Dangerous things you did as a child A comedy article
by Millie 116,988 28 01/18/2010 02:48 PM 1552 views
This may have been done already but I don't give a Shakespeare.
Today, while driving during a snowstorm, I thought about a dangerous thing we used to do as kids. We called it "skitching". When it was very snowy out, we would wait for a car to drive by and grab the bumper and let the car pull us through the snow. This was without a sled or anything, just our bodies. You might start out on your feet but would usually end up laying down, holding onto the bumper for dear life. The one who held on longest "won".
I don't think this is possible today, because cars don't have the same types of bumpers and it would be harder to grab one. Also, they seem to plow every two minutes, so there is very little snow on the road, compared to my childhood.
Other things we did: One of us would tie a rope to the back of his/her bike and the other one would hold the end of the rope and be towed along on either a skateboard or roller skates.
I would climb to the very top of the tallest tree I could find and sit at the top while it swayed in the wind.
I would skateboard down the steepest hill I could find and stop by crashing into a bush or something.
Helmets? Knee and elbow-pads? Those didn't exist in the 1970s. It would never have crossed our minds to wear those.
When I was a teenager, my dangerous ways continued:
I would ride on the backs of motorcyles driven by older/drunk/stoned guys and we didn't wear helmets.
We'd stuff about 30 kids in the back of a pick-up truck and ride out into the woods for a party.
I'd stay out all night partying with older guys.
I tried pretty much every drug that was available in those days.
Amazingly, I never broke a bone, OD'd, or got raped.
Wow sounds idyllic. I'd like to trade. I lived in a hell hole of a town, with lots of creulty and murder. The first time someone I cared about was murdered happened when I was 13.
She was not a hooker. That's about as funny as I can think right now.
We used to get 10-20 kids out in the woods and have BB gun wars. No one ever got an eye put out, but I think one of my oldest buddies still has a BB lodged somewhere in his upper arm.
As teens, we smoked grapevines and banana peels, huffed freon, drank tea made from Jimson Weed, as well as the normal drug fare. One dude ended up with a free lifetime pass to the mental ward after the Jimson Tea, but I made it through just fine!
I can remember getting towed behind a 4x4 pickup in the snow in a boat dragging with a tow rope between us and the truck. We were completely at the mercy of the driver and often would careen off trees in the curves.
Ditto the skate board down ridiculously long hills only to leap off into the softest looking yard available.
When I was a kid, I'd walk a mile up the road each night alone to play with my best friend (we lived in the middle of nowhere). It'd take around 15 minutes. We would always meet and walk together halfway. I remember one night I came home and my parents were yelling because I had called to say I was coming home at 8 pm, and it was almost 11:30, and they thought I was out playing in the woods because neither my friend nor I had returned home. Both her and I swore up and down that we walked straight home, and we HAD. I would still swear that we did.
After that, she started having nightmares that centered around aliens. We started having difficulties when we'd separate to walk the rest of the way back home at the halfway point - we didn't want to be alone, and we'd both start crying for no reason - not just scared, but TERRIFIED. Her parents made her stop playing with me, period. Her nightmares stopped.
There are other times like this, with other people - friends whose parents would call and say that their kids were scared to be with me at night. There was never any real explanation, just that the kids were having nightmares.
So as far as dangerous things go, for me, walking alone on my street was a bad thing. For other people's children, apparently the most dangerous thing they could do was walk with me.
I spent my childhood hanging out with a kid who could vomit on command. I'm not sure why it looked like a bunch of stuff I'd never seen mixed together like that. Anyway, he would climb up to the top of the monkey bars and puke into the gravel pit, which, at the time, was gravel and not lava, and the monkey bars was not a spaceship because no one had declared it.
When he was done, I looked at the chunks of undigestion, and it seemed as though he had eaten a barbie doll. Never forget that... Surprisingly, this was not the same kid who noticed I had a stomach ache and slammed me, tummy-first into the parallel bars because he thought it would make me feel better. In hindsight, I think he did that because it would make me feel worse, and distracted long enough for him to rip off my copy of Kung Fu, which he did. I loved that game... Every time the karate guy did a high kick, it sounded like he was saying "Shakespeare".
...come to think of it, that game was a Japanese import, so he probably was saying "Shakespeare". Did you ever notice the baddies with the knives? They hold them at crotch level. The ones who don't have knives attack you with their armpits, and the last boss looks like he's wearing pink high heels.
