Eight minutes. Eight minutes is how long it takes for radiation from the great ball of fire in the sky to burst down upon our fragile little skin, bury between our molecules, and give us the friction-filled sensation of warmth. This means that if you use the jelly inside of your tiny eye sockets to squint into that burning ball of death, what you will be seeing is an eight minute old painting. You're experiencing the past. You're too slow to even be in the present.
Try and remember the last time you were in a classroom. The teacher stood in front of the class, their glasses tilted down at you just enough for you to think they were egotistical. Boredom clung to the back of your skull like a cat convinced you're about to give it a bath. Some nonsensical information was being blasted upon a screen that was both too bright for your weak, hungover mind to handle, but too dark for your glazed, doughnut shaped eyeballs to process.
Now imagine that freezes. Your teacher is stuck, their nose scrunched in rabid frustration as they try to shout the day's lesson into your overbearingly large skull. Spit molecules are sputtered about through the air, hanging like rainwater on a windshield. This scene is stuck with you, unmoving, for eight minutes. It takes eight minutes for any future information to be processed by your eager, budding mind.
Of course, by the time those eight minutes have passed, the sun, or your teacher, are somewhere completely new, doing something completely exciting and wonderful and you weren't invited, because you live eight minutes in the past. If the sun were to decide to up and leave our lost little solar system, you wouldn't even know it for eight whole minutes!
Seven minutes. Well, for the first minute of the sun saying, "Peace out hommie," - like your strange friend who isn't a friend but a roommate of a friend of a friend - for that full, wonderfully encapsulating minute, you were being a dunce. I'm sorry, that was mean. You were staring at the sun. Just zoning out, thinking about what it would be like if that brutally unfair teacher - because you're smarter than them - were to suddenly freeze in time and space. It was funny. It was fantastically, serotonin-releasing, blood-clotting, phone-rupturing, excellence.
But you wasted a whole minute! The last eight minutes of your life and you were day dreaming!
Six minutes. Uh, shit. Last two minutes day dreaming. You should probably spend less time talking with the voices in your head. Yes. But then you would be all alone for the remainder of your life. Those poor, lonely six minutes all alone, sitting in the scratchy green grass that hasn't been mowed in three weeks which is way too long and probably full of ticks and now your ankles itch and you only have six minutes to live but you don't really know that yet.
Five minutes. Alright, alright. Let's be serious now. Seriously, you have five minutes left. What can you do in five minutes? Call your family and tell them you love them? Well, maybe, but you don't love them that much! How about that crush? You could walk to their dorm room. Huh? They live in an apartment? How fancy of them. Are they rich, or just smarter than you?
Okay, okay. I'll be as chill as an Earth without sunshine. I don't mean to be mean, it's just-there are only five min-
Four minutes. Four minutes left of humanity. Is it just me, or did the first minute seem a lot longer than these other minutes? Like knowing that your life is about to end somehow sped up time? Unfair, really. I stare at that clock for hours on end and it never moves, but as soon as I'm enjoying myself, WOOSH, I'm a twenty-seven year old naked man with no home or family and I'm living in a prison cell because it's warmer than the frozen over cardboard box the old lady with the stereotypical homeless cart said was home.
Sorry, sorry. We were talking about you. How much time do you have left, four-
...
No? I'm not being cut off mid countdown again? Alright, so you still have fo-
Three minutes. Oh, now isn't that so darn-tootin annoying. These interruptions are horrendous! Please do something. You only have three minutes left until you look up into that big, bleak sky of endless crushed dreams and realize that the sun has vanished. No more warmth in your section of the great big unknown. Just a frozen tundra, with only the core of the planet to give you warmth. Hey! What a wonderful idea! You could move to Iceland. Dig a giant hole and live near the core of the Earth, under a volcano! You could be the last human ever. Maybe a wonderfully, spectacular species of generous, intelligent creatures would fly their spaceships by and notice your life sign buried deep down under the lush green, freshly mowed grass (that would be frozen over) that is Iceland. Then, they will save you, and whisk you off to explore the universe, to have wonderful misadventures with all sorts of new, exciting, and beautiful things for the rest of your naturally short human life!
You could repopulate humanity!
Two minutes. Yeah, you right, you're probably just going to die. You have two minutes now. Do you really not have any last wishes? No one who is even kinda cute who might live in a nearby dorm-room? You could run there, confess your wonderful, copied and prepared feelings intended for another human, and get some nasty, blood-pumping, kinky, end of the world Mario-kart races in.
...
Or, you know, sex. Can you finish in under a minute? Can you?
One minute. Oh, you've gone and buggered it all now. No-Keep your pants on! Even if you could finish in under a minute, whats the point now? Are you going to go out with your pants around your ankles, in a hot, sticky, itchy mess, thinking of the things you only dreamed of? Oh, look at that. Now you're crying. With your pants around your ankles. Buck up! It was a joke. The sun is fine! I mean, really, eight minutes? You really think that the sun is just going to disappear, and then you'll die in eight minutes? Hah!
Lights out. Well, will you look at that. Sorry, I was joking about the bit where I said I was joking. I didn't want you to cry anymore! You looked like a clown who had run into a mule's arse, then tried to wipe the shit off your face with fire ants and a side of hay-fever. You're looking much better now, though! That look of massive, erection bursting anger mixed with unbridled surprise seems to fit you. You should wear it more often. And pull up your pants. There is some good news!
The good news is, uh, well, maybe I should deliver the bad news first, so that the good news is more goodly? Like when the doctor sits down your family and say, "The bad news is, your 21 year old has cancer and the medical bills are going to cost around 200,000 dollars when all is said and done, even though you have medical insurance. But the good news is, he probably won't die! Probably."
I mean, the bad news is pretty obvious - the sun disappeared eight minutes ago! So, no more sunlight. Or warmth. But good news! Which is, uh, I was lying about the dying in eight minutes part. Obviously, since you're still alive. It'll start getting cold soon - like so cold that even ice will start to get frostbite - so you should probably pull up your pants. Seriously. You're making this weird. Pull them up. And you should probably find more pants, to put on top of your pants. Throw a pants party! Because ocean freezing, vegetation killing, Antarctica-feels-like-Hawaii, cold.
And you should move to Iceland. Because, uh, you have about two weeks before it gets so cold that your tiny, meatless, sinewy arms will snap off in the frigid air faster than you can shout, "Where did the sun go!?" It went on an elongated vacation and it isn't coming home until mommy stops being such a frigid bitch, okay? Okay!?
...
At least you have time to walk to your crush's apartment now. You better not throw away Mario-kart victories to get end of the world sex, either, or I will-
Oh, shit, here comes that teacher we hate. Gotta go. Good luck with the whole lights out thing!
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Well, that was interesting. Uh, for the original thread, follow this. Thanks for reading, and have an enjoyable afternoon.
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