I once drove ten miles dead drunk. On a major road. In broad daylight. Left the car in the driveway, door ajar, engine running and went to bed. I remember wondering why my dad was so upset when he woke me.
I was trying to explain the difference between a revolver and a semi-auto pistol to my sister in law. My brother, the gun nut, wasn’t home at the time. To demonstrate, I went and got his .45 auto from the holster on the wall and forgot the #1 rule of picking up a gun: see if it’s loaded before you do anything. I showed her the slide and told her how it worked, then pulled back the hammer, aimed at the wall and pulled the trigger. Click. Then I told her how the slide would then automatically come back, and pulled it back to show her how it worked. There, staring me in the face, was a fully-loaded magazine. I broke into a cold sweat and begged her not to tell my brother, who would have thrashed me.
< making plans to keep kid locked in the house till she turns 30 >
Edit: Well, crap. Going by Chefguy’s story, even that won’t work.
Note: alcohol and trains don’t mix.
In H.S. we used to drive to the tracks out in the country and hang out drinking beer where the cops were unlikely to bother us. Somehow we started laying on the tracks at night when a train would come by to see who would be the last to scramble up and off. It was quite the rush, something that huge, certain death, bearing down at you out of the dark.
Later in college a friend came to visit me on a motorcycle in the Texas panhandle where I was working. We drank prodigious amounts of Jack Daniels and got polluted. Then a icy cold front came through. He had to get to Amarillo so I had to drive him, this back before drunk driving was taken very seriously. So we’re on the highway laughing it up, I look to my left and probably fifty yards away is a freight train about to T-bone us. I slam on the brakes, we spin 360 degrees and come to a stop about three feet from the engine and cars blowing by. No shit, it was that close. Slick and I (Lucky) looked at each other wide eyed… and burst out laughing. Without question, our closest to death moment ever. Nothing else even approaches that.
Same here, drinking and driving(really freaking stupid).
When me and my buddies were 13-16 we camped out every chance we had. One of our favorite games was shoot a arrow straight up and duck under whatever cover we had.(probably as stupid as the driving thing. We also enjoyed the train trestle,climbing on over and around.
One of my friends would light a puddle of gas on fire then run through it, leaving flaming footprints down the street.
The same friend and my brother stole a tripod from the school chemistry lab. They also got hold of a blowtorch and a butane gas canister, set the canister on the tripod, lit the blowtorch, and went a few yards away to wait for it to go bang. Nothing happened for about 20 minutes and they were about to go back to see if the blowtorch had gone out, when they heard a “whump” and the canister flew into the sky, never to be found. They found the tripod and blowtorch lying on their side in a crater a couple of feet across.
I know I’ve recounted this one before: my next-door neighbor and I got a bottle rocket and soaked it in gasoline for a week. Then we took it to the field and stuck it in the ground. The gasoline burned the stick off quicker than the fuse burned, then the rocket part took off out of control, and made a spinning beeline straight for me. I ran and turned at the last minute and it scorched up my shirt under the collar at the back, burned through the collar, and I batted it about three feet away from myself before it went bang. I was deaf in one ear, had burns all over my neck, and no hair on the back of my head.
We lived in a small village and were bored out of our minds. We stopped doing these stupid things when we discovered drugs and alcohol. 
When I was a teenager, I rode with my sister to take her car to get fixed. Not so dangerous, right? Only problem was that it was the car’s brakes that needed fixing. They were completely gone. It was about 15 miles and 4 stoplights. I can’t believe we did something so dumb. Now I would get it towed, no question.
In college, I sledded down a very tall, steep, unlit, tree-full hill at night. My sled was spinning in circles because the person who pushed me down put a “curve” on it. Near the bottom of the hill, I saw a tree coming too late to avoid it (and I was dizzy as shit–not drunk though). I reared onto my back and splatted the tree with my thigh, instead of my face. I did a jackknife before I slid to a stop, and I’ve never screamed so nakedly in my life.
That night, I was in more pain than I’d ever been up to that point of my life (leg/abdominal). I couldn’t put any weight on the leg whatsoever, and I felt like I’d been sucker-punched by Mike Tyson. I ended up on crutches for a week with a really severe contusion (I think it was a bone contusion, although I didn’t have an MRI done). The enormous bruise touched on every color that’s in the rainbow (and several that aren’t).
But really, I’m lucky I didn’t break my skull open. My friends could have been wiping bits of my brain off their snowsuits! :eek: Before that night, I was an outspokenly devout atheist, and even I found religion afterward (for a while). It was a mixed blessing though, because after my born-again atheism kicked in, I realized how *easy *it can be to believe in god when one feels they were the beneficiary of a miracle.
Damn, that sucked. Never sledded again since then.
I hitchhiked to New Orleans from Tennessee when I was 17. Lived on the streets down there for several months. Rode from there to Texas with some guys who were apparently going to buy drugs.
When they abandoned me in Texas, I thumbed it to San Diego with the promise that a friend could get me a job there. I didn’t like it enough to stay more than a day.
Got rides from there to Sedona, AZ where I lived in a canyon for several months in the winter.
