I agree there is an overall equilibrium, but there do seem to be perpetual feedback loops.

Consider a stone dropped in water; Is entropy the force radiating out, potentially toward infinity, or is it the fluctuations generated settling back to equilibrium? They go in opposite directions and in an infinite universe, the force radiating out, is replaced by force from adjoining areas radiating in. Even the current cosmology, assuming a finite universe, continues to grow extensions, from dark energy and matter, to multiverses.

Entropy is both energy lost, leaving the remaining in equilibrium, but "lost" merely means lost to the system, because it is lost to elsewhere.

My point about time is that it's an effect of activity, like temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude. So the only way for the system to come to a full and complete stop would be if the vacuum, the equilibrium, stops fluctuating. Yet that would mean energy is lost, not simply that it reaches some harmonic equilibrium. Order will still arise, waves will synchronize as a feedback of paths of least resistance. The most synchronization is black holes.

It just seems to be some Escher sketch, sloshing back and forth in this eternal present.

Doesn't the present consume the past, in order to inform it? Cause becomes effect.