What stupid things did you do as a kid?

[helel ben shachar]

This thread might be fun.

There was talk about a right way and a wrong way to melt paraffin in the COVID thread. That reminded me of an incident I once had, so here is one of the many stories of cdc's childhood.

I can't recall how old I was, maybe eight years old, possibly younger. I honestly can't recall. Anyway, I was over at a friends house down the road playing, and somehow we got the idea that we should melt a bunch of wax crayons and see what color we could make. We gathered up all the crayons we could find and we had a LOT. I don't recall if I had went home to get mine as well because that might help explain why we had so many crayons. Funny how memories fade.

We unwrapped all the crayons and put them in a medium sized pot and placed it on the stove. I don't recall if the parents happened to be away or not, but in retrospect we were definitely not being supervised. So we placed this pot full of crayons on the stove, turned on the heat and commenced to wait and watch the crayons slowly melt. After a while we had about half a pot's worth of grayish brown melted crayon goodness.

Here's where another part of the memory is lost to time. For some unknown reason we decided to pour a glass of water into this mixture. I don't think we were thinking about watering down the wax but rather I suspect the wax was getting hot enough to start to smoke and we thought that the water would cool things off faster. I highly suspect we hadn't turned off the heat, and it was probably on high or nearly so. In either case we poured in the water and what happened next sparked off 'ol cdc's interest in science.

At first nothing happened. The water just sank to the bottom and what was transpiring there was something we couldn't see and even if we could young me wouldn't have been able to understand what happened until later in life.

What I know now is that it took the water a while to come up to boiling temperature. What I knew then was after waiting a bit the mixture started to shake a little and after a moment a little bubble erupted out of the wax. Neat! And then another little bubble. And another bubble right after that one. We were fascinated but unknown to us the water was about to come up to a full rolling boil. So these bubbles were getting larger and started coming up at a faster and faster pace, and now when they erupted they were starting to throw hot wax out of the pot. It happened so quickly in retrospect, but when the hot wax started flying a little bit we stepped back because we were getting burned. Then the full rolling boil hit and the pot starting erupting hot wax everywhere. We had inadvertently created a damned steam powered wax volcano. Wax was shooting everywhere. Onto the backsplash, all over the stove, onto the floor and cabinets and possibly even the ceiling. We went into full panic mode, wax was flying everywhere, and what was worse we could't turn off the stove without getting scalded by the onslaught of flying wax.

I'm unclear as to what exactly happened next. I'm pretty sure I ran the hell home. I don't recall the aftermath of the steam powered wax volcano, but to this day I still wonder how we didn't burn my friends house down. Given the mess and the sheer stupidity of what we did, I'm fairly sure his parents were thoroughly pissed off, as I would have been with my kids had they pulled such a dangerous stunt.

I did learn a bit about science though.

 

[abj]

I have to look up various statues of limitations before posting anything to this thread.

 

[fitten]

Lots and lots of stuff... even up into my 20s It's more fun to tell the stories and discuss them over beers in a bar, back yard, boat, beach, etc. though

 

[yd]

I have to look up various statues of limitations before posting anything to this thread.

Indeed!

I will just go with a stupid thing.

Kids like to have water fights - balloons, hoses, buckets, whatever works. We had a water fight and my master plan was a bucket. My hiding place was tucked to a wall on the top of a 2x4 fence. No one would see me till it was too late.

Well sure enough, no one did see me till it was too late and I got a great hit on some kid.....

However, the law of inertia is a cruel task master. After nailing that kid I myself kept moving....off the fence. And into a nice and freshly trimmed bush of some sort. I still have a nice 3 inch or so long scar on my inner thigh off that stupidity having landed in the middle of a bunch of sharp stems; one of which creating said scar.

To be honest, I am lucky it wasn't one hell of a lot worse.

 

[rtrefz]

Me not so much. My older brothers though. I learned from their mistakes.

The house I grew up in had a long driveway with a flat section and then a sharp slope down to the garage. My oldest brother was working on his motorcycle and spilled some gas on the driveway. He decided that the best way to clean up the gas was to set it on fire. The fire was going a bit stronger than expected, so he tried to put it out with a garden house. This caused the flaming gasoline to go downhill towards the garage, and my dad's 1968 Firebird. Somehow my brother didn't end up starting the garage (or car) on fire.

