Calculating the value of pie.

Of all the obnoxious and unpopular universals we have to deal with – gravity, conservation of momentum, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, the speed of light in a vacuum, the way coffee never tastes as good as it smells – the one that seems to be the hardest for most of us to accept is entropy.

Just when we think we’ve gotten a handle on things, figured out how to survive, how to be happy, how to get through the day, we discover that the universe has marched on and the situation has changed. Suddenly all the systems and workarounds that we rely upon to keep us sane no longer work the way we expect them to. The rules have changed on us. Loved ones die, things break down, the places that are important to us become strange and different. “For no reason!” we insist, red-faced and frustrated, but in fact there is a reason: simple entropy.

I own a car that is now entering into its sixteenth year of life. I don’t drive it much, and I take care of it to the best of my (admittedly limited) ability, but nobody’s ever going to mistake it for a new vehicle. The headliner is pulling loose, the paint is dinged, the driver’s-side window no longer goes up and down: entropy. Even if I had shrink-wrapped the car sixteen years ago and stored it in a climate-controlled bunker in the desert, it would still not be the same car it was when it first rolled off the VW assembly line in Puebla, Mexico. Plastics deteriorate, fabrics sag and pull, the same chemical and mechanical processes that created the materials and parts continue long after the papers are signed and the keys handed over, turning gaskets into ash, warping delicate fixtures, and disabling sensitive electronics.

One of the most important features of entropy is its adherence to what is known as “the arrow of time”. This is to say that entropy, unlike any other measurable quantity in our universe, only works one way: things break down with the passing of time, going from more structured, more organized, to less. A muffin, a Maserati, or a man will, given enough time, be reduced to component atoms, and the carbon in an oatmeal muffin is absolutely identical to, and interchangeable with, the carbon in my red blood cells. That carbon will not spontaneously reorganize itself into a bird or a pot roast, not without the expenditure of enormous energy and even more time — during which everything else is still sliding into oblivion.

At absolute zero, -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (-273.15 degrees Celsius, zero Kelvin and Rankine), everything stops. All activity in the sub-atomic world of electrons and protons ceases, and matter becomes inert and unchanging. This is, however – like the perfect marriage or consumer-friendly air travel – an imaginary state. In the real universe, nothing achieves absolute zero for long. Even in deepest space, beyond the light of any star, the background radiation left over from the Big Bang keeps everything percolating away at about four degrees Kelvin. Things slow down Out There, but they don’t stop. Here, in the world of light and air and heat that sustains us, entropy churns along at a pretty frantic pace. We can irradiate our tomatoes until they glow in the dark, persecute termites and mildew and dry rot with all the passion and inventiveness at our disposal, but in the end, the leftover pasta sauce goes furry and green, the shower curtain has to be replaced every August, and the tires on that bicycle you haven’t taken out of the garage since the Reagan administration crumble away to nothing.

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Make a pie on Sunday, and then eat a slice of it every day thereafter. At some point you will discover that the dish is empty, and there’s no more pie. This is irritating, but it’s not the fault of immigrants, or healthcare reform, or political correctness. It’s just that pie is finite, you ate all your pie, and sooner or later you have to either make a new pie or find something else to snack on. You have to change. You have to do something different. No rhetoric, no rallies, no ranting on cable news is going to make that pie last forever. The universe moves on. Things are consumed, becoming something else. Life happens.

I wish I still had the hair and teeth and knees I had at twenty. I wish there were still places on Earth that were represented on the maps by big glamorous empty areas marked “Terra Incognita” and “Here there be dragons.” I wish a new Chrysler Imperial cost $1,500, and doctors made house calls. I wish I could read The Haunting of Hill House for the first time, again and again and again.

I wish a lot of things, but the universe really doesn’t give a damn what I wish – the universe has much more important things to do.

So, what are my options? Obviously, pretending that entropy just isn’t happening is not very helpful. Nor is simply throwing up my hands and locking myself into the basement to wait for everything to grind to its messy and inevitable end. Punish the Jews, or the Muslims, or the gays, or the poor, or the people in the big fancy house down the street for the fact that my pie didn’t last as long as I had hoped it would? None of these things is going to make the tiniest bit of difference in the end. I’ll just be making life more difficult for people who are probably no more to blame for my bad knees and thinning hair than the Queen of Sheba. Things are going to change. Tomorrow will never be exactly like yesterday. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way the universe works. I can learn to deal with it, change with it, or I can shoot myself in thehttps://www.turningupbones.com/https://www.turningupbones.com/ head before entropy has a chance to wind things up for me. My choice.

For the moment, however, here we are. I’m still going on and on about all sorts of things, and you’ve actually managed to stay with me all the way to here. So sit with me for a bit longer. We’ll share some of my pie.

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