Tilt

Without fail, kids are excited at the beginning of any new adventure. That's youth, after all: when the spring at your back launching you forward and into the unknown is a thrill instead of a cue to dig in your heels, if only you had some. Then we're dropped into the grand melee and are all the same. Just another bouncing ball trying to stave off the gutter as long as possible with no real hope of ever controlling our fate, simply wishing for the best in spite of the flashing lights and all available evidence telling us otherwise. And the youngins, god bless them, still think that it's a lark. 

Gravity always wins though, and in spite of the flippers and sound effects and extra points, we're all rolling downhill. Some days that's easier to ignore than others, but sooner or later the incline of your descent is all you've got left. Sooner or later you arrive in the gutter and the game is over. Rebelling and trying to spin away feels good when you have energy that's more kinetic than potential, yet so much of it is futile when your opponent is nature itself. You can't fight physics. You can't kill the ocean. Some things are just too big. 

None of it stops us from careening from bumper to bumper and through the bonus chutes though, because what else do we have but the game? Young people may be more eager to join in, and will even find the ricocheting amusing for a time. All of us did once. There's a delight in the unknown, in believing the cacophony of stimulus is a prize and not a sentence. But one day everyone wakes up to the fact that our slanted world is nothing more than a ballet of chaos, where we're all trapped inside the same machine, just waiting for someone to run out of quarters.