Waiting for Xfinity

As I sat on the floor of my new apartment waiting for Xfinity to call me back, waiting for instructions on how to sync my modem to my router or my router to my modem, waiting for international assistance with the so-called “self-install” process, it occurred to me that Xfinity might never call me back, and that I wouldn’t mind at all if they didn’t. For I could extend this moment indefinitely, remain here on the hardwood of my sister’s and my new abode for weeks on end, months, even a year or more, moving between the bedrooms and bathroom and living room and kitchen without ever going anyplace else — save for other real, physical places, like the nearby park or grocery store — and without giving any thought to my modem, which would sit gathering dust at the dead end of the Ethernet cable, lights flashing blue, green, and amber, blinking their way up and down the glyphic pillar, from power to downloads to sends to connection, pausing at sends, at connection’s threshold, the device like a hand left hanging on a shake, never clasping its intended object, while next to it the router would sit equally defunct, activated yet obsolete in the absence of a working modem, just a piece of junk I hadn’t yet had the audacity to throw away, in the rank of Allen wrenches and bubble wraps and other shipping oddments, things I couldn’t quite bring myself to trash at my previous apartment, things that seemed hypothetically useful, vaguely nostalgic, or especially non-recyclable that I therefore kept despite knowing that less is always more, that miscellaneous possessions are deadweight anchors to my existence, that all I need are hardwood floors and large pieces of furniture to sit convincingly atop them, plus obviously also books, drugs, food, water, power, and the insatiable Insinkerator, and yet there I found myself, still “on hold” with the foreign Xfinity operative who had in fact inadvertently ended the call and who would soon call me back to apologize in a voice quaking with a wholly absurd second-world servility, addressing me by the name of my former roommate whom I was impersonating in order to expedite the process, begging my pardon for the long wait-time and the series of abstract technical errors (for which he was in no measure responsible) involving, at their core, god knows what sort of electrical futzing in some data center god knows where in the world, after which point my problem — having dragged on through a series of tussles with increasingly apologetic agents — would magically resolve itself, courtesy of some obscure deus ex machina trigger in the unknowable “bowels” of the system, leaving me free to resume my distracted existence at my own little node of the Internet, now displaced to Savannah, GA, where rather than proceeding along the alternate timeline in which I did not conclude my series of calls with Xfinity and reconnect to the Internet after a period of eighteen-odd hours (a period during which I wasn’t actually away from the Internet at all, given the combination of my phone’s trusty LTE and my sister’s rather hot-and-cold hotspot, and therefore can’t be said to have truly disconnected but simply to have undergone a slight attenuation of my multiplex and altogether unbreakable connection to the Internet, the World Wide Web and its attendant cyberspaces, the myriad sites and domains annexing our otherwise narrow two-bedroom apartment, unbounding my existence while at the same time bounding it within their own unboundedness, their scrolly endlessness belying the smallness of the screen, like an optical illusion that makes a pantry look like an auditorium or a puddle like a lake, a situation wherein I would always estimate myself to be somewhere grander than I really was, e.g. in the global Xfinity waiting room rather than my own living room), I would make my triumphant return to connectivity, though only after spending countless hours crouched in child’s pose on my yoga mat, attempting to turn my interminable wait into something healthy and productive, an impromptu mindfulness session in place of the all-too-predictable tantrum that such technical errors would have reliably produced in the past, up-to-and-including just under a year ago when my former roommate and I had struggled to install Xfinity at our apartment in Atlanta, plugging and unplugging wires into the hand-me-down modem and router we’d been gifted by the upstairs tenant, the both of us valiantly refraining from yelling at the somewhat snide, impatient, and un-obsequious agent who, perhaps having overheard our snickers through the staticky speakerphone, believed we were committing some obvious and catastrophic blunder which he — from his transcontinental remove — could neither perceive nor redress, so that we remained on the line with him for well over an hour, plugging and