Entropy: Time Flies Like an Arrow
Introducing "Entropy" on stage at the Jalopy Theater with my band, M Shanghai, I once asked the audience, "Can I see a show of hands? How many homeowners do we have in the crowd?" Crickets. Exactly no one raised their hand. Apparently, this was not the right question to ask a bunch of young-ish Brooklynites in 2007 just before the housing bubble burst. Hey, sometimes you shoot and miss. I was just trying to find a way to connect this concept song to something relatable. I didn't write the lyrics about the trials of home ownership, but it was lately on my mind.
My wife, Jenna, and I had just recently purchased a house near the town where we first met in high school. Being back on the Jersey Shore was a welcome change from city living, but it quickly dawned on us that the responsibility and complexity of maintaining the place was going to be worlds away from the apartment renters' lifestyle to which we had become accustomed. "What is radon?", we asked. Oh, just invisible, carcinogenic gas constantly leaking from the ground into our hillside basement. And we thought NYC was dangerous...
The whole home-buying venture may have seemed deluded, if not for some irrepressible, intuitive feeling that we were being guided by something bigger than us. Jenna and I had both recently come through challenging periods in our lives, and we shared a kind of pre-ordained surety of survivors given a second chance. Now, we were making a long-term investment in our future together and planning to start a family. In a post-9/11 reality, with unjustified wars taking young Americans and killing thousands of innocent people, and global financial collapse imminent, this new beginning of ours felt like a big middle finger to fate.
The children came, and they are the best part of our lives. Jenna and I each started over with new professions. It was humbling. The house and property started its inevitable, exponentially accelerating decline. Then, my sister died suddenly of brain cancer. Our family of eleven siblings, our spouses, children—and our parents—were absolutely shocked. In short, life happened to all of us.
As a philosophical type with a bent for appreciating life's unsolicited, devastating slapstick, I began to think, in the midst of all this, about entropy. Not just the properties of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but its metaphorical aspects as well.
In high school, I was assigned a book by Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard called Entropy: A New World View. The authors argue, among other things, that the "Mechanical Worldview" inherited by Newtonian physics and classical economics treats our planet's non-renewable resources as limitless income instead of diminishing capital. The evolution of more technology is only speeding up the entropic processes of economic disparity and global habitat degradation.
This theory had a big effect on my thinking at the time, and influenced my decision to work in the renewable energy field in my early twenties, before I became slightly jaded, and the music business lured me away. The concept of entropy stuck with me for decades, though, and it seemed to be happening everywhere, always. Of course it was. The arrow of time only flies in one direction, after all.
But in the face of this reality, the old vocational obsession emerged: could it work as a song? Could I take the piss out of it, as the Irish say, by adding some dark humor to a hook and some bouncy music? The challenge inspired me. The minor sixth chord beckoned. Eventually, it became a blast to play live with the band.
So, I wrote this song during some precious, quiet winter nights, as a new homeowner with a new family, a mountain of debt, and a nagging sense that the clock was ticking. Thank goodness, it's ticking still.
P.S.: I want to thank my old friend and former band mate, Matt Schickele, for composing that despicable, unconscionable guitar run in the chorus. Matt IS music, and everything he's ever recorded should be listened to by you, reader, as quickly—and as closely—as possible.
Entropy
Of all the Laws of Science
One sticks in my craw
It's Entropy, The Second Thermodynamic Law
Your ice cubes keep on melting
And sure as sun will shine
That lemonade you made ain't gonna turn to lemon wine
Time flies like an arrow
We can't unburn the fire
The angels' wings and everything is hanging by a wire
We flee the rising ocean
The mountaintops are sand
We idolize the work of human hands
Everything falls apart
Don't you see
Everything falls apart
Eventually
Everyone falls apart
Even you and me
Entropy