I eventually rode from Sedona to Phoenix with a gentleman who was peaking on LSD. He was the driver.
From there, I got a ride with some Dead Heads on their way to Chicago to see The Grateful Dead perform at Soldier Field. It was one of Garcia’s last performances before he died.
Rode with a trucker from there pretty much all across the country and unloaded his truck. Among other things.
Eventually came back home and got that one credit that caused me to flunk out my Senior year of high school so I could get my diploma.
I am glossing over the meat, but those are the bones of the trip. I did many things that one could consider to be dangerous in the middle of all that, and I always planned to write it all down. I just never got the motivation to do so.
TOm is that you? Can’t be he’s dead, anyway that was his MO, 450 ducati year round transport in michigan :eek:
My stupid moments are many, worst was getting blotto and leaving Fire and Ice with some psychopath whom I let drive my car to the marina. I didnt hang around long but my wag was he wanted to kill me and dump my body in the bay. I ran off the docked boat when I regained my sobriety after I heard him banging around and cursing in the hold. I shoulda listend to my friends…
I was 19 or 20 and one of my favorite fraternity brothers kept getting his heart broken by this girl (who was a great girl otherwise, except for repeatedly breaking his heart [oh, and she had a long term boyfriend]).
So as usual, we’re all drunk at a party at the fraternity house and I realize that those two are MIA. I figured they were out in the driveway, pressed up against the “makeout wall.” Which they were. How did I find this out? I went up to the second floor bathroom window and looked out. How’s that dangerous? Well, I really looked out. Most of my body was outside the window and I was holding myself in by the tops of my thighs, well above the knee, but well below the hip. I recall having a conversation with them about how she shouldn’t behave this way and how he should stop being stupid. Imagine! someone hanging out of a window telling you to stop being stupid. At some point, I imagine it was only less than a minute after sticking my body out of the window, some of my brothers ran up and pulled me back in by my pants. By all rights, I should have been sticking head-first like a javelin in that gravel driveway.
When I was five I climbed to the top of a 125’ tall grain elevator on my grandpas farm. Standing on top, yelling and waving and having a grand old time, not really noticing everyone down below was having a heart attack.
Drove home on acid and absurdly drunk, in the middle of orlando florida. I apparently passed out at a light, since a friend who left the party a couple minutes after me told me I’d been sitting there through several cycles.
I pulled apart a bullet as a kid to see what was inside. .22 LR. Rimfire. With a hammer. On the kitchen counter.
Made CO2 bombs with old CO2 cartridges and black powder.
Fired an arrow straight up to see how high it would go. You can’t see how high it goes.
One that springs to mind was: on a dare I climbed out of my bedroom window- on to the sill. The 6" wide sill with the loose tiles, on the third floor.
I think I was about 10.
My friend realised how utterly stupid I was being at about the same time I did, and pretty well dragged me back in.
Not long after I got my driver license, I was driving my dad’s red Z28 Camaro with some high school buddies. Hadn’t been drinking, but I was having a great time and showing off. I passed a car on a blind corner just because, you know, he wasn’t going fast enough!
There wasn’t a semi coming the other way, but there could have been, and we all easily could have died. I immediately recognized how stoopid I’d been and vowed never to do it again. And I never did.
When I was a wee lad of about six, I tried to upend my sister’s “big wheel” tricycle by running after it with a giant branch (probably an inch in diameter). My plan was to put the stick underneath the bike, then lift up, thereby hilariously toppling my sister.
Instead, as I ran toward the big wheel, the branch became pinned in the cement at a 45 degree angle, facing me. I smashed into it full speed, putting a large jagged gash at least five or six inches long into my inner thigh (I still have the scar). A couple inches to my right and I would no longer have the choice of having kids. :eek:
I played with matches when I was about 7. To make sure my parents didn’t catch me, I hid in the center of a field of tall, dry grass next to the house. :rolleyes:
Used to be, I had to find out how fast any vehicle I owned could go, whatever the soundness of the vehicle.
Dumped a Honda with bent front forks on the freeway at about 70 once.
My Porsche 914 got decidedly squirrelly at about 105 MPH, but recovered.
I’m not really sure how fast any of my present vehicles can go…
When she was about seven, my little sister and two of her friends found a Zippo lighter on the street. Knowing it would be confiscated if an adult found out what they had, they went somewhere discreet to play with it: a nearby field. One of her friends burned her finger and dropped the burning lighter on the ground, where it set fire to a small patch of vegetation. My sister panicked and tried to put it out - with an armful of hay. Result: sirens for a couple of hours, police at the house asking who burned down the cornfield, sister hiding in bedroom crying hysterically and smelling of smoke.
I’ve always taken all my cars to 100 at least once but it was especially bad with my Neon.
Speedometer reads 100. But what if it’s off, better speed up to make sure.
Speedometer reads 105. Better go for 110! But is it really 110, or is the speedometer off?
Eventually I’m going UP a hill on a small country road at 125. But it handled better than my Kia Rio did at 105.
Just wait until the blind humaniods find them.