Everything does fall apart. It's a law.

Sometimes I get the sense that everything?and by that I mean everything around and within me?is slowly falling to pieces, all the way down to the cellular level?and quite possibly much further than that.

Of course everything is falling to pieces, all the time. Always has been the case. Laws of nature and all. It's just seemed much more evident these past few weeks and months. Much more determined, in a way. It's as if instead of leaching away slowly and imperceptibly, the way it usually does, the energy that holds everything together is now leaking out in a steady stream.

Things fall off shelves as I pass them, or break for no reason. Sloughed-off skin cells and other particulate matter gather into great dustbunnies that tumbleweed across the apartment floor. Glasses tip over, pills spill from bottles. Every pass through the apartment leaves me with another reason to go make a grab for the paper towels.

Outside the apartment, fingertips get caught in closing glass doors, Front gates are left wide open at night, ensuring a collision, whether or not the cane is out and at the ready. The big toe that, just the night before, lost most of its nail to a nail-clipping accident slams really, really hard into a cinderblock that appeared in the middle of the sidewalk for some reason. Every day in the office, the computer finds yet another thing it now refuses to do. Which in itself isn't much of a problem, as my typing's gone straight to hell anyway.

My chest hurts, my head hurts, my sinuses feel like someone's taken sandpaper to them, and in my guts, I feel an ever-present weariness that I simply cannot seem to shake.

When these things (many of them, at least) occur in isolation, or in groups of no more than two or three at a time, I put them down as hilarious examples of true-life slapstick. When there seem to be hundreds of them everywhere, all around you and at all times, when it seems there's nothing but these things, that's when it becomes entropy. Or more specifically, The Entropic Follies, from which there is no escape.

While passing me in the subway station at 6:15 in the morning, an attitude-riddled teenage girl tells me, without the slightest provocation, "I hate your ugly face?and you can tell your daddy that, too."

Perhaps I will, I think.

I suddenly find that I have to look up my own work number. Dodging pedestrians, dogs, strollers is becoming increasingly difficult, as they no longer seem to be moving in accordance with any known and readily agreed upon pattern or sense. And the eyes?

Every headline on the news wires seem to be a neon road sign directing us to the apocalypse?but that's what everyone has always wanted to think. Not only the threats and the impending wars, but the indestructible bacteria, the utter defenselessness against both nature and the smug, wicked smiles of human corruption.

All I want to do, it feels like, is crawl further and further away. But I can't, not now at least, not yet, because dinner's burning again, and the cats need to be fed again and whoops, there goes half a box of cat food across the floor again and another bottle's tipped over and the ashtray needs to be emptied and the laundry needs to be done and my head's empty and the windows are dirty and I can't concentrate on a goddamn thing, except to compose the beginning of a little ditty which, in the words of the old MAD magazine, can be sung to the tune of "My Favorite Things":

Fingers in doorjambs and spillage on notebooks

Front doors that won't slam and coats slide off coat hooks

Cat sputum puddles and eyes that can't see?

All evidence of cree-ping en-tro-py~

(You need to fuck around some with the meter of the last line, but you get the gist of it.)

I'm reminded of a scene from a class I once took. I was at the University of Chicago, studying physics and fast coming to the conclusion that I should not, for godsakes, be studying physics. The particular class I'm thinking of was being taught by the great Norman Nachtrieb, a gentle, soft-spoken physical chemist who had worked on the Manhattan Project (as so many of them had). He had been lecturing a couple of sessions on the subject of entropy.

After class one day, he lent me a small book entitled, if I'm remembering correctly, Human Entropy, or Entropy and Life. Something like that. Not sure why he lent it to me?I'm guessing because I happened to be sitting closest to him at the time. Maybe it was the way I was dressed, I don't know.

After I read it, I suggested to him the possibility that, as far as the human body was concerned at least, food might be considered a source of negative entropy?providing the nutriments and ironments and proteins necessary to repair damage, sustain life, replenish energy.

It was an idea that ran counter to everything he'd taught us and everything which had been in that little book, but it made sense to me at the time.

He smiled a sad, wise old man smile at my proposal, pulled the pipe from his mouth and shook his head, the same way he did whenever a student, however well-intentioned, made an incredibly stupid point.

"No," he said, "I'm afraid it doesn't work that way? You see, everything falls apart, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing at all."