“No, no, I beg to differ, quite honestly; I don’t believe that cheesecakes are it. Black Forest… now, that’s the sweet stuff,” she said.

“Someone told me that it was the cheesecakes,” I said.

She shook her head histrionically, her tomboyish hair tossed around like a weird variation of a shampoo commercial.

“Cheesecakes are cheesy. You need… exquisiteness. You need… subtle, sublime charm. Passion. Mystery.” She smacked her lips.

“It’s just a cake,” I said.

She winked. “A cake to go somewhere. Think about it.”

And then she was a fisherman tossing the day’s catch into a wicker basket, yelling “4 KILOS!”. And after that, she was gone.

* * * * * *

My dream didn’t go exactly like that. It’s roughly like that, and I can only say roughly, because it’s a dream (my dreams are the type that are built like film reel badly edited and horribly cut; it jumps and stutters and most of the time the sound is out of sync), but I did remember that I was talked to about Black Forest cakes.


(I am also pretty sure the fisherman yelled 4 KILOS, but it might’ve been mandarin sounding like that. It might’ve even be German.)


This harkened back to a long, long time ago to that dream where a girl told me about cheesecakes. I think I might’ve written it down somewhere, but I forgot. It was the weirdest dream I ever had (this also accounting the other scenes the dream jumped into, one of them about ghosts and a frying wok), and I sort of forgot what the cheesecake was all about. I don’t know if anyone can remind me.


It’s funny when I dream about cakes. I don’t like cakes.


I do, however, to a certain degree, enjoy Black Forest cakes.


**********


Now, yesterday was a peculiar day.


You see, I woke up at 9.45 or so, and the first thing that struck me was that I was late for class. The second thing was the fact that both my father and my brother had left for work and outing respectively, and I was literally stuck home with no transportation and no company. I third thing was the several trucks rumbling into the front of my house, most of them with ladders and men, one of them a large wooden cylinder with huge wires twirled into it.


I went outside and asked the nearest uncle what’s up. He said that there’ll be a power-line wire upgrade for the street and that power will be out until 4 in the evening. He said that there was a notification prior. I walked back into the house, looked at the fridge and found the notification.


I said, oh shit.

I walked down to the shoplots and bought breakfast and lunch, and by the time I returned home the power had already been cut.


When the power’s out, my house is as dark as hell.


The power didn’t come back until it was 5. By that time, I was already mossy and the cobwebs had settled and the termites had eaten through.


This was what I did during the 6 hour power outage;


1) Play solitaire (with actual cards, of course) at the front door, where there’s a little light.

2) Do as much work as I could until the laptop battery ran out (1 hour and a half, with music on).

3) Go talk to the dogs. Lanna talked back. Marley slept.

4) Took the rabbit Happy out, petted him for a few seconds, and placed him back.

5) Found a gecko in the garden.

6) Read a book in the porch, but the mosquitoes annoyed me out of it.

7) Practised the Coin Matrix trick with 10 cents coins. Practised the coin drops absent-mindedly for a bit.

8) Raked leaves in the garden.

9) Shot at some birds with the BB pistol (intentionally missed; just to scare them off from stealing Marley’s leftovers).

10) Lay on the floor and thought of sleep.

11) Ate lunch at the porch, beside Marley.

12) Grabbed a bunch of manga from the store, settled down at the porch and read with the music playing from the phone. Made 3 books when the father came back.

13) Read the newspaper.

14) Retreated to the room to lie down and hope to sleep.


The first thing I did when the power came back was to turn on the PC and play Assassin’s Creed until it was time to feed the dogs.

Surprisingly, it wasn't quite a long day.