Don't Whistle Past the Graveyard

Ch. Sixty-Six

When you've been with someone, or with a group of people, long enough, you don't have to really talk anymore. I think I've said this before, but it has bearing here.

Before, we talked to share ideas or gossip or thoughts. We had a lot to talk about. People, movies, books, music, politics, religion, love, lust, our jobs. The list could go on and on.

But what happens when you take that all away?

What happens is we get overwhelmed by our more animalistic tendencies. We become aggressive or submissive, we seek strength and reject weakness, we avoid fights we can't win or we look for fights to prove that we can.

The need for higher thinking is removed and we learn the ugly truth: that the wolf is better than we are because at least the wolf kills indiscriminately and only with a purpose. To feed or to protect.

Some people left, like us, try to kill like the wolf kills. Others clung to their so-called higher reasons for why some people should die and some should live. But the truth of the matter is that there's never a reason for it. There's probably a plan it falls into that we just can't see, but Death doesn't have a reason, and he doesn't need one either.

So I quit trying to look for one. I stopped asking why and just started wondering when.

It was easier that way. I wouldn't venture to call it better. Rule #23 in case you need a refresher. I honestly used to think of myself as an optimistic person. I kind of had to be to convince people who'd had their legs blown off that they could, in fact, walk again. If I didn't believe it, they wouldn't either. Simple. I wasn't unrealistic. I knew that hard work was the only thing that would get me or anyone anywhere worth being.

Sometimes you'd get a lucky break and sometimes I would think that certain people were more prone to those than others were. And that's fine. Not everyone can have the same lot in life and the fact remains that the human condition is one of suffering.

It doesn't have to be constant, but I always reminded myself that things were more prone to chaos than they were to order.

Chemistry actually has a name for this: Entropy.

If I'm remembering correctly, the definition of entropy is "a system's tendency to gradually decline toward disorder." Or something like that. The universe builds entropy with every second, pulling the whole shooting match ever closer to the disorder nature craves.

It's why trees don't grow in straight lines, why perfectly poured concrete cracks and disintegrates into rocky powder, why cities spring up and flood out with crooked streets and sideways buildings.

Humanity has spent thousands and thousands of years trying to hold back the tide of entropy. We established rules and governments and laws to try and wrangle the universe into submission with the lasso called Order. But, the thing is, is that nature eventually wins.

Now, this is not to say that nature rejects order, period. No one could think that who has seen the perfect synchronicity of bees, or has heard of the Fibonacci Sequence or the golden ratio. Viruses are more efficient and orderly than the most tightly structured business humans could create. They have one purpose, and they carry out that purpose without fail, with no variation in operations.

Performance is another matter, but that's not what I'm trying to say here.

I guess what I'm really getting at is my final rule, so far. More might be made, but for now, this is the last one.

Rule #37: Expect the unexpected.

Slightly cheesy, I know, and not exactly original. But if you walk around here thinking that things have established themselves in an orderly pattern all by themselves, then you've got another thing coming.