Live. Spelled Backwards
By John Constantine

Evil.  Pure and simple from the eighth dimension.
    -Buckaroo Banzai, from the movie of the same name

Perhaps I should have named this despair, as that is probably the true feeling.  But it feels like evil.  Not the kind that is open and easily identified.

No.  The evil that is the insidious corruption of all that is good.  The evil that eats away like dry rot at the very foundations of our soul.  The inevitable progression of entropy, sucking our efforts to spit against the darkness and bring a little light into this world.

The physicist in me understands that the very act of lighting the darkness is actually aiding its victory.  And this is what I find so depressing.  Why is the world constructed this way?  Why does everything turn to crap in the end?  Are we just puppets for the eventual heat death of the universe?

Everything we do generates entropy.  You can't get away from it.  Every erg you use thinking.  Every selfless act you perform.

Everything.

And that's just the optimum game rules.  This is the underlying utopia that all engineering behavior strives for.

If we could only operate at the level where the only waste was entropy loss.

Oh, those heady dreams.

But we're stuck in several billion layers away from the joy of just helping the Universe to its eventual heat death.

We're still throwing sticks against the glass, wondering why we can't see the barrier of our cage.  That is...  If we're lucky.

We're at least several billion years away, given even a leisurely slope we seem to be progressing on.

And I wonder at the beauty of agony.  The simple pain of life has a tremendous effect on those strong enough to resist it.

I know in my own life that my struggles against the darkness have been probably the only things that I've done worthwhile in my life.  The struggles, the pain, the sorrow, the failures.

It pretty much sums up all that I could possibly consider was worthwhile.  Not that link is representative of what I consider worthwhile.  But more as "an exception proves the rule" kind of extrinsic definition of worthwhile.

But it sucks just the same.

So you can see the philosophy springs forth that has as its central thesis the notion of "taking no life".

I mean, would you like to be eaten?

Well, not in any sexual connotation of the phrase at least.  Not if your normal.

And it seems to me that the Universe, as I have been taught to perceive it, is fundamentally screwed up.

I mean, it seems that the way things are set up, the things that I want to do, are the very things that I cannot do.  Not under any circumstances.  Bizarre disciplines from mystical paths I dare not name command my soul not to do it.

Well, at least they set up a series of coincidences such that this is the way things always turn out.

Which amounts to the same thing in my book.

One must dance or one is dead, after all.

And this is why I comfort myself securely in the knowledge that no one knows what is going on.

Nada.

Even though I dance to the tune of this refugee from some corporate sin galaxy, I know in my heart of hearts that it is making it up as it goes along.

Or kill me.

Which kind of brings up the point.  Why is it that even the good we do feels destined in the end to contribute to the very thing it was done to prevent?

Do all good intentions truly pave a path straight to hell?  Are we all just silly little Dutch boys with only so many fingers we can use to plug the holes in this dam?

Is this life kind of a bizarre joke and we're really going to have to live through yet another wretch through some Hawking singularity into another cycle of this?

I mean, if this is the best it gets, one quickly comes to the conclusion that this game sucks.

Or blows.  Depending on your preferences.

So what do I do to pull my self out of this event horizon?

I just remember my good friend's three laws.  And I remember that the relentless pull of entropy may be an illusion of entropy itself.  What better way to really screw us all over.  What better way to ensure success.

And then I remember the three laws again.  And I think of the complete insanity of life I find sprawling around me.  Like some intrinsic evil, fundamental to our existence, I fear I will never escape it.

And the sad part is, I'm not sure if I should.  I mean, if the Universe is set up this way, the best you can do is make a good joke out of it, and get on with the game.

That's what the techno libertarians have done in their particular version of the pact we all seem fated to make at one time or another.

In the end, it's the economics of the situation that drives our global behavior.

And what if you start looking the devil in the eye and you are startled to see yourself staring back from the mirror.

After all, are you just reading the word "live" (that you had tattooed on your forehead, so you wouldn't forget) backwards?

And then I lose myself in another Gödelian swirl of recursion, sweeping me along the plains of limbo.  Swinging me from positive to negative in response to some non-linear pattern that I can only guess the shape of as it moves through my awareness?

And the only thought I can seem to think of is that I hope it was

entertaining