Order and Chaos

no, take those melons and use them to fertilize the next tree you see

Yes, what the world needs, is... more trees.

Wait, what was I thinking? There's a whole forest out there. You know what? Fuck trees. There's too many of them. I hate air. And maybe once I get some of these god damn trees out of the way I could actually see the forest.

ppprrrooobably not.

I shook my head and focused on the issue at hand. Was I going to just go ahead and eat a rotten melon?

No.

No, of course not! Though I may have been affecting the station of a commoner, (who I imagined were just eating out of dumpsters, like, all the time, whenever,) I was still a princess. I put the rotten melon back down on a doily, then curtsied my farewells to the twins.

"ſo long, gentlemen," I said, "but I muſt be taking my leave now."

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

I woke up.

There was only one possible explanation for such organized thuddery — I was near other humans! Quickly, I pulled my (now tattered and filthy, having been run through brambles and torn-up for bandages and firestarting material) dress on and ran closer to the source of the noise.

It was a flock of lumberjacks, uniformed in flannel and beard (even the ladies.) They were all very hard at work attacking the nearby trees, but I couldn't help noticing they were using the wrong side of the axe. Some of them were even using baseball bats.

There was likewise only one possible explanation for my dream deja vu: The gods had been sending me prophecies in the form of dreams. Usually, they say these messages come in the form of vague, oblique symbols and recurrent motifs, like say, the number 3, or duplicity, that you can't rightly recognize as a prophecy until after the prophesied has passed unless you're REALLY keen. (It's really kind of a dick move.) Seeing as this one was just plain accurate so far, though, and honestly pretty boring, I was inclined to believe that the gods were just trying to get me to trust my dreams, and the NEXT one would be of supreme importance. It was also important to watch for the moment when things diverged from my dream, if they did. After that, I could retroactively recognize where it went back to oblique warnings or a regular dream. So I resolved to do things exactly as they happened in my dream.

"Excuse me," I said, my voice hoarse from lack of communication, "is there a town nearby here?"

"Yes, stranger?" said a lumberjack, his voice hoarse from a lifetime of smoking. "It's over there, in a distance and direction." He indicated with a gesture.

"Thank you, that's very specific and helpful," I said, walking forwards towards where I had been told the nearby town was. "And by the way..." I grabbed his backwards axe and turned it around, "I think you'll find it will work better this way."

He looked confused for a second, then swung and buried the blade of his axe in the trunk of the tree. His face lit up with childlike delight and the other lumberjacks peered around their trees to gaze at his handiwork, astonished, as he enthusiastically chopped the tree down, grunting all the way. When the tree finally fell, crushing one of his fellow lumberjacks to death, the entire lumberjacking expedition erupted into joyous celebration, laughing and dancing and crying from joy.

"I'M RICH, I'M RICH!" I could hear the raspy gentlejack holler from a distance as I was en route to Town.

At last, I arrived in a hustling and bustling hamlet. A woman sprinted by me carrying a wicker basket full of water. Check. Another was hocking apples and oranges from a stand. Check.

"ORANGES, ORANGES, GET YOUR ORANGES HERE," she hocked. "APPLES, APPLES, INCOMPARABLE APPLES HERE!"

"I'll take an apples there," I honked, putting down a coin from my purse on the table.

She bit into the coin and tried to bend it. When it didn't give, she threw it back in my face, spat in my direction, and began to rant angrily about my shoddy clothes and funny money and throwing quite a lot of verbal invective at me as I backed away. This didn't make any more sense (or cents) the second time around.

I was walking backwards when an arm yanked on the torn-for-scrap hem of my sweaty dress, right on time.

"Excuse me," a voice said. Presumably, it belonged to the same person as the arm. "Could you help us settle a debate?"

I pivoted to face the voice and arm that had tugged on my disgusting dress. Sitting up against a nearby dumpster with their legs crossed were three blind men, all identical triplets, all disgustingly old. I couldn't tell whether the smell was from the refuse or from their general slovenliness.

Wait, triplets! Yes! I hid my smile at this tiny difference and resolved to ride out what would be potentially the same three monologues over again.

