The Old Hack

Ayan Rivera is a writer from the Phillipines, whose blog caught my eye because of its unusual and haunting style.  Below he talks about Birthdays - and cake.  But first a profile of the author:  Reproduced from his own site with permission:

Ayen Rivera has been taking odd jobs since his undergraduate college days. He told his Korean students, in simple English words and in violent pantomime, what's wrong with this country. He convinced kids from expensive private high schools that Oedipus Rex was not related to a certain dinosaur. He shivered in a cold room in Malacanang Palace while he typed regret letters to people wanting to see the President. He hated writing stuff in a Makati office (his job) while fixing everyone else's cranky PCs (not his job at all). He clocked in five years as an info officer at the University of the Philippines Diliman Information Office, where he started to blog. He was managing editor of and contributor to "Sites and Symbols 2" (published 2005), a coffee table book about the buildings and landmarks in UP Diliman. He lost sleep as a night shift web content writer in Ortigas. After serving as an Affiliate Marketing Manager for an aircraft scale model company, Ayen realized he'd rather earn from what he does best: web content writing. His sudden fiction "Notwithstanding Pigs" is included in "Very Short Stories for Harried Readers," an anthology of sudden fiction published by Milflores, December 2007.

when the fog clears

I'm not even sure I want a cake. But my wife insists, and I think she's right (I'd probably want something to see that sets the theme), so I'm hovering over images of nothing but chocolate in my head, and the memory of my not wanting something so sweet. Maybe something with some filling inside, something that, when I rub my eyes in the wee hours of dawn, when the refrigerator fog clears, pokes me awake (a discovery): hey there's a cake here--I'm digging in. Over and over. Because it's not so sweet. And there's some filling inside. The last thing you want is to keep seeing cake and keep being reminded there's cake and whose birthday cake is it again, and that oh, there's cake, you want some cake?

Ayokong maumay. 

And please, no two candles stabbed into the cake spelling out my age. We almost always eventually have to pull them out of the cake. Because the cake won't fit in the ref with the candles jutting out. And we're sure we'd see the candles later, in the same drawer where we keep the kitchen stuff, like old knives, barbeque sticks, plastic forks and spoons, electrical tape, and an unused can opener. Someone but someone on someday will slide open that drawer and see a 3 and 2 with wicks burned long ago and holler, huy, birthday ni Yayen, eto o, look: proof.

But that's in the foreseeable future, far and away from here, which is now, and now is the time for a cake. My cake. Darling, you buy. You choose. You know me better than any other psycho with thinning hair.

I'm gonna go grab the cat and hose him in the bathroom. It's my birthday after all.