mist of plastic

When I was last in school, I was given the assignment to write a 2-3 page paper on Buddhism for extra credit. For some obscure reason, I have decided to go ahead and write this paper even though no one knows when (if ever) I will be able to re-enroll. The research was a little disorienting as I have never been exposed to any but the most mainstream Buddhist concepts. Then I started reading about the four noble truths.

As I understand them, the four noble truths are the original Buddha's convictions about life that one must understand and accept before traveling on the path to nirvana. I was pleasantly surprised and amused to recognize a familiar concept in the first noble truth: "life is dukkah". If you say this aloud, it kind of sounds like "life is dookie" as in poo or shit. and, indeed, dukkah is roughly translated as "suffering" which can be one of the connotations  of "shit". So, in order to find the secret to happiness, one must first realize that life is shit.

This is the same message voiced by the dead milkmen in their song Life is Shit. Perhaps the teachings of Buddha aren't so foreign after all. Or maybe I'm just trying to compress an ancient religious truth into a catchy pop phrase so I can better relate to it.

Life is Shit

I ran into a friend of mine
Said he was gonna take some words and make them rhyme
I said "You can fool some of them some of the time,
But you can only fool half them all of the time"
He said "Yes I do believe this is true,
Would you like to come and sniff some glue?
And we'll fly to where the skies are blue
And look for things both bright and new"

And on a pretty Sunday morning
A bunch of pretty Baptist girls
Linked their pretty hands and they sang
Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it
This is life as I know it

And in the sky I saw Richard Nixon
Smoking a lacey with Mr. Dickson
He said "Son there's something I must say,
I do believe I've found a better way"
And a vision came
And I new it was Bob Crane
And Bob sang:

Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it
This is life as I know it

And when my friend and I were done
We went to rest upon the sun
Cause life takes from us the things we love
And it robs us of the special ones
And it puts them high where we can't climb
And we only miss them all the time

And we sing:
Life is shit, life is shit
The world is shit, the world is shit
This is life as I know it
This is life as I know it…