The Fools "Life Sucks Then You Die"

For anyone under the age of, say, 25, it’s probably impossible to imagine, but there was a time when computers were not in the classroom.

In fact, my first academic interaction with a computer was in my Junior year of high school. The building had one computer lab, and juniors and seniors could take computer classes. I guess Freshman and Sophomores weren’t quite ready yet.

And there wasn’t really software, per se. Or operating systems like Windows.

So computers were pretty new. And really, they couldn’t do too much.

One of our early assignments was to print out something we’d written. That was the extent of the complexity of computer programming: can you type something, and get it to come out on a piece of paper. High Tech, for 1985.

“What to you want us to type?” someone asked.

“Anything you want,” Mrs. Larnard told us. “It doesn’t matter. Just type it and print it. That’s the assignment. And she left us to our task.

So I typed up something that had been rattling around in my brain for the last few days, got it to print on the first try, passed it in and didn’t think about it again.

A few nights later, I was wandering through the kitchen near dinner time, when Dad asked me to come sit at the table. Mom stopped what she was doing and joined us.

Uh-oh.

“Everything okay?”

“Um. Yeah . . .” I was, of course, wracking my brain, trying to think what I might have done.

“You’re sure?”

Yes.

“School’s okay. You’re not feeling down?”

I’m fine.

“It’s just . . . Mrs. Larnard said you passed in some writing, and it was pretty upsetting. It sounded like maybe you were having some problems at school.”

The next day, I had a sit down with Mrs. Larnard.

“You’re okay, then, PJ?”

“Yes, Mrs. Larnard. They’re just song lyrics. I’m not depressed. Don’t worry about me.”

Here are the lyrics that I’d handed in. Just the first verse and chorus. (You can also read the full lyrics)

My house burned down in a flash of thunder
My wife ran off with a one-legged plumber
The crops fell dead when the riverbed went dry
My dog got squashed by a pick-up truck
My son ran away and got hooked on drugs
My daughter's knocked-up by the Class of '85

People say that life is good; it don't seem good to me
I'm lost without a paddle and I'm headed up **** Creek
People say that life is fun but I don't know why
As far as I can tell,...
LIFE SUCKS...then you die!

This was a popular, regional song, played quite a bit on WBCN, back in the 80s. It was the first thing that came to my teenage mind when I was asked to write something. It didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time.

I guess the irony of the song is lost, on paper.

Fortunately, the intervention was canceled.