The middle man, who had been the one to tug my once-white-now-urine-yellow dress, spoke first. "The question is simple on its face, but vast: Is nothing a thing?"

"My position is that is obviously not," said the man on the left, "first of all, on semantic grounds that should be obvious. And, in addition, we simply cannot consider — cannot conceive of — that which is not, only that which is. Anywhere you turn your head, you see things; there is nothing before you but thing. With the thoughts of is-nots banished from our minds, we are left only with the is, the truth, and can not help but proceed rationally, as so:

"Immediately, it occurs to us that there is no division between what our senses tell us are discrete objects. Ironically, it was my blindness that helped me to see this. Not only is nothing not a thing, there is only one thing. Furthermore, for something to come into being implies that it once was not; this is patent absurdity! What is, then, must always have been, and likewise will always be. The same principle goes for the illusion of change. All is one, one is all there would ever be, and to consider otherwise would be deigning to lower ourselves into a cavern of falsehood and deceptions — for the is-not is synonymous with the false." With such a great exertion of breath, he practically deflated.

"You yourself use the word 'not' to describe your position!" accused the man on the right to the man on the left, seemingly only stopped from physically assaulting him by the middle man. Things were clearly heated between these two. "The existence of a falsehood implies an absence of truth. And furthermore us of all people, the blind, should know that no matter how we turn our heads, we see nothing! In this way, perhaps my blindness is actually the true sight, for I imagine there is much more nothing in this world than thing. For starters, if all was one, motion would be impossible, for there would be no empty space for moving items to displace. This alone proves my case for me!"

"Motion is an illusion," peeped the man from the left.

"Motion is an illusion, change is an illusion, everything is an illusion to you! What good is rationalization if it is unsupported, indeed is exactly contradictory, to the observable reality of the world around us? Bah!" The man on the right was eminently a pragmatic sort.

"How can we trust our senses at all to deliver us an objective picture of observable reality?" spoke the man from the center. The man on the right nodded. "Indeed, one we have in common has failed us already, which is proof enough, and the remaining ones can be fooled. How many times have you smelled something that you couldn't determine what was? You, young lady, does the area's odor emanate from us or the dumpster? You couldn't tell, can you? If some of our senses can be fooled some of the time, then it stands to reason that all of our senses could be fooled all of the time; and thus we must hold the entirety of reality in doubt.

"This is where I diverge from the man on my left — your right, though," the centermost man continued. "If it is true that all around us is an illusion, then it stands to reason that in reality, nothing could very well be the only thing! The exception is my own mind, which is what is used to hold reality in doubt — if my mind were not real, nothing would be holding reality in doubt, and it would collapse into concreteness once more, like a dam holding a river back!" He chuckled. Apparently that is what passes for a joke to him. "But truly, my mind is the only thing I cannot refute that I experience. You could say I am my mind. Other than that, I must assume there is nothing.

"Life," he concluded, "is but a dream."

"As you can see, we do not agree, because we are not the same person," said the man on the left.

"As far as we can tell," said the man in the center.

"Which is where you come in," said the man on the right. "Lay the question to rest for us so we can all finally die: Is nothing a thing?"

This time, there were no intrusive thoughts butting their way into my head like a headbutt. It was like the rails I had been on suddenly disappeared. I had to act on my own free will again. That's when I realized I hadn't been really listening.

"Uh," I said. "Um," I said. "Well, nothing... does... I am... uh..." How did it go? Shit. "Oh, who gives a fuck!? It's all semantics!" I said, frustrated.

And I think to myself: "What the hell, I'll just eat some trash! I will cross the line that divides man and bum." I picked up a rotten melon from off the ground and buried my face in it, gnashing my teeth through its skin and into its moldy core. It tasted worse than I could have ever imagined, and I had to fight the urge to vomit before I had even swallowed. (In retrospect, why I didn't just give in is a mystery.) I was now... a bum.

"Well," said the man on the left, "if it's all semantics, then I definitely win."