I was just thinking about this the other day. I wanted to go to the grocery store, but I couldn't go because my oldest son had taken the baby's car seat out of my car and put it in his, then forgot to put it back and left me at home with no car seat.
When I was two, we had no car seats. Hell, we didn't even wear seat belts. My family had a station wagon, and half the time we were just bouncing around in the cargo area in back. By the time I was six, we were out playing all day in the woods, the dump, construction zones, the swamp and wherever else we felt like going with absolutely no adult supervision. My mother was always warning me to do or not to do things because I would break my neck, put my eye out or catch pneumonia, but she never followed me around to make sure I listened to her.
I did have a friend whose eye got put out playing with sticks, and another who broke both his arms climbing trees, but they both lived. And it didn't stop anyone from doing those things again.
One of the best things was building jumps to take our bikes over. This was, obviously, before BMX bikes or bikes with shock absorbers. We would build a ramp out of stolen wood from a construction site and use it to jump over garbage pails. Bicycle helmets were something no one had ever even heard of. I got some skin scraped off and the wind knocked out of me a few times, but only one concussion.
Later on, when I was like 11 or 12, we had a go cart that was built from scrap lumber and old baby carriage wheels that we used to coast down the hills. Then we got an old Briggs and Stratton lawn mower engine and hooked it up to the go cart. This thing had practically no steering - just a cable hooked to the front axel and twisted around the metal rod we used for a steering column. And it had no brakes, clutch or throttle whatsoever. We would start it up propped on a brick, then sit in it and have someone push you off the brick. You stopped when you ditched it.
Real minibikes, dirt bikes and motorcycles followed, but by then drugs and alcohol were also involved, so I'm not sure if that still counts as childhood hi-jinks.
According to those "back in the good old days" emails that always make the rounds, everything I did as a child was dangerous. I have to laugh when I see these completely pussified kids wrapped up in all this padding to rike a bike or a skateboard. We never had any of that and we survived. The most fun I ever had, I was about 5 and my cousin took all us kids for rides on the back of his Harley. No helmets, pads, or even shoes, just hanging on tight. That or going for a ride on a big backhoe. To get back down my father would set us on top of one of those huge tires, and you'd just ride it down. If someone saw that today it'd be an instant cell call to CPS.
In high school we used to play a stupid little game called "Snag". If you were caught eyeing someone's crotch you got snagged. Well we were getting pretty good at avoiding looking at someone's crotch and weeks had gone by without anyone getting snagged.
One day I had a brilliant idea. I poured some lighter fluid on the crotch of my jeans and climbed up on the roof. When a large group of my friends started up the walkway to the front door I jumped off of the roof with my crotch on fire. Every last person got snagged.
I did not burn or hurt myself and to this day I still hold the "Queen of Snag" title.
Wow Undies that was the best alien story I've every heard.
Gah! I wish that was my only story, but I have more:
I remember as a teenager, being scared to turn over at night in bed, because I was CERTAIN something was standing on the other side of the bed, looking at me. I would cry and cry and then something in me would just seize up and I couldn't move at all. To this day, I have episodes of sleep paralysis from time to time - and during them, there is always a figure or two in the room with me, off to the side. Whenever I try to look at what it is, it slides out of view.
I also have a surgical scar on part of my spine, but have never had surgery. Every time I see a new doctor, they ask me about the operation, but when I say I never had one, they just chuckle and say, hmmm, well it must be from when you were an infant, but it's not in the record. My parents both think the doctors are nuts because I NEVER had surgery or was even hospitalized for anything until I lost my gallbladder a few years ago.
Truthfully, I have no memory at all of ever being abducted, and I think everyone who clams to have been "taken" is a crackpot looney Frost. But all this Shakespeare has really happened to me and because of it, I really am terrified of the dark now.
We used to empty bullets and use the gunpowder for all sorts of fun stuff, like making bombs. I don't remember where we got the bullets, but since we're talking about the 70s, we probably got them free with every pack of Razzles.
I second Whistler's Evel Knievel-like stunts on the bikes.
We would set up enormous ramps in the street outside my house, then try to jump our bikes over as many cars as possible (at one point I actually tried to convince my parents to let me build a ramp that would be large enough to jump over a school bus).
