Fractally Speaking

I have a deep and abiding respect for physics. You can see it in the title of this blog: Entropical Paradise. Not just a clever play on words, but a solid description of the world in which we live. Things continue to move from an ordered state to a less ordered state seemingly without fail. You could tell yourself that you're staying on top of chaos by sweeping up on a regular basis, but those dustpans full of debris have to go somewhere, and the bristles on your broom eventually wear down until you need to get a new one. And what do you do with the old one? 

More debris. 

There was a time when I was more of a fan of the world breaking down. I found myself rooting on the gradual breakdown of our place in the galaxy. I was amused by the idea that we might somehow slow the disintegration of our planet by conserving or taking care of the nice things we have. In the 1980s, hedonism seemed to have reached some sort of logical extreme, and the notion that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down for freedom was tempered by the need for free enterprise. It was the poet and philosopher Notorious BIG who suggested, "mo' money, mo' problems." Mo' anything means mo' problems. 

We knew about global warming. We knew about polluting the land, the sky, the water. America led the charge: Go big or go home! 

Except we were home. Which might explain all these vain efforts by billionaires to flee our third rock from the sun in hopes that we could find another rock to abuse for a few thousand years. 

Now that I am a parent with a sense of just how badly I have messed up the earth for my son to take it on the next leg of our tour of expiration, I feel bad about every plastic bag I wasted. I wish that I would have considered mortality more fully when it still seemed hypothetical. Like the fact that we are running out of helium. Humans consume it far faster than it can be made. When I think about all the balloons that I inhaled only to make my voice rise momentarily while that precious gas disappeared into space, it gives me pause. It makes all that terror of Mylar balloons seem a little ridiculous since soon there won't be anything to put inside of them.

And someday I expect that I will have a moment left to apologize to my grandchildren and their friends as they sit around their birthday table stacked high with Soylent Green wafers and decorated with worn out brooms. Sorry kids, I'm the reason you can't have nice things.