Columbine's Legacy

On this day 15 years ago–half a lifetime ago now–I was taken out of class, interrogated, and ultimately suspended for a week, over what I would call “thoughtcrime” if I didn’t associate that word with the sort of mouth-breathers who unironically use the term “sheeple.”

Long story short, I was falsely accused of planning to shoot up the school. This was the direct result of paranoia surrounding the one-year anniversary of Columbine. This would become one of the defining events of my life.

The “evidence” against me consisted of hearsay, grossly misinterpreted minor details, and what amounted to profiling: they never found any guns or bomb-making materials or detailed school schematics and plans for murder because there fucking weren’t any. The school administration at the district office, where I had to attend a two-part hearing to see whether I’d be kicked out permanently, deliberately skewed everything to make it appear as though I had no thoughts or interests beyond violence and murder. Imagine being barely 15 years old and having adults who hold direct power over your life and future argue over a conference room table about whether or not you are, in fact, a monster that needs to be Dealt With.

My charges were “making threatening remarks about school safety” and “possession of a weapon on school property.” The latter was the result of the campus cop finding a paring knife in my backpack. (Note that the class I was initially pulled out of was an art class. In which we were using class-provided X-Acto knives.) Although, for obvious reasons, I told no one at the time, I had this in my bag because of a boy in my acting class named Tyler, who would “jokingly” hit on me, put his arm around me against my wishes, etc. when people were around and then mutter violent threats when no one else was within earshot: this sad little knife was my last resort in case he actually did “try anything.” (In retrospect I’m appalled at how massively fucked-up that entire situation was.) It didn’t occur to me to tell an adult because it would be his word against mine and, seeing as he was a generic preppy type (he would later be nominated for Homecoming King), he would absolutely escape punishment and possibly escalate his treatment. As a wee true-crime aficionado, I already had him pegged as the Ted Bundy type. And in an absurd twist, he would later end up dating the lying little cunt who had reported me to the administration in the first place.

My lawyer was ultimately successful and, after my week-long suspension was over, I was “allowed” to come back, upon which I had to refute various asinine rumors about what had happened multiple times a day every day. And I was still a target: about a month after that, a friend of mine dismembered a Britney Spears doll at lunchtime, and I was called to the office and “gently” interrogated. (If you think that’s absurd, you should read a laundry list of the supposed “evidence” against me during my hearing.)

For some time I’ve wanted to write about this experience, and how it’s affected my adult life, in long form. Perhaps this year will be the time.

Untitled (3:36 AM / 20 Mar 2009)

Written under the influence of a certain pharmaceutical at the time and date in question. A bit "softer" in content than much of what I've posted here, but my work isn't all perversion and murder.

The Flooding of Nordstrand

As I live in Brooklyn, I was not unaffected by Hurricane Irene, though my preparations amounted to collecting tap water in jars and taping cardboard over my bedroom windows. My neighborhood didn't happen to lie in any of the three "danger zones," and the hurricane only appeared last night as a rather windy rainstorm sans thunder and lightning. No damage to my apartment, no power outages, etc., though other parts of the city experienced flooding and loss of electricity. I tend to be rather stoical in such situations, as I was with that brief earthquake aftershock I also experienced a few days ago: "Well, it didn't harm me or any of my belongings, nor did it disrupt my schedule. Right, then, I have other things to do."

I'm reminded, though, of the Burchardi flood in October of 1634 that enveloped and basically destroyed the island of Nordstrand, off the Jutland peninsula. One of the oldest branches of my family that I can definitively trace came from that island, a fact I discovered while doing genealogical research a year or two ago.

The area itself was already going through a fairly shitty time, recovering from a plague epidemic that had occurred some three decades before and getting their asses handed to them by Frederick III in the Thirty Years' War. This was also not the first flood to hit the area during that timespan: only the most destructive. All in all, not the best time to be a Nordstrander.

After the dikes burst on the night of 11 October: "The sea swallowed more than half of the island. A total of 6,123 people drowned, and 1,339 farms and houses were washed away, as were 28 windmills and 6 clock towers."

The flooding was so great that it permanently altered the entire geographical makeup of Nordstrand Island, creating a cluster of smaller islands in its wake, one of which was also called "Nordstrand." This being Europe in the 1600s, it was naturally perceived as evidence of God's wrath. (Perhaps some influential 17th-century Dutch pastor blamed it on all the sodomy.)

On a more personal level, my ancestor Volkje Jurians was a native of Nordstrand. Evacuated to the nearby mainland town of Husum in Schleswig-Holstein, she met a young sailor called Jan Fransse; the two ended up marrying about four and a half years later. (It would be nice to think they were a love match, though considering marriage at the time was largely a business transaction, it may well have been an arranged act of charity since Volkje had been orphaned by the flood and presumably whatever dowry she'd accumulated had sunk to the bottom of the sea. They did have nine kids over two decades, though, which might speak for itself.)

A short time later, they emigrated to a settlement that would later become Albany, NY, and went on to produce the family line that led to my dubious existence. So, you see, I'm not being facetious when I describe myself as "the residual byproduct of a 17th-century mass drowning"!

It's rather striking to think that, if this island had not been destroyed and thousands of people killed, I wouldn't be alive today.