literature

Entropy

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Literature Text

Entropy is a hypothetical scientific measurement of randomness; a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.

You know what’s funny about people?  We act like we have this ultimate control over our lives, like we have it all under our jurisdiction, and we can do or be or have whatever we want.  We all walk around pretending like we have forever, whining about petty things, when, in the end, we have no real control.  You hear all those Freudian scientists blathering on about how we all have an animal instinct to survive, and “humans will always find a way”.  But, then, here we are, planning for a future we have not the remotest way to be sure will ever happen.  
This semblance of order and control we have; routines and roads and taxes and uniforms.  Alarms and security and emergency plans. Education and trust funds and life preservers.  All are a façade, an illusion of safety and order and permanence.  In reality – the world is chaos.  And we’re all just bits of glitter, floating and twirling helplessly in the grip of gravity, like silver splinters in a snow globe, unable to come or go.
It’s those kind of thoughts that got me packed off here in the first place. It didn’t take much.   A few argumentative rants at school, a handful of therapists who said they could no longer help me, and a refusal to just “leave it all alone”, as my mother requested.  So, as fast as they could, my parents had the sign-up forms for “Pax Mountain Camp for Troubled Youths” in the express mail.

Here, the very essence of life is the semblance of order.  We all wear the same uniform – Square, ill fitted white polo’s.  Light blue pants.  Dark blue socks and shoes.  When dressed, it appears as if all of the color has seeped out of our hair and eyes and faces and clothes and has dripped and driveled down the lengths of our bodies, depositing itself at our toes.  We all look the same – pale, faded, bleached.  We blend in with the walls, and the sheets, and the floors, and the food. I suppose it all fits in with this overwhelming theme of order one finds them self in here.  All of camp life revolves around an omnipotent, never changing schedule, preserving the order held within it.
Everyday we wake up at 6:45, eat breakfast at 7:00, and then are forced to engage in various socializing activities, games, and crafts until lunch, which is served promptly at noon.  The schedule of activities and perhaps the odd meeting with a therapist or specialist continues until 2:30, when we have a rest hour.  From 3:30 to 6:00 we have vigorous recreations, designed to make us so exhausted there will be no resistence in getting us to go to sleep.  But all that usually results is a couple of girls fighting and the rest of us trying to avoid getting punched accidentally.  At 6:00 we are all herded back to our cabins in a straight, silent line.  There, we get ready for supper, and at 6:15 we eat.  By 8:30, it is “lights out”.  The order here is impressive.  Not a thing is ever out of place.  The counselors are infallible robots.  The entire place is spotless and without flaw.  But, with that said, my bunkmates consist of the following; One girl who thinks she is a pink unicorn, another who is convinced that the Russians are coming to get her with their “nuclear munitions”.  Another who speaks only in an imaginary language and spends her hours swatting away at imaginary things in imaginary worlds.  And then yet another who never speaks at all, only sobs continuously, and makes sad, mournful faces and gestures whenever someone enters or exits the room.
The “campers” here understand chaos well.  Just as the world, they are chaos.  Therapists have tried to sort us out.  Psychiatrists have analyzed us all and given us more drugs than an old-folks home.  We have been prodded, cajoled, begged, bribed, punished, and commanded to behave and obey the rules.  But most of us are here for a reason.  We have met and conversed with chaos, and he has spoken to us with clarity and conviction.  After that, we cannot go back to the order of the “normal” world.  Each of us, though unspoken, knows what the other lives through.  A maze and web and puzzle of our minds, through which we wander endlessly everyday, making no plans for the future, setting no rules, no order, no itinerary for ourselves.  And we have made our peace with that.  And while we are at peace with that, no amount of drug nor therapy nor internment in this place of order will ever change that for us.
And so, the rest of the world continues on as it always has, outside the boundaries of the Pax Mountain Camp for Troubled Youths.  People work and politicians lie and citizens plan and humanity makes rules and schemes and itineraries and inventions to try and hold back the inevitable chaos which will one day claim us all, in one way or another.  A freak car accident. Some force of the weather. Collateral damage in a war.  A random abduction.  An “act of God”.  Murder. Poisoning.  Suicide.
And yet, we push and push, like trying to hold back the tide from the beach.  And, for a while, we succeed.  But, eventually, the rallied determination of the waves will overcome us all in a tsunami of chaos too great to escape.
So, now, I pose this question.  Who is right?  All of us in here, who have made our peace with the chaos that will eventually claim us anyway, making friends with that which we must spend our eternity with.  Or, those on the outside, who toil away like ants in the sun, against a force a billion times greater than all of their collective efforts at control combined.
But, then again, I’m crazy.
bleh.
© 2009 - 2024 fadedmannequin
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spoems's avatar
Convincing treatise on why it's more honest to behave as though you know life is absurd. Love it.