One day, when I had gathered quite a crowd, I tried to make it over a record six tires, got my front wheel stuck in the first one, flipped over, and landed on my head.
Fortunately I had a helmet and only suffered brief unconsciousness. Otherwise, my writing would have a lot more misspelings. Also, it would be transcribed by my wheelchair computer.
Well duh! The ones that didn't make it aren't here to post about how they survived.
I'm not advocating for more funds for those fine folks at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But saying "we survived" stikes me as a pretty lame argument. I think the reality is that weakest-link types will always overcome safety efforts. (Examples.)
And that's how it should be. Plus, if they do manage to survive some stupid stunt due to safety equipment, we can always push 'em in front of trains.*
*Apparently, here in Maryland, folks are incapable of crossing a railroad track without getting hit by trains. I think 3 people have died from these so-called "collisions" in the last year. WTF people? One teen-aged girl couldn't be bothered to turn her iPod off, or pull the earbuds out while she crossed decorated the tracks.
I once played in our back yard four foot deep pool with no adult supervision!
I once walked out of a friend's backyard and into an undeveloped semi-wooded area with him, and we were gone for at least 15 minutes.
I once used the blood code in Mortal Kombat.
I sometimes took the public bus home from high school.
I'm in the generation between you middle aged folks who were allowed to actually do things as kids and the kids these days. The sad thing is, compared to the current crop of kids, the stuff I did was incredibly reckless and dangerous.
I used to have stair jumping contests with a friend. Essentially the goal is to jump from the stairs to the floor withoug touching any of the other stairs. The goal was to see who could make it from a higher step. During a very competitive day we got higher and higher until it was my turn to jump from the 3rd step from the top. I was feeling good, today was going to be my day. I jumped and then WHAM!....BANG!.
I had failed to notice the overhang on the stairs from the 2nd floor. I hit that with my forehead, snapped back, and then fell flat on the stairs and was out cold for about 10 minutes. When I came to, my friend was gone and I had a large goose egg on the front and back of my head. Needless to say, my stair jumping days were over.
As a teenager, my friends and I would go car sledding. That is we tie a rope to a car and then the other end to a sled. You lay in the sled and hold on while the driver tears around a parking lot. Let me tell you that those concrete car stoppers in parking lot Frost-ing hurt when you slam into them at 30 MPH.
Also despite MacGruff the Crime Dog's concerns, I walked 3-4 miles to school by myself on mostly empty streets. Appenantly that's a recipe for getting abducted.
My sister and I used to "go sledding" down the 14 stairs in our house on pieces of cardboard. The door at the bottom of the stairs had about 24 panes of glass in it. It's a miracle one of us didn't put a foot through the glass.
My sister also used to dig animal trap pits using post hole diggers and cover them with palmetto fronds.
This would have been when she was about 5 or 6 years old. I still don't know how she managed to do it since we were both about the size of starved Ethiopian children, minus the distended belly.
Oh! I forgot! One day my Mom told my friend and I to pick up hickory nuts out of the yard and dump them in the road (our dirt roads were mostly sugar sand, and it was easy to get stuck). We ended up having a hickory nut "war" instead, and came home completely bruised and scratched from head to toe from throwing them at each other.
Underwear, it sounds like you have Cataplexy. It makes you freeze up when scared and see and or hear stuff not there. Please get checked by a Sleep Doctor. You don't want to go Cataplectic while driving. As for the back surgery, you probably had some extra limb and your parents didn't want you to know. Parents always lie about stuff. Also, you may want to get a body cat scan just to be sure the aliens didn't leave any parts behind.
I used wake up terrified someone was in the room with me and had a saw; because my bed had been cut in half. If I put my leg off the edge where it was cut in half, I just knew I'd loose my leg. After being terrified for like an hour; it would dawn on me that if anybody trying to get my leg would have done so already. That's when I would realise I was turned sideways in my bed.
Or she could just suffer from occassional sleep paralysis which can also induce hallucinations and feelings of terror. It is your mind having woken up partially, but your body hasn't and is thus unable to move.
When I lived in Missouri; some of the stupid kids would roll under the cars of trains going by. You know so they could get accross the street 2 minutes faster. Until one got caught under it and lost his arm. He and his friends got in alot of trouble.
