High School Backpack

It’s September—that time of year where you feel a little change in the air, the Fall months approach, and you have a bit of bile in your stomach from past trauma. What PTSD would this be? Well, back-to-school season, of course.

And what better way to celebrate days past that won’t leave our psyche than to revisit the ghosts of high school? And I just so happen to have my bag from high school still sitting around. I know that’s likely not a glowing endorsement of my packrattishness, yet it’s still a wonder that it’s bounced around from house to house without being disturbed. Directly after graduating, I probably threw it in my attic and never bothered unpacking it. Then it ended up in the storage space above my garage in my first house before eventually ending up in my current house’s attic.

At times, I would find it and wonder why I still kept it around, but I figured it would serve as an interesting time capsule. Now, 28 years later, we get to crack it open and wonder if all that anticipation was a wasted effort or not.

There’s the beauty. A little dusty, but otherwise intact. You may be thinking that this isn’t really a backpack but more of a duffel bag—and you would be right. You wouldn’t garner too many points for such an assessment, since it’s rather obvious, but I found that larger bags suited my needs. Starting in Junior High, I became paranoid about getting home and not having a book needed for some homework assignment. I suppose you were supposed to account for what you needed on any given night, but without fail, I found myself without the necessary materials all too often. Hence, I just dumped everything I owned into my bag and trudged home.

It didn’t take long before normal backpacks just weren’t going to cut it. So when high school began, I went to the sport department for my needs, which naturally was one of the few times I stepped foot into those aisles. My first one had the word CIAO on the side, which always prompted the vice-principal to try and speak Italian to me. I didn’t speak the language, nor was he from Italy. He was Portuguese, but that didn’t stop the awkwardness. I probably had several others but ended up on this. By the dates within, it looks like Spring 1997 was when it found its last use.

We’ll work our way around, slowly and sensually unwrapping until we get deep inside. Starting with the zipper tags, which are just keychain fodder well before actual backpack hangers were created for this exact purpose, we have the Prom Promise card and a Fujifilm foam diskette.

Prom Promise was a contest to see who could not do drugs the most during prom. In my innocent mind, I thought it was a fairly simple assignment. The dance and afterparty were thoroughly monitored, yet somehow every class managed to fail it, thus preventing the school from getting any of the prize money. In retrospect, I feel like this was one of those unwinnable scams that companies ran, knowing full well that they’d never have to pay up. I wonder if they ever got their comeuppance?

The diskette is probably something my mom brought home from a tech conference. I’m not sure how invested Fujifilm was in tech, but I guess it was enough to warrant some table swag. If I ever get my ear pierced, I’m going to hang this from it.

The side pouch had a Mead binder. Ignore the moire pattern—I had the wrong settings loaded in Photoshop, and I don’t feel like recompositing the images a second time.

You can see a glimpse into my interests at the time. Fractals (more on that in a second), Taz, and otherworldly landscapes fit the bill. I feel like Taz was a product of my time in fifth grade, but apparently it was still holding strong years later. During one dress-down day, I wore a sweatshirt with a small portrait of the marsupial, and another classmate called me phat. Since it was spelled with a ‘ph,’ I’m assuming it was a positive statement. I hope so for my fragile emotional state anyway.

I guess Ames was still around at this time. I know it replaced Zayre*s, which to this day I still use as a landmark for directions, and I guess it was in the 2000s that something else took its place. I feel like I would have been going to OfficeMax or Job Lot by then for supplies, since my memories of Ames ranged from buying Ben Cooper Halloween costumes to my first stereo in the shape of a 1956 Chevy.

The sticker-bombed divider was a choice gem to find. It appears to be 90% sourced from a single holiday sampler, but there are a few others. Speedy Soccersaurus is this site’s new mascot starting tomorrow. The random sports stickers confuse me, as do the two Dalmatian ones, which are identical. How would I have had doubles of the same sticker pack, since it’s clearly part of a larger set?

I’ll let you view the whole page so you can find your personal favorite and leave a comment below. It’s not like I’ll be depressed or anything if you don’t.

Back to fractals, these again felt like something that I was into earlier in the 90s, but based on some web pages we created around the time, I was apparently still into them. Rather than just plotting them out in standard 2D fashion, designers managed to turn them into alien landscapes with impressive results. Add a psychedelic color scheme and call it a day.

The insides of the folder were rather dull. There were a few graded tests and some blank looseleaf with a pre-filled-out header that would have saved me time at one point, but since it never found use, it only served to waste it.

There was this paper though, which was from a gravestone rubbing. For some odd reason, there was a cemetery on the school lot, half hidden in the tree line. Before rubbings were frowned upon, we brought out large pieces of butcher paper and made a copy of the stone, then we had to write a fictitious biography about them. Naturally I derailed the narrative at the end and turned him into a corrupt politician who used his influence to punish his rivals. Please forgive me, Asa.

I remembered the name years later, since it sounded an awful lot like Ace of Base, a band no one admitted to liking until you were alone in your car and Kix 106 was playing the final remnants of Europop. Checking FindAGrave shows that the cemetery has been cleared a bit, and the stones are maintained.

And do I still have a copy of the bio? Why would you ask such a thing? Of course I do. And it’s been on this very site for six years now! You did check out the WordPerfect page, right?

Doodling was another common feature in my notebooks. More prevalent in Junior High, I kept it alive somewhat into the following years. At some point, I’ll do a deep dive into the notebooks I had, which took on a life of their own, but here there are just the sad remnants of the bridge between reckless childhood and taking academics somewhat seriously. At least more serious than using the back of the notebook for notes so I could dedicate the majority to the vast lore of characters my friends and I dreamt up.

