Your honor, I would like, at the very start of this, to note that I did not know that overflowing the stack would kill the snake inside my computer. It took my an awfully long time just to get that python inside my machine and to get used to talking to it, so, really, if you think about it, it dying was the last thing I would have wanted.

How’d it happen? Well, sir, it all started … it all started so long ago that … well, it gets fuzzy in my mind.

You see, your honor, I am a plain man, a simple man. I don’t have mighty ambitions. I simply want to understand how people think. I’ve had this fascination ever since I was a young man and I went off to college and I found myself taking both philosophy classes and poetry writing classes. In the writing classes, I eventually wound myself up to want up to write a poem that was like a cathedral. That is, as you read the poem you would get the same feeling you got from being in a cathedral—I confess that I was not long back from my first trip to Europe where I had become quite fixated on rambling around the interiors of every cathedral in France that I could find.

So I had this idea for this poem, which I never really wrote, because as soon as I had the idea for the poem, I wondered how it is one could string words together in such a way as to capture a dynamic experience of space—by this point my college learning was doing me some good and I was beginning to get fond of saying things like “dynamic experience"—let alone communicate that experience to someone else. Luckily for me, in my philosophy classes we had gotten to phenomenology, and I spent the rest of my college years hoping to find, if not the answer to then at least the key to unlocking, my question.

Fortunately for me, the federal government, of which I am normally suspicious as a right-thinking kind of person, your honor understands, decided I needed more schooling—I guess I wasn’t smart enough yet—and so they gave me what they called a fellowship, because I guess I was a pretty decent fellow, to go off to a special school for others like me who needed more schooling. About the only that happened there, your honor, that you are probably going to want to know about so you can understand how I got in this fix more better is that I found myself up to my elbows in post-structuralism, and I took to it like a cow takes to fresh grass after a long winter. (And if you’ve ever seen those cows on Reddit, your honor, you know what I mean.) Those post-structuralists, well, they just seemed like they were asking the kinds of questions that needed asking: things like what was a text and how did things like texts get made and how was it we could pass these things we call texts around, like a bottle of the good stuff on a Saturday night, if you follow me, your honor, and I think you do—you look like a man who appreciates the finer things in life, if I do say so myself, sir.

Asking those kinds of crazy questions, and really wanting answers, kind of got me pushed out of the barn where all those bookish people were hanging out – and, really, your honor, you should send someone by there and check on them: some of them don’t seem right in the head, if you were to ask me. There were some other folks, however, folks calling themselves folklorists—so they seemed all right—that said I should join up with them, and, well, the government folks said I should keep on going to school, that I still had some more learning to do. And so I did.

Now this next part gets kind of tricky, your honor, so try to do the best to follow me, but what happened next, well, it was something else. First off, I got introduced to all those structuralists that all those other folks I had read before were all “post” about and I realized that the questions they, those structuralists I mean, were asking, well they was some kind of questions. There was this Frenchman, who also makes jeans I think, who was actually talking about mapping the human mind just from collecting enough texts and understanding how they operate. And there were a bunch of Russians—I know, your honor, I was right suspicious of them too, being a right-thinking kind of individual—but if you had seen the kinds of things you were doing, well you would thrown in with them just like I did. Those Russians were talking about taking apart stories like nothing I had ever seen before: they even called the parts of those stories functions your honor, which got real interesting as I learned more about growing snakes inside my computer.

If I’m lying, I’m dying.

Anyway, your honor, I finally ended my schooling by writing a right technical dissertation in that there folklore studies where I looked very, very close at how people talked when they was talking about the past. I went out and interviewed folks, and I came back and wrote down every word that they had said. And then I broke those words into lines and I marked each line according to how they moved about in time inside the story itself. (I still haven’t figured that space things out neither, your honor, just so as you know.) The three fellers who sat in the room, well, they didn’t quite know what to do with what I had done but they reckoned that folks had spent enough money, including myself, on getting me schooled properly and it was time for me to go out and get a job and start paying taxes and things like that.