This same brother discovered that he could hotwire golf carts by jamming a screwdriver into the lock mechanism and he'd go on joy rides at night on a nearby golf course. One night a cop chased him across the course course in his cop car! Somehow my brother got away, but decided to stop because his antics were being reported on crime stoppers.

 

[thekaj]

I was pretty sane when I was a kid. I remember my friends were all into climbing to the top of various playground equipment (back when it wasn't nerfed so kids can't severely injure themselves) and trees and jumping off. They were jumping from at least 10-15 feet, into pea gravel. And I mostly noped out of that sort of thing.

Biggest thing I can remember in the "Jesus Christ, I could have died!!!" category was when it would snow, we'd walk down the road to a pretty big hill to sled down. This was still on the road, and the bottom turned, with a completely blind corner. It was a rural county road, but there would still be traffic on it. So we could have easily been sledding down the hill at high (sledding) speeds, only to have a car come around the corner with neither one of us being able to stop or avoid each other. The craziest thing is that this was done WITH parental supervision. One of those thing where you wonder if your mom was trying to end the family line.

 

[Helpless Will]

My reaction when I saw the thread title;

I have an enormous number of these stories. There are fewer before I reached my teens, but still far more than there should have been. We extend the definition of, "kid," into the early to mid twenties and they grow exponentially.

Limiting myself to pre-teen;
Learning to play mumblety-peg, bottle rocket and BB gun war games, climbing small cliffs, jumping off houses to test the "viking landing," thing I'd read about in a young adult work of fiction, the time I damn near drowned by tying my legs together in an attempt to perfect my butterfly stroke, and those are just the first bits that flood to mind.

One of my favorites, was the time I was convinced I could jump my bike, a banana seat Schwinn five-speed, across the entrance to the cul-de-sac, if I got the angle on the ramp just right. I succeeded, but did not stick the landing. That in turn reminds me of the time I regained consciousness, in a snow drift, after knowing mid flight, I'd really screwed up the approach to that mogul. All I could see was white, and my first thought was, quite literally, "Oh fuck, am I dead?"

Edit: spelling

 

[ramases]

I have to look up various statues of limitations before posting anything to this thread.

One of the sad consequences of the War on Terror is that I'll probably never post online the full amount of stupid-but-fun shit we pulled in high-school chemistry and physics lab. True, except for a couple of instances of what probably was some sort of minor property damage most of it wasn't (back then) illegal in the first place; and our teachers have long since safely retired, so us having unsupervised access to things we probably shouldn't have had no longer can affect their careers.

But it involves simply too many things burning, going boom, getting corroded, or incidents like a physics lab prank involving a fake geiercounter almost getting out of control, to post their details online these days. I dread to think what would happen to students who pulled stunts like that now.

 

[beeblebrox]

What stupid things did you do as a kid?

Yes.

That almost covers it.

 

[helel ben shachar]

Yeah, I agree there are a lot of things we can't talk about. Personally my closet is so full of skeletons that I've had to make space in the garage.

In things that you really, really can't do now but wasn't the case when I was younger is the following. I had to go the county courthouse for something but I don't recall what it was about, so it must not have for anything bad. This was sometime late 80's or early 90's. I went there with my mom.

We're in the courtroom for something or another and it being winter I had my coat on. I reached into my pocket and was instantly horrified. You see, I had ordered some inert hand grenades from a military surplus store, the kind where the fuse wasn't charged and a hole drilled in the bottom so there were no explosives inside. Don't ask why an underage teenager would be ordering inert hand grenades through the mail.

Anyway, I reach in my pocket and realized I had one of these on me. Me, in the courthouse, with what otherwise looked like a live grenade, pinned and with the safety clip on. Talk about a holy shit moment. The judge and the guards were none the wiser but I do recall keeping my hand firmly gripping the grenade in my pocket so that there was no way it could accidentally fall out.

I would have been bad 30ish years ago had that been exposed, but I cannot begin to say how bad that would have gone nowadays.

 

[Thorvard]

I was honestly a pretty good kid overall. I can only think of 3 things that were bad/terrible.

1) A friend dared me to light a neighbors yard on fire, I dropped a match and run. It didn't even catch(thankfully!)

2) I took, from the mail, my freshman year HS report card and hand edited the grades to give my self Bs. I did terrible and I was horribly embarrassed. My parents either A) bought it B) didn't buy it but assumed I would improve over the year.

