August 17, 2007
Death Looms Ahead as Classes Resume
A Guest Editorial by Logan Williams,Indiana University Class of 2009
It seems like only weeks since IU let out for the summer, and here we are, getting sickeningly close to the start of classes. True, we have ten days until we have to drag our depressed selves into an actual classroom, but the past two weeks have been filled with all sorts of quasi-academic crap that has bled into what remains of a dying summer season.
Death is stronger than we are, and we can’t prevent it. Therefore, whatever meanings exist must apply to the temporary period while we live, those remaining days before the start of the new semester.
Oh, we uncertain students are doomed to be seekers, always searching for a meaning to life but never quite finding that shred of purpose that keeps us from splattering our fucking brains all over the Quad with a rusty shotgun.
Yes, death looms ahead of us like a hangman’s scaffold being assembled outside the 12x12 window of a condemned man's prison cell, pouding nails an ever-present reminder of the precious few minutes we have before the noose of life breaks our fucking necks and we spend eternity floating around like one of those Bounce Fresh Linen Scent sheets that fell out of the laundry basket of a student on academic probation, blowing across the dorm parking lot with all of its softening and static-cling protection long since sucked out by the dryer that is life.
So you sit there listening to the horrific sounds of death around you - and I do mean horrific, so don't accuse me of an artifice like hyperbole - so you sit there with your drooling mouth hanging open because you can't believe what you're hearing from me, the sounds of TRUTH and LIFE hitting you smack square in the middle of your bourgeois face, and realize that there are now less than ten days left, brother, to make something of this impossibly short summer.
So what do you say? Would you rather hit Kilroy's Sports Bar or Scotty's Brewhouse tonight? Not that it really matters, given our inevitable deaths, but I hear Kilroy's is running a 25-cent Hot Wings special tonight, and I know the bartender, and she'll probably give us a couple of free beers, too, espcially if we leave her a phat-ass tip and stuff.
And there's nothing like that live pub trivia contest, matching wits against drunken imbeciles across the country, to make one forget about all that death shit.
Labels: existentialism, Indiana University, IU
