Reconnected

Tuesday: I spent a lovely evening helping my friend Pam select a red wine for her cheese event, What's Cooking at the Library, next week. (It's sold out, but visit Pam's website It's all about the cheese! for upcoming events.) Pam gave us a preview of the amazing cheeses we would taste, as well as other delicious morsels she'd brought back from California's Artisan Cheese Festival. The company was excellent and my taste buds were thoroughly satiated. I went home, settled in, and turned on my computer to discover that the internet was down. Resetting the modem yielded no results. I flipped on the TV to horrifying static on all channels.

The following notice hung on my door: "Time Cable has conducted a routine service audit in your area and discovered we have been providing service that was not ordered. We have corrected our error and disconnected that service..." I immediately called up Time Warner. No record of the disconnection existed in the system and Friday was the only day I could be available during working hours for a technician to come out. Three whole days without television and internet. I would miss an entire round of American Idol. The fury, the frustration, the utter helplessness of it all overwhelmed me.

And then, I got over it. I cooked dinner and read a book. I wrote a poem:

Three days offline and off-screen
and I'm pheening for a fix of the net--
connectivity and HDTV to numb the brain,
entertain, and even inspire.
Wired to watch and read and recognize other's art,
I've stood apart and willed my heart to wait--
wait for time and wait for genius,
missing the whole point of creating.
Cramming my craft into spare moments
rare and few and far between,
I've seen the dark and dismal underside of self-denial,
all the while feeding on the fiction and distraction at my fingertips.
With the stroke of a key, a press of the remote,
entire worlds unreal revealed,
and creative intentions ditched.
Thanks to a cable audit glitch,
my disconnect affected a hard reboot
straight to the root of my discontent.

Well, I do need the internet to be able to post this. And email really is essential to communicating, especially for the freelance work I do. However, I learned that I shouldn't rely so much on a cable connection. Yes, it keeps me connected to others, but often quite disconnected from myself. So this brief interruption in my cable services has helped me reconnect with my commitment to making a habit of being inspired.

Tim, the very friendly and helpful Time Warner tech, confirmed that the "error" lay in the fact that the auditor disconnected me in the first place, but we'll let bygones be bygones, as they agreed to credit my account for my days without service and I learned a very valuable lesson. Let's hope it never happens again, though.