Welcome back to Chapter 2 of Wifi at the Monastery. We’ve all missed you. I hope you’re all having a good summer and are ready for a fun romp in the woods with our nameless hero. Talk soon? RIP Ozzy.
I was hungry and lost. Not in the metaphysical sense, but in the visceral ‘I have no food and don’t know where I am’ sort of way. It had rained every day for the last two weeks, and I was stuck trudging through the muck of the uppermost Appalachian Trail. It had been eight days since I’d seen another human.
The words ‘Radon Internet’ hadn’t left my mouth in over one hundred and seventy hours. The sword cuts both ways.
Waterlogged and distraught, a doglike devotion to my employer — instilled during a byzantine, indoctrinating training period — and a preternatural instinct for survival urged me on. Having grown up on Discovery Channel survival shows, I knew the perils of trenchfoot, so I’d stop every forty-five minutes to burn a fire and let my socked feet dry.
I’d set fall traps and snares on paths to which I would never return, inspect mushrooms and tree frogs, neither convinced by their safety or hazard, and would move along. Each night, I’d construct elaborate lean-tos and rain-collection devices for my water supply. One particularly rainy day, I commenced to building a dug-out canoe from the deadfall in the forest.
My impulses, natural and learned, were competing. My will to live — and to embody television personality and my personal hero Bear Grylls — was constantly subverted by the effects of my Radon Internet onboarding. We were told to ‘Eat, Breathe, and Sleep Radon.’ And once we inculcated the virtues of the company fully and were dedicating our waking and digestive lives to the company, we would then be asked to Deliver, Implement, and Exemplify Radon. ‘DIE Radon’ we would wall chant after our morning struggle session where we dimed on our fellow trainees.
After the traps had been set, the shelter was complete and the fire was crackling, I’d forget about the hunger pangs and I’d pull out my company-issued cell phone.
Tired of your phone battery dying too quickly? Try the brand-new Wave cellular phone from Radon Internet with improved half-life in three exciting sizes, tsunami, light, and micro!
The internet connection was weak in the area and the Radon Internet technology required a critical mass of users before the satellites and services really got to humming. And seeing as our sales mission was only in its larval phase, there really was no connection of which to speak. The only site I could access was the company’s English-language page, replete with its latest press releases and mission statements.
The maps app was still in beta.
A solid two-decades-worth of media consumption was really catching up to me. During the moments where I didn’t believe I was an American Bear Grylls filming a new series in the American Northeast where the cameramen hid amongst the trees while they followed a more depressed, less competent survivalist in the woods, I found other phantasms.
In the darkest hours of the night, I’d be woken by strange sounds in the distance. Low rumblings, mechanical hissing, and whispering voices. I’d cloak myself in mud and leaves every night before I slept to camouflage myself from these invisible assailants. I began to believe I was in Episode 7 of Ken Burns’ excellent TV series The Vietnam War. My pack weighed a ton, the jungle was thick, and Charlie was everywhere.
During those hours, I would sing ‘I Can’t Write Left-Handed’ by Bill Withers quietly to myself as I humped through the bush. I only knew the first line and the chorus so the song came in quick repetitions, turning itself into some self-limiting mantra and less of a protest song. There was a lot of humming in to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. I had to keep quiet though; I must have been behind enemy lines since I hadn’t seen American troops for God-knows how long.
Something you learn pretty early on in ‘the shit’ as we called back in Nam, is that you can’t trust your senses. It could be hours trudging through triple canopy before you see the sun. North doesn’t stay North for long in those circumstances. Even things like your sense of smell or eyesight can be misconstrued. Movement in the branches looks like an enemy soldier when it’s only a small rodent rushing off into the brush. Gun powder and agent orange smell surprisingly like local fauna so you never know when the enemy — or your friends — are nearby. Shoot first, identify later.
I was second-guessing myself at every conceivable moment. Which side of the tree did moss grown on? Did I just trip a land mine? Had I seen this dugout canoe before? Should I not have urinated on my sprained ankle? I was going in circles.
The only times where lucidity prevailed were the nights I was kept up late by the blue light of my phone. I would read promotional material from Radon, check the employee message boards that were routinely scrubbed of any verbiage that might be considered insubordinate or possessing too much personality, and rehearse my sales pitch long after smothering my fire in a paranoid panic. I would read until my eyes blurred and I found myself, thumbs twitching, in the outskirts of Pewter City looking for Pokémon.
It’s unclear how many days went on like this. I would leave communiqués to my comrades on the exterior wall of that godforsaken wooden vessel every time I had the misfortune of passing it by.
‘Check the traps.’
‘Rain coming.’
‘Charlie don’t surf.’
‘Do you think he should?’
Having never practiced meditation or prayer, in my darkest moments, I was only able to recite sitcom theme songs and commercial jingles in my most desperate pleas for solace. Whatever higher yearning that belonged to my subconscious had long ago been decimated by ads for poisonous food, medications I would never need nor ask my doctor about, and hours upon hours of situational comedies. I would have called upon a supreme being if only I knew the words, but then those spells of despondency, I could only recall words like, ‘Get your title back with Title Max!’ or ‘Toots! Good food and fun!’
The god-shaped hole in every man’s heart was eagerly and voraciously set upon by the corporate interests of the late 90s and early aughts, and I am but a humble vessel.
My feet were beat, and I was slowly starving. My psychological walls of reality were caving in, and an undignified death was a foregone conclusion. It was around this time that a particularly passionate recitation of the theme to NBC’s hit show The Big Bang Theory yielded the miracle for which I was looking.
‘And it all started with the Big Ba—’
A small stone came tumbling in my direction from a path I’d never seen before. It was lined with stacked rock retaining walls winding off towards some undisclosed peak. I wiped the drool from my face and stumbled up the trail. My haggard breathing increased with every passing step as I scrambled over roots and rocks, tripping all the way. After over an hour of feverish ascension, my lungs were burning white, and my knees and palms were dripping with fresh blood.
Exhausted, I collapsed in the dirt, resigned to whatever cruel fate was about to befall me. Before I buried my face in the black soil, during my final gasp for air, there they were.
Beneath a tattered robe that lilted in the mountain breeze was a pair of unwashed, unshod, unnamed feet.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA