Victim of the Wire

Today the internet died - a saturation of the cable sunk in the back yard where a deluge of rain has soaked the lawn to the bone - and I found myself suddenly alone, utterly, completely isolated, without a voice to speak or ears to listen. Completely closed off from my world, abandoned.

I kept telling myself, ‘it’s okay, the conversations you have with friends can wait. It’s not like they hang in mid sentence, waiting with baited breath for your words of worldly wisdom. And it’s not like you stay plugged in all day, every day.’

Yet, the fact that the outside world was unreachable added a sense of urgency to my need to reach it! I tried to focus on something else but my mind kept drifting back to the empty screen. I wandered the house in a distracted fog, touching this, reaching for that. I picked up a magazine, shoved it aside. Tried the book I’d been reading but the words swam in front of my eyes, blurred and unreadable. I phoned a couple friends but only got their voice mail. How suddenly I’d become desperate for a voice, new words flashing across the screen, that little red icon in the lower right corner! But I was shut off from the world, a victim of the broken wire.

I tried to work on something local to my machine, Photoshop or the book I’m writing. But I kept getting distracted by the Internet Explorer icon sitting in the tray at the bottom of my laptop. It kept calling to my mouse, ‘click here, click here!’ And whenever my mouse wandered over of its own accord, not a thing would happen. It was then I decided how desperately I needed an intervention. My life had been hijacked by Facebook, Blogspot, Gmail, Youtube and MSNBC.com.

I tried positive self talk: ‘Ah, Linda, life is much larger than the seventeen inch screen, is it not?” And this helped to calm my angst. My gaze wandered out the window to the yard, still glistening from the morning rain. Where a cool, fall breeze ran its fingers through the fronds of the palm tree and then rippled the surface of the pool. Where a cardinal sat eyeing me from its place in the yaupon holly and where my two dogs romped around, playing keep-away with a small, pink Frizbee. But soon my eyes moved down, down to that strip of lawn where I knew the traitorous wire lie buried in its shallow trench. And I wondered how long it would take the cable guy to get here.