3) I pushed my friend into the metro as it was arriving into the station. We were fucking around and kept pushing each other, I pushed him just as it pulled up and he crashed into. Again thankfully he didn't, you know, get pushed into between cars. :facepalm:

Otherwise we were annoying little shits, we'd go to movies, sit all the way in the back and be annoying. I want to punch teenager me.

But other than those things I never drank to excess, never did drugs, never ran with a bad crowd, etc. I think a lot of it goes back to I only had 2 real friends and neither did any of that stuff. One was a big geek like me and the other was just a calm guy.

 

[Technarch]

I started fires. So, so many fires. In hindsight it’s incredible that I didn’t burn down any schools or homes.

To be honest, though, I‘ve done far stupider things as an adult.

 

[BenN]

Two things spring to mind:

When I was very young, I spent the school holidays at my grandmother's house in the countryside. Her house was on the side of a valley, with the garden sloping down to a low wall, below which the valley continued to drop. I thought I was Evel Knievel, and decided to ride my bike down the garden lawn & do a jump over the wall, landing like a frikkin' hero in the valley. I actually succeeded in getting over the wall, only to land in the massive patch of stinging nettles than was immediately below the wall on the other side.

I went on a camping trip with a church youth group, and at night, the adults would sit on camp chairs around a fire, in a field recently inhabited by a herd of cows. One evening, I found a plastic trashcan lid that had been sitting on top of a cowpat (and was consequently liberally smeared with shit), crept up unseen to the fire, and put the lid on the head of on of the leaders, like a broad-brim Spanish Inquisition-stype shit-covered hat. At the time, I thought I was badass & this was the funniest thing ever, but now I realize I was just an asshat.

 

[leet]

Most of my really stupid stuff was past the “kid” threshold, but I’ve still got a scar on my index finger from trying to scrape the paint off a pencil with an Xacto knife I wasn’t supposed to have. Somehow in the course of a few grades several things were cool to have on your pencils, but suddenly it was what we’d now call “unfinished “.

 

[chalex]

Take a folding knife, fold it at 90 degrees, throw it really high and try to catch it. Somehow 0 scars from regular play sessions of that.

Take a car battery, break it open, take the lead out, melt it on the stove top, put it into some cool molds like beer caps.

 

[Bardon]

Well, in Year 7 Science Fair my best friend and I made orange soda using orange juice, some empty beer bottles and a capping machine and some dry ice. It was lucky that the inevitable happened during recess when we were making another batch and a bottle pretty much vaporised itself - our shirts were cut to ribbons, we had a myriad of tiny shards embedded in our skin that had to be removed at hospital along with both of us having nasty gashes from larger flying bits, including one that widened my smile by about 2cm as it literally sliced open the edge of my mouth a la Heath Ledger's Joker.

The next year they banned dry ice.

 

[SuperDave]

I was a relatively innocuous Jehovah's Witness kid; little happened with me aside getting beaned in the head in a rockfight and impressing everyone with how much blood was available in a human body, and getting "arrested" at about 10 years old (yeah, I'm sure it was symbolic) for breaking into the local Agway simply to play among the stuff stacked high inside.

Didn't hit my hellraising stride until I was in the Army, and it was nonstop from then until a year or two before I registered here (I was 40 when I registered), you'll never hear about any of it (gorram wonder I stayed out of jail) and would likely call me a liar for much of it. Let's just say that until I was Fortyish you wouldn't have wanted your kids hanging around with me.

 

[PhaseShifter]

This same brother discovered that he could hotwire golf carts by jamming a screwdriver into the lock mechanism and he'd go on joy rides at night on a nearby golf course. One night a cop chased him across the course course in his cop car! Somehow my brother got away, but decided to stop because his antics were being reported on crime stoppers.

When I was 3 or 4, I hotwired my grandfather's farm tractor. I vaguely remember playing with the gearshift, so it's a miracle I didn't run over myself.

Years later I heard the story that my grandmother, who was partially deaf, saw me repeatedly looking out the window at the tractor before she noticed the exhaust it was producing. When she called my grandfather at work, he responded that he was impressed, because he hadn't been able to get the thing to start the previous day.

