DIARY OF A HOME RENO WINO
DIARY OF A HOME RENO WINO
(subtitled, “Part Two — Where There’s Smoke, There’s IRE”…)
Day, “Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes…”
…is how long one of my smoke detectors has been chirping.
Actually, it’s been a week to the day.
But please don’t confuse this complaint with the LAST complaint on the same subject.
You see, this is deja vu all over again.
A couple of weeks ago, desperate to stop the pulse of my smoke detector loudly echoing off my tall ceiling, I constructed a basic yet effective slingshot from an old razor and a scrunchy, and prepared to shoot the shit out of the errant smoke detector with some glass beads and my amazing aim, on account of the ceiling is too tall for me to reach without being Peter Pan, and I was at my absolute wits end.
And then, just like that, it stopped.
I’d say I had about a four day reprieve. It was glorious! I didn’t just think I was in the clear, NO! I thought I had manifested a freakin’ miracle by “telling the universe what I needed” in the form of the biggest, most frustratedly obnoxious fuck-roar the universe has ever heard!
(Sidebar — what’s a “fuck-roar”, you ask? Well, kids, a “fuck-roar” is when you literally roar — not exclaim, mouth or utter — the f-word by stretching out the “uh” sound for several seconds, as if you are an atonal spasmodic auditioning for the role of Ricky Bobby when he stuck a knife in his own leg.)
But then, the chirp returned — just as vociferous and incessant as before.
Seven more days, and seven more nights, have since passed, and that chirp has chirped every thirty seconds without fail or reprieve. I had little choice but to breakdown and schedule a professional to come over here tomorrow to perform a service call — or an exorcism — whichever the case may be.
Well, wouldn’t ya know it…
As I type this, you can hear a pin drop.
This mother effing bastard of a smoke detector decided to stop chirping. Again.
I SHOULD be thrilled! Ecstatic! Jumping for sheer joy! But no. This inanimate prick is trying to outsmart me. It somehow knows that I called a real, no-nonsense smoke detector annihilator to be here in the morning, ready to dismantle the menace whose silence will now have me looking like the crazy one!
I’m not crazy! IT’S crazy!
Who’s in there, huh? Who’s spying on me from some desolate warehouse, smoking generic ciggy butts and jerking off to my devolution into insanity with each of the five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred chirps I’ve endured???
You KNOW that’s happening, right? I mean, there’s no other logical explanation for how this device knows when it’s pushed me past the brink, and then magically retracts its auditory pincers as if to say, “Wut? Is something wrooooong?”
Since I am an extremely logical person, I’m going to move out of its sight-line and go put on a bra. And maybe some lipstick, but not without first giving my smoke detector the double-middle finger, with a very menacing, “I’ll be back!” salute.
We’ll see who has the last chirp then, won’t we….