<Channel 17: ESPN SportsCenter.
<Channel 18: a rerun of "Friends."
<Channel 19: a commercial for Taco Bell.
I click through television channels on a Michigan January night in between periods of a Detroit Red Wings hockey game, a bag of chips and a bottle of Coke on the nightstand of my tiny one-bedroom apartment. The sleeping bag I took with me in the divorce has been replaced with a stained-pocked burgundy love seat I bought for $20 at a Holiday Inn furniture sale. This is the same apartment where I found old newspapers lining the cupboards, hints of flowered wallpaper bleeding from a chip in the wall plaster, specks of yellow peeking from under a cracked tile. Perhaps the newspapers came from one person, the wall paper from another, the yellow paint from yet another. Now I've absorbed them and made them into a gelatinous now.
>: Commercial showing jovial kids stuffing burgers in their mouths
> A boxy utility vehicle climbs jagged rock.
> A spunky mom cuddles a baby
> Dial 10-10-whatever and talk and talk for $1.
< Channel 25: PBS. A violin plays dark lines as a dripping narrator voice laments the loss of some young man who died 172 years ago, lungs full of unhacked phlegm, on a rugged foothill of Colorado as his family traversed the Oregon Trail. His weathered grave marker survives, overlooking the cut geometric designs of neon lights from a nearby town. A power plant and a highway have been built around it. Families rushing home from church to check pot roasts zoom past the young man's remains. I wonder if his bones rattle from the hum of the kilowatts, or quake when huge trailer trucks loaded with beer ramble by. His earth must sound like bucks fighting in October, maple trees in December wind. I wonder if his soul swam relentlessly through the ocean of dirt and rock and mated crudely with rubber, metal, transformers, gilded towers. I want to think of him in colors—red-hot cheeks, blue shirts, orange laughs—but I see only bleached grave clothes and the glow of the clock on my VCR.
> Quick game check: Third period still hasn't started. I've missed the highlights of the second period while watching an excerpt of a pioneer documentary on PBS and fragments of product commercials.
> Channel 26: South Park. Cartman gets abducted by aliens. Saw it. Funny, though.
> The third period has started but I'm tired now. Agitated. Bored. Mostly tired. Hell with it. The Coke doesn't help. Nor the chips. I finish both. I'll catch the box score of the hockey game tomorrow.
<power>
In bed, I listen to the wind tug and push the maple tree in the yard. The branches scratch at the aluminum siding of the house. My mind devises a game where the branches are mallets of an instrument playing a tireless ode to me and for only me. It's a comforting thought, even if the sound is only the scratching of the branches against the house and nothing else.
Bill Milligan teaches composition, creative nonfiction, and journalism at Bay College in Escanaba, Michigan. Currently, he has a creative nonfiction piece accepted for publication in the winter 2008 edition of Rosebud. He has also published memoir pieces several times in Traverse Magazine.