On some days it, the writing that is, comes out all smooth and just right on the very first try. You just have to sit down with your laptop and the fingers start tap dancing on the keyboard as if with a will of their own. Those days are few and far between. The rest of the days things play out a little (or a lot) differently.

You open your laptop, write a few sentences, delete a couple of words and add three more and not satisfied by the effect delete the whole thing and start afresh. This goes on for quite some time. Annoyed, you stop and sit staring at the screen lost in thought, till your eyes start to water, which is when you shift your gaze to the roof and notice the cobweb in one corner.

Cobweb? You gotta do something about it tomorrow, you tell yourself. You check the other corner of the room and find a lizard bravely holding up the roof. You let out a muffled shriek. The dog, its alert ears having picked up signals of your distress jumps up and runs over to investigate and lend assistance. Not wanting to have your eardrums broken, you hide the fact of the infiltrator-lizard from the dog and say nothing is wrong.

The dog is skeptical. Tell me, tell me, she insists, butting you with her nose. You change tactics, scratch her behind the ears a good deal and tell her of the goodies you are ordering for her from the pet store at Amazon. The sucker that she is, she is easily distracted and with some belly-rubs  added, goes back to sleep,  to dream of a parcel arriving the next day with beef jerky, juicy bones and squeaky toys.

You sigh in relief and get back to your writing, adding a few more sentences to the unsatisfactory stuff already typed. Now it looks positively repugnant that you delete it all deciding to start anew yet again. You find the newer lines even more revolting and decide the earlier version was better. Thanking whoever thought up the Control+Z function, you go back to the former version.

You now yearn to chew on a pencil to aid thought. But there are no pencils around. They went extinct on your table centuries.. er.. decades ago. You decide to chew on your nails instead and remember too late that you cut them too close just the previous day. Pulling out hair is not an option. The hair you have left now is too close to your scalp in a military-style cut.

You wander off to your online scrabble game and make a few moves, also scroll through your Facebook feed and ‘like’ a few updates. When you return to your page, nothing has changed. No fresh ideas have popped up. The few sentences you have jotted down still look terrible to you as before. You decide a change of topic is what you need, but resolve to retain the earlier one in case you changed your mind.

So you start typing the new one below. It strikes you that the new topic necessitates a clearer mind than the one you have at present, in short you are too lazy to think and analyze right then. The older one is a safer bet. You scribble and scribble. Sorry, you type and type. Shit. This is nonsense, you decide, sitting back.

Music. That’s what was missing. You play your favorite song. After a while of losing yourself to your favorite foot-tapping music, you feel ready to take on the world or just the writing part of it. Isn’t that an idea that has reared its head at the back of your mind? You hold on to it for dear life, intent on putting it in black and white before it gets lost. The only problem is you are reluctant to take yourself out of the magic world of music.

With utmost willpower, you resist the temptation to play the next favorite song. Instead you change tracks and fall back on the smooth familiar notes of The Pyramids by Rahul Sharma and George Kazazian. That’s your writing-song, non-intrusive, soft and soothing, it plays in the background while you type. It is the most played song on your song list. After a while of writing, you find even this non-intrusive song to be intrusive. So you switch it off and choose silence for that absolute smooth experience of writing.

You have been typing for quite some time now. From far comes the whistle of the Gorkha watchman doing his nightly rounds, warning miscreants of his impending arrival. You start. Is it as late as that? Everyone’s asleep, except you. You feel too tired to read what you have been busy writing. Tomorrow, you decide, I will read it all tomorrow, and then post it. So you shut down Windows, after saving your work. Time now for sleep. But for a smooth transition to the land of nod, you need to read some, that’s a must. So as you settle in your bed, you stretch your hand for your Kindle…

Omigosh, that was smooth sailing for the Daily Prompt for today! 😉

©Shail Mohan 2016

Daily Prompt: Smooth