So I did. I moved to Louisiana, where I wrote a little about this, and a little about that, but I finally settled on writing a book about guys who make these crazy boats that can roll up on dry land as sure as a gator does on a sunny day. What I liked about them was that they were making things, and I was thoroughly into what is now called the maker movement—don’t worry, your honor, it’s not no communists; these are right-thinking people who want to take back our stuff so as we can do with it as we want, which is about how the almighty intended it, if you were to ask me. But as I got further and further along in that work, I realized that I didn’t want to study making so much as to be making things myself. Now, chances of me quitting my job and taking up welding were mighty slim your honor. I may be fool, but I am not crazy. No, sir, not crazy. Now, I had, in the past, built some computers, and I had done some crazy things like trying out that operating system written up by that boy who plays the piano for Charlie Brown.

What’s that, your honor? That the one who totes around a blanket? Yes, sir, I believe it is. But he must be all right. He plays the piano right nice, and that operating system he come up with is a doozy.

Now, I kind of thought of myself as being pretty good with words, your honor, and being so long in school I thought I could string some of them there code words together and make myself something with that. Well, I have to tell you, them code words will fight you. It’s like trying to give the cat a bath: just as soon as you think as you got one paw in, another paw shoots straight out.

I tried a couple of different cats, I mean kinds of words, your honor. At first, because I was hosting my own website using what was then this new-fangled contraption called WordPress—no, sir, you can’t make sandwiches with it—I thought I might try to learn this language called PHP.

What’s that? No, sir, it’s not like French. Not at all. You can count on these here languages to say what they mean, only they don’t say what you think, sir.

What’s that? No, sir, not PCP, PHP, but I have to tell you that trying to wrap my head around it made wish it was the former. Only wish, your honor. I’m a law-abiding man and I would … Just get back to my story? Yes, sir.

So I gave up on that PHP stuff, but I was still interested in learning how to make my website run just the way I wanted to run. It’s like hot-rodding your car, if you follow me. I guess I got that in me. So, it wasn’t long before I was trying Ruby, especially when some feller built a train out of it. I tried building my own train, and as long as I kept to what people told me and I ran it on my own machine, it seemed mostly to go alright, but whenever I tried to do anything on my web server … well, those nice people who provide me with that service, well, they’d regularly have to kill a runaway process.

What’s that, your honor? Do you need to go investigating them? Well, sir, I don’t think so. Those processes lived inside boxes they owned, and so I think they a right to kill them. I really do. Besides, leave bygones to be bygones, I always say.

Anyway, a little over three years ago I got invited all the way out to California so as to build nets of humans, or something like that, and this fellow Tim Tangherlini—is that Italian? I don’t rightly know. He seems pretty American to me, sir—anyway, this fellow Tim Tangherlini roped a bunch of us humanists up and had a bunch of smart math and computer types give us some good talkings to. And, it was like the sheet was lifted from my eyes and I could see. I can’t tell you how excited I was that there was a way for me to begin to understand how it is we think by modeling that behavior using computers.

Am I saying you’re a computer, sir? No, sir, not at all. Why your dog can do more than your computer? Is that right? Well, sir, don’t get me wrong. I seen your dog, and he’s a right smart hound and he’s definitely got a two-duck mouth, but I’m not talking smart like, or thinking like that. I’m talking about breaking off the teeniest tiniest of pieces and just beginning, ever so slightly, to see how it is our minds might work.

And with that as my goal, I pitched myself into learning how to wrestle a snake like there was no tomorrow. This Python is supposed to be what they call user-friendly, but I been using it for a while now, sir, and it’s not so friendly.

Well, I say that. It’s just a computing language and it’s going to do what it does, and I’m just going to have to learn to think like it does in order to get it to do what I want to do.

Am I afraid that it will make me into a robot?

No, sir, quite the reverse. I find that as I struggle, and goodness do I struggle, to understand this stuff, I’m getting better at my human thinking, too. You just have to. And now I not only want to use this stuff to learn how we think when we’re making cathedrals out of words, but I also want to understand how we think when we’re making programs.

What’s that, you think that’s kind of a loopy idea? Well, sir, I have been trying to tell you all this time that it was a loop that got me into this mess. I’m telling you it’s what done overflowed that stack. And when that stack done overflowed, it caused a fatal error. I didn’t kill nothing, I promise. It just up and died all on its own.

You guess it was just it’s time? Yes, sir, I will agree with you on that.

I’m free to go? That’s very kind of you, but I have to tell you I’m a little afraid to go home. What if the stack has overflowed the computer and done spilled that code all over the house. Gosh almighty, it’s gonna be a heck of a mess.