Editorial

Naked Dung

You are a dung beetle. Wipe your feet before you enter the real world.

There are two ways of looking at your University experience. You either dedicate four years of your life to shoveling dung for the sole purpose of self-improvement, or you merely hitch a ride on the back of a flatbed piled high with dung, immersing yourself in this dung, only to emerge four years later miles away from the point at which your journey began. You either accept the conventions of the University microcosm as you would the truths of the world it attempts to embody, or you accept the microcosm's irrelevance and hang on 'till you can leave it. Whichever way you view your University experience, you will invariably come away reeking of academic excrement. Your OSPIRGs, your Student Governments, your Mandatory Fees, your overbearing administration, your major requirements, and a handful of MIPs all combine to form a substance that not even an inbred dog would eat.

But fear not, kind sirs, because your bodies, your souls are designed to handle dung. You are, for all practical purposes, a dung beetle. Your entire existence is one long tedious exercise in justifying your name, you smelly little bastards! So what do you choose, stinky-boy, are you going to push that ball of shit? It's a thankless Sisyphean task, and with a college degree under your belt there's a good chance you might even know who Sisyphus is. Especially since we're going to hell and we're dragging you down with us, even if it's the last thing we do.

But you're young, right? You probably think that the afterlife is a long way off. Spend a few more years and you'll learn that on a good day, hell can look a lot like Eugene. Hell is Art Alexakis and his music ("handsome man with athletic thighs") -- what the @#$%?! does that mean, Art?) Hell is Ron Wyden. Hell is the ASUO turnspits who look up to people like Art Alexakis and Ron Wyden. But most of all, hell is other people. Sartre said that--the same man who wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. So you see it's all coming together now. You can set your watch by the fact that no matter how hard you try, that ball of shit will roll back down the hill. Or maybe we've spent so much time at this illustrious University that talking in circles comes easy to us.