unplugging and replugging and pressing and holding and laughing and chewing curses into the collars of our shirts, until eventually it just worked, for no apparent reason, just as this time it would abruptly begin to work, the lights greening and the hands clasping and another year streaming past, and though I knew this meant I was now guaranteed to spend months out of the coming year in nowhereland, in a sort of involute digital trance, I would at the very least remain part of the world, able to look up recipes and other things I didn’t know, able to communicate with anyone at any time and so assure others of my continued existence, even as I myself remained unassured, blue-faced and slouched in my bed or seated in my desk chair, opening and closing tabs, streaming content, experiencing “experiences,” transforming myself into a voracious orifice not unlike the Insinkerator, which could gobble up virtually anything organic with nothing more than running water and a flip of its switch, much as I, once connected to the Internet, would be liable to gobble up virtually anything, i.e. anything virtual, just so long as it did not relate to my immediate surroundings, which, I implicitly sensed, did not quite constitute a life, whereas these same surroundings raised to the power of Xfinity’s 200 mbps plan somehow did, even if said plan did not actually support download speeds of 200 mbps but instead topped out just shy of 40 mbps if I was lucky — in actuality the coming weeks would see me engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to get the download speeds above 10 mbps, 20 mbps being the bare minimum required to stream live content (which I was desperate to do in order not to miss out on the much-delayed NBA playoffs) — and regularly plummeted to 1.5 mbps or even 0.5 mbps (for no apparent reason), prompting further calls to Xfinity’s customer service line, which I would end up dialing frequently enough to inadvertently memorize, such that I wouldn’t need to rely on the mnemonic aid of 1–800-XFINITY or scroll down through my call history anymore but could instead effortlessly punch in 1–800–934–6489 and be promptly connected to the virtual agent, who would greet me by name before reiterating the same sequence of unhelpful prompts, interpolated by an irksome plea for patience given “conditions created by the global pandemic,” terminating in the inevitable suggestion that I restart my modem and then wait for at least ten minutes, to which I would reply, in mounting rage, “No, I already did that,” and “I need to speak to an agent, please,” and “I already tried that you stupid fucking bitch” (provoking disapproving frowns from my sister, whose functional hotspot and continued employment had spared her the chore of wrangling with Xfinity), cussing and shouting having proven my only reliable strategies for persuading the loathsome fembot to relent and re-admit me to the global Xfinity waiting room, handing me off like a baton to the jazzy hold music which would attempt to assuage my frustration for a period of up to one hour before handing me off to yet another Southeast Asian or Central American service agent, whose voice piping up on the line would come as such a relief that I would immediately melt into an ecstasy of fellow-feeling, addressing the agent by name before explaining my issue and asking how exactly my download speed could continue to fluctuate by a factor of twenty on an hourly basis, despite my having now purchased and installed a hybrid modem-router (supporting up to 397 mbps download speeds) from a rival manufacturer (thereby eliminating the possibility that the problem was my router rather than my modem as originally suspected by more than one service agent apparently hell-bent on offloading responsibility onto my shoulders and/or pressuring me into giving up the ghost and subscribing to Xfinity’s grotesquely overpriced xFi Gateway rental unit, which I refused to do on principle even though doing so from the get-go would have spared me a world of trouble and hours upon hours of stress and heightened blood pressure), a device which I knew for a fact was capable of maintaining download speeds above 30 mbps, even with all the fine-print degradation and walls-and-furniture signal absorption taken into account, because it had stabilized at around 35 mbps for a blissful two-hour period during which I was able to watch the entire second half of Game 4 of the first-round playoff series between the Clippers and Mavericks, the very game in which the Slovenian wunderkind Luka Dončić hit a buzzer-beating 28-footer to win the game, crossing his defender over twice and reclining into his signature step-back all in the span of the mere 3.7 seconds left on the clock, 3.7 glorious seconds which the brief cessation of Xfinity’s continual assault on my sanity had permitted me to