my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light that split the night

as i type this, i am staring through a murky window across the murky hudson river at the murky state of new jersey. there are a pair of white lights that shine more brightly than any other lights in the state, from what i can see. they look like headlights, but they're immobile and huge. they are like a pair of unblinking white eyes. they reflect on the sewage with a cold, eerie stare. i gaze at them, they gaze at me. we have one of those blinking show-downs that people get into without realizing it. but they win. they have to. they're just lights.
just lights... what makes people people? aren't we just machines? as emerson pugh (not that i know who he is) said, "If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it." so are we as magically human and irrational as we like to think that we are? or are we just incredibly complex machines that can program ourselves and perform commands that "we are too simple to understand?" after all, no machine can understand itself. this computer that i'm typing on doesn't know that it's recording a young human's existential ponderings. those eyes across the river don't care that they caught my attention.
or do they?