The time I did actually get hurt was when I was in first grade, and the school had just installed a set of balance beams in the playground. Being the newest thing on the playground, they were also the most popular--so someone decided the rules were, if you fell off you could get back on, but if you jumped off you had to go to the back of the line and let someone else take their turn.
I made my way down the low beam just fine, and the second beam (about a 2' off the ground) was also fine. Then came the high beam, which was 3-4' off the ground. I made it about half the length of the beam before I fell off. At that point I was still OK, but I didn't want to go all the way to the back of line, and since I fell off, I was allowed to climb on again. So I tried.

What I tried to do was grab the beam with my arms, then swing my legs up and wrap them around the beam. What I actually did was swing my legs up while I was losing my grip with my arms, resulting in a fall that ended when my shoulder hit the ground first.

After recess, I went back to the classroom for another 5 hours, then my mother picked me up along with my older brother and some other kids who carpooled with us. As happens when you have several young boys in the back seat of a car, there was a little bit of pushing and shoving. When I complained about how it hurt to be shoved was the first time someone noticed that one of my shoulders wasn't level with the other one.

I still remember the x-ray showing my collarbone was clearly two pieces pointing in different directions.

 

[thekaj]

Ah, the hotwired tractor story does remind me of the time that my mom went to visit someone and left me (must have been around 5) in the car (ah the early 80's). Naturally, I went about pretending to drive. At some point, I got the car into neutral, and discovered that the driveway was sloped towards the street. I clearly remember rolling backwards and doing a 5-year-old version of "ooooooooh shit!!!!" Fortunately, the street was nice and flat, and a quiet residential one at that. So the car stopped when it reached the street and was sticking fully out into it. I went inside the house and announced that I had moved the car. My mom waved me off, thinking that I had just pretended to do it. When I insisted, and noted that it was in the street, she and the woman she was visiting came out and were rather floored that I had, in fact, moved the car.

AND THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T LEAVE KIDS IN THE CAR ALONE!!!

 

[helel ben shachar]

....

When I was very young, I spent the school holidays at my grandmother's house in the countryside. Her house was on the side of a valley, with the garden sloping down to a low wall, below which the valley continued to drop. I thought I was Evel Knievel, and decided to ride my bike down the garden lawn & do a jump over the wall, landing like a frikkin' hero in the valley. I actually succeeded in getting over the wall, only to land in the massive patch of stinging nettles than was immediately below the wall on the other side.

......

That remindes me, when I was something like twelve my buddy and I decided to coast down the side of a smallish mountain (but still a mountain none the less) in a section that was grassy all the way down. Of course we didn't have the presence of mind to scope the whole run, just decided on a lark to see how fast we could go. The answer is when gravity is your friend you can go pretty damn fast. Peddling was useless after a certain speed.

So we're screaming down this mountain, whooping it up the whole way down. What we didn't know was at the base of this run was a giant well established briar patch, blackberrys if I recall correctly. We hit that at speed, wearing shorts and tee shirts, and commenced getting shredded to pieces as we plowed into the vines. It was like swimming in barbed wire. The whoops quickly became peals of pain as we quickly ground to a halt. It was hell getting us and our bikes out of there. Needless to say we were cut head to toe and bleeding by the time we got out. Never downhill raced again I don't think, at least not without checking out what's at the end anyway.

 

[Tom Foolery]

Those records were sealed, and expunged when I reached the age of majority.

 

[Deleted member 12245]

This would be the time I learned about the wave of death and almost got myself t-boned by a school bus. That was probably the closest to death I've been, in a sense that if I had hesitated for a few seconds, or if I didn't floor it like the idiot kid I was, I wouldn't have cleared the bus.

 

[KermitTFrog]

Two things spring to mind:

When I was very young, I spent the school holidays at my grandmother's house in the countryside. Her house was on the side of a valley, with the garden sloping down to a low wall, below which the valley continued to drop. I thought I was Evel Knievel, and decided to ride my bike down the garden lawn & do a jump over the wall, landing like a frikkin' hero in the valley. I actually succeeded in getting over the wall, only to land in the massive patch of stinging nettles than was immediately below the wall on the other side.

Oh wow. I grabbed a stinging nettle this summer bare handed while weeding, it was no fun. I can't imagine falling into them.

