Sometimes I feel so good I gotta scream

My house has a porch, and I like to sit on it, on the cusp of dusk, when it's just dark enough that passersby don't notice you but the warm of the day hasn't faded away, and glare at my neighbors sitting on their porches and and covet their porch furniture. I watch them chat pleasantly amongst themselves and concoct sinister plans to steal across the street under cover of darkness and take their matching patio furniture sets and gently swaying porch swings away. Not to my porch. For one thing, if all the outdoor furniture on Dupont Avenue suddenly appeared on my porch, there might be suspicions. And for another, for all I know if I tried to set up a porch swing I may well succeed in only ripping a big chunk out of the ceiling. My house has gotten a bit soft in its senility.

I covet theirs because my porch is furnished exclusively in coffee tables. I was lamenting this to a customer today, and she asked if I had considered asking them to trade. Do they have any coffee tables? she challenged. I was stunned. I had never considered this angle. Perhaps as I am sitting on my coffee tables, my bottom slowly falling asleep against the unforgiving wood, and muttering tirades against their multitude of chairs, they are casting a gimlet eye to me perched on my coffee table horde. Perhaps inside their immaculate apartments they have chairs covered in magazines and ash trays and old coffee rings, all for want of a coffee table. "Look at her," they may be saying to themselves, "her with all those coffee tables. Who does she think she is."

Queen of coffee tables, for your information.

Looked up to the lord above and said "hey man, thanks."

The power went out to a massive chunk of Lake Street yesterday, and nobody seems to know why, but I have a theory. Like what if every popcorn kernel popped at the same time, or what if everybody flushed their toilets at exactly the same moment, I think this was a case of what if everybody in the Hi Lake Shopping Center thought "oh god I don't want to work right now" at the same time. Somehow we collectively short-circuited the laws of probability. Whatever it was, the power went out at around 1 pm on a very busy Monday, and everybody secretly cheered. We had to ring up all the remaining customers on paper, using money out of the safe because none of the registers could be opened without electricity. Then we finally cleared all the customers out of the store, locked the doors, and sat in the dark and pretended to sulk for a while before Mary decided she wasn't paying us to be there if there was no business to be had so she made us leave. The plan was, we'd go home, and then call the store, so as soon as the power came back on we'd all come racing back to work.

Ha ha. As if.

So I had a nice, leisurely day yesterday. I put part of a puzzle together, Bambino the Beast of Entropy put parts of my puzzle everywhere, I bought some more hair dye from Extreme Noise, and that's pretty much all I accomplished. It was like a snow day. Well, but without the snow and with half your day already gone. So I guess not really like a snow day. Really more like a bomb threat day. It was like when somebody calls in a bomb threat to your high school and everybody gets hustled outside in case it blows up, and the sun is shining, and the skies are blue, and you're fifteen and invincible and honestly who's going to blow up your stupid high school anyway, and you know they'll eventually figure out there is no bomb and you'll have to go back to school but for now, man, you are granted the rush that always comes with unexpected bursts of freedom.

Mine is probably the first generation to wax nostalgic about bomb threats.

I had my hands in the river, my feet back up on the banks

Most people at work wear their nametags on lanyards around their necks, but I "lost" my lanyard and "had no choice" but to wear mine on a zippy little thing at my hip. Like you know how in movies, when people are marching through top secret building with security clearance doors and they have their IDs on little spring-loaded wires and they pull 'em out and swipe 'em and the door opens? One of those.

So today, as I was walking down a crowded aisle, I brushed too close to a rack of clothes and my nametag caught, waited until I got about a foot away, and then released and slapped me in the butt as the cord retracted. I didn't know that, though. All I knew was something smacked my butt and I spun around to see what it was and saw only four old ladies.

And I mean, I eventually figured out it was the nametag, but for a horrible few seconds, I could only stand there and gape and wonder which of those old ladies had just patted my bottom, and why, and how I so did not get paid enough for this.

What you gonna spend your free life on?

Curiosity finally got the best of me and I just had to have a peek at the chia cake. To my chagrin, there wasn't a spot of mold on it anywhere; it even smelled as lemony fresh as the day I drizzled icing on it. Which had to be back in, like, February. What is that! I know I should be delighted to find I haven't been sharing my kitchen with a cake-shaped potted plant, but it was such a let down. I think on some barely subconscious level I was really hoping the whole cake carrier would grow legs and skitter around the floor like an angry hermit crab, and every time it geetered too close to me I'd swing a chair at it and yell "Back! Back, you fiend! Hyah!" and it would keep me trapped on the counter top for hours until I finally managed to trick it into the oven, killing it (ironically!) in its very birthplace. All this with a soundtrack by Rush. Or if Rush isn't available, just "Eye of the Tiger" over and over again.

I guess this is what happens when you grow up having your imagination fed on a steady diet of Jonny Quest and Faerie Tale Theatre.

If a cake turns into a monster crab and tries to kill you, do you think you get a book deal? I think you should get a book deal. I would read that book. If Augusten Burroughs hasn't already written it, anyway.

How we gonna end up feelin'?

Several months ago I got a hankering for cake, but had no cake pans, so I made it in a loaf pan. Then I patted myself on the back for brilliance, ate half a loaf of cake, put the cake in my cake carrier, and completely forgot the cake ever existed. The cake carrier was slowly absorbed back into the living mess that is my apartment, resurfacing occasionally but never long enough to remind me there was cake in it. By the time I remembered it was at least a month, if not two, since I'd baked it.

Which is about a century in cake years.

I didn't open the cake carrier. At the time it was simple laziness. Why deal with a slightly fuzzy cake if it's so conveniently out of sight, out of mind in its little metal carrier? I'd just do it later. And as later slid along to cover days that turned into weeks which threatened to stretch to months, my reluctance changed from pure lethargy to growing fascination. What did that cake look like? Gray? Green? Black and white? Maybe the carrier sealed off well enough that there's no mold at all and it's as sprightly yellow as the day it came out of the oven. Or maybe it looks like a guinea pig on St. Patrick's day. I'm free to imagine a host of horrors with the lid on. Enclosed, it is Schrödinger's Cake. Who am I to meddle in the affairs of the quantum? I dubbed it the "chia cake" and mostly forgot it was even there.

Over time my feelings toward the chia cake have changed from fascination to a sensibly irrational sort of fear. I don't want to open the cake carrier not because I don't want to ruin the surprise, but because, in the back-road corners of my horrified imagination, I'm afraid I won't be able to get the lid off. I can almost hear the dry crunch and feel the sudden jerking stop as my arm tries to lift the top away and can't pry it off more than an inch because the mold inside has grown so prodigiously as to have bonded with the metal of the carrier and as I am choking back a small shriek of horror at this realization a thick fuzzy gray tentacle darts out of the opening and grabs my wrist and I become famous (post-mortem) for making the worst cake EVER.

And besides, what if it isn't anything near that bad and, as empty-handed as Geraldo in Al Capone's vault, I'm left with nothing but expired possibilities and a vague sense of dissatisfaction about the cake that could have been?

I mean, man. What a theoretical let down.