Yesterday evening about 10:00, I sank into our living room recliner, happily exhausted from a day which included three hours at the station, a sweaty stint at Razor Sharp, some housecleaning at Carthage, supper with a friend, and a two hour and 45 minute rehearsal for the RTG’s summer show. After all that, I was hungry for nothing more than a few minutes in front of the TV, watching the start of the news and then switching over to “Everybody Loves Raymond.” The two dogs were at my feet and I had a Caffeine-Free Diet Coke at my side. (Kathy had retreated to bed long before that, tired out from a long day of her own, and still trying to recover from a poor night’s sleep the night before.)
I turned on the TV but was greeted with what has become an all-too-familiar sight as of late- a picture appearing to be torn and distorted- freezing- going black- and then returning to normal for a few moments before once again becoming distorted and frozen. Usually just changing channels does it (a couple of channels have been particularly prone to the problem) but last night as I bopped from the news to Raymond to “Will and Grace” to “Cake Boss” (as you can tell, I have very sophisticated taste in television) the problem only got worse. And before long, the picture had gone completely black and the sound completely silent. . .no signal whatsoever. Turning the cable box off and on did nothing, so finally I just turned the TV altogether.
At that point, I grabbed the laptop to check my email accounts. . . mostly to confirm what radio interviews I was going to be doing the next morning. The Carthage account came up smooth as silk, but when I tried to bring up Yahoo, all I got was that little spinning circle and the word “Loading” up at the top of the screen. . . but no Yahoo. Irritated, I decided to bring up Wikipedia. Nothing. The Metropolitan Opera website. Nothing. Youtube. Nothing. I couldn’t even get Carthage to come up again.
It was as though the outside world had suddenly winked out of existence.
It was great.
Actually, it wasn’t all that great. It was irritating. More than that, it was a bit disconcerting. All of us have grown so accustomed to being immediately connected with so much of the world- hundreds of television stations streaming into our homes, available at the touch of a button . . . and the limitless sights and sounds of the internet a click of a mouse away. It is truly astonishing- and almost as astonishing is our capacity to take all of this entirely for granted, as though it has always been so.
I think about growing up in Decorah, Iowa with two channels that came in clearly on our black and white television set…. NBC channel 10 from Rochester and CBS channel 12 from Cedar Rapids. At some point, we also could bring in ABC channel 7 from Waterloo (if we twiddled the rabbit ears just right). That was it. Three channels. It seems now like something out of “Little House on the Prairie.” And although there actually was an internet- or at least its precursor- in 1970, nobody had computers in their home. There would have been no point. And when I graduated in 1982, nobody at college touched or even saw a computer except computer science majors. And although we now have telephones that go wherever we go and that can double as cameras, camcorders, computers, and tracking devices, I grew up in a home in Colton, South Dakota with one of those old-fashioned wooden phones that hung on the wall, where you turned a crank on the side in order to alert the operator who had to place your call for you. (By the time we moved away in 1965, I think we probably had one of those new-fangled new phones with a fancy dial!) Maybe it’s because I just past the 50-year-mark that I find myself reflecting quite often on how much the world has changed during my lifetime- for good and for ill.
As I sat in the recliner last night, with no TV and no internet at my disposal, it was as though I had suddenly been wrenched out of the present and into the past where such connectedness was not possible- and scarcely even dreamt about. But once I had accepted the strange circumstances in which I found myself, I settled into the recliner with a new sense of relaxation and release- and with an awareness of how still everything was and how nice that was. And once I had read another chapter of my next book – John Feinstein’s Moment of Glory – for once reading without being on a treadmill or taking a shower or splitting my attention between book and screen – I found myself on the floor, happy to give the dogs my undivided attention for a few minutes.
As if to counterbalance the quaint picture of rustic simplicity I’ve painted here, I just finished reading an article in Atlantic Monthly about new fears of cyber attacks and the devastation that is theoretically possible – and NPR just this morning carried a story about how such attacks might be all but impossible to trace, which could make would-be attackers all the more daring and brazen in their attempts to do us harm. It ’s a scary scenario and I’m trying not to be naive about how serious a threat this is to what we hold dear. But what I experienced last night in our unexpectedly quiet living room was another side to the story. I have no interest whatsoever in giving up my computer or the TV- and the thought of doing so even for the length of a vacation gives me hives. (Pastor Jeff – now Bishop Barrow – gave up a long time ago trying to persuade me to do the boundary waters thing. The physical toil – the bugs – the lack of hot showers – no Taco Bell – those are all deal-breakers. But I used to say that my biggest objection (is that the right word?) is the notion of being that disconnected from the rest of the planet. . . of going days without listening to old Met broadcasts or watching the latest episode of “Big Bang Theory.” (And since I would probably get lost on any such expedition, we’re probably talking about weeks instead of days.)
But I am starting to warm up to the notion that such a thing might in fact be the best thing I could possibly do for myself and for my soul. In fact, last night was like my own little Boundary Waters trial run. Granted I was seated in a comfortable recliner and a well-stocked refrigerator was ten feet away from me. And since the phones still worked, Domino’s Pizza was just a phone call away from being delivered to our door. (Not that we ever order Domino’s anymore, but you get the idea.) But for a few minutes, I understood a bit better how someone might willingly uproot themselves from the comforts of home and purposefully disconnect themselves from all that connects them with the wider world. Because in allowing the rest of the world to go away, even for a little while, you suddenly see the world around you – and your own self and your own life – in a much more vivid way.
It almost makes me want to send Time Warner Cable a thank you note.