Be Curious, Be Interested

December 31, 2011

The last few days everyone has been making those next year jokes.

I can’t believe I have to wait until next year to go to the dentist! Did you know we won’t see each other until next year? I promise, God, I won’t drink beer again until next year!

Either that, or they have been making lists. Lists recounting this year’s occurrences or lists trying to shape dreams into next year’s possibilities.

I like lists.

Are annual ‘best of’ lists arbitrary? Yeah, probably. But so are most temporal distinctions – that shouldn’t stop us from sharing some good things that human beings make. And this list includes things from before 2011, so it’s pushing boundaries and that sort of thing.

So here are a few.

Articles

Music

Five albums, arbitarily listed and with no accompanying information.

And: DJ Earworm’s 2011 United States of Pop mash-up, which means that in just five minutes you can recognize every popular song of 2011 without actually having to listen to each individually.

Movies

I didn’t see too many films in 2011, but I really like The New Yorker’s list. Here are the best films I saw this year:

Websites & Webstuff

The internet, thanks to its democratization and Web 2.0-ness and so on, is mostly drivel. Some excellent websites help track down the good stuff, one of which is Longreads: It is committed to finding pieces that are “not just for scanning but for reading, savoring and digesting.”

I don’t always want to read something I come across right away, which is why Instapaper is the best thing ever created. A simple read-it-later button sits in my browser and collects all of the content I want to read and saves it for when I have the time. It syncs automatically with iPhones and iPads. It sends all new articles directly to a Kindle. It’s free. Anyone with a commute or a desire not to try and remember everything they want to read would benefit from signing up for Instapaper.

This year, my love of Dropbox has really blossomed. Dropbox is free storage ‘in the cloud’, which doesn’t mean anything until you need a document that’s on a USB stick five hundred miles away. Then it means that all you have to do is log on to Dropbox from any device connected to the internet and the file is there waiting for you. Every document I write and every photo I take is automatically synchronized with Dropbox, and available anywhere in the world. If you do sign up, using my referral link will get us both extra storage.

Finally, it’s been a good year for music on the internet. Spotify, which freely and legally streams thirteen million songs, was released in the United States. It’s akin to a client like iTunes, but instead of hitting “Buy”, all you have to do is press “Play”. Another great music service is Turntable.fm. Earlier this year I wrote a story about Turntable, which is like those creepy AOL chat rooms from the 1990s with less predators and more music.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed the last few months of Yabot the Robot. I’ve written some of my favorite pieces here in 2011, and 2012 will bring either improvement or deterioration. Who knows.

I’ll see you all next year.

For Beginners

December 16, 2011

Lea is sitting at the kitchen table trying to solve a puzzle. A logic game. A brain teaser.

There are nine tiles with colored edges. Each edge is either red, green, blue, or yellow. The goal is to make a 3×3 square such that each edge is touching a same-colored edge.

Lea lays down a piece and then connects two red edges. She connects blue edges, green, blue, red, red, then yellow. The last piece is in her hand, but it doesn’t fit in the last empty space. So she shuffles the deck and tries again. Lay a piece, connect connect connect connect and so on until the last piece doesn’t fit.

Shuffle again, lay the pieces out, wrong again.

She tries to solve the puzzle like this eight times. Then she’s bored.

“Let’s playing something other than this stupid game.”

So she pulls out a box and takes out a fake needle and says: “I’m the doctor. You look sick.”

The puzzle is still sitting on the table. With her all-or-nothing approach, Lea had exhausted 8 of more than 350,000 possible ways to lay 9 tiles in a 3×3 box.

Recently I came across one of David Kendal’s blog posts, which requests that someone start a blog for beginners in philosophy.

I’ve had a passing interest in areas of philosophy for a long time, but never really known what to do about making it a more serious pursuit. The realm of philosophy seems so big; where should one begin? With the Ancients? The Renaissance? The philosophers of the modern day?

So I would enjoy a blog offering regular reading recommendations for philosophy, and a guide to the perspectives of the philosophers whose work it recommends.

When I was was starting Yabot the Robot, I considered writing occasional articles that distilled the thought of philosophers I have read into simple, readable prose. I found myself with two major problems:

  1. I am not knowledgeable enough for such an undertaking, and I think if the blog that David describes were to be created, it would need a team of authors – perhaps even a different author for each post.
  2. It is very hard to simplify challenging ideas.

