Reconstructing Religion and Green Grass

I'm posting another Modest Mouse song, Lives, that I'd like to "reconstruct" with the aid of mythology. But first I want to make a side comment on something Dr. Sexson stated in class today regarding reconstruction. He said that mythology doesn't deconstruct religions, but instead it reconstructs their stories. In order to reconstruct something, doesn't it have to be deconstructed first? Or at the very least, it has no resemblance of a properly constructed idea, so it must be built up differently. We have the privilege of studying mythology in an very open-minded setting (at least no one in our class objected to Dr. Sexson's reconstruction of their beliefs) and that's all well and good, but the rest of the world does not interpret religion with open ears and closed mouths. Dr. Sexson said so himself that, "People usually hold their religious values very dear to them." You can call it "deconstructing" or "reconstructing", but at the base of it all, it represents a fundamental change that most people will not recognize. The world does not agree on a universal afterlife. The world does not abide by a set of universal values. The world does not read the same texts as we are reading. I mean, seriously, who else on the MSU campus has read The Golden Bough, Ovid's Metamorphosis, Henderson the Rain King, or Myth and Reality outside of the select handfuls of students that study under Dr. Sexson. One would be hard pressed to convince another student to read any ONE of those books, let alone all four of them. If we are reconstructing the MSU student body's religions, how can they interpret what we are saying if they are ignorant or abide by a different set of texts? Our interpretation asks them to make a fundamental change in the way they view life; something that may not happen in a year's span or even that of a lifetime.

I digress. Here is "Lives" by Modest Mouse:

Everyone's afraid of their own life
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?
No one really knows the ones they love
If you knew everything they thought
I bet that you'd wish that they'd just shut up
Well, you were the dull sound of sharp math
When you were alive
No one's going to play the harp when you die
And if I had a nickel for every damn dime
I'd have half the time, do you mind?
Everyone's afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?
Am I right? And it's our lives
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
We're alive for the first time
It's hard to remember were alive for the last time
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
To live before you die
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
That our lives are such a short time
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
When it takes such a long time
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
My mom's God is a woman and my mom she is a witch
I like this
My hell comes from inside, comes from inside myself
Why fight this?
Everyone's afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?

There are many myths that this song touches base with, most importantly the story of Midas and the general idea of "the grass is always greener on the other side." Midas thought that if he could just turn anything he ever wanted to gold, all of his problems would disappear. Be careful what you wish for is the moral to that story. Life is not a math problem to be solved in one full swoop, but rather it is a never-ending essay to be written as time passes us by. We as humans have the natural instinct that what we have in the present is not as good as in the past and could be better in the future. Issac Brock says in the song that, "My hell comes from inside myself". This shows that everything we think about our reality is a perception that we construct through myths. Our concept of Hell is entirely our projection of our worst imagination, our worst thoughts imaginable, and our deepest fears we choose not to face. We our thrown in constant doubt of whether or not out conception of a "happy life" is as good as someone else's life. That feeling of missing out, being asleep and not awake to life is constantly present with each new realization of another story taking place in our proverbial rear-view mirror of life. Like Lot's wife, we want to look at the destruction that is taking place behind us. Like Eve, we want to eat the fruit for which we are not supposed to eat. We are curious of what is happening around us. Our live seem boring compared to the lives of Gods, Heroes, Action Heroes, Prophets, and natives of distant cultures. Dr. Sexson would say this is why we read, so that we can discover these mythologies and enrich our boring lives.