I didn’t know the thinner side in an AC outlet was the live one until after I tried pulling a broken piece of plug out of a live socket. Not the first time I failed to think ahead when dealing with a live socket, but hopefully the last.
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Less fatal, but still dangerous…
I thought the blades in my blender’s pitcher weren’t catching the gear right, so my bright idea was to hold the blades while I turned on the blender. The blender was smart enough to realize how stupid this was and spit out my hand before too much damage occurred.
The one time I tried a Joey Chitwood thrill show type stunt. Made a stack of 3 vehicles, a Buick on the bottom, an old Ford van in the middle and a Chevy Vega on top. I drove an AMC Rebel off a ramp and tried to knock the van off the Buick, and if it worked right, the Vega would land on the Buick just behind me. I did knock the van out of the way but I failed to go any farther and the Vega crashed down on the Rebel right over the driver’s compartment. Despite some crash bars I installed, the roof caved in about a foot and I was knocked out cold. What saved me was the fact I was not wearing a shoulder harness to hold me upright. Upon impact I was thrown forward and to the right, the only thing I felt was the roof hitting my left shoulder. I was paid $200 by the track promotor for attempting this stunt.
The dumb thing I did was a kid was hop a moving train with a friend of mine and his older brother. 5 miles later the train slowed and a couple of hobos joined us. One pulled a knife and threatened to stab us if we didn’t give him our money. We had about 50 cents between us and he took that. About 20 miles down the tracks, the hobo with the knife was kneeling by the open door when my friend’s brother snuck up behing him and pushed him out. The train was going pretty fast and the hobo bounced through a bunch of brush. We got off the train as soon as it slowed, we were 90 miles from home. My friend’s father came down and picked us up, you can imagine he was not pleased.
I had ADHD. Back in seventh grade or so, my meds stopped working. I could not sit still and I couldn’t think about my schoolwork. My psychiatrist tried a few drugs. Pill A made me think about my schoolwork, but I couldn’t sit still. We discontinued that and tried Pill B. Pill B made me sit still, but I couldn’t think about my schoolwork.
The solution was as obvious to me as it must be to you. I began taking Pill A and Pill B. I could now sit still and think about my schoolwork. Of course I did have this odd feeling that my bones were shaking, but what medicine doesn’t have some side effects?
At my next meeting with my psychiatrist, I told him the good news. He told me IIRC that I was mixing uppers and downers. He insisted I stop immediately. He told my parents to rush me to the emergency room if I felt at all strange. He said I was very lucky not to have had a heart attack.
I was living in Santiago, Chile. I and three other girls were in La Serena in the North when we decided that we felt like going to Argentina. There happened to be a mountain pass nearby, so we figured we’d hitch through it and get a ride from there. Unfortunately, we didn’t think to ask anyone local how frequent traffic was up there. So, we hopped a mining truck and got as far as the border guard station at the pass, when we were dropped off because the truck was going the opposite direction.
When we got out, there were 10 fairly burly border guards waiting to look at our papers. It was really bleak up there - nothing and no one around for miles and miles and no other structures but the border station. We weren’t equipped to spend the night in the mountains. It had never occurred to us that we wouldn’t get into Argentina and be sleeping in a hostel that night. The border guards told us that there was no way we’d get over the pass and into town before nightfall, so they offered to let us stay with them (this is starting to sound like a really bad porn).
So we agreed - not much choice. Four gringas - either stay outside and freeze or sleep in the border station with 10 strange men with guns and handcuffs. So we stayed and got really drunk with the border guards. Shockingly, they were absolute gentlemen. They spread their mattresses on the floor for us to sleep on in the bunk room and slept in the chairs in the main room then drove us back to town in a police car in the morning.
Thinking back about it - just writing about it - makes me want to slap my 19-year-old self.
-My friend and I had rock fights when I was probably 10. I still remember the rocks whizzing by my head, we thought it was cool. At least I quit while I was ahead.
-I jumped off a lot of roofs (no 2 story buildings at least.)
-Racing down back roads at night. I was in a 90 Mustang GT, my friend was in a ~94 Grand Am. We went 90MPH into a 30MPH curve on a 2-lane road, I was in the right lane but he was in the passing lane. Neither of us gave up our position. Lots of squealing tires but good thing nobody was oncoming and no deer jumped out.
-And not many years ago we were tearing apart my sister’s old carport, and I had my pickup truck parked near the edge so we could throw the old boards and plywood from the roof into the bed as we tore it apart. I had been standing on the roof of the carport and was ready to get down. There was a ladder but since I like jumping off of stuff and since the pickup bed was only 4 or 5 feet below the roof, I decided to jump down into the bed of the pickup. About halfway down I realized I was jumping onto plywood and the plywood had dozens of nails sticking up out of it, it was the backside of where the shingles were nailed. I landed and froze, everybody else froze for a few seconds, and SOMEHOW I had managed not to puncture my feet with any of the nails. I turned the plywood over so the nails weren’t sticking up after that.
I followed a woman (probably in her twenties, possibly early thirties) home from the laundromat once, because I liked her shirt (I don’t remember what was on it anymore, something latin-sounding and containing the word “satanica”, around an emblem of some sort, and she was dressed in black, though not completely decked out goth or anything. She just looked normal). When she got to her house I somehow popped up, told her “I don’t want to weird you out or anything, but I think you’re really cool” and followed her in. sigh
She turned out to be pretty nice and let me hang out in her house for a bit (it was around the corner from mine) and I ended up going back one time too, to hang out with her and her roomate (a man) and watch the Simpsons. She never kicked me out or told me to stop coming but I stopped at some point. I think they eventually moved. They were cool and I was stupid to do it.