witness in their entirety, as if to taunt me with a tantalizing vision of the joys which a reliable Wi-Fi connection might entail before pulling the rug out and consigning me to yet another week of sub-10 mbps download speed, a week which would see me cycle manically back and forth between stretches of yogic bliss and fits of apoplectic rage, bury-your-face-in-a-pillow-and-scream type rage of the sort I hadn’t experienced since my days of playing online FIFA on the PlayStation in high school, when my parents’ shaky Xfinity (née Comcast) would regularly crap out on me at a decisive moment, leading me to fling first my controller and then myself onto the couch with all the force I could muster, like the snotty flailing pent-up “griefer” I was (and perhaps, in a sense, still am), because even then I was at the mercy of the modem, whether or not I had any concept of what a modem even was, even then I couldn’t bear to go a day without the world at my fingertips and would huff and puff, curse and moan at the tiniest delay in the occult process that whisked it there, for I am at core a pathetic type of person, someone for whom adversity exists only in the form of hangnails and hyper-knotted shoelaces, unresponsive Internet browsers and un-openable jars, the kind of person who hasn’t suffered a day in his life and yet behaves as if the entire world were against him, someone so spiritually bankrupt that his sole accesses to rapture are these microbursts of incandescent rage, rage at silly games, rage at little glitches, rage against the espresso machine, rage at Xfinity or Expedia, and really now that I think of it, that’s the great conflict of my life, Xfinity versus Expedia, the central drama in my life is simply the question of which one I hate more, Xfinity or Expedia, Expedia or Xfinity, the one that has robbed me of so much of my time or the one that has robbed me of so much of my money, which amounts to the same, or so I’ve been led to believe, time = money = blood, so that really Xfinity and Expedia can be seen as two bloated vampires snacking on my neck, one on each side like in a sick ménage à trois, draining me to the point where it’s a miracle I even have the strength to go on raging, throwing my little clandestine temper tantrums, tantrums which, to the impartial observer, might appear out of character, or at the very least out of wack with my otherwise laid-back demeanor, tantrums which only my girlfriend, parents, sister, one or two very close friends, and one or two very unlucky customer service agents have had the immense disprivilege of witnessing, tantrums which embarrass me to no end but which I feel powerless to overcome, tantrums which start as a boiling feeling in my chest and build to the point that I have to take great shuddering gulps of air just to avoid exploding — such is my issue, and whether it can be traced back to the charmed upbringing or the delayed puberty or the checkered concussion history I don’t know (or much care), all I know is it’s my demon and it’s the reason I’m again lying supine on my yoga mat, child’s pose having felt too childish and downward dog too dogged, exhaling for eight seconds after every inhale, staring up at the pretty chandelier, the phone on the floor next to me, the hold music playing, waiting, feeling very much like a child again, a child in my childhood bedroom which is now the TV room, having swapped places with the former TV room which in turn now serves as a guest bedroom, i.e. the bedroom where I sleep as a guest in my own house, the bedroom with all my stuff in it (my bed, my bookshelf, my clothes, the years’ accumulations of trinkets and half-wanted knickknacks), the very room where I once threw my tantrums but where I now lie awake on cold December nights or warm August ones, staring at the dim-lit prints and paintings on the walls, the haphazard and patternless collection of artworks consigned to the walls of this room simply by virtue of their not fitting in anywhere else, artworks which, like myself, no longer truly belong but feel too precious to get rid of, and thus have been crammed pell-mell into any and every open surface, such that the room resembles a sort of Parisian salon in miniature, its centerpiece the nude painting my girlfriend Spencer did in college (the moon-white voluptuous body, the thunder thighs, the torso in the shape of a shark tooth, the pointy triangular breasts), the most striking features of which are the protuberant elements, the moss glued to the canvas at the pubis, the dried leaves for pit hair, the crushed flowers for nipples, a work of amateur genius so arresting as to completely overshadow its neighbors, namely another (far pruder) nude depicting a woman’s sagging rear, an abstract landscape by some dead distant cousin however many times removed, and a print of a horned ungulate