Ordinary automobiles have lights on the front, called "headlights". These are handy: For example, when you need to dispose of a body, the best way is to drive out to the country at night and bury it. If you've ever tried to dig a sizable hole out in the woods at 1:00 AM, you'll appreciate how good it is to have some lighting. Those selfsame lights are also handy for illuminating dark roads while driving, and they make your car a lot more visible to other cars, too. Best of all, they seem to confuse the hell out of rabbits. That's a great comfort if rabbits make you uneasy or depressed.
By and large, these "headlights" have two settings: Normal, and "high beam". The "high beam" setting gives a lot more light, and usually directs it more upwardly1 as well. When you're driving, that means you can see much farther ahead. When the road winds and there's little or no ambient light, boy oh boy is that useful.
In my experience, the "high beam" thing is engaged by fiddling with a stalk on the steering wheel column, the same one you use to turn the lights on in the first place. On my car, you pull it back towards you until it clicks. If you just pull it back a little bit, the beams turn on while you're holding it back, but it doesn't click and they turn back off as soon as you release it. This is an admirable feature, and we'll soon see why.
If you live in a more populated area, you don't need headlights for illumination all that often, and "high beams" even less so. The real reason for keeping your lights on at night in a city is so that you can easily be seen by other drivers and by pederasts. Also, the cops may give you a ticket if you don't have your lights on.
In that kind of a driving environment, you mostly use your high beams to communicate with other drivers: If you see people coming the other way at night with their lights off, it's probably an oversight. You flash your high beams very briefly, and that makes them think of their headlights; they say "d'oh!", strike their foreheads theatrically (I'm asking you to visualize a lot of people doing this in unison), and turn their lights on. The same beam-flashing gimmick is also handy for communicating things like "Yes, I stopped here so you could make a left turn across my lane. Make the turn. Make. The turn. MAKE THE FUCKING TURN ALREADY."
Finally, we often use our beams on the highway to say, "Get the fuck out of my way." Sometimes we use them to tell people in the oncoming lanes "There's a cop hiding behind that tree that you're about to blow past at 100 mph. He is fiendish. His eyes shine bright with cruelty and unnatural lust." We can even do this in broad daylight, because on many cars the "beam flashing" feature mentioned in paragraph three will turn on the beams even if the lights are off. That's cool.
The word "stalk" is crunchy and delicious. Today, it is our favorite! We thank you for this opportunity to share.
1 That's not real grammatical, is it?