This second point I know well. I started my philosophy thesis presentation with the goal that my mother would understand it. I even looked right at her at the beginning and said: “I’m going to try to make this so that you can understand it.” And then I started talking about infinite substance and synecdochic properties and ethical edification.

But maybe philosophy ought not be simplified.

I think of struggling with a philosophical text very much like reading a difficult novel. Which is to say: it takes time, and the experience of being uncomfortable is essential. And just like reading the plot summary of Moby Dick will only give you a mere glimpse of what is actually in the novel, reading a blog post about A Critique of Pure Reason will not give you knowledge about the arguments and ideas it contains.

In fact, it is usually harmful to prepare to read a philosophical text by reading a summary because you rob yourself of the challenge of following an argument. And this is another way that reading philosophy is like reading a novel: it’s not the goal to just get to the end or figure it out; the real intellectual joy is being right in the middle of some harsh desert or tropical jungle. (1)

Kendal’s post led me to an essay by Paul Graham called “How To Do Philosophy”, which may have been more aptly titled “How To Do Something Fairly Unlike Philosophy”. In his essay, which is an attack on the way in which philosophy is a “sea of words”, Graham sets sail for distant shores with confused ideas and polemical cannons as cargo.

Graham’s main argument is that pretty much all the work done so far in philosophy is incoherent:

When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet. There’s no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can’t distinguish them from placebos.

And the reason that Graham is the first one to profess this truth is because the other people who noticed it just didn’t bother.

And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.

Those people who went to find ultimate truth elsewhere also knew everything Wittgenstein knew, they just thought it’d be a waste of effort to say it.

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

Look, there’s a lot of ways I could go about criticizing the flaws in Graham’s essay. But it wouldn’t be worthwhile, because he repeatedly demonstrates in the piece that he’s made of straw.

He’s uncertain about how arguments function.

I took several classes in logic. I don’t know if I learned anything from them.

He’s unaware of a thousand-year period in the history of philosophy.

In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold: that it was not only acceptable to produce works like the Metaphysics, but that it was a particularly prestigious line of work, done by a class of people called philosophers. No one thought to go back and debug Aristotle’s motivating argument.

And he holds kitschy philosophical stereotypes – the sort of things that one unlearns in the course of bceoming educated – as the very ideas that he somehow learned by studying philosophy.

There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don’t exist.

Alas, I can confirm that he does exist and has subsequently produced an essay filled with dubious claims.

But for me, what is more troubling than his misunderstandings is the conclusion that he makes from them: that philosophy needs to be more practical. If those silly ideas did something, maybe asking fundamental questions would be worthwhile.

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics does anything differently as a result.

The reason Aristotle didn’t get anywhere in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless.

The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward.

Graham thinks that Aristotle is acting out a contradiction by exploring abstract ideas and assuming abstract ideas are useless, but he’s wrong in two different, important ways:

  • Aristotle is only performing a contradiction if we take it that the goal of human action is efficiency. It isn’t.

And more pertinent:

  • It isn’t true that Aristotle thinks that abstract knowledge is useless, it’s just that usefulness isn’t the aim. And because Graham repeatedly assails Aristotle but never quotes him, I will:

Evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… So we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake. (Book 1, Metaphysics)

The last line is important: where Graham says useless, Aristotle says free. And why free? Because perfect knowledge is not bound by circumstance; it is not bound by anything at all.

Aristotle is after the truth. He’s not seeking it because it will help him build a better mousetrap – though it may very well be helpful in that endeavor – but because he is curious.

And I guess that how I feel about philosophy and its relationship to human beings is pretty simple: I’m curious. Aren’t you?

We need to eat and sleep, it’s useful that we have roads and gadgets, and it’s nice to have a collection of cardigans or shoes – but: What can we know? What ought we do? What can we hope for?(2) No one tells us to ask these questions. And when we consider them, it’s not because we’re thinking of some practical benefit. We’re responding to a need.

Which is why I’m so baffled that philosopher lecturer Lee McIntyre recently published an article declaring that we need to “make philosophy matter—or else”.

The profession of philosophy has had ages to make itself more relevant…We need to show our students that—when it is done right—philosophy can help them to be better, more critical thinkers and communicators in their jobs. It can teach them to be skeptical of political rhetoric and advertising. It can help them to consider what is worth caring about and so perhaps to begin to make the world a better place…But what seems problematic is the widespread philosopher’s prejudice that we are somehow sullying our discipline any time we try to make a real-world connection.

The individual statements McIntyre makes are not wrong: studying philosophy does foster critical thinking and those skills can be used to make the “real-world” a better place.

