I clicked a box this morning that said I am not a robot, and I want the record to show that I hesitated.

Not because I’m a robot. Because it was six in the morning, I hadn’t had coffee, and the question felt premature.

But I clicked it. And that’s when the grid came out.

Select all squares containing traffic lights.

Nine squares. Two of them obvious — traffic lights, we’re all adults here. But square seven has a smear of pixels in the corner that is either a traffic light four blocks away or a seagull. And I have to decide. Me. A grown man with a hangover he did not earn, squinting at a blob at six in the morning, with my whole standing as a member of the human species riding on it.

And then the pole.

Does the pole count?

I have thought harder about whether the pole counts than I have thought about my retirement. I have a strategy for the pole. I do not have a strategy for retirement.

I get it wrong. Obviously. The machine reloads and gives me motorcycles. Then buses. Then staircases, which felt personal. Then crosswalks, and I want to say:

buddy, we both know that I know what a crosswalk is.

Try again, it says.

It has reviewed my work. It has looked at my answers, my instincts, my whole entire life, and it has concluded: robot.

And I sat with that. Which, in fairness, is a very robot thing to do. Recalculating.

Because a machine looked at forty years of me and said no, and my first instinct was not outrage. My first instinct was to check.

Dude. Robots move in a straight line. I move like I’m looking for my car in the Target parking lot.

Maybe I should let him in on my routine, the guy in Iowa waiting on my answer.

Most mornings I get up at the same hour, head to my coffee shop in Homewood and sit at my regular table to write. On the way, I say, “Doing well, how are you?” to four separate people without ever once involving my brain.

The baristas don’t ask me if I’m human, or if I want to select the seagulls or the traffic lights or the buses.

Here’s the thing. I have been checking boxes in this country for four decades. Boxes about where I was born. Boxes about whether I was worthy. Boxes with the word OTHER sitting there like a folding chair at a wedding. Boxes at the DMV, boxes on forms, boxes held by a very nice man in a very small room who wanted to know how I spell my name, and where I was from — and why do they always have wars over there?

There is never a box for Arabs, or the Middle East, or anything remotely close to what I am. How about a box for Arabs in Alabama?

But yeah, with all the boxes I check day in and day out, I have proven a great many things to a great many people. And the internet, which itself is not human, is the first thing that ever asked me, straight out, no small talk: are you a human?

And I got it wrong. Twice. Forty years in this country and my humanity still comes with a checkbox.

Anyway. At 6:44 a.m. Central Time — forty-four minutes after finding all the traffic lights and motorcycles and buses, and let’s not forget that lonely seagull — I was declared human.

Documentation available upon request.