Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
1. Migration
Over the years, I’ve had a fair share of pretty odd jobs. I worked the graveyard shift for a pickle factory, delivered fireworks to parking-lot fireworks stands, answered the phone as a tutor for this high school kid up in Noatak, Alaska and these private school prepsters at some place called Pillow Academy in Mississippi.
Bagging groceries? Yep.
Umpire for six-year-old T-ball games? Yep again, and who knew parents could be so invested? Come on, Ump! Get your eyes checked, dim wit! My kid is being scouted by the New York Yankees!
How about loading panel trucks at the warehouse hub in Spokane? I did that too, also on the graveyard shift, like I’m some kind of low-wage vampire, loading trucks for United Parcel while the northside suburbs were under construction; meaning, every night new street names popped up on the map—Lake Street, Lake Court, Lake Route, Lake Place, Lake Lane, Lakeside Boulevard, Lakeview Circle, Lake Vista Avenue—and each one had its own designated space on the shelves. Oh, and I also had a manager, a manager whose job seemed to be just following me around. I’d run back and forth from the conveyor belt to a truck with this dipshit shadow over my shoulder, with this ass-clown behind me like a backpack, and all the time shouting his mantra in my ear: “Work harder, work faster.” I want to say I punched his face in for him, but no.
And then there was this one—not a job, exactly, but it felt like one. I was home, visiting for Christmas, and my mom had this to say: “People I know think you’re funny. I don’t think you’re funny at all. Say something funny.”
“You mean, now?”
“Yeah, right now. Let’s see if I laugh.”
I wasn’t successful.
So anyway, jobs—maybe you’ve had a few doozies too.
But some jobs are way too important to quit, like migration and being the moon:
“It’s Time, It’s Time, It’s Time”
Hello, migration—bird after bird,
pushing the wind around.
Down here the moss is still green,
but I follow your point, and I like your honking.
There’s always more work to do, isn’t there?
It’s getting cold.
2. Being the Moon
When I lived in Spokane in the 1990s, I didn’t mind the lights, so I didn’t close the blinds. But one night, I woke up and the light in my room was bright red, not the usual. Like the building across the street might be on fire and I should get the hell out of there.
It wasn’t on fire, though. In fact, nothing in the city was in flames—just a strange rectangular glow about a half a mile away.
I put on my glasses, looked again, and saw this giant, hideous block-lettering that spelled, BUFFET. How pathetic is that? Extremely.
Not that I got dressed and went and shattered the sign with rocks, but I absolutely thought about it. And I still believe it would’ve been the right thing to do:
“Open 24 Hours”
Our moon wasn’t born
to look down at neon skies.
That was never in its forecast.
It can glow. And it predicts the tides,
those blue-green birthdays
always arriving.
It can pass for one minnow in the universe,
and yet still tell the sun, “Hold on,
just keep sitting in the east,
you aren’t the driving song of astronauts.
I’m a medium,
the strange lines in their palms,
but to look at you
is to blink.”
No wonder the moon
used to fire our legends.
What made us think
we can confiscate the night?
P.S.: I’m not sure this is related directly, but it does seem related at least indirectly, and I thought it was interesting, so you might think so too. It’s something I heard on NPR about a month ago, a segment of a show on AI “learning” models. Apparently, researchers give their AI simple tests in order to see if it’s capable of solving problems the way that people do.
Turns out not so much, although this wasn’t the conclusion I heard on the radio. What I heard was this: The researchers fed their AI a question to answer (I’m paraphrasing now, but this is close): Let’s say Maria and Georgia are roommates, and the two of them have a cat. There’s a basket and a box in the apartment. Before Maria goes to work, she puts the cat in the basket, and leaves. Then, before Georgia goes to work, she moves the cat from the basket to the box. Where do they think the cat is when Maria and Georgia get home?
The researchers thought their AI did okay because this was its response: that Georgia will think the cat is in the box because that is where she moved it. Maria will think the cat is in the basket because that is where she put it, and she does not know that Georgia moved it. The cat will think it’s in a box because it is. The box and the basket will not think anything because the box and the basket are not sentient beings.
Maybe you think that’s funny, I don’t know, but to me it’s stupid and spooky. I also think I know why this happened, and it isn’t the reason the researchers and show hosts were guessing. They supposed that maybe the AI was trying to show off, as if—what?—it could up and say to itself, “Oh man, this’ll impress ’em.” I’m sorry, but no. An impulse like that would be human, and AI isn’t human. It isn’t even the myna-bird impressionist echo of a human. Forget about it. And here’s why this happened… not that anyone’s taking bets on it, but if they were, I’d win some money. My bet is that it spit out this answer because of the word “they.” That pronoun is why the AI counted the cat, the box, and the basket along with the two human beings. It didn’t distinguish between the nouns in the question because to AI we aren’t more important than a box. It didn’t assign us more value because it isn’t alive, it isn’t really reasoning, and it doesn’t have ethics or emotions.
So maybe not so funny after all.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by Robert Owen-Wahl, courtesy Pixabay.