On the subject of relevance, however, I disagree with McIntyre. I don’t think philosophy needs to be made relevant. Just as you don’t need to list your hopes on an index card to remember them, you don’t need to be convinced that considering difficult questions about your existence is important. It just occurs to you.

Knowing that those questions are important doesn’t mean that you’ll devote your whole life to them – the real-world is shiny and fun and distracting, after all.

And this is why Graham’s test of utility – “whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward” – doesn’t make any sense. There are all sorts of reasons why someone could intensely study philosophy and still lead an awful life. Shiny ardent zeal helps us “follow the worse” though we “see the better”.(3) I don’t think that makes philosophy a worthless pursuit.

An action can be judged by its efficacy or by its worth, but Graham only considers the former.

I think of it this way: I spend fifteen hours a week teaching German kids how to speak English, and most of the stuff I teach they forget. It may turn out that my teaching is ineffective, but it’s undoubtedly worthwhile.

And when I break down on that big blue bridge and I think and I think about my thinking and I dance that meta-dance ad infinitum as my anxiety rattles sixteenth notes on the hihat to accompany my slow glance downward – it’s a long way down – and those Big Questions occur to me, then it’s easy to see: philosophy is undoubtedly necessary; it needs no justification.

After a while, Lea says I’m now healthy, no doubt thanks to her toy medicine kit filled with fake pills that look like wooden peas, which were originally made when eastern Germany was East Germany and were later sold at a flea market along banks of the Elbe at a price that only nostalgia could afford.

So I sit down with the puzzle and I set the nine pieces down and look at each one, and then look at them all.

The puzzle, I notice, is already almost finished. I turn one piece and swap two others and it’s done.

Lea comes back but doesn’t notice that the puzzle is solved. She just says, “Hey you little pimple, do you want to play Twister or are you going to read like you always do?”

  1. Reading A Critque of Pure Reason has been compared both to crossing a desert on foot and to a tropical jungle. ↩
  2. Kant. ↩
  3. Spinoza’s Ethics, Part III. ↩

My Dad Slayed a Dragon

December 9, 2011

My dad has this story about an old computer game he used to play when he was just starting out with his degree in computer science.

I don’t remember what it’s called, though it’s probably something dramatic like “Dragon’s Breath” or “Scales of Danger”. There is no graphical interface, rather, the game is presented entirely as text. At the beginning of the game a few words appear, something like: “You have begun a dangerous journey, and you carry only a slingshot with you. What is your name, hero?”

And here my dorky twenty-year-old dad gets a choice: fantasy name or funny name. A name like Gandalf or Strider has benefits, but there’s also the latent desire to name the hero Penis or Captain Ovary. A name like that provides unending humor throughout the course of the game when it declares: “After traveling through the forest for a few days, Penis was exhausted and began to forage for food.”

By entering simple, intuitive sentences – “Go North” “Unsheath Sword” “Attack goblin” – my father navigated the textual landscape. He grew in power, collected loot, and impressed attractive elf women throughout the land — maybe. The part of the story my dad always tells me is the part I know he’s most proud of, which is the ending.

The hero reaches a cave where an awful dragon lives, but he only has a torch with him. A small torch is probably no match for a dragon, my dad must have thought. The game’s description confirms my dad’s fear: “A dragon is in front of you – it looks like you are no match for him.”  Then the game presented my dad just one option: “With only your torch, your only choice is to run.”

My dad, however, was no coward. He quickly entered the word that would earn his glory: “Attack.”

He risked the life of his hero, he risked the entire journey that he had undertaken, he risked everything, and it paid off: “You strike the dragon suddenly with your torch, and you have found his weak spot!  The dragon is slain!  Congratulations!”  The game ends as quickly as it began, and a once-unknown hero is thrust into the highest realm of greatness, thanks to a single foolish decision.

That hero is my dad.

Thanks, Dave

December 7, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I signed up for NextDraft, which is Dave Pell’s newsletter that reports “the day’s most fascinating news”. It is excellent and has led me to stories and sources that I would not otherwise have considered. I want to do something similar here.

I like to tell stories about my life, and those are the primary focus of this blog. There are a lot of great blogs that are primarily repositories for collected content – check out Bookshelf Porn, for instance. That isn’t what I want to do here. However: I bounce around other corners of the internet, and I come across a lot of great work. I want to share some of that with you.

I hope to provide you with an occasional spoonful of the best few things I find in this vast black hole of porn and vanity. Enjoy.

