Dear Farnsworthy:

You aren't going to change much of the world about you so get used to the idea. Change in cultural terms is largely illusional. Not an iota of change will be attributed to your effect. Perhaps a tenth of an iota if you become an especially active president of some large country.

So what are the rules of creative living? Try to leave more than you take away. Aha, a mystery rears up. How can that be? The law of entropy insists that you will clearly consume more than you will provide. This cannot be avoided. The universe will be worse off because of you. You, you suckling welp. How so?

So can there be rules of creative living? Of course! There are things besides energy. Bridges, buildings, roads, infra-structure. These are good things to leave behind, I ask? Your legacy bequeathed to the world? Energy dissipated into form which in itself can never be permanent. Leaving ugliness when we're gone. But what is beauty or ugliness if there is no eye which can appreciate it? Perhaps beauty to the remainder will be a heart-shot concrete hulk looking through the growth with black rectangular eyes. They will want to be near this god at least once before they die. The priests will graze on its shaded side.

Shaded ideas. Shaded words. This time we will bargain for less. Temporary nuggets of worthwhileness. Tuckered out. I'm tuckered out. A phrase meaning that I have used up my readily available store of energy. Is there another use for tuckered? Tuckered is a word because we use it, yet how many dictionaries have its meaning? And yet it persists while lives flare up and shrivel then into ashes and tuckered the word with hardly a meaning goes on from father to son, father to son, father... Snivelings of words and phrases spoken in the dirty cruel streets of ancient cities living beyond the foundations of great structure. Tuckered in, I say. You, sir, are tuckered in. Get used to it. Father to a son, the secret to eternal life.

Eternal life, so what is lasting? The earth's teaming races of living things last. But if in every hundred thousand years three-quarters of the then existing life forms are destroyed and gone forever, then when shall we be down to one? Where are the new being created from Gaia's eternal protoplasm? We need new ones. Hey, over here; we need new ones. What are the conditions? Surely they must exist. Let's all gather around a new one and tickle its little toes and coo when it kicks and hope that it lasts.

Lasts. We are lasting, in so much as we have unity, in so much as the builders exceed the consumers -- a narrow call. Should the universe tremble?

Tremble at a race of beasts that regards itself and seeks in grand delusion for more than what it is. A stupid marvel with a granularity of three which speaks across the eternal void seeking its destroyer with the speed of light. Are we lost, Farnsworth? Should we stop and ask someone?

End