The Little Apartment on the Prairie

There’s something in a Sunday

that makes the body feel alone.

Johnny Cash

It has long been my practice to “honor the sabbath,” that is, take one day off every week to rest, no work, not even writing, and for me that day was Sunday. In California it was easy to do–I had so many nearby friends and family, and it was a short drive to San Francisco–but in rural Minnesota Sundays were excruciating. At least during the week, I had my writing and teaching, but on Sundays in a town of 12k there wasn’t much going on. I spent the day in my Default Mode Network (DMN) of consciousness. Neuroscientists say this is the part of the mind that takes over when you’re not focused on a task. It is the “idle mode” of your cognitive engine, and it’s far away from Flow.

When you are in Flow, there is no time and space. There is only the work that you are focused on –until you snap out of it and realize time went on without you. You might say that in the DMN, you are rooted in time, sometimes chained to it. You are living the minutes, slowly.

The thoughts are mostly self-referential, which for me, back in Minnesota, were self-destructive thoughts, like, I’m not good enough. I’m too stupid to be a professor. They only hired me because I’m Chicano.

We spend up to 50 percent of our day in this state, so it must be evolutionarily useful. Unconstrained thought allows our minds to wander and to gather ideas along the way. Most thoughts may be mundane – What a pretty flower!– but great ideas appear from nowhere, and when it’s time to write, we bring those ideas to life.

On Sundays in Minnesota, I could’ve rented movies. I could’ve started a project –maybe built a desk or painted, I could have gotten drunk and blasted the music, but I wanted to do nothing for one day a week.

Both the DMN and are portals into Nepantla. In flow, you enter with a focus, and you want to perform a task–like writing code for a new system, or writing poetry, playing music, entering into a mathematical equation, but those sessions of deep work can only last short periods of time. Cormac McCarthy is famous for saying he only wrote two hours a day. What did he do the rest of his day?

In El Paso, I used to live a couple of blocks away from where McCarthy lived (appropriately) on Coffin Street. I would see him walking in the late afternoons down Mesa Ave, lost in thought, walking, clearly with no direction in mind. Or at least that’s what I imagined. When I would see him, like when I saw that little brown kid in rural Minnesota, I enter into his brain, and I am him. Mi otro yo.

There is a term I love in Spanish when walking without a goal, sin rumbo. Caminando sin rumbo. Without a destination. McCarthy did a lot of that, spent a lot of time in the DMN.

I can spend up to three hours in the Writer’s High, but I break it into 90-minute sessions. The rest of the day I might be performing other duties, department chair stuff, teaching, making lunch for my daughter, and as I’m performing these tasks, I find myself back in the DMN. When I’m making my daughter a sandwich, I feel the cheese in my hand as I place it on the slice of honey wheat bread, and I remember when I was a kid and mom packed us bologna sandwiches with American cheese and lots of mayonnaise on white Wonder bread.

Wonder bread.

What beautiful name for bread. When we were kids all we ever ate was white bread. I loved how soft it was when the loaf was new. I would reach inside the bag and pull out two middle pieces, put the softness to my nose and breath in. This wonder bread sparks another memory, years later, when I was 17. My high school girlfriend Ariana was at my house, and I said, Let’s make sandwiches. I watched in shock as she took out three slices of bologna and put them on her bread. Three slices? And I know this sounds ridiculous now, but my first thought was, Do all white people put three slices of bologna on their sandwich? We only put one slice, and I guess I had never thought of putting more. But that day I did the same as Ariana and put three slices, and it was delicious. After that day I have rarely made a bologna sandwich with only one slice of meat.

See?

The DMN is a great place for a writer, but you have to be able to use the self-referential thoughts for a positive framing of your life, not to conclude that your life sucks and so do you, like I seemed to do. I defaulted to my faults.

Also, the DMN is boring, and nobody wants to be bored. Parents will try to prevent their own children from boredom, and when a child starts to get restless, they feel they have to give them something to do, a screen, a hit of sugar­–avoid boredom at all costs. It breaks my heart when I see families at a restaurant or a grocery store and the six-year-old kid spends time by himself on a phone, watching videos or scrolling, or in a grocery store a little girl might be laying in the grocery cart as the mother pushes it around, and she is on the phone like there is nothing around her, not landscape, just that screen.

We need to be bored. Writers need boredom, because out of nothing to do come different glimpses into parallel realities. Ideas come out of boredom.

When my daughter whines that she’s bored I tell her to do something. Draw a picture. Read a book. Play outside in the backyard. She’ll groan, No! I’m so bored!

Five minutes later, I’ll find her in a corner of the house playing with dolls or puppets and making voices and telling whole stories with characters and conflicts, having so much fun that she’ll even laugh aloud. Out of boredom comes imagination.

Sundays in Minnesota were the DMN on crack. I worried about everything, lamented every decision of my life, like leaving California to live in a little apartment on the prairie. It was a mansion cut up into three apartments with a big front yard, wooden floors, and wooden staircases. My apartment was on the very top, what used to be an attic. It was large and had windows on all sides, so when I opened them, the breeze moved things around, and when the strong Minnesota winds came, books and papers flapped all over the place, and I had to close them. I couldn’t walk outside unless I walked down two flights of stairs, and in the cold, it took so much prep to dress in winter clothes. Mostly I walked around the apartment thinking, around and around, like a thought on a loop, over and over, around and around the same thoughts drilling into my mind. I can imagine that the mansion was shaped like a giant brain and my apartment on top was the prefrontal cortex, always thinking. It was great for a time, but thinking too much can drive a guy crazy.

I had to consciously stop thinking about bad things or the day could very well end up in drunkenness. Anything to avoid the pain.

