the corporate ice-water-caffeine
concoction again and down
a good dose of the throat-numbing, nerve-rattling, carbon-fizz antidote. The
popcorn is by now cold, so you gulp said beverage until the frozen cola is
fiddling with your adrenals again.
In an instinctive effort to minimize the damage to your kidneys, you find
yourself clumsily swallowing handfuls of the sodium-encrusted cardboard
buffer-staple, barely-chewed in an effort to reduce the aftertaste,
and vaguely hoping that the stomach will accept this sodium/caffiene
banquet as some sort of a protein-fruit-juice combo.
It was so expensive you had to finish it.
Ian Rooney