Jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. This of course after attending a three-day ground school course in skydiving. What sets this story apart is that this school didn’t use static lines, oh no. You had a buzzer in your helmet timed to go off at the right moment to pull your cord, AND a switchblade in your flightsuit pocket to cut through the lines should your main foul. :rolleyes: I obviously survived intact, but I never did it again.
Drove back to campus from the local college watering hole so drunk that I (a) don’t remember driving back to the dorm, and (b) didn’t know where I parked the car. Took me 24 hours to sober up and lose the hangover, and another day and a half before I finally found the car, intact and untowed or ticketed.
Thankfully, the distance between dorm and bar was very short, and I didn’t hit anyone or anything on the way. The only reason I know this is that there wasn’t any damage to the car. Jebus, but I was young and stupid. :eek:
About 20 years ago when I lived in Albuquerque, one afternoon my brother and I decided it would be a good idea to do a little amateur cave-dwelling up in the mountains. Armed with flashlights and nothing else, we ventured into a cave with an opening about the size of a single-car garage door.
We went deeper and deeper into the cave, sometimes pulling ourselves along on the cave floor, as we could feel the cave ceiling brush against our backs, holding our breath as the dust kicked up.
Once we got as far as we could go (I’d say about 1/3 mile) without traversing down into vertical caverns, we just sat there sitting on the floor, hunched over a bit because the area was so tight, and commented on our accomplishment. I remember we both turned off our flashlights and in the pitch black my brother kind of chuckled and said, “Man, if our flashlights broke or ran out of batteries, we’d really be screwed.” It was at that time we both realized neither of us had told anyone what we were doing, or where we were going.
We beat a hasty restreat and made it out without incident, but to this day we still talk about how incredibly stupid it was.
Another nine-year old and I were playing with carving knives from his mother’s kitchen. We were sitting on the grass on opposite sides of an apple crate and decided to chop it to bits. He swung a bit wide and opened a large gash in my chest. Fifteen stitches in my skinny little ass.
We used to hang out under the railroad trestle over Chester Creek, where it dumped into Cook Inlet in Anchorage. It was a good 20 foot drop to the creek, whose banks were made of that gooey, sticky mud peculiar to that area. I made a misstep one day, and if not for my friend’s quick grab, would not be typing this today.
I was 21, and curious about the mechanics of an old large mechanical wound up alarm clock. So I dismantled one and removed the tightly coiled metal band spring.
The spring uncoiled with near explosive force in my hand, a cross between a metal whip and a chainsaw wheel rotating in mid-air. Sharp rusty band edges and all. If I had had my face a little closer, it might have easily cost me an eye.
**picunurse **, you have reminded me to lock our ladders in the barn.
My three year old has a sort of jungle room with a low bunk bed, an overhead exercise rail, and a bean bag to jump into on the floor. He practices a lot. And it seems to pay off, because the other day I encouraged him to jump off a three foot wall onto grass and he said: “no mummy, that is too high”. But who knows what he might do if he wears a superhero costume…
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And have I told you guys about the time I sort of dozed off with a candle in a candleholder next to me, placed on the central heating?
The candle didn’t pose a problem while it stood upright, even if I had fallen asleep. But while I dozed off, the heater had caused the candle to sag and bend sideways in a graceful curve whose still burning wick had almost reached the highly flammable curtains.
Oh, and my dad had some old shotgun shells. From back when the shell casing was made out of a heavy paper? I used to take a kitchen knife and cut them open to get the gunpowder. Yeah, cutting open thirty year old shotgun shells was a great idea.
8th grade, on a field trip in downtown Washington DC, I was horsing around with another kid while we waited for our subway train to take us back out to the burbs. One of my shoes flew off during the horseplay and landed on the track. I jumped down and retrieved my sneaker from where it was lying against what I was about to discover was the third rail. Luckily, the discovery was due to teachers and Metro employees screaming at me, not through electrocution.
My cousin, a friend of ours, and I were shooting off bottle rockets in a field. My bottle kept sliding over, so I had a bright idea: I’ll just stick the rocket right into the ground! I still remember watching as the lit fuse climbed up into the paper, then without warning the rocket burst out of the ground and flew directly at the three of us. Somehow we all managed to hit the ground and the rocket blew up about 15 yards behind where we were standing.
