Gustatory Luckpilling

vivianimbriotis | March 17, 2023, 2:24 p.m.

I have been obsessed with Luck lately, and she is hungry.

Her stomach growled when she saw How To Be Free by Epictetus on my bookshelf, and she started by eating that. Then she ate Epictetus himself, whole, and moved on to Hard Determinism as a chaser. She ate retributive judicial systems and grudges and personal blame.

She came with me to the hospital and saw the treatment of IV drug users and smokers and alcoholics by medical professionals, and she lapped it up. Then she looked more broadly at the senseless stochasticity of sickness and ate that up too, smacking lips made of nebulae.

Then she turned her gaze to me. She ate my intellect and my successes, my doting parents and brothers. She ate my way with words and sense of humour. She ate my obsessiveness and the earplugs I use to sleep. She ate my arrogance and my occasional humility. She ate my academic success and my romantic failure. She ate all of my internal states and experiences, hollowing me out, as though gulping an oyster from its shell.

Then she gazed at the shell – at my poor response to resistance training and my need for glasses and the colour of my eyes and my hands that are too small to barre a G chord shape – and she crunched it between her teeth like cereal.

She was hungry at the very beginning. When the cosmological constants of the universe were set to values compatible with intelligent life, that was her entrée. She will be hungry towards dessert, when one last consciousness will get the opportunity to gaze out across a truly empty cosmos.

At the end of things, when entropy dominates, when all that is consists of iron atoms spread homogenously though thin space, when the probability distribution is perfectly flat, when there is nothing of moral value left, she will finally be sated for a moment. In time she will hunger again, and for her next meal will move onto other worlds than these.