# 57 INSIPID INDEED

I love pets but they can become a nuisance. I love plants but they can become a nuisance. I love kids but they can become a nuisance. I love Hub and he can become a nuisance. But most of all, I love words but they can become a nuisance as well.

I can sit down at my computer with a passionate thought, and a voice that can’t be silenced, and a plot as organized as train cars following an engine down a straight and narrow track. I can have a story with a deeply embedded moral content and a lighter side for entertainment. Everything there. Everything set to go.

And then out of the blue, here comes this word. It jumps into my head and rattles around. It has no denotation or connotation that could possible make it usable in my exposé. But still it demands to be a part of my prose. It runs interference like a quarterback in a football game. It jingles and jangles in my head until I get a skull cramp. It is a nuisance and so distracting that, with my failing memory, I panic for fear I will lose my original train of thought and often I do. And then all I have left to work with is the interfering ‘word’.

This morning was that kind of morning. The word that came into my head, rattling its three ugly syllables like tinny cowbells on a galloping herd of bovines was ‘insipid’.

‘Insipid!’ For crying out loud, I don’t even have a clue what that stupid word means. Normally I would look it up. That’s what I normally do. But no more. I look up these stupid words that continually run interference and find after that exercise, I go back to my computer to write and find my mind devoid of any worthwhile content. Everything in my carefully plotted and twice reviewed writing plan trashed. Ultimately, all I have now is an empty head that has nothing in it except some dumb word bouncing around like an errant pinball in a pinball machine.

So although this is a forced entry. Although this blither has nothing to do with my originally planned exposé, I have written it. And to clear the annoying jangle in my head, at the risk of committing a grave grammatical error, at the risk of using the wrong word for the wrong reason, I am forced to use that bloody word to write this bloody ‘insipid’ blog.

But this crap isn’t going to happen again. This morning, after I don’t know how many years without it, Hub is finally installing a one-click dictionary on my laptop. That’s one way to get those nuisance words in line so I can get back to some serious and thought-provoking blogging.

Insipid?

Indeed! Pfft!