Taking The World On With A Smile!

It’s official. I’m stumped!

Well, kind of. There’s actually a trillion things looming around in my head that are bursting to get out. The problem is, I just can’t seem to choose one thing. I guess you could say I have What-chya-ma-call-it; not quite writer’s-block but more like writer’s-overload; you know, What-chya-ma-call-it. Yep, that’s what I got. I’m not lacking in content as much as I’m lacking in focus and I can’t really tell if that’s on purpose or not. There are dozens of childhood stories still to be told but they require much more than an hour or two of writing. It would be an injustice to try to retell any one of them now, at the eleventh hour. There are those events and situations too, that I am trying to figure out how to put into words and there are the thoughts I am trying to come to terms with, those that teeter on the fence of whether to be put into words or not. There are things that are too personal for a post and things that are simply not interesting enough. So here I am. It’s well after my regular publishing hour. It’s late, late, late on a Saturday night and I’ve got What-chya-ma-call-it!

The fact that it’s after midnight and one of my smoke or carbon monoxide detectors (I’m not sure which it is) is consistently sounding off at 3-minute intervals, isn’t helping my concentration either. That’s right, since around 10pm this evening, a high-pitched chirping sound has been erupting from a small, round, white alarm affixed to the ceiling in my daughter’s bedroom, every-three-minutes. This unit is one of about a half-dozen attached to a home alarm system that I don’t understand. At all. It’s not as simple as swapping out a battery (I wish it was) and I can’t find the manual for it. At one point, after getting on a ladder and pushing a few buttons, the entire system begin to blare and the mono-toned voice of a mechanical woman came out of nowhere and began shouting the word, “FIRE!– FIRE! –FIRE!”, over and over again. Alarmed? Yes. I was.

How I managed to stop that, I have no idea. But I did and soon after the chirping began again.

It’s also summer time and my head is in enjoying the extra time I get to spend with my kids and not so much in formulating a composition with some kind of heart-felt meaning attached to it. That feels too heavy right now. Whatever it is, writer’s-block, writer’s-overload or What-chya-ma-call-it, I think I’m going to sit with the chaos in my head for a few days and wait for the stories to settle.

Besides, if I can’t figure out how to stop this chirping, I’m may end up either ripping this alarm-thing-y out of the ceiling, or pulling my hair out of my head, strand-by-strand, tonight.

There’s a black, a white and a red wire. No battery. Chirping.

Any thoughts?

What do you do when you get What-chya-ma-call-it?