I leave the room for one minute — to get a soda, or answer the phone, or to yell at one of our dogs for barking at three thousand blackbirds swarming in the sky above, so many birds that the sky is blotted out, so many birds undulating in one giant mass that it looks like God is shaking out a quilt, then settling in a row of trees, gossiping madly in the branches, crapping arbitrarily on the hoods of our cars and our neighbors’ cars, torturing the dogs with their diving and whooshing, quite startling and beautiful if you haven’t seen the Alfred Hitchcock movie about them, quite mysterious if you know absolutely nothing about the species or its migration patterns, quite fascinating if you are a 6-month-old boy and have had it up to here with your mushed-up sweet potatoes and have been crying for 30 solid minutes — where was I?

Oh yeah, I take Jack out for one minute, and when I get him settled down, when he has been mollified or mesmerized by these birds — where did all these birds come from anyway? — we go back inside, and his mother has turned the station to another design show. Maybe you have seen these shows. There are several of them — I think there were originally two, but they were scheduled next to each other and have since multiplied. Now there are dozens, perhaps hundreds.

I believe there is a cable channel devoted exclusively to shows in which bad houses are transformed into good houses, or uncool houses are miraculously made over into cool houses, or neighbors get to redesign each others living rooms, or kitchens, or whatever. You get a budget of a thousand dollars, an interior designer who looks like a model, and a team of carpenters, who also look like models, and in just a few hours, your house or your room looks completely different as the gorgeous men and women sweat over your place in their tight jeans and cut off shirts, sawing and painting, nailing and sanding, oohing and aahing, until the “Big Reveal,” when you reappear and survey your new home. You are amazed, simply amazed. You are especially pleased over the new love seat that was fashioned from a bunch of old Dinty Moore Beef Stew cans and two dozen Nerf footballs.

Tammy loves these shows. I think it is fair to say that she is addicted to these shows. She needs to get into a program. No, not one of the design programs, which has become her fondest wish. I mean a 12-step program, one in which she is forced to say, “Hello, my name is Tammy, and I haven’t watched Trading Spaces in four days.” Then she gets a cookie. But not before she has made amends by letting me watch the Carolina Panthers’ game without a single sarcastic remark, no matter how subtle. Yes, the game WILL end sometime in this century. No, I do not think it IS possible to actually die from boredom.

She is always threatening to write in and get us on the show. Wouldn’t it be “just fabulous” if the crew showed up one day at our house with their circle saws and belt sanders? Wouldn’t I just love to see what they could do to our living room, or our television room?

No, I wouldn’t. As a man, I am genetically engineered to resist any change to my living environment. The red shag carpet from the early 1970s strikes me as retro and very cool, and I have come to really adore the ultra minimalist sensibility in decorating that informs the entire place. Which is to say, all right, we can take down the Ramones poster if you insist, but we are not putting up a twine ball sculpture of a chicken in its place. So we settle on nothing, literally. Nothing becomes our organizing principle, nothing our central motif. Tammy is not all that fond of nothing, but she prefers it to my decorating ideas, and I prefer it to hers. So there we are.

Would I like to see the designers show up at our house? Only if the birds are still here, only if I could somehow command them to sweep in and attack, only if all the beautiful model designers and carpenters were borne away on the wings of a thousand blackbirds. Now there is a show I would watch every week.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at jchriscox@bellsouth.net.)