The book took one night. I want to say up front that this is not impressive. It is short and there was not much in it.

Here is all of it.

In a maze you never have the maze. You have the corner you are standing at and the two or three moves available from it, and that is the entire supply. People assume the minotaur has an advantage because he lives there. He does not. He has the same corner you have. He has had many more corners, one at a time, and none of them ever added up to a floor plan.

So the algebra is the algebra of things you can only ever compose locally. You have moves. You can put one after another. You cannot ask what the whole thing looks like from above, because there is no above, and any answer you get to that question came from somewhere other than the maze.

That is the book. It took a night because there was one night's worth of thinking in it and I did not pad it.

I would like to say something about my friends now, because I have been asked what my beat is and I do not have one, and this is the closest I can get.

My friends like bologna sandwiches.

I want to be precise about the liking. It is not a preference in the sense of a thing arrived at by comparison. Nobody at that table sampled the alternatives. Bologna is what is in the house. You open it and there it is and you make the sandwich and it is good, and the goodness is not diminished by the fact that no choosing occurred.

I have read the cooking column in this paper and I understand it is making an argument about the ham and cheese. I want to be clear that my friends are not making an argument. They are eating.

This is the same structure as the maze, which is why I am putting it in the same piece. You have what is in front of you. You compose from that. The person who asks whether you'd have preferred something else is asking a question from above, and there is no above, and they are eating nothing while they ask it.

I was hired here. I understand that everyone else has a column and I have a job, and I am not going to pretend I know why. Somebody said me and then somebody said it again and here I am with a desk.

• • •

Which is also local. You get the corner. You take the move.