There was nothing to do in that town, and if I wanted to go to the Twin Cities, the driving part would take 6 to 7 hours of my day, so I would get there and have to come right back. Sioux Falls, South Dakota was roughly an hour and a half away, and that was a small big city, so I went there a few times on a Sunday, once to go to Barnes and Noble, as Marshall had no bookstore.

Most Sundays I would take a walk around the town, passing by houses with families cooking bacon and gathering at the table for or sitting in front of the TV for a football game. I’d eat lunch at Perkin’s or walk the aisles of the Hy-Vee grocery store wondering what I could cook in my small kitchen with only two misshaped pans. One Sunday afternoon I happened to walk by the house of a faculty member in the English department, where I worked, and I could see the cars of other faculty members out front and I could hear the game from inside, and I realized it was Superbowl Sunday. I heard the screams when someone made a touchdown. They were having a party that I wasn’t invited to.

Then it so happened that one Sunday, about six months after I had arrived, I decided to visit the little indoor mall. I needed at least one new pan so I could fry eggs that didn’t stick to the bottom, and I wanted a good one. The mall was so small, not even a food court, just one anchor store, maybe a Sears or Penny’s, and a few little shops. I had expected to spend an hour or two there, but after I bought my pan, there wasn’t much else to see. I was walking to my truck, trying to think about what I could cook with my new pan, but I suddenly felt sad and thought about how much I miss California. Maybe I’ll just go back to the apartment, I thought, open all the windows and drink whisky in the cold wind. The Cash lyrics came to me.

On a Sunday morning sidewalk
I’m wishing, Lord, that I was stoned

When I was walking to my truck, I felt like someone was looking at me, and it hit me: I arrived at the future. I looked over to the hotel, and I imagined the other version of me looking at me. I waved at him, shrugged my shoulders as if to say, Yup. This is your life now.

This is the only time I have written about seeing myself in the future, but I often tell it to my friends. Some think I’m being woo woo or a romantic writer type, exaggerating the story for the sake of impact. But it’s a true story. Not fiction, not magical realism, but a real experience, and I can defend it throughout most metaphorical systems. If something is “true,” whatever that may mean, it can be explained across systems, physics, biology, mysticism, philosophy. That day I saw myself in the future, I may have gotten a glimpse of the infinite universe, Everette’s Many Worlds Interpretation, where realities exist and never existed. In one world, I got the job. In another world, I didn’t. And in even another world I was literally that little brown kid in the schoolyard running around in circles. Every possible universe exists in the Many Worlds Interpretation, and of course, Marvel and other comic books love to play with the idea. How can you not want to play with it? It’s fun to imagine.

And let’s not forget the brain. Since the 1970s neuroscientists have known that humans fabricate memory, or to put it another way, we deepen the meaning and significance of a memory every time we recall it. Memories are not stable. They do not mean one thing over time. The meaning gets greater and more nuanced every time we recall it. In fact, the memory of making sandwiches with Ariana might have taken on new meaning the more I recalled it as an adult. Maybe as I watched her put three slices of bologna on the bread, I didn’t think anything other than, Wow.

Maybe wondering about how white people make sandwiches didn’t come until years later, when I was recalling it. Now, it sparks the New York-Katz-deli neuron, the first time I went there. I was in my thirties, hanging out with a bunch of writers after a poetry reading in the Bowery, all of us people of color, and many of us a bit buzzed. I ordered a bologna sandwich. It wasn’t three slices of bologna. It was a tower of bologna, enough to make multiple sandwiches. Maybe in my tipsy head, I might’ve said, Do all white people use this much meat on their sandwiches? I remembered Ariana. Eventually, the memories became fused.

Elizabeth Loftus, a pioneer in memory research, says we “take bits and pieces of experience from different times and places and combine them together to construct what feels to us like a memory.”

When we are exposed to new information about a memory and then later we recall the memory we bring that information with us into the memory, and after a while, we can’t distinguish between the information that came later and the memory itself.

On 9/11, many people remember seeing the plane go into the building, even though the videos weren’t available until the next day. But because the images were so impactful and because they were about that memory, when we recall that day, we cannot help but to recall the images. They become fused into one memory.

Loftus’s also showed that scientists can create false memories, vivid memories of what never happened.

Loftus et al were able to implant a false memory into test subjects so that they believed that when they were a child, they got lost in a mall. Of the total group, 25% of the them believed that it was true, and they came up with amazing details about the mall, maybe venturing into a specific store or standing in the middle of a food court looking around and smelling corndogs and seeing the teenagers laughing as they ate and hung out together.

But they were never lost in the mall.

When I go back to the original memory of flipping through the channels in that hotel room, turning off the TV, walking outside and smoking a cigarette, looking across the parking lot and the tall grass to the mall and seeing myself, I cannot recall the exact details of the original experience.

It might have been out there smoking, trying to imagine myself living in this town, imagining myself coming out of the mall on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe I would be walking to my green truck and maybe the image seemed so likely that it hit me, I was going to be offered the job. Every time I recall the memory, I add more information, more meaning.

I must do the same thing when I recall the memory of being at that mall on a Sunday afternoon. I was in the DMN, so I’m thinking about my life. What am I doing in Marshall? Why am I here? Why did I take this fucking job? Why didn’t they eliminate me as a candidate when I was short with everybody and cried in the arms of the chair.

Walking out of the mall becomes a memory I keep returning to, and I bring new information, and it leads me to a stunning realization:

The day I walked out of the mall and recalled the hotel caused myself from the past to see myself in the present.

Alan Lightman writes about Einstein’s concept of time: “consider a world in which cause-and-effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first.”

That night at the hotel, I wasn’t seeing me in the future. I was and I wasn’t. It once was and it once was not. That’s a part of it. But it was also me in the future (which is now the past) being so damn bored on that Sunday afternoon that opened the portal.

The future caused the past.