Carbon-Based Life
I stand in the blue glow of the projector,
Slide 12: The Inevitable Dissipation of Energy.
The graph looks like a slide going straight into a grave.
A student in the front row, who I'm pretty sure is wearing pajamas,
raises a hand and asks, "So, like...what's the point? If it all falls apart?"
I blink in the harsh light.
"The point," I say, trying to sound reassuring,
"is that the universe isn't cruel.
It's just...expensive.
Order is a luxury item.
There are a trillion ways to be dust
and only one way to be a star."
They stare at me.
A boy in the back is peeling the label off a Gatorade bottle with intense focus
while ignoring the end of the world.
I feel a data point of sadness.
The math is true, even if they're just waiting for the bell.
Then I drive home to the practical application of the lecture.
I have two sons, three and five.
Biophysically speaking, they are adorable, high-speed
Entropy Generators.
I walk in the door and trip over a plastic stegosaurus.
The probability of the toys returning to the bin spontaneously
is zero.
And like a dutiful biological machine, I react. I don't yell—I'm too tired to yell—
But I can feel the cortisol spikes on a cellular level.
Order demands a thermal cost
I am stripping electrons from a cold chicken nugget
and shoving them through the furnace of my cells,
metabolizing processed carbon to negotiate a treaty regarding pants.
"Please," I say to the three-year-old, who is naked and wriggling from my grasp.
"It's just pants."
I know the physics of this moment.
I am oxidizing.
I am leaking free radicals.
I am literally rusting my own telomeres
because I love these little gas clouds in human form.
I am aging in dog years
because I care so much about whether they eat their peas.
I slump onto the floor, right there in the hallway.
I look at my wedding ring.
Gold. Element 79. The noble metal.
It sits there on my finger, shiny and unbothered.
It possesses the Holy Grail of atomic physics:
It has no desperate need to grab a stray electron
just to feel whole.
It has no open slots for anxiety.
It doesn't care if the toddler is scribbling on the walls.
It refuses to participate in the decay.
I look at the ring and think,
Must be nice.
To be chemically complete.
To sit in the chaos and never change.
But I am not Gold.
I am Carbon—wet, soft, sticky Carbon.
I bond with the little entropy machines.
I bond with everything.
So the goal isn't to stop the fire.
The goal is just to bank the coals.
To find the steady state.
The regulated burn.
The three-year-old climbs onto my lap.
He smells like milk and reactive molecules.
I make a biophysical choice:
I lower the voltage.
I decide that the stegosaurus lives in the hallway now.
I decide that pants are optional on Tuesdays.
I wrap my arms around the chaos.
I try to hold my electrons close
but in the end, I share them.
I am not the unblemished metal that lasts forever.
I am the soft, burning thing
spending myself, atom by atom,
to keep the lights on in a galaxy that prefers the dark.
Please enjoy this YouTube video of the author reading their poem.