 

[Deleted member 13594]

My family lived on Merritt Island Florida in the late 50's and early 60's. I had a little wooden flat bottom fishing boat with a bait-well under the middle seat and a 5 1/2 horsepower kicker. I used to roam the Banana River River fishing and snorkeling and exploring the areas south of the, now, Martin Anderson Beachline Expressway,The Barge Canal and environs there about. At the time the expressway was just being built with the main bridge being finished and roadway but not connected to the rest of the causeway. Well, one day my friend (who I just found and reconnected to on a FB neighborhood group) and I climbed up on the bridge by a ladder on the bumper walkway. I remember looking down to my little boat (it looked about a six inches long from up there, I don't know how high it is actually) and since we had a dare we jumped off. I remember touching the concrete bottom and swimming up to the surface and finding my friend. Wow I look back at that and wonder how I survived at all.

edit to correct spelling.

 

[fitten]

Not even as a kid... I was shown how to make a sparkler bomb. Pretty easy to do... one we made we put a two gallon pressure cooker pot on the ground (upside down) and the thing on top of it and set it off. It caved in the pressure cooker and blew a hole in it about 4" in diameter. Another one we set off was about 30' from a board fence and the sparkler wires were embedded in the wood, some had hit end-on and were through the 1x4 planks.

 

[Cabusha]

Played a game of Dodge the Stick with my sister. I finally got bored of playing. My sister didn't. Turned around and took a nice 1inch piece of wood to the forehead. Tried to hide the knot with my hat, but my Mum eventually noticed.

Was probably 10 or so?

 

[BenN]

Played a game of Dodge the Stick with my sister. I finally got bored of playing. My sister didn't. Turned around and took a nice 1inch piece of wood to the forehead. Tried to hide the knot with my hat, but my Mum eventually noticed.

Was probably 10 or so?

If we're talking "evil shit my brother/sister did to me when I was small".......

My older sister, who I now love & cherish, was basically Damien when we were young. She:

* Stabbed me in the face with a pair of scissors. I've still got the scar; its about 1cm from my left eye.

* Jumped on me, and broke my collarbone.

* Pushed me over, so that I fell & sat in some dog shit.

* Took my favourite toy car & filled it with quick-drying cement.

Admittedly, she didn't do all of these on the same day......

 

[bjn]

I grew up on the outskirts of Sydney in the 70s in a relatively new suburb, and they were continually building new housing or industrial estates nearby. I was about 10 when I was out and about on my bike on Sunday with some mates raiding building sites for shit to break/steal/burn. We came across some other kids who had managed to liberate many boxes of gunpowder cartridges for Hilti style nail guns, which they were handing out. So we tried hitting them with rocks, or prying them open to get the gunpowder to ignite. Some genius then started a fire, another genius then decided to throw several boxes into the fire. Nothing for a few moments, we all crowded round, then bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! hot metal fragments flying everywhere. Fuck did we run. I was amazed that no one lost an eye or was hit in the face. I escaped unharmed with a box of cartridges I later cracked open for gun powder, but I think a few kids from the other group got a few hits.

Boys really are dickheads. Not necessarily evil, just thoughtless with no idea that actions can have consequences.

 

[dferrantino]

My brother and I were usually fairly tame. Most of the really stupid shit we did was at the instigation of our cousin, who was 2 years older than me so we definitely had to follow his lead.

My favorite is probably one 4th of July, we got our hands on a whole bunch of Black Snake fireworks and decided to have a bonfire at the curb while our parents were hanging out in the backyard. This involved using the Black Snakes to set fire to pretty much everything we could get our hands on: other fireworks, grass and leaves, plastic bags and bottles. Parents didn't realize what was going on until they saw the giant pillar of black smoke rising from the front of the house, which was a result of various plastic jugs we had found in the recycling and decided to toss in. Of course, we were also within about 3 feet of our grandmother's car. That was fun.

The one that I managed to do to myself was far less dangerous, but about as stupid. There was a telephone pole outside of our house, and after the workers would go up I used to collect the clipped wires that fell to the ground. One day I decided to test my theory that if I wrapped the wires around the prongs of my TV's power cable and then plugged the wires into the outlet, my TV would still turn on. Lo and behold, it worked! When it came time to disassemble the science experiment, rather than kill the power strip I plugged it into or remove the wires from the outlet, I decided the most expedient course of action was to unwrap the wires from the plug first. Skin touched bare metal, 13yo me was reminded why we don't fuck with electricity. Of course, I learned absolutely nothing. Just last year I started screwing in the neutral wire for my porch lights while relying on the fact that the switch was off instead of tripping the breaker again. It worked fine until my finger touched the post for the hot wire. Took about a minute before I could properly move my hand again.

