Karl Klockars

Memory is such a completely subjective thing.  It’s astounding how wrong I can be about occurences in my own life.  And yet, this week, it’s been proven how mistaken I can be about lil’ ol’ me.

I would have sworn I was in high school during Columbine.  Would have sworn up and down on a stack of bibles.  I remember people worrying about trenchcoats (because I wore one), I remember talk about metal detectors, I remember people freaking out about school shootings.  I remember people freaking out about goth/metal kids, and long hair, and piercings, and computer games, and just about everything else counterculture.

I graduated high school in 1997.  I can’t figure out how Columbine happened in 1999.  I’ve been reading the headline “ten year anniversary” correctly, right?  When the newspapers say “ten” they don’t really mean “fifteen,” right? I remember very well the dean of the school calling us ne’er-do-wells the “Gangsters of Nicotine.”  Maybe that got wrapped into Trenchcoat Mafia?  I have no idea.  I’m trying to figure out how old I am and if I actually attended high school when I thought I did.

Memory is soft, like pushing fingers into jello.  Or like wet bread.  It’s gross, and often times can be shoved around.

I remember very well having someone come to school the day after all the Columbine action happened and that someone was wearing a black trenchcoat.  On purpose.  Because that someone was addicted to negative attention, and they got it.  I swear, I’m not making this up.  It’s in my head – and it’s forcing me to wonder what else I’ve concocted in this hunk of grey meat I call my brain.

I remember distinctly talking with someone in college in 1998 about living in Colorado just a suburb away during the Columbine incident.  I remember hearing about some girl that slept with one of the killers’ brothers.  All this would have been in 1998.

And it was in 1999?  Are you sure?  Really?  Or did the country just miss the ten year and are calling it this just to pretend they didn’t drop the ball?

I mean, maybe all the horrible things that happened during the 90′s seemed to me to occur in 1994.  Oklahoma City, Waco…I distinctly remember hearing about those in classes like Freshman Earth Science and American History.  I got my first real news on Waco from the show Inside Edition on ABC when I walked downstairs from school and was eating something from Market Day.

But Waco was 1993, right?  What the hell went wrong in 1994?  Why is that ground zero (forgive the conflagration of terms) of time for all these things in my head?  Could it be because anyone in sophomore year of high school is going to relate all the terrible things in the world to one of the most excruciating periods of life for any American Child of the 90s?

It makes me wonder about what else I’ve gotten wrong about things that happened when I was 19.  I don’t remember where I was when I was watching Columbine go down on TV.  I know I missed most of it – maybe I just assumed it was because I was in school?  Or because I was wasting time watching Jerry Springer on broadcast television waiting for a Freshman Philosophy class to kick in.  Maybe it was chicken parm day in the cafeteria.  I really don’t know.

Could I just have chosen to have it happen in my head while I was in high school?  Would that make any sense?  That something that traumatic to a high school would have taken place while I was in high school?

And if all of this is completely messed up, confusing, and frighteningly insane to me in my head, how bad must it have been for people closer to it?  And how much dirt must have been in the heads of the two kids that did this?

None of this makes sense.  Soon it’ll turn out that I was 47 when the Challenger happened, and 60 when man landed on the moon.  This is Benjamin Button style confusion and I’ll let you know when I get it figured out.

But when I think I do – how will I know to trust it in another decade?