prompt: reveal, title: amusement purposes only in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Fighting entropy, with this universe’s grim deterministic physics, is a lot like playing skeeball in a beachside arcade. You can practice and practice, but no matter how skilled you’ve become, the prize you’ll get for the tickets earned will always be worth less than if you’d taken your quarters to the store across the street and spent them directly. The problem is, the brief tiny sparks we are, we haven’t the capacity to step out of the arcade for a fair equivalent exchange. Maybe the gods receive such luxury, if so, good for them but I am no god and neither are you. All we get is this mostly-rigged game of skill where the very best we can do with a lifetime of technique is close the gap a little and lose less in that rotten swap than average. In the end, the house always wins.

Any metaphor that works for you is fine, of course. Blackjack, maybe. The claw machine by the front door of some chain diner, perhaps. It’s skeeball for me because I was once a little boy from nowhere, playing skeeball at the Sylvan Beach arcade or The Enchanted Forest water park. I did so while imagining I was in a big city instead, at Coney Island, at the Santa Monica Pier, in some other place my television-saturated brain thought actually mattered. It took me half a lifetime to unlearn that, you know, to realize everywhere matters, everyone matters. That I, despite my own spectacular failure at the rigged game of dreams, matter. That blowing my handful of tickets on absolutely useless trinkets does not change that fact at all, either.

Christ, I’m in my goddamned forties, and I still sometimes forget that unlearning, in moments of pain, in moments of weakness. Chasing significance is the sucker bet of all sucker bets. Wasting your skeeballs trying to perfect the carom for those impossible hundred-point corners instead of hitting the rhythm for nailing the thirty-pointer straight up the middle and at least walking away with a workmanlike sense of accomplishment to go along with whatever cheap amusements we may gather along the way. We don’t get very long here, it seems as though everything outlives us except our dreams. When they pass this life before you, only then is your true self revealed.

Our battle against entropy, for lasting significance, for eternal life in bodies or in memories, is ultimately doomed, no matter how skilled you become with a crooked system, no matter how good you become at minimizing losses. If we could beat the house, the arcade or the casino or the universe would never stay in business for long. Their perseverance tells the tale completely.

But we’re stuck here anyway, so all we can do is whatever good we can manage while we slowly lose and try to have as much fun as we can with all the silly children’s games and all the chintzy prizes we might accrue before the coins inexorably run out.