  1. I love hockey, and I have always enjoyed the fights. I’m pretty docile, but a bare-handed duel gets me pumped up to the point that I’d be inclined to say, “I’m so pumped!” Hockey is a dangerous sport – I knew that – but somehow it never occurred to me that fighting was especially dangerous. The story of NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard was released this week by the New York Times as a poignant series of videos. Boogaard died this past summer from a lethal mix of alcohol and pain killers – of which he took thousands to deal with the effects of repeated concussion. He was 28.
  2. Ken Jennings wrote an excellent piece today called “Globes in the age of Google Maps”, which served as my dose of needed nostalgia for the day.
  3. Finally, as a follow-up to the piece I wrote about making sacrifices, I want to tell you about a great website I found this week called 52×52. Organized by Jessica Hische, the site asks its users to make a pledge to donate a certain amount each week for a year. Each week the website features a cause that uses its donations well.

Mr. MacGuffin

December 5, 2011

The relentless hunt for a MacGuffin begins something like this:

GRUFF MAN: We have to get our hands on those files. It’s imperative.

NAIVE RECRUIT: But why, sir? What’s in the files?

GRUFF MAN: Did you hear me, kid? Finding those files is imperative.

A MacGuffin is a plot device that’s easy to recognize: it’s that thing that somebody wants. It could be a briefcase full of cash or it could be a sled. It doesn’t matter, as long as it starts the action.

And one of three things happens to a MacGuffin by the end of a story:

  1. The MacGuffin is completely forgotten.
  2. The MacGuffin is found (and acquired or destroyed or, in the case of that horrible film with the crystal skull, launches ancient ruins into space.)
  3. The MacGuffin is better explained or put into context.

The best case for a MacGuffin is the third one.

What I want to do here is put a MacGuffin into context, but not one from a work of fiction. Rather, I want to talk about that currently despised MacGuffin known as “The One Percent.”

You know: the one percent of Americans who are horrible and greedy. The rest of us average Americans live on Main Street and hate pepper spray and stand proudly with those just outside the top one percent who only earn $593,000 per year.

The One Percent was a good device to get us talking about inequality. It served the traditional MacGuffin role: starting the action.

Now, however, we are in the middle of things and we have to figure out what we are really after. We are not looking for a maltese falcon, but rather justice for human beings.

That’s what this article is about.

I have no practical knowledge of economics or business or law, and so my discussion here will largely ignore those angles. Instead, I will focus on the things that I am good at: telling stories about people and making strong demands with ethical arguments.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the bus stop chatting with a policeman. It was a Sunday and the bus only comes twice each hour. Talking is a nice way to forget that it’s freezing.

In the middle of our conversation, the policeman walked a few yards away toward a pile of patio furniture in front of a closed cafe. He unfolded a large umbrella and found a man sleeping inside. The guy was wearing ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. He had a two liter juice container filled with whiskey that he held under his left arm like a stuffed animal.

“You got a home?” the policeman asked him, setting the man up on a bench and gently taking the whiskey out from under his arm.

“I don’t know, man.”

He didn’t know if he had a home.

In one of my classes during my first year of college we were talking about hospitals.

“Who works there?” the professor asks.

Everyone sighs. Who works there? Come on, professor. We all know this crap already. A guy named Rob raises his hand, says, “Doctors. Nurses. You know.”

He’s right, he’s right. But, wait.

“And who else?”

Oh – we didn’t know we were supposed to be exhaustive. So now it’s a competition to think of the most obscure thing one can be employed to do in a hospital.

Janitor! Water Fountain Tester! Technical Support Guy! Sanitary Napkin Stocker! Vending Machine Operator! Dirty Laundry Collector!

And, Rob again:

“The guy who collects the dead bodies for research.”

Laughter, laughter. Dead bodies. Research. Zing.

Then the professor calmly asks us: “Which job is the most important?”

Rob is ready.

“We’re back to the beginning again now. The doctors, the nurses. They have the most important job.”

It seemed like he was right – the doctors and nurses have the knowledge and skills needed to promote health. And that’s what a hospital is for.

Except the question is intentionally misleading.

What we really have to acknowledge is that all of those jobs are important – in fact, all of them are essential. If the computers are not functioning, the doctors cannot access important records that they need to make decisions. Even jobs that we take to be menial – like taking out the trash, mopping the floors – are immensely valuable: how well is a hospital going to function if it’s unclean?

No job is the most important.

