I think back to how dumb I was at their age, and it makes me feel as if I'm 761 years old - born midway through the reign of Henry III.

This past weekend, as part of Hooligan's exhaustive look at Juneau's unfortunate 1980s hairstyles (Pages 10-11), our investigative team spent hours looking at old Juneau-Douglas High School Totem yearbooks.

Later, we held hands and wept for the souls of this lost generation.

I attended high school in the early 1990s. The experience was comparable to repeatedly opening a refrigerator door into your own face, then finding nothing but leftover pasta.

We weren't dorks on a grand scale like my older brother's class (1982-1986), but we were huge dweebs.

In 1992, my sophomore year, I listened to Nirvana and Slayer, and the tip of my bangs hung down to my chin. I looked like Cousin It crossed with Wesley from the TV series "Mr. Belvedere," and even the stoners thought I was on LSD.

Nope. My high was studying for molarity quizzes.

I can't say for sure what I was thinking, or even if I thought at all. If I did, I couldn't see very well with the hair in my eyes, so I probably would have tripped over something.

Regardless, I had just turned 16 and it was time to get my driver's license. Piloting a vehicle with a pound of greasy hair in my face was like swimming three miles in a burqa. And my dad recognized this when he saw me going the other way one day on Alpine Drive.

"I'm not going to tell you what to do," he said, or something to that effect. "But some cop's going to see you and pull you over for having hair in your eyes."

It was true. So rather than get beaten in the streets, I went to the barbershop.

Great guys over there, but when I walked in, I might as well have been from the planet Xxzzlyn. They fumigated the place, then sliced and diced until I looked like a used-up Brillo pad.

It might have been the worst haircut ever perpetrated. And at school the next morning, running the two-mile in red gym shorts, I was the biggest geek to walk the Earth.

It all comes rushing back to me when I look at the JDHS Class of 1985, frozen in their tragic sophomore angst in the pages of the 1983 Totem.

So I offer this to the now-sophomore class of 2009:

Keep on studying for those molarity quizzes. Your long nightmare will soon be over.

• • •

Here are the answers to the same-sex special election logic puzzle that ran in the April 12 installment of Hither and Yon (www.juneauempire.com/entertainment/stories/041207/kor_20100412026.shtml):

• Dolph from Switzer Creek was shopping at Costco while the rest of the area voted at an 11.80 percent rate.

• Fizzy Lizzy from Juneau Airport was skinning hippies, while her district voted at a 20.85 clip.

• Moses wasn't the only one from Mendenhall Valley 1 who was worshipping Jesus - there was a 17.83 percent turnout.

• Shlomo from Juneau 1 was practicing ignorance while the district turned out at 20.09 percent.

• Tinkerbell from Lemon Creek helped her district to a 20.07 turnout. Her car was on cinder blocks.