I don’t have any idea why I did. I was generally a quiet, speculative child, always considering everything carefully, and I was old enough to know not to take candy from stangers (well, usually). I didn’t have homosexual tendencies or find her particularly attractive, and she hadn’t said anything in the laundromat that I remember. Just something in the air that day, I guess. I never told my parents.
Playing with knives, matches, strange unmarked fluids aside, I’d have to say the time I tried to throw this shambling, snotty drunk out of a building. He was already escalating to the “fuck off” stage when (thankfully) one of our managers intervened.
When I was about 6 or 7, I was visiting my mother in St. Catharines (Port Dalhousie). It was the middle of winter and quite cold out. Nonetheless I wanted to go out, so I walked down the street to the beach on Lake Ontario – she lived just off of Main and Simcoe, just a stone’s throw from Lakeside Park and its attendant lake. I was thoroughly bundled up in several layers of clothing and a snowsuit – not too far removed from Randy Parker, though I could put my arms down. So down to Lakeside Park I went, and there I noticed that a good portion of the lake had frozen over. It must have extended several hundred feet out. Too tempting for an intrepid young explorer such as myself. Out I went on to the lake and headed towards an icy embankment that looked like a reverse wave – it rose to a crest as it went into the lake, rather than out. I reached the crest. On the other side was a sheer drop totalling all of about four or five feet. Piece of cake! And there was a ton more frozen lake beyond so it ought to be plenty safe. Down I went. Most of me stopped at the ice below. My right leg, however, continued to plunge through ice whose thickness I had grossly miscalculated. I stayed there a moment, my left leg crouched on the ice, my right soaking in sub-zero lake water, and pondered my predicament. Indubitably, this was a terribly untenable situation. Slowly I raised my left leg and extracted my right from the water. I carefully hoisted myself back up the ridge and thence headed back to shore.
In retrospect of course it was a pretty stupid thing to do. That could have been much, much worse. My position placed me well below the crest of the ridge, and I was a good 150 feet out and no one on the shore – had there been anyone crazy enough to be walking along the shore at that time (other than me, that is, and I was certainly the only one there at the time) – they’d never have been able to see me, and probably wouldn’t have heard me calling out for help, either.
When in grade school I walked to school past a yard that had a German Shepherd dog on a chain. I used to tease him by barking at him when I walked by. The dog would be at the end of the chain, snarling and slavering to get at me, but I thought it was funny. Hey, I was stupid in the second grade. I never poked the dog or throw things at it, just barked. But oh God, what if the chain had ever come loose?
I had a small brush this weekend. I was snorkeling with my wife and we were flowing with the current looking at the reef. I looked up and we were much farther out than I had realized and the water was quite deep. I’m not a great swimmer and I said we should start heading back in.
We swam for a while and my wife said “are we getting any closer?” We weren’t getting much closer because we were swimming against the current and every time we stopped we kept getting pushed back out. We were getting tired. I’m not a real confident swimmer and being at trouble in the water is high on my list of fears.
So I said as calmly as I could to my wife to swim straight towards the shore (perpendicular to the current). This patch of shore was no beach, but just big boulders. I was worried we’d ge thrown up on the rocks, but more worried that we’d get taken out to sea. But as we got closer to shore, the current dropped off and we were able to get back to our beach. Later that day, I was sitting on the balcony of my room looking at were we were and it is by far the farthest I have ever been away from the shore without a boat trailing me. It still kind of freaks me out two days later.
A lot of my dangerous stuff has to do with a period of my life I’m not prepared to share much about on the internet. Suffice to say, there were some near-misses with automobiles because I was fucked up and/or tired (as a result of being fucked up). And some pretty sketchy people, as well, who were armed, and who would have used those armaments on me.
I used to hitch by myself in Western Massachusetts. Sure, there was a free bus but I could stick out my thumb and get a quicker ride back to town.
And then there was the night I slept out on Avenue A in NYC, around 1995-1996…right as Giuliani was starting to clean up the neighborhoods, which made lots of people nervous. I was with a couple of boys that I knew and we met up with some street punks that probably would have protected me, but still…drunk and out in alphabet city…and the boys were trying to buy smack. (I was not partaking.)
And then we hitched our way back, and got picked up by Connecticut state troopers, who thankfully never realized that my friend was holding about $80 worth of heroin in his hat band. (He kept having to take off his hat to show the cops his multicolored hair.)
After that I hit my meager savings account and bought all of us Peter Pan bus tickets home. I’m dumb, but I’m not super dumb.
I had a conversation about this a few years ago with several female neighbors when the Natalies Holloway case was first reported. To my surprise, all of these educated women admitted to putting themselves in the same situation.
One Fourth of July I was at a party at a friend’s house and someone had some M-80 firecrackers. They had the brilliant idea of tying two together to make a bigger bang. Of course, instead of one, larger explosion, what happened was that only one of the firecrackers exploded at first, propelling the remaining firecracker (with lit fuse) directly towards our heads! Luckily we managed to dodge this flying time bomb and it exploded in the tree behind us.