1. It is the opening of the year twenty-six. The people of the sea see the mighty force of the north wind. Behold, it commeth like a comet, said Simon the jester. But no one laughs, for their mouths are already wide open and their throats garroted and laid waste, their voices ascending into nothingness at the sight of the mighty north wind armada.

2. Simon is beside himself. There is no one standing beside him. He is the very Simon the jester who jested with the people before, promising to feed the multitude with five loaves and two cups of water. At the appointed time, when the multitude had gathered, he cut off the ends of the five loaves of bread and proclaimed: Endless bread, look, endless bread. Then, with his two empty cups in hand, in waiting, he called upon Nicholas the procurator to procure and supply the water. Nicholas the procurator called upon Osmosis the provider, who answered the call positively, but alas, Nicholas the procreator had endless pipe with endless holes and endless wastage.

3. Cast aside by the people, with many clamoring for his arrest (with neither bread nor water in jail), Simon the jester secludes himself for 40 minutes and 40 seconds. It takes precisely that little time for the voice of the Oracle to descend onto him and proclaim that the people need laws, laws to live by, laws of nature, laws about the whole wide world from here to eternity, the expanding edge of the universe. Laws that will make them fearless and feared.

4. Rising from his torpor, Simon the jester goes in search of a sign before going before the people again. But with clouds of pungent smoke from heaps of burning marijuana bush blowing all over the promised land, his passive intoxicated nose knows not what is what.

5. Suddenly, out of the indigo sky, a quintuplet of hemidemisemiquavers whispers through the viscid air. It carries a lengthy word, a word so long in spelling you can put the kettle on, have a cup, share a cup, wash both cups and saucers with soap and dribs and drips and drabs and drops of salinated water, dry them, turn them down, and burp.

6. Ther-mo-dy-na-mics. Ther-mo-dy-na-mics. Ther-mo-dy-na-mics.

7. Simon the jester shouts at the sound of the word coming from the Oracle, saying, show thyself, reveal thy meaning and thy etymology! But before he could reach the end of his sentence and not get even anywhere close to its exclamation mark, the Oracle moved, and having moved, moved on and moved away as swiftly as it had come.

8. Now in those days, and worse be the nights, many roads were possessed by a holey ghost that would spring up at you and damage the springs of your cart. In your downtrodden state, you would look at your broken-down ground cart, and say, oh my, it came to pass, it came to pass; but lo, it passeth not. All the while, the drivers of other carts would curse all manner of evil, saying colorful things, without rhyme, reason, syntax or sin, telling each other unclean words about anatomy and parts of family members. It was out of this earthly morass that four tablets of stones, bearing the four laws of thermodynamics, rose up, and landed in the hands and on the feet of Simon the jester, suddenly now a juggler. The return of the Dread-I Oracle.

9. The Zeroth Law. Simon says it is so called because although it came after the other three, it is so supremely empirical that it had to go before the first. It states: If two systems are both in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then all three are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Called upon to explain, Simon the jester said, if America and China are equally hot or seeking equal heat and energy, little Antigua and Barbuda has no place in that system, until and unless it joins with other nations to form the United States of the Caribbean.

10. The First Law. Simon says this is the law of the conservation of energy. The total energy of an isolated system is constant. Energy can be transformed from one form to another but can be neither created nor destroyed. Called upon for an explanation, Simon the jester said that the conservation of energy, means, for example, that the Industrial Revolution to come will use the energy and skills of Africans, via the Atlantic Slave Trade, to build the places of the north; and hence the North People must pay reparations since the energy of the Africans is conserved in every single thing used and possessed by the North People. Equity. Fearing ridicule and retribution, Simon the jester does not warn his people that since humans should not be bought and sold like property, like chattel, the North People simply will use a marketing ploy and say yes, they agree; but Africans are not humans. Therefore.

11. The Second Law. Not wanting to be stoned with or without the four tablets, Simon rests two of them to emphasize the second law. Over time, he declares, every isolated system releases its native tendency, its intrinsic, endemic urge to achieve a state of maximum disorder. This disorder is called entropy. Remember disorder if you forget entropy, even though entropy, as a word, concept, or idea, is unavoidable and predictable. This means that change is inescapable. Every system wants to achieve a state of maximum disorder, maximum randomness, or chaos. Survival depends on managing this natural, tendential disorder. The only way to accommodate the change from the blistering north wind armada is to form the United States of the Caribbean.

12. The Third Law. The natural disorder, the randomness, the entropy of a system decreases and approaches a minimum or a constant as the temperature decreases. It goes to the illusive endpoint of zero disorder that we cannot reach. Perfection. We exist somewhere between total disorder and no disorder. This demands cooperation for survival. The nations of the Caribbean must huddle together in colonies of the Caribbean to form the United States of the Caribbean.

13. The scribes and pharisees cry out a warning that in time to come the people of the Caribbean will learn a new arithmetic and say one from ten leaves nought. Not to be outdone, Simon the jester calls on the Oracle. He is infused with a retort. The new arithmetic will also teach that zero from ten leaves one. This means that for the ten to exit as a unit of force, even with no subtraction, there must be one leader, one who pulls and holds all of the numbers together. It is this messiah or messianic country that the people of the Caribbean await to show the way to withstand the force of the fierce and mighty wind from the North People.

14. Where is he? Where is he? the people eagerly beg. But some are wired to inequity and corruption and shout out: Away with Simon the jester, off with his big, ugly, stupid head. He needs the messiah. Give us Barabbas.

15. Fearing the everlasting sin from gigabytes of another eaten apple tablet from the Garden of Amazon, Simon the jester consults the Oracle one last time and then speaks in tongues and ears. She is already here. Do not take Barabbas. I give you Barbados. She is already here. The messiah is already here.