This story appeared in the Winter 2000 / Spring 2001 issue of the River Oak Review

Phil Schilling watched storm warnings creeping across the bottom of the screen while he sat on the living room couch with his wife, whose favorite television program was about to begin. Their county did not appear among the names of counties scuttling by, which made Phil question the point of the unrelenting creep of words. They wormed along, proclaiming the type of weather threat, the affected areas, and the suggested precautions. Then the words slunk by a second time. Minutes later, the process began anew. It interfered with Phil’s appreciation of the medical drama, in which a calm doctor suggested a patient would recover if treated with pills, while an excitable doctor wanted to try a tricky operation he was not qualified to perform but which he claimed represented the patient’s only hope.

Phil once lived a lively life of the mind as an aspiring member of the English faculty at a large university. Then, last year, he lost the promise of a tenure-track position in a battle over trendy theory and identity politics. He ended up working on a cemetery grounds crew and earned nearly triple what he would have made teaching on a per-course basis at the community college. After an exhausting yet enlightening summer — he learned how to do everything but operate the backhoe — he worked his way up to plot sales and, when a funeral home chain acquired the cemetery, he moved into a marketing job. In a few days, he would reach the three-month mark in this new job, at which point he stood to gain full-time, permanent status and a twenty percent raise. Now that he had a job in the real world, as he once called it, he had plenty of time to sit around in the evenings, watching television whenever his son, eight-year-old Nathan, did not seize control of the tube for video games. With this show, Phil usually took an interest in the orchestration of medical professionals’ soap operas and bloody messes crashing through emergency-room doors. In some cases, the professionals faced decisions in which either choice contained elements of wrong and right. While admiring these dramatic elements, Phil winced at the implications of his musings. Yes, with the collapse of his long scholarly enterprise, the years of hardship and suffering of fools, he had achieved a new consciousness that would have made him a star academic — he found merit in television!

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