The Century 16 Aurora massacre brought out strange behavior in the people I knew.  I lived by the theater, about 2 blocks away.  The night it happened I drove by it on the way home, the emergency response as extraordinary as it was pointless.  There were fire chief cars parked so thick and from so far and wide that they covered every space for blocks around, making it hard to get home. My only thought at the time was that it was a terrorism drill. When I did get home, it was late, and I went right to sleep.

   I awoke the next morning to find more text messages than I had ever gotten in all my Christmases and birthdays combined.  Quite a lot of variants on "I know you go to that theater all the time, did you die?"  Truth is I never went to that theater, it's a shit hole.  And while a more optimistic person might think of it as an outpouring of love and caring, a more likely explanation is people just wanting to get in on the excitement of such a newsworthy event by talking to the person they know closest to it.

  I'd be lying if I said I was upset by the whole thing.  Neither the fact that I lived 5 minutes walk from an internationally talked about massacre, nor the fact that I was on friendly terms with one of the victims, much left an impression on me.  I'm just not that good at feeling what I'm supposed to feel.

  My flat emotional aspect and apparently high functioning psychopathy aside, what really interested me was what happened next.  Which was the spontaneous assembly of a memorial in real life that followed the unwritten creative rules of the internet.  Such a reverse flow of zeitgeist culturalism was something I had never seen before. And I suspect I never will see it on this level again. 

   Sections would form, based on a sign or gift someone left, and grow in variety and complexity, like a meme given physical form. Someone would leave a candle, and a candle section would form. A stuffed animal lead to a mountain of them, as if they were self replicating only to rot in the sun and rain.  It was people riffing off other's ideas as a creative practice in how to show grief. 

   I made a point to visit it every day. Watch its growth and decay, until the city tossed it all into dumpsters a few weeks later.