 

[.劉煒]

Sometime around ten-ish.. I was disassembling some electronics without draining the capacitors first. Owch.

 

[beeblebrox]

We used a pipe bomb to put out a fire. Accidentally, of course. What we MEANT to do was use a pipe bomb to blow up an active fire pit, thinking that it might just destroy part of the fire pit but leave the fire burning. What it did do, though, was destroy roughly 1/2 of a 6' diameter, 3 cinder block-high fire pit. The explosion must have used up all the available oxygen in the immediate area as well, because the fire itself was snuffed out in an instant. Pieces of cinder block landed up to 30' away.

We then used the second, smaller, pipe bomb we had made to destroy an old toilet. That was less spectacular, but a chunk of toilet did get embedded in a tree, so that was both cool and frightening.

 

[Coleman]

Nothing. And no video evidence exists to prove otherwise.

 

[Zaskar]

Rock salt 22g wars in the forests around town, 10, 20 kids at a time before we got yelled at.

Frozen gobstoppers shot at cars from bushes via paintball gun and wrist rocket.

Stupid high dives into pools. Ended up breaking both my legs with this one.

And, the, haircuts.

 

[thrillhouse]

I was around 8 when my neighbor got a mini dirt bike. It was WAY too big for me to control, but I was determined to ride it. And I did, directly into a 3' ditch.

I was Evil Kenevil. I made ramps out of EVERYTHING. We used those giant metal trash cans that rusted out...my neighbor and I built a ramp to jump those. We both made it the first time, and those things were like 3 feet tall. Then we decided to light the trash on fire. Needless to say, that was the jump where the ramp gave out. I hit the ramp, it collapsed, and I drove right into the fire trash can. Cut my arm on some of the rusty metal, but managed to avoid the fire. I was 9 or 10.

Another time, we lived at the top of a tall hill in northern Indiana. At the bottom of the hill was a County Road (long, lonely stretch of road where semis routinely do 70+). One of the older kids in the neighborhood got a skateboard. I had never been on one before. I was sitting on it, kinda trying to get the feel of it, when same older kid pushed me from behind...right down the hill. I flew down the hill holding on to the skateboard for dear life, across both lanes of traffic and into the ditch across the road. Nothing broken on that one, but a nice scar on my face from the barbed wire fence that slowed me down.

So many others involving BB guns, 22s, fire, tractor shenanigans, the time I go treed by a bull, that time when I was 11 and decided I could drive...being a kid in the 70's was fucking awesome.

 

[fitten]

being a kid in the 70's was fucking awesome.

Yeah, and 80s (I was in both). It's something that people that I knew at that age, knew the things we did (and they did), and they freak out if their kids do even 1/2 of what we did back then. I can kind of understand it with my age-group's kids freaking out over their kids' (my age-group's grandkids) antics. But we also didn't have social media so we weren't posting all our antics for the world to see. We used to cut vines to swing on back in the woods... we found some discarded firehoses (they had holes burned in them and stuff) and made swings with them in the woods... jumped off bridges into water or one place even just a lot of sand. Ramping bikes... we'd walk around leaving bloody footprints from wrecks we had... our shoes being soaked with blood. We also made ramps into a pond that was back in the woods... we'd get long downhill runups and ramp bikes we had put together into the pond. We'd have a 2-liter bottle tied to it so it'd float up so we could find and pull the bike out. We found a bunch of roofing shingles that were discarded and had wars (you get a shingle, tear a bit off about as big as a saucer and throw it like a 'ninja star'... with practice, you could get it to where you'd hit with a glancing blow with the gritty side so it'd be like hitting someone with sandpaper). We used to have sleepovers... friend of ours had a guesthouse in the back that we could use so we'd frequently (like most every weekend) have two to four of us staying back there all weekend... we'd play all kinds of games... computer games, D&D, board games, etc. and we'd also get drunk a lot. We also played a game called "kill each other"... the main bedroom area had only two windows and one was covered by an AC unit and the other was blocked for some reason so it'd get *really* dark at night in there. We'd all go in (sometimes 6 of us) and basically try to beat up each other in the dark and every so often when things quieted down, whoever was closest to the light switch would turn it on for a second or two so we could all see where everyone was and the game commenced.