We all had that person in school who we couldn’t stand and made our lives that much more miserable. We all took our frustrations out in the digital landscape. We all scanned their yearbook photo and made a Quake skin so we could shoot them in the face.

I’m not alone, right?

It is strange how much of the contents of this backpack are already archived here. If you’ve visited the Quake Page, you’ve likely seen this very image at the bottom from my Quake Patch. (We called mods "patches" back then. I don’t know why.) The paper in the middle was something I printed out and would hold up whenever he started talking about something nerdy like Magic the Gathering or C++. I wasn’t too far removed from such geekdom, but Junior year was a turning point for me. I reclined in a chair one day and declined smoking when offered, granting me access to the cool kids. I know that makes no sense, but it literally happened that way. It will be clear when I recount my Junior year retreat one day. But that’s an article for another time.

In grade school, the first order of business was to cover your textbooks. It provided a minimal level of protection in hopes that they could survive year after year, at least until the publishing oligopoly decided to change a few words and insist that the schools update to the 116th edition.

This involved telling your parents in late August that they needed to eschew their normal creature comforts and answer the usual “Paper or Plastic” question by opting for the latter. A few folds later, and your book was ready to be decorated.

By high school, this was not mandated; however, at this point, I was buying the books, so I had a vested interest in keeping them in decent shape so I could attempt to resell them to the next grade. I was well into the Doom clones at this point before FPS became the preferred term. Quake was the big one, but Blood was also fairly popular. My temperamental inkjet got plenty of use, as did the thousand fonts I had loaded into Windows since the early 90s.

I got flak for writing Grammer on my grammar book, many pointing out the irony. But jokes on them—it’s a typo, not a grammatical error. Also, I just noticed that Word didn’t flag either term above as a misspelling, so now I’m really confused.

Confusion is a common theme here. I certainly have no idea who Dan Mielcarz is, and it’s certainly not me. Phish was the big band in high school, but I’ve yet to listen to any of their songs despite this. I can only guess that I searched for “Dan Web Page” in Lycos, and this came up since there were only a half dozen websites at the time.

I joke, since by 1997, we were entering the free-host era of Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, Xoom, etc… This appears to fit the bill, although it could have been hosted on the campus server, as many did. I was in the transition period between outgrowing my first website—which consisted mainly of links, ensuring that any and all visitors left the site shortly after arriving—and getting more into gaming content. That said, if you ever want an authentic Web 1.0 page experience, this is it. The fact that it’s on paper and not subject to digital revisionism only cements this artifact as one of the most important pieces of internet history.

I think I found Dan online too, so I might send him a message and tell him that I have a 28-year-old printout of his first website in my possession. I’m sure that will go over without a hitch.

I forgot to mention that we were in the central portion of the bag. That happened when we got to the textbook covers, but I’m not revising the paragraph to mention that. Here’s some junk that has slowly composted into dust from repeated jostling and, no doubt, the silverfish that threaten everything paper-wise in my attic.

The first is a flyer from Junior Ring Day. I recall practicing for this event for weeks. The teacher, who was certifiably insane, chose Lenny Kravitz’s ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way’ as a way to have a hip song to connect with us kids. As mentioned prior, Phish and Pearl Jam were the only authorized bands that we could like. Someone brought in a Green Day album once and was shunned. We weren’t having that, even back in the 90s. Ring Day was sort of pointless since I did not have hundreds of dollars to spend, so I opted out. Instead I had to sit through that awful song over and over while trying to stifle my laughter when my friend next to me leaned over and commented that Dan backwards is Nad. We were very mature. After that, they let us out, so the one person with a driver’s license brought us to a mall. I bought my first CD (Gravity Kills—Self Titled) and got home a minute too late to get my sister off the bus. Parents weren’t happy.

The St. Anne’s Hospital thing is a paper doctor’s hat thing. The old-timey ones with a flashlight or something. There was a career awareness day, which we always called queer awareness day, and one table was giving out these hats. We wore them for the rest of the day, even though in any other instance it would be social suicide. As long as you get the coolest kid to do it ironically, all is fair game.

We’re onto the last item, which is disappointing in its own right. This could only be from that same insane teacher who set up the ring day. She was the art teacher, and this minimalist garbage was always at the top of her list. She also told us that every day, she and her husband stand naked in front of a mirror. It was a mental image that I neither needed nor wanted. And apparently, she had liquid mercury in her teeth, which was why we couldn’t rock in our chairs, since the squeaking activated it.

Anyway, this art is probably worth more than my organs on the black market. The ‘Swimmer in the Aquarium’ appears an awful lot like the one on the cover, which I assume can only be ‘Man Eating Taco Bell.’ The final picture has some nuance, but only because since he created it, it’s empowering. If I drew it, I’d be hanged from a tree for some sort of insensitivity.

Finally, we have yet another instance where I appear to have collected items bearing my namesake. Unlike the holy website, I don’t much care to be associated with the art style that eventually became the abomination that was Corporate Memphis. The write-up is wild too. It’s too small to see, and I don’t feel like saving a second copy, but there are questions about his motivation, his ideals, and his passion. Most of the answers were along the lines of: ‘I like to draw’ and ‘I don’t know.’ Despite the non-answers, the article has likely inflated his ego. Just meander and gander at that promotional photo. He’ll still probably be more successful than me, so I probably should pipe down and end it here.