True Tales: May 2011 Archives

I've been working on a post since the 19th of April which is apparently too loopy even for me, because although I know exactly what I want to say, the words have formed into a big crazy ball of Sufism and Hermeticism, with a bit of Theosophy thrown in for flavor, all wrapped around a core of love, romance, and the immanence of God, which is a pretty heady mixture for an atheist to be writing about.¹ I'll get it finished eventually, but first I have to figure out how to not sound like a loon while I do it.

Let's leave that aside for a moment to ponder the mystery of the Beeping Dumpster Device in the Night.

Friday night, while out for an evening constitutional that had nothing to do with tobacco, I happened to pass by the dumpster enclosure that's below my bedroom window. My ears detected a faint beeping noise. Curious, I opened the gate to the enclosure, and, lifting the dumpster's lid, determined that the beeping was coming from somewhere amidst the trash inside of it: dit-dit-dit...dah-dah-dah...dit-dit-dit. Repeated, over and over. If you know a bit of Morse code you'll recognize that as: S-O-S.

There was an electronic device of unknown origin in the dumpster below my bedroom window, emitting an audible distress signal.

I couldn't immediately think of any such manufactured device: even an iPhone isn't smart enough to know you've accidentally thrown it away and call for help. I decided that I had to discover the source of the signal, and went to my apartment, returning to the dumpster armed with a flashlight. I propped open the lid, and lifted a couple of packed white kitchen trash bags out of the way. The beeping got louder. I poked and prodded at more well-stuffed garbage bags, noting the dark fluids that mushed against the plastic, and although I could narrow down the general location of the signal by its sound, I could see nothing with the flashlight. It was likely that the device, whatever it was, was inside one of those gloopy-looking bags. After a few more minutes ineffectually moving bags around, I decided that I'd had enough of being mistaken for a vagrant for the evening. It was cool, and my bedroom window would be open, so I covered up the general area of the signal with trash bags, muffling the noise. Closing the lid dimmed it further.

Later, as I lay in bed reading, I could--if I focused my ears just so--still hear the distress call: dit-dit-dit...dah-dah-dah...dit-dit-dit.

Saturday morning, around 7AM, the garbage truck came, dumping the crashing contents of the dumpster into its back and carting them away. I thought of the mysterious device, packed somewhere among coffee grounds and papaya rinds, still earnestly broadcasting its signal in the darkness of the truck's innards. Eventually, the truck would be emptied. Would someone better equipped or more willing to sift through kitchen trash hear the beeping, and seek out its source? Or would the device continue beeping, on into a landfill, its signal lost in the roar and crunch of dozers and dump trucks.

And, more importantly: what was the device? What sort of device does that, just beeps out a distress call that wasn't yet in common usage when the Titanic went down? Was it already beeping when it was placed in the trash, or did it somehow start transmitting after the dumpster's lid closed over it? Did the person who threw it out know what it was? Was it, perhaps, a device intended to spark exactly the sort of weird little evening encounter I'd had with it? A speaker, a couple of chips, a 9-volt battery, all pranksterishly intended to entice the curious?

I'll never know. It's Sunday evening, and while I wish now that I'd had a bit more fortitude and searched a little more thoroughly for the device, there's also something to be said for the mystery of it as it stands. A forlorn call for assistance, transmitted from a trash bag, intended for...whomever.

¹My particular problem with today's fashionable capital-A Atheism is that at the popular level, a good deal of it seems to be a exercise in pseudo-intellectual hipster me-tooism, with people who want to be publicly clever setting up massive god-shaped strawmen, knocking them down, setting them on fire, and pushing them off a cliff. Yes, that's entertaining, but reducing a human language project that's been going on for over 10,000 years down to a belief in the Bearded Sky Ghost and then oh-so-bravely declaring you Don't Believe In That Nonsense demonstrates all the intellectual depth of a puddle in Harvard Yard. It seems to me that too many people have mistaken reading The God Delusion for full engagement with the subject. Also: if your shiny new rational belief system is accompanied by merchandise such as a "hard enamel lapel pin with a silver edging and back with deluxe locking barrel style clutch," you're playing on the same field as that yahoo in the Ford F-150 with the Jesus fish on the tailgate.