 

[Cranioclast]

Yeah, fires.

One time (okay, a few times), a friend of mine and I kept dousing a basketball in white gas, lighting it and kicking off the top of a sand dune. It would usually go out completely mid-air, but it would occasionally land still in flames and we would have to stomp out a patch of burning beach grass. Eventually it exploded when he kicked it and covered his leg in flaming bits of rubber. He'd say it was worth it.

Anyway, his mom and a neighbor saw us doing this, so when a fire broke out on the same dune and burned down several acres (thankfully no structures) later that summer, the police came looking for me. They were obviously convinced that I had done it (I did not), but had no evidence and eventually dropped it. Everyone who lived on that road glared at me for the rest of the time I lived there, though.

There were at least three major fires in that neighborhood in the eight years that we lived there and, amazingly, I didn't start any of them.

 

[Ardax]

Being an 80s kid was pretty awesome too. The lack of social media and pervasive recording of all the things certainly helped.

One item in the "stupid" category: Having rock fights. As in, boys throwing rocks at each other. For fun. I'm the embodiment of "it's all fun and games until someone gets an eye poked out." Well not "out", per se, but I still have a pebble embedded in my eye.

A friend's son did that one proper. A couple of boys fighting with sticks. Accidents happened, and my friend's boy ended up losing an eye.

 

[fitten]

Yeah... we had all kinds of fights like that. We discovered the atlatl but with big globs of real tough mud as the projectile (sometimes with rocks in it). With practice, you could flick a pound wad of mud at someone from a good distance. I remember getting hit in the head once, mid-stride, and almost doing a flip. Friend also had a horse and we'd get horse poop and put a firecracker in it, light it, and throw it like a grenade. Helped the neighbor of my cousin (I was over at his place for the day) put out a fire in his own back yard that he accidentally started with a Roman candle. That was a close one... almost caught his house on fire and it did burn almost the entirety of his back yard and some of their neighbors (not my cousin's).

And of course we all had dirt motorcycles... generally 80cc to 120cc. I have a few scars and bones that have been broken from that (and from riding horses)... including a dent in my ribs that I still have from where I landed on the end of the handlebars ramping a friend's younger brother's bike that we weren't supposed to be messing with. Of course, we were a couple miles from home out in the woods and I landed on the clutch lever and broke it... I thought it was broke off in me... that took a while to even get to where I could get back on the bike to ride home... or when I slipped in the rutty mud road after a big rain (the road that went back to the pond where we ramped bicycles) and burned the heck out of my calf on the exhaust (wearing shorts, of course)... or when I came unseated and landed on the (skinny) gas tank. I was walking funny for a few days and my friends were getting girls to come up to me and ask why I was walking funny at school. Still... I didn't get hurt nearly as much as one guy we know... he had a number of hospital stays including a few where he broke over a dozen bones at a time. It's a wonder he lived through a few of those.

And yeah, we'd have stick fights (like swords). Gashed my leg pretty good with a machete that we weren't supposed to be messing with. "I don't know how it happened, honest!" I had full access to fireworks, pellet rifles (not BB guns). I had a Sheridan 5mm that was powerful enough to squirrel hunt with. Basically equivalent to a Benjamin .177cal or .22cal (which my friends had). My friends and I carried those thing with us *everywhere* when I was at home messing around. We'd go to each other's houses, put the pellet guns in the corner on the porch, and walk in... like the old west. We also went fishing a lot... made our own boats from logs and barrels, etc. on some nearby ponds and lakes. Explored the woods for miles around (literally... there were a few thousand acres of land behind our houses right there (we lived in a rural area) that were owned by Georgia Pacific. At that time, they let people who bordered their land hunt and stuff on the land as long as we didn't mess with the trees. We used to get in from school, change clothes, and take off fishing/whatever until dark. During the summer, we'd be gone almost all day fishing and stuff.

 

[Dan Homerick]

This thread is a hilarious reminder that Mother Nature has way more males than she needs.

 

[PhaseShifter]

Sometime around ten-ish.. I was disassembling some electronics without draining the capacitors first. Owch.

That sounds similar to (but probably shorter duration than) my experiences with electric fences as a kid.