We used to have bottle rocket wars. Most often, they were launched directly out of the hand, or if they were available, we’d use PVC pipes for bazookas. We’d shoot directly at each other, and part of the fun was having them detonate near a head, ear, or in a clustered group of enemies. I’ve had bottle rockets fly directly into me, get lost in a bundle of clothing, and detonate despite my frantic attempts to dislodge them.
We once set an ambush up with a carefully chosen choke point, many hidden kids with bottle rockets, roman candles, firecrackers, and two high-caliber potato guns.
It was a slaughter.
Good times.
Probably the dumbest one along those lines, though, was when we built a homemade squib out of black gunpowder and taped it to a board which was then strapped to a friend’s chest. We detonated it (intending it to be a special effect for a silly “indy film” we were making) using a model rocket igniter.
It contained a lot of gunpowder, and we apparently sealed it way too well. When it went off, it detonated explosively, split the board, set his clothes on fire, and knocked him on his ass. He came up with a nasty gash on his chest, and a badly bruised sternum. He had trouble breathing for days. Jesus, that was stupid of us.
Driving 75 miles in a complete deluge on a mechanically unsound motorcycle, without rain gear, after dropping acid probably qualifies. (In my defense, it was Easter Sunday and I really wanted to get back to my apartment, as I had a paper due the next morning.)
So does spraying a paper shredder’s gears with WD-40 and then plugging it in, causing it to blow up almost in my idiot face, but since that was last year I don’t think I can blame it on youth.
I used to routinely drive drunk. It’s probably nothing short of a miracle that I didn’t kill myself or anyone else. For instance, there was a bar that was four miles from my house, and I would leave and try to get home in exactly four minutes, driving through sleepy suburban towns with stoplights and stopsigns at a mile a minute. Even when I wasn’t racing home from that bar, I spent more time drunk behind the wheel at night than I care to remember. And some of it I can’t even remember.
Lighting puddles of gas on fire was pretty fun until we forgot to move the gas can out of the way one time. Picture a burning red plastic gas can sitting on the driveway with the car and house not 10 feet away and a bunch of 12 year olds freaking the fuck out. In the time it took us to get the fire extinguisher from the house the can had melted at the top and a small hole had developed. I’m sure another 30 seconds would have seen some bad bad shit go down.
I’m also lucky I didn’t freeze to death in a field during a snow-storm. When I was 13 I decided to take a short cut through some fields that I sometimes used during the summer. However this time it was near dark, cold, with a real good snow storm going on. I was dressed for the weather but if I had gotten lost or tired I would have been dead meat, and with the snow and no landmarks it would have been super easy to get turned around…
Pretty sure I’ve posted this somewhere before. In our early 20’s, my two best friends and I did some really dumb shit. The dumbest was driving home from the bars, probably 2-3am one night. The friend in the passenger seat decided to stick her head out the window, then to sit on the window sill, then - hey, the roof looks like fun, so she stood on the window sill and laid herself across the roof for a second. Not to be outdone, my other friend the driver, decided it was her turn. With me reaching through the bucket seats from the back and grabbing the wheel, and our long-legged friend in the passenger seat putting a leg over the console to put her foot on the accelerator to keep us going at 30-35mph, the driver went out her window and up to the roof. She never stood up, but was laid across the roof and somehow turned herself around. I still don’t know what the hell she held onto, and I still don’t know how we stayed on the road. The driver was the sober one - us two morons who were not in the driver’s seat were the drunks, and were pretty much looking up the whole time because we could see her through the sun roof.
We reminisced for a long time about that one - and how incredibly stupid it was.
I swam across a pond when I was 18-on a bet. It was about a half mile.
I realized just how stupid this was when a kid drowned ina local pond next week.
When I was 11 or 12, I went snooping through my mom’s room and found a pen-shaped tear-gas gun. It fired cartridges that you screwed into the end of it. I noticed that it had a firing pin like a real gun and that a .38 caliber bullet fit fairly snugly in the end, so of course I had to try that. Well, it didn’t fit quite snugly enough. The casing exploded. I never told a soul about it. I dug a couple of pieces of metal out of my hand that night-the last one worked its way out several months later. I feel very lucky that I still have two eyes.
I grew up way out in the country, so no close neighbors to hear, and my parents werent home. I aimed at the ground, so the bullet ended up a couple of inches deep in the dirt, with no deformation whatsoever.
