I am trying to be more content with what is in the now.

Take I-25 northbound up to exit 235. On the side of the road is a church with a giant cross plastered on its eastward side. It’s lit up a burning hot yellow, a burning cross for a burning church in the burning heart of America. My eye is drawn, like a moth to the flame. I turn to my lover, tell him it’s reminiscent of the American Gothic, and don’t you quite agree with me? Drive west a little. Drive west a little more. Off to the left of the road, the only light for miles and miles is the deep blue porchlight, screwed into the cover of a farmhouse room. It’s beautiful, I’ll tell my lover, like something straight out of a horror film. I can picture getting murdered as I step into the mid-century farmhouse. 

And he’ll say to me, the closer we get to the right turn that takes us off of 52, American Gothic in the sense that we’re always swimming upstream. As though I’ve just stepped into the river with stones in my pockets. 

These days, the only time I disconnect from the social media noise machine is my nightly drive from Brandon’s to my home, from my home to Brandon’s. Always the drive is at the heart of night, on roads hardly lit, that seem to imprint themselves in the center of America forevermore. 

In small pockets I see cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods, each of them lined up in clustered rows. They’re those new builds, with large living rooms and small squares of backyards. I’m sure the closest grocery store is, bare minimum, a half hour away. It’s a pocket of middle-class life where it doesn’t belong. But who am I to judge it? The kitchens are spacious, the dust storms ethereal. 

When I was younger, I was content to stay in the car for long stretches at a time—just watch the land roll past my eyes and into my head. I was bored in a novel sort of way, the kind you can only feel at seven, when everything is new and old hat to you. I took to memorizing the landmarks around my childhood home, the way to my grandmother’s house, the way it felt to pull into my church’s parking lot. These memories stemmed into feelings of wholeness in the center of my stomach, I could feel them blossom and grow. It left a fuzzy sort of feeling in my shoulder, a contentedness. 

I felt this novel sort of boredom in church all the time. We used to have a chapel, but it was built on unstable soil. There were literal cracks stretching across the walls in the steeple, where the concrete was splitting apart into imperfect opposite directions. Pastor Steve’s wife covered them with duct tape, to stop little girl fingers from sticking their way in and running along the sharp grooves of a cracking chapel. 

Isn’t it the perfect picture of the American Gothic?

We moved our church into its adjacent gymnasium, where they used to hold basketball tournaments and the AWANA club. My mother ran the coffee cart, selling King Soopers donuts for 50 cents a pastry. I sat in pretty dresses on cold metal chairs and followed the black lines on the gym floor to their natural conclusions. I can still smell the plastic rubber balls and leather Bible covers. 

Nowadays, the patterns of carpet and couches have fallen to the foreground of my mind’s eye. Our attention spans are so precious, but I sold mine for a small fee and some loose dopamine hits which never seem to arrive quite right. Kids these days will never learn how to read a Bible story or get motion sick from the rolling black rubber roads. I can’t say it’s better, in a specific sense, to learn about Samson and Delilah—I don’t go to church anymore and I never felt the spirit of the Lord in that precisely Christian way. But I’m glad I felt the sun on my back and stared into the open sky for a few breaths. I’m glad I outlined the dimensions of the Tabernacle. I’m glad I stuck my hand in the cracks of the concrete wall. 

To stay in the now has become a difficult task. The working class can no longer afford to be bored. At least, I fear this to be the case. Think of it this way—with the advent of the cell phone, we can no longer turn our outside selves off. I must always be available to my boss, my friend, my lover, my mother. Otherwise, you might miss an email or a phone call, jeopardizing your whole career, relationship, family. And once you are already online all the time, you might as well play the social media slot machine. This is different from the intrusion of the television or the novel, in the sense that you might get sick of whatever program or author you’ve chosen. But I’ve been warned by my elders, there’s a chemical consequence to the ever-popular short form content. Our attention spans are shrinking. 

Sometimes I wonder how much I’ve made a billionaire in advertisement. Is the cashflow worth my ability to focus? Someone did an equation on an office desk, they calculated how much I’m worth. Google learned everything about my personality, down to the very last drop of my soul, and sucked it dry for a couple extra cents. If I had any say in the matter, I’d turn the whole thing off. My cell phone, my laptop, even my television screen (save the occasional film). This is not some novel revelation—I’ve already lost hours to the content machine. But I have work to do, three jobs demanding my semi-permanent presence. I have phone calls to make, transportation to arrange, clothing to buy, furniture to sell. 

If I could go back in time, I like to think I’d count the eyelashes on my lover’s eyes a few more times. I’d wonder a few more moments about who once lived in the abandoned three-story house by my uncle’s place. I’d feel the moss on the side of the trees. I’d touch a painting in an art museum. 

When my father drove us to church, it was in impeccable silence. My brother and I were meant to sit in quiet contemplation of the Lord. Isn’t that an incredible thing? All I could do was stare out the window and watch the road unfurl before me. I hated it. I knew he stopped believing in God when he started playing the radio on our way to church. Boredom was a holy experience. And he was no longer interested in the Lord. 

As a child, this suited me fine. I was never interested in being bored. Now I miss my capacity for boredom, the way I’d press my forehead to the car window, feel it imprint in my skin. Make up stories and turn them over in my mind. Picture myself stepping onto the porch of an abandoned home, letting myself inside. 

Really, I’d sell my attention span for another second of a dopamine hit. It’s the way my brain has been trained. The information highway stretches onward. I’ll take cherished pockets of boredom on I-25, turn to my lover, tell him I can just picture the pews inside that church—the old velvet kind, that were nice 30 years ago.