That's right, in the dream, wasn't he the one that doubted my nothinghood on the grounds that I existed according to all senses, when he was the one of the two that firmly took a stand AGAINST ever relying on the senses for observation? And what did it mean that I had once again become Nothing? Was it a warning, was I to later encounter a Nothing, or was it more symbolic than that? And what about The Boogieman, was he a god manifesting in my dream, or a demon, or a warning? What was I being told?

And even more importantly, which god was telling me it?

Someone grabbed me by the arm from behind. This was a total break with the dream.

"Excuse me," a voice said. Presumably, it belonged to the same person who was grabbing my arm. They turned me around and grabbed my other arm, leading me away from the triplets.

They were a knight in shining armor — minus, for some reason, the parts that covered the calves and forearms? Her grill was up and I could see her face, which was beautiful. "You're coming with me," she said, and I was perfectly happy to. Perhaps this was a potential lover, laid in my path by fate? Or, wait, perhaps she was what my dream was warning me about with the Nothing! Gods, so confusing.

While I was dreamily entranced by her face and lower limbs, and in a trance considering my dreams, she slapped me in handcuffs. Oh, she was a cop.

"Did I do something wrong?" I said.

"Well, let's see, since you showed up in city limits about an hour ago, we've officially recorded..." she said, "One count of manslaughter, one count of conspiracy to defraud the city treasury, one count of vagrancy, one count of counterfeiting, ten counts of public indecency."

"Ten counts of public indecency?!" I said. "I'm wearing as much as anyone else I see around! How do I rack up ten whole counts of it!?"

"Why should I care what you're wearing? We're not the fashion police," she said. "But your fingernails — no paint left, hardly — simply unacceptable!" She made me look at my fingernails. It was true, the green paint had mostly chipped off while I was out in the forest and hadn't had the time nor resources to reapply. "And since I found you, you've managed to rack up one count of eating trash that didn't belong to you, and THREE counts of attempted manslaughter!"

"Those old men? I was just talking to them!" I said. She stopped me in front of the stairs that led up to what I had to assume was the courthouse or jail.

"Do you know who those men are?" she said. I shook my head no. "Well, ignorance is no excuse," she said, and took one step up the stairs. Then, she stopped short of her next step, and returned to the base of the stairs.

"Might as well explain it," she said, with a hint of a sigh. I nodded — at the least it would extend the time until my trial or incarceration. "Their mother was a pastry chef, and a very pious woman, but she was never able to conceive a child with her husband no matter how hard they tried. She prayed and prayed and prayed, until one day her prayers were answered. Because she had been so unfailingly pious and such a great pastry chef, she would be blessed with not one child, but triplets — all of whom would be further blessed, with immortality.

"As the brothers aged though, they discovered that — well, that they aged. When they were 60, and the ravages of time were truly beginning to show how they would take their toll and not stop just because of immortality, they decided to make a pilgrimage to visit the gods and have their blessing lifted before they were too decrepit to make the journey.

"When they got there, they kneeled before the gods who had blessed their mother's womb. They came face-to-face with them — which was the last thing they'd ever see, because the gods struck them all blind for their impudence in visiting without calling ahead to make an appointment. Nonetheless, they were permitted to plead their case.

"The gods — Andrew, the god of doughnuts; Drew, the god of doughnut holes; and Andy, the god of the holes in doughnuts — told them that if they could simply agree on whether or not nothing was a thing and settle a centuries-long running debate between the three, they would lift their immortality and furthermore, graciously sic Cerebus, the three-headed dog, on them, to eat all three of their throats at once.

"It matters not that they are 111 years old now, nor that they wish only to die. It is always wrong to try and lead someone to their deaths, you monster." She spat on me. Nonetheless, she guided me to the courtroom, where my fate would be decided. I had to admit, I was nervous. I knew I was innocent, or was reasonably sure I was, at least. But could I convince the court that I was? I still couldn't fully understand most of the charges against me, and I had had no time to consider my case.

Now hear the word of the Lord...

"You have been acquainted with the charges against you," said the judge, who was dressed much like you'd imagine a judge would be, and sat atop a pillar that must have been two stories high. I'd imagine most of those unfortunate enough to be thrown before them were imposed by this — myself included. "How do you plead?"