imaginary end times

A very strange thing happened a few hours ago.

I was standing in my kitchen cooking dinner when, without warning or discernible cause, my electricity died. It was 9 or 10p, and the power was out all down the block, so it was very dark. So dark, in fact, that I had to light a kitchen match to blaze a path to my cell phone, the sickly glow of which I planned to use in lieu of a working flashlight. (I say working flashlight, by the way, because I own several flashlights that do not work.) When I found my cell, it was dead. I've been testing iPhone apps for a magazine article and evidently they are a huge drain on my feeble 1G battery.

From there, I lit four or five more matches as I looked for a wee candle, a lone tealight, that I knew was around here somewhere. This felt both ridiculous and like something out of the kind of movie where there's a girl in a basement or a cave or a cupboard below the stairs lighting matches because she's alone and afraid and THEN, just as her last little flame is extinguished, the baddie appears. NOM NOM human flesh rape murder death kill bear-trap-mask!!

Or, in my case: tealight!

After that, I retired to the couch and waited for the lights to be restored. I mean, I couldn't do much by the dim glow of my tealight, and both my mobile and landline (a portable phone) were dead. So I just sort of sat there for a bit.

At first, it was relaxing. Then I felt sort of disconnected and alone. And then someone outside started playing a saxophone(?) and things started feeling very apocalyptic. I thought: the world could be ending and I wouldn't even know it. Maybe I should fill the bathtub?

And then, with a degree of calm I almost admire myself for, I thought: OR...maybe the giant rat people are coming.

Now, granted, I have been watching a whole lot of Doctor Who. (In fact, I had to cut back after I caught myself thinking in a British accent.) And while I haven't actually seen any giant rat people on Doctor Who, giant rat people definitely represent a sort of Doctor Who-influenced, like, waking dream logic.

Or, you know, I just had my first schizophrenic episode.