And if we’re going to condemn The One Percent – i.e. doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers, CEOs – we have to remember that our intuitive thinking is that they are the most important. Yet there’s no influential politician who doesn’t have hundreds of human beings supporting him, no successful CEO who doesn’t have specialists translating his ideas into actualities, no doctor who doesn’t have someone to clean up the shit and blood.

And traditionally the reason why The One Percent earn the most money is because we think that they should. We think that large amounts of money are the best way to motivate individuals to do jobs that require a lot of skill.

But that’s not true. The good people doing far-reaching jobs are doing what they want to do, what they’re suited to do. I’m thinking here of someone like Steve Jobs, whose yearly salary at Apple was one dollar and who worked the day before he died. No one works the day before they die because they want to increase their net worth.

And I’m not advocating the implementation of some sort of socialist experiment: Pay everyone the same and let’s see what happens!

Rather, I think we need to unwind our thinking a bit before we can properly address the problem of wealth inequality, because currently we are reprimanding the wealthiest for doing exactly what our default position mandates: do a job that is Very Important and you can take home the big bucks; do a job that Well Somebody Has To Do It and you’re pretty much a failure.

If we agree that every job makes necessary contributions, our view of earnings should reflect that by becoming more moderate.

In other words:

  1. The highest earners should be making less, because their current wages are based on a false notion that they perform in isolation.
  2. The lowest earners should be making more, because the work that they do is vital.

And we should all strive to do those things that we are most suited for. I could never be an architect or a X-Ray technician or a carpenter because what I do well is write – but all of us have a role and we should never look down on someone who is doing any sort of hard work.

It all needs to get done.

It was an icy eighteen degrees outside the night that man slept in an umbrella. The same night, six thousand miles away in Egypt, a two-week old baby died in his mother’s arms having never been inside a building and having never felt water on his skin.

The philosopher Peter Singer wrote an article called Famine, Affluence, and Morality, which discusses the duty the rich have to the poor.

The impetus for Singer writing the article was a 1971 famine in East Bengal, but the situation today is no less dire. Some human beings have the luxury of playing Angry Birds all day and their greatest problems (“First World Problems”) are, for example, only having $100 bills when they want to buy a pack of gum. Other human beings are homeless and starving, abused by their own government and neglected by wealthy countries.

Singer’s assumptions are hard to disagree with:

  • “Death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad.”
  • “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.”

And his argument is quite simple:

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

What ultimately follows is this: Those of us who have more than we need ought to give things away until we reach the point where giving up more would cause more suffering than it prevents.

When you consider that giving up trivial objects can relieve someone from great suffering, it’s hard to imagine that collecting such objects is very important.

I don’t want this post to resemble those sensationalist commercials where a man with a beard walks down a street covered with glass and hubcaps and picks up a famished baby and says, “Zandra here hasn’t eaten for two weeks. For just ten cents a day…” – and yet, isn’t it true?

Those of us lucky enough to be affluent in the year 2011 live more comfortable lives than the royalty in any other century in history.

And it is luck that I am here and now and not there and now.

I remember when we read Singer’s article in a philosophy class in college and the typical reaction was: “I earn the money that I have, so Singer is overstepping his bounds to say that I have a duty to give it away to the poor. I can decide to do that, but I can also decide to do whatever else I want with it.”

It’s true that middle class Americans earn the money they make – the same applies, of course, to The One Percent – but what they didn’t earn is what very few people have, namely, the opportunity to be born in that place at that time.

That’s just luck.

We need to remember that: there’s nothing fundamentally different about how a starving Somalian landed on this ramshackle planet – she just landed in a different place. A place that’s harder than any I’ve known.

After a few minutes a police car came to take the homeless man away, wrapped in a blanket. He never stopped looking back at the nearly empty container of whiskey that had been tipped over by the wind.

The police officer said goodbye to me, said that that guy would be back again some day.

“He fucked up his life,” he told me.

But still – he needs help.

The same week I saw the man at the bus stop, a young guy in New York City was getting prepared to leave the temporary housing where my girlfriend Lily works – his time there was almost up. And where the hell do you go when you don’t know how to find a job and everyone thinks that you messed your own life up, that you’re causing yourself to suffer?

I have no idea.

Just yesterday Lily told me about another guy who came to her and asked if there was some way he could move back into the building. There is not. All she could do was offer him some advice on other places to try.

And I’ll tell you: Lily is tremendously empathetic and must have felt that guy’s despair. She earns no money for the work she does, but I wish she did, because she’d know what to do with it.