drawn in geometric style by my sister’s ex-boyfriend Jonas, this latter piece hanging more or less exactly where the TV once stood, the very TV teenage me would leer at for hours on end before emitting a primal scream and bashing the much-abused controller into the ottoman, the Internet having conked out on me at a decisive moment in my online soccer match, the screen sputtering or freezing up, lending my anonymous opponent an advantage which he would seize upon to score the winning goal, the anonymous opponent I pictured as a greasy, Cheeto-fingered ogre gloating on a couch somewhere in Arkansas or Michigan, dick in hand, headset on, gleefully shit-talking even though I owned no headset and (thankfully) could offer no riposte, and this was what got my goat above all, not the losing per se but the injustice of the outcome decided by glitch, worse yet by a glitch which was visible only on my end, only to the victim and not to the victor, such that my opponent would erroneously believe that he had won fair and square, that he had bested me, that it was I who had commanded my sweeper or center-back to stand stock-still like a bowling pin while my opponent’s striker raced past and booted the winning goal into the net, when in truth the fault lay with none other than Xfinity (Comcast) and its sad joke of an Internet service: it was this gross, obscene misconception on the part of my anonymous opponent that drove me up the wall with grief, for what kind of God would create a world in which a lucky schmuck like this could genuinely believe he deserved to win, a world in which the invisible hand of Xfinity could crown the most undeserving of victors, allowing smug Cheeto-fingered Michiganders and Arkansawyers to go about their days in an opioid glow of false accomplishment, blissfully unaware of their own worthlessness, unaware that their sole redeeming quality in life, the one thing that elevated them above the status of the amoebic, was that by chance they (or more likely, their parents) did not subscribe to Xfinity’s Internet service, or did subscribe but somehow benefited from a superior throughput to my own, thanks to a geographical contingency which, when you really thought about it, was not a gift but a curse, in that it forestalled any hope of self-knowledge on their part, condemning them to lives of pitiful delusion and unwarranted self-esteem, lives of secret ignorance, in short, the polar opposite of gnosis, while losing in this harrowing manner, I can now assure my past self, was not a curse but a gift, an invaluable education, a moral instruction far surpassing those conferred by my high school Ethics seminar, for instance, with its facile questions of train-tracks and switches and fat men on bridges, whether or not you should push the fat man in order to save the lives of five children, which in my view you very obviously should, anyone who wouldn’t kill a skinny man to save five children is a monster, period, and if you intend to kill five children in order to save a fat man clearly you subscribe to a worldview according to which body-mass is the sole index of human worth, but I digress, the lesson delivered from the nexus of Xfinity and PlayStation and FIFA is simply that winning is an illusion, losing an illusion, Fate nothing more than a series of more-or-less invisible glitches, contingencies whose chains of causality recede far upstream, out of sight and out of mind, such that the aforementioned God, the divine winnower who sorts wheat from chaff, winner from loser, if He even exists, must in truth be as mindless as a wave, an electromagnetic wave traversing a fiber-optic cable buried deep underground, zipping in nanoseconds from Arkansas to Washington or Washington to Michigan, ventriloquizing hapless adolescents along the way, making them scream with indignation or elation, smashing controllers left and right, artificially inflating the sales numbers of middling salesmen at Targets and Best Buys nationwide; His divine will is thus not will at all but mere impulse, nothing more than a mindless squiggle, mindlessness made manifest, repeating itself in fractals and Mandelbrot sets and microscopic crystals of Cheeto dust, all the glories of Creation nothing more than the nocturnal emissions of an idiot savant, such that my rage could not be explained away in terms of “anger management” or immaturity or toxic masculinity or any other earthly phenomenon, but was in truth a divine force, God’s wrath, like lightning sprouting from the ground, not a whimpering man-child in the midst of a conniption but the very universe becoming conscious of itself, of its innermost nature, i.e. its own abominable stupidity, thereby acceding to a rarefied awareness that can only be described as transcendent, or so I reassured myself, lying splayed on my mat as the hold music played.