In Oregon we used to play a game of chicken with pocket knives. You each stand with your feet wide apart, 10 paces away from each other. Then you took turns throwing your knife in the ground between your feet. After each throw you would move one foot in closer to the other foot. Whoever stopped first was chicken.
Underwear, it sounds like you have Cataplexy. It makes you freeze up when scared and see and or hear stuff not there. Please get checked by a Sleep Doctor. You don't want to go Cataplectic while driving.
Cataplexy sounds like a madeup lolcat word. I never freeze up when awake and - you can ask Spicey - I am easily startled! My son likes to freak me the Frost out all the time by walking around silent like a ninja and then appearing suddenly. I think if I had this kitteh-disorder, it would have shown itself in the middle of one of my son's stalking attacks.
I like how no one has brought up the idea that maybe I AM REALLY BEING FOLLOWED BY ALIENS. Gosh people, it's like I don't even know you. Or is it that I've finally become too strange even for internet weirdos?
I am easily startled, too. My ex-husband used to do it all the time. He thought it was hilarious.
There are a couple of people at work who do it to me while I'm sitting at my desk, concetrating. I can see it being funny once or twice, but, seriously, all the time? One of the people who does it is a manager. Maybe I can get him fired for it.
Back in the days of mandatory French classes, one assignment was to get into a group, make up a product, and make a commercial for it in French.
My friends and I had decided on a seniors scooter called "Le Geezermobile Cinq-Mille."
To demonstrate our scooter's superiority, we showed how a competitor's scooter fails when "pushed to the limit." This involved taping a giant wad of cotton balls to my face to simulate a beard, duct taping a chair to two skateboards to simulate the inferior scooter, and coating both the chair and my beard in copious amounts of bug spray and lighter fluid, then lighting the chair and the beard on fire, and pushing me down a steeply declining road into oncoming traffic.
Despite it being 9 years old, when cleaning his room, my friend found the video. Unfortunately, it's on lithograph VHS so uploading it to the internet for the masses to enjoy would be a pain.
I've jumped off the top of haystacks, fell through them too. Hookybobbed on a horse drawn sleigh (basically holding on to the back of the sleigh and trying to pull yourself under as far as you can.) I used to run as fast as I could down narrow hallways so that the "Big Boo" from Super Mario World wouldn't get me. I've also had a competition with my twin to see who could jump off the top bunk of our bunkbeds the most. I lost that one, because I jumped to far and hit the wall *laughs*. The '90"s were very dangerous for me.
My idiot friends and I would occasionally play tackle football in the middle of the street. I still have a scar on my knee where a large, deep patch of skin and tissue was torn off.
We jumped off bridges into canals and lakes full of anything from gators and cotton mouths, to old refridgerators, and abandoned cars.
There was bike tag too. We would divide up into two groups. Who would then break up into smaller packs to hunt for the other team memebers. We would play over a couple mile area. And when we found each other, we would try to make each other crash into whatever was around. Like trash cans, rose bushes, chain link fences, houses, cars, other players, dogs, cats, small children. And the more hurt you got the more fun it was. The team who was bleeding the worse and gave up were the losers.
When I was nine years old I went on safari in Africa with my family. My sister and I decided it would be a good idea to try and kill a scorpian using hairspray out of an aerosol can and a lighter. My left eyebrow still has a patch that can't grow hair.
the innards of a roman candle and a magnifying glass once joined forces to give me 30 minutes of blindness and 2 weeks of NO facial hair. eyelashes, eyebrows, peach fuzz, and moved my hairline back an inch. did I mention this occurred in my bed-room?
another time I was running with a glass jar in my hand, tripped, shattered the jar and sliced my palm. cleaned and bandaged the wound, it healed completely, then a month later felt a pain when I was clapping, recut the scar open to remove not one but two half inch shards of glass.
same hand, was attacked by a llama, knocked into a barbwire fence, caught the inside middle joint of my pinky on a barb, ripping it to the bone. the flap of flesh grew back on and I have no feeling there now.
growing up in the Texas Hill Country, a steep gravelly slope and a large flat rock were the closest I could come to snowboarding, still don't know how that didn't kill me.
used to shoot arrows straight up, and dodge, or catch, them as they came down.
back when it they were still worth something, dad trapped varmints for the pelts, so we had a bunch of rusty leghold traps in the barn, used to set myself up a mine-field, leave it alone till I forgot where I set them, then try to find them before they found me. crawling made it more exciting. still have all my digits, and never got tetanus somehow.
got a hatchet when I was 8 or 9, and turned loose on 300 acres of cedar trees. never hatcheted myself, or dropped a huge tree on myself, somehow.