And I wish that I was empathetic in the same way that she is, because I think it is that ability to look at someone and really believe that could be me that the world needs.

It is so difficult to get out of my own perspective – every experience I have reinforces the fact that I am at the center of it all! – but it’s something resembling objectivity that helps human beings act ethically.

We have to try to get out of ourselves, because if we don’t then the only suffering we know is our own. And we’ll forget that the man sleeping in an umbrella is us in a different battle, us in another scene, us weeping and dreaming and asking, “Why?”

Our life is not a movie or maybe in the opening sequence you are chasing after some Mr. MacGuffin, but it’s just acting after all so you go to the director to ask what your motivation is and hanging on the wall behind him is one index card for every actor in the film, that is, one index card for every human being that was/is/will be – it’s a big production, a big wall – and according to the cards some of the actors play generals and some play presidents and some lovers and some farmers and some builders, some die in burning houses and some get out in time, some ford the river and some die of cholera, some nights some sleep and some nights some don’t, some live and some die and then the some that live die too, and you, you’re supposed to kill that son of a bitch Mr. MacGuffin but you can’t find the guy anywhere, he doesn’t hang out with everyone else, he doesn’t even have an index card, so one day in the middle of shooting you pick up that damn camera and you sell it to the guy who plays a pawn shop broker and he gives you two thousand bucks for it and you give it all away and when the tape runs out some metal needle spinning in a deep dug well worn groove tells you that you got him, you did the right thing.

The Switch

December 1, 2011

Look way up there and you’ll see him. High above that sulking valley is Samuel, his thumb on the switch.

When I passed him, he was sitting in a lawn chair behind the guard rail nodding at every car that drove by. Just a little polite nick of a nod. In quick succession he nod nod nods at three cars going from his right to his left.

Just before I saw Samuel, I thought to myself: I wonder if a human being controls this stoplight.

I was driving on some horrible mountain road: the kind whose upkeep consists of putting up signs to warn drivers of everything that will never get repaired. The kind of road whose curves are so curvy, whose loops are so loopy, that you get out Roget’s and wonder if maybe the road is coiling or even undulating.

And suddenly I’m stopped. We’re all stopped. Why are we all stopped here?

A stoplight.

Here above clouds on a road where no road should be but is there’s a stoplight set up like a joke or a prop.

Just beyond the stoplight, there’s a narrow hairpin turn, and titan cars are careening around it and toward me. They’ve got a green light somewhere around that turn assuring them: Go on! Go! No one is coming!

And I thought to myself: I wonder if a human being controls this stoplight.

We’re waiting, they’re driving – but what if someone sent us all hurtling around that corner at once for love of fireworks and mayhem? Why am I thinking about that? Does that mean I’m that sort of person? Would I do that? I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. I could never do that, but someone could, right?

Someone could kill us.

Green light and I make the turn slowly. And that’s when I see Samuel, sitting on his chair. He’s wearing an orange vest and basketball shorts. As he gives me that routine nod, he leans back a little bit and keeps himself from falling backward by curling his toes around the bottom of the guard rail, one small segment of which looks new.

Then I see his thumb making circles.

He holds his thumb just above the little widget that controls the stoplights. It looks like a TV remote and in the middle is something that is not quite a button and not quite a lever – it’s some kind of switch that no one ever found a name for. Or maybe switch just seemed okay.

I finish the turn but I can’t stop looking in the mirror at Samuel and that one section of the rail that’s newer, brighter than the others. I wonder how Samuel gets there in the morning. I wonder if someone works the night shift.

I wonder and wonder and wonder, but not in succession – no one wonders in succession – and when all those sensations subside I notice that Samuel flips the switch with that wandering thumb and shit I think he’s trying to kill me so I look forward quickly and hit the brake then hit the accelerator because who knows which one you’re supposed to push anyway.

But I notice that I am already passed the stoplight, passed the cars and the people in the cars who are wondering: I wonder if a human being controls this damned stoplight. Samuel wasn’t trying to kill me.

Samuel was just flipping that switch at the right moment, nod nod nodding at everyone who streaks past him and never notices that he could kill them but doesn’t.

In fact, no one has died there since Samuel set up those stoplights nine years ago, the day after he was barreling around that turn and some condemned family smashed through a sedan-sized section of the guard rail to avoid hitting him and then sailed off toward some wintery sun, the luggage in the back and the voice on the radio beamed over landscapes looming larger and larger in the windshield that disappeared in a puff of smoke as the kid in the backseat woke up and said, “I’ve got it!”