WUMP

I came home from my psychiatrist girlfriend's last night and went to bed about 9:15.  

While I was going to sleep I heard, every 10 minutes or so (it was random!) a sort of dull thumping sound, it kinda went WUMP! like someone was banging the side of my house with a stick wrapped in a rag.

I walked around and couldn't see what was making the noise.  

I made sure the front door was all the way shut (it wasn't, which didn't make me feel that good, but it was obvious there was no one else in the house).

I went to sleep but a WUMP, this time maybe a bit more broken stick sounding, woke me up a half hour later. I eventually dozed off again but the noise hit me this time at 11PM.  Now the sound was more frequent at times. WWWUMP! (wummp?)  WUMMMPP!! Mostly it was pretty dull, really sounded like someone banging wood with a stick or something, sometimes with more vigor, and it was really hard to tell where it was coming from.

I cursed but must have fallen asleep again, and by about 1AM a new WUMP, much louder, jolted me again. I was not getting consistent sleep and had a tough work day coming up. I had to do something.

But here was the problem: It was random, sometimes every few minutes, sometimes 4 wumps in a minute, sometimes maybe once every 15 minutes. I abso-frigging lootly could not tell where it was coming from; it sounded like perhaps from outside, from a neighbor's back yard.  Hard to say, but it might have been louder in the back of the house than the front. It would help a lot if it wasn't so damn intermittent!

So I stood in the dead center of my house (I was really, really tired) for 20 painful minutes waiting for the next WUMP so I could track it down. But--of course!--whatever was making the noise refused to cooperate.

So I got dressed and put on boots and found my camping flashlight, stepped outside into the surprisingly warm May 1AM morning  and meticulously went around the outside of my house, looking in crawl spaces, looking around the back of my yard, looking at the trees near my house, seeing if a homeless dude was sleeping in my crawl space, maybe a skunk giving birth under my house or anything else that could make this random WUMP sound. 

WUMP!!!

It actually took a bit of bravery to do this (well I thought it did, anyway) and I was absolutely bone dead zonked out tired at this point but in spite of going over every square foot of my house and yard with a flashlight, probably scaring the hell out of the my neighbors,  I couldn't see anything that could be making this sound.

I went back inside and got back in bed and 15 minutes later heard yet another WUMP!

Back to the dull muffled thump sound. 

DAMMNN!!!

Wait a minute: something on the roof? Seemed unlikely but I hadn't checked that yet!

Before doing the whole go to the garage, get the ladder thing I decided to go upstairs to look through the upper bathroom window at the back roof, then I got very lucky! when I walked by the speakers set up by my bench I heard a WUMP!

I could immediately tell what it was: the computer and DIY audio gear I have in there, which are hooked to some Mackie near fields, were the fault. Everything was powered on, and for some reason (no idea--did I leave some random patch up? Reaktor?  Youtube gone zombie?) the setup was making a random WUMP sound.  It was crazy, and it didn't sound electronic at all! 

The Wump Starts Here!

I shut everything off and it stopped.

And then I could sleep.  That was the end of the random WUMP.

I told this story to my psychiatrist girlfriend the next day and she told me, that's so geeky you should put it on your blog. So, here it is.