If I had been born with a tail, or an extra foot growing out of my back, I would have heard about it over and over again as a child. My parents would have taken pride in it, rather than try to hide the truth from me. Hell, they probably would have fought any doctor who told them to consider having it removed.
Anyway, I don't think my insurance will cover body scans to check for alien hardware. At least, I've never seen that check-box in the welcome materials.
Undies, just buy an airline ticket and walk through the full body image scanner at security. If something shows up on the screen I'm sure that the TSA will let you proceed without incident after you tell them the alien abduction story.
The best part of these stories is telling your parents about them now, right?
I have 3 daughters, 18, 14 & 12. In their combined 44 years of life, (you math dorks are free to double-check my calculations, but I'll warn you - I used Excel, so I'm pretty sure I'm good), they probably have a combined 42 minutes where I didn't know where they were. Sadly, I'm probably not exaggerating.
The last few large family get-togethers have all featured segments where my brothers, or in-laws, regale their respective parentage, (parentages?), with tales from their youthful days. I was with my parents, and watched them witness my brother falling off Sugarloaf mountain, only to be caught when his heel wedged in a crack, (we were playing hide-and-go-seek in the dark, on a mountain, what?); was with them when he fell off a diving board & cracked his head on the side of the pool & sank like a rock to the bottom. They were troopers, and handled all that very well.
But I don't remember their eyes growing so large as they did at Christmas, when we calmly explained the geographic range of our exploits as kids during summer vacation. You'd go outside around 8am, and come home for dinner. Apparently, my parents thought we were in the back yard. My dad choked on his drink when we got out a map & figured out we'd traversed some 6 or 7 miles away from home, following the Patapsaco river to the nearby dam. It was sweet.
My kids weren't allowed to leave the front yard & go to the back without coming inside & telling us first. Apparently, dictionary.com has a link back to my zug profile, next to the word "overprotective."
I'd like to blame my wife, and since she doesn't visit this site, I think I will.
When I was about three or so I pushed my tricycle up the slide out back of my house. I climbed aboard and rode it down....not realizing until to late that the back wheels would get stuck near the bottom (it got narrower) and I'd be pitched over the handlebars. Broke my nose.
Years later, I essentially did the same thing (with a limited amount of success this go round) on a stairwell connecting upper and lower Wacker Dr. in Chicago.
One time at my grandma's house, we cousins strung an empty milk carton across the road so it looked like it was floating there. It wasn't actually dangerous to US though until our parents got ahold of us.
Real firecrackers- M-80s. They stay lit when flushed and wreak havoc on plumbing. I grew up in Redneck Land and we were running around with these partial sticks of dynamite in about 4th grade or so...
I'm raising kids in New England and our nanny state only allows sparklers and snakes.
I earned the title of Best Mom Evar when I had my brother bring 4 gross of bottle rockets up here for my son's graduation party. I turned 6 teenagers loose in a field for a 2 hour bottle rocket war.
One kid married last year and his best man told the story with the toast. His parents looked a little pale. Guess he won't be playing at our house anymore!
Probably riding on the back of a golf car while it got airborne (not for very long, but still).
I was visiting my cousins and we went over to their other cousins house, and they had a golf cart that he was allowed to drive. They lived out in the woods and had some dirt roads that crossed just outside the house (all on their property) and one of the roads had a pipe mostly buried in it, lying across the road. Note, I said mostly. My cousin and his cousin were in the golf cart (don't remember who was driving) and I was STANDING ON THE REAR BUMPER (or wat ever golf carts have) AND HOLDING ON TO THE BARS. Then we hit the pipe; and for about a half-second maybe, the golf cat jumps into the air. I didn't fall off orget hurt but it was pretty stupid, in retrospect. It was fun though.
As teens, we smoked grapevines and banana peels, huffed freon, drank tea made from Jimson Weed, as well as the normal drug fare. One dude ended up with a free lifetime pass to the mental ward after the Jimson Tea, but I made it through just fine!
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