O 1 Refridgerator Test

What happens when you shut the refridgerator door?

George was constantly drinking beer and he’d go to Jesus’ bodega and buy all the loose bottles of beer in Jesus’ store. He had no use for the full six packs, but if there were five in a box he had to buy it and then all the 22 oz. bottles and the 24 oz. cans and the the 30 oz. and 40 ouncers too. He’d come grunting up the stairs every day with all of Jesus’ loose bottles, but Jesus is cruel, or at least not an idiot and smelling a good thing he went around to all his bodega-running friends and family – collecting as many loose bottles of beer as they could spare from their shelves.

George was flush from selling that huge sculpture and he bought all of the loose bottles every day and now his studio had stacks of old milk crates full of warm beer and it was late and George had been acting crazy and he talked too much and I didn’t really want to listen to his yammer, but I was out of beer and I knew George would have some and so I walked down the hall and knocked on the door. I knew he’d be up. He never slept any more and he let me in and I tripped over a sculpture in the dark.

“What’s that doing there?” I asked.

”I had an accident,” George said.

The heavy steel sphere and had fallen from it’s concrete pedestal and crashed through the sheet rock wall and rolled to a stop against the wasll of warm beer filled milk crates by the door.

”What happened?” I asked.

“Fucking thing fell….I was trying to move it and you know, it fell…Newton.”

“You can’t move a thing like that by yourself, it’s hundreds of pounds, dude.”

“If you get the balance right, you can move anything…It’s the balance of action and reaction.”

“You got a cold one of those?” I asked, pointing to the can of beer in George’s hand.

“Sure,” he said and he went over to the fridge and opened it up and the dark studio filled with light and you could see the shadow of the sculpture, like a cracked egg and then it was dark again and then light and then dark. George kept opening and closing the door. “On,” he said. “Off. On……Off…..0,” he said. “1.”

I stood there for what seemed like minutes with he light coming on and going off and me just watching him and wanting that beer and getting a stream of 0s and 1s louder and louder.

“What if this refrigerator is really just a transistor?” he said. “Open is on, or 1 and closed is off or 0,” he said demonstrating by slamming the fridge door. “What if the whole town…or country, or world, or whatever is just an enormous semi conductor?…part of a vast computer and the whole electrical grid is just there to act on switches like this refrigerator…. all the stuff that’s plugged in is just transistors? Right? You see? We think that we have free will, but really we’re just a part of electrical force that opens and closes these switches. We’re part of some vast machine, but we don’t know it, see?”

He started opening and closing the fridge quickly and the light went on and off and on and off and he laughed and said, “What am I?”

“Nuts,” I said.

“What am I?” he said….”What am I?” he screamed over the thud and bottle clink sound of the door opening and closing. “I’m error delete,” he said. “I’m a mistake in the code… Get it? I’m error delete….”

“You think I could have that beer now, George?”