On a dare, I raced my bicycle down a big steep hill, jumped it off a homemade ramp at the bottom and flew into a pond.
I miss that bike.
FOUR OR SO? Cool! Where did you get an idea like that at that age?
When I was little I watched a lot of Loony Toons, and it seemed a staple of Loony Toons to have Venice as a setting for hilarity. Now, being a small kid (5 or 6) I had no idea where this place was, only that there is clearly a palce n Earth where they have water for streets.
So, one day, my mom tells me she has to run an errand and I can either come with her, or go be babysat by my aunt for a few hours. Seeing as it was the aunt who had no kids, and therefore no one to play with or even any toys, I decided to be smart and see where the errand was (at the young of an age I really only knew of my hometown, Burlington which was far away, and Middlebury which was close. If she said Middlebury I decided I would go, since it was a shorter car ride (I didn’t mind being in stores with my mother but I hated car rides.)) Well, my mom suprised me and said,
“I’m going to Waterbury.”
You know what I was thinking. So I said I’d go and was all excited (my mom must have been wondering why.) When we finally got there, and the roads were…well, just roads, I was severly disapointed. I asked my mom why the streets weren’t made of water. She just gave me that “my kid just said something stupid” look and said something about how if they were water we couldn’t drive on them.
Yeah who woulda thunk cows could be so darn ornery! Some people still think that story is a crock, they kept saying “Bulls not cows” and I am like “No, just plain old udders hangin cows”
When I was very young, one of my sisters used to entertain herself by trying to get me mad. Apparently, it was quite a challenge, as I was a very easy-going kid. Once I got worked up, though, I got really mad. Well, on one of her more successful attempts, I was chasing her and she ran into the house, slamming the screen door behind her. I never reacted too quickly to begin with, and it was even worse when I had a good mad on. I charged straight through the glass, arms first. The scars are pretty faint now, but for many many years I looked like I had tried to commit suicide – nice, long lengthwise scars on both wrists.
Stupid things I’ve done? Nah… not me…
Well, there was that time when my mother told me that I couldn’t watch the 3 Stooges anymore. When I asked why, I was told, “You keep trying to poke your brother’s eyes out!”. “But”, I said, “All he has to do is stick his hand up to block it…”
And then the time the police showed up because I and some friends were cutting down trees in the woods near my house because they were blocking the view from our treehouse… we were only around 8 to 10 years old, so the cop just took our names and scared the crap out of us.
…Err, and the time when I was sliding down the snowy hill at school after being told it wasn’t allowed. A heavy kid slipped and fell on my right arm while I was using it to prop myself up. My mother and step-father were not happy having to show up and take me to the hospital for my broken arm.
Annnnnnd then, I guess, was playing with the Lawn Darts, trying to see who could throw them the highest…
Maybe I should include building the ramp out of tree limbs and snow at the bottom of the local sledding hill. While I just had the wind knocked out of me upon landing, my brother hit a tree about 3 feet up.
Maybe I should just quit while I’m behind…
I was raised Catholic. When I was 9 or 10, I got my first look at a Playboy magazine with some friends. I enjoyed it so much I knew it had to be a sin, and therefore had to be mentioned in my next confession. I was reluctant to go into the gory details with a priest, so I tried to come up with a generic way to confess it. I had some vague idea that my sin was sexual in nature, and I had an equally vague understanding that the commandment concerning adultery was somehow related to sex. So, after the usual preliminaries, I told the priest that I had committed adultery. He didn’t laugh, amazingly. He gently quizzed me about how exactly I had committed adultery, then explained that my sin was not adultery. Anyway, I spent a prepubescent day or two convinced I was an aldulterer.
This one made me laugh till my eyes leaked!
I made a skateboard by taking my sisters steel-wheel skate apart and nailing it to a board. Then, going reeeaallly fast down the concrete driveway, clack-clack across the expansion joints, the front wheel comes of and the board digs into the ground. Fifteen feet later I’m sliding down the drive on my elbows and knees.
Visiting friends of the family that live on an inlet off the ocean, I climb down the seawall to walk on the coral, with flip-flops on, and when I slipped it took the skin off my entire left side, arm and leg. Sliding into the salt water also was less than desirable.
Riding a bike down hill, again veerry fast, I decide to try riding with my left hand on the right handlebar. The front end crossed up instantly and I was picking gravel out of numerous wounds for sometime to come.
My best friend’s cousin used to take great delight in torturing me when I was little (he was like five years older than us). Once, he tied a slipknot loosely around both my feet, and told me “When I say Go, you start running.” He yelled Go and I took off, and right then he jerked the string so that both my feet were yanked out from underneath me and I landed squarely on my chest and spent the next five minutes gasping and wheezing, trying to get my air back.
I’d say that was pretty stupid.
Actually-you will probably end up with all your teeth when you are 90+yo—presuming that you brush more regularly to avoid the headaches—or not if you no longer do that and have a headache every day instead.
When I was 5? 6?, I knew that shaving lotion was liquid, and that liquids put out fire, so I splashed about half a bottle of my dad’s Aqua Velva on my shirt, set a match to it, and . . .
I think my dad beat the flames out just a bit harder than he had to.
Oh, I remembered another.
People put oil in their hair in my culutre. Softens it up. Anyway, I got the idea that I should do it for a stuffed bunny rabbit. Only my parents didn’t put oil in their hair. So I couldn’t find any. So I used…
sewing machine oil. A whole bottle.
The bunny went into the trash. Yuck. And I had only just gotten it, for Easter.
I thought if you bumped into anyone while walking down the sidewalk in NYC that you got arrested.
I thought my Grandpa would be arrested when he purposely danced around on a “Keep off the grass” area; they would take him away and how would I get home??
I thought cutting those short wisps of hair at the front of my hairline would make them go away forever.
I thought if I got just the tiniest bit of lead pencil on my skin I would die of lead poisoning.
I thought you had to write a thesis at every college. If I had known they are optional some places I could have saved myself a lot of stress, from seventh grade through senior year in college, and still in my sleeping hours.
I thought when I dropped my ice cream cone on the neighbor’s yard, that I would be arrested for that.
Oh, wow. That was my number 1 fear when I was a kid. I still inexplicably get jumpy when I’m a passenger in a car and the driver gets out. I’m 32 years old now.
In kindergarten, our teachers had a hot plate plugged in in the back of the room to warm their coffee and make soup for lunch and stuff. A “friend” of mine cheerfully informed me that when the hotplate was glowing red, it was off. I believed him because, you know, red=stop. I put my hand on it and blistered my entire palm. :eek:
I thought the hair on my stuffed animals would grow back if I cut it off and that they would come to life if they really liked me.
My parents, who didn’t drink beer, told me that beer was horse pee and that the horses in beer commercials were out working up a good pee for the beer company. To this day everytime I see beer I think of horses.
For this, you have to remember that milk used to be delivered by milkmen and left on the front porch of homes every morning.
I was a little adventurous tyke. One early morning I am outside playing when the milkman comes by. An older friend told me that thhe milkwas actually for the mommies to water the plants with in the garden. I took it upon myself to do a good deed for all the mommies in the neighborhood and went around pouring all the milk onto flower beds and hedges. Such a good little lad! My mother had to drive to the store and replace all the milk.
Once, while teaching a summer survival course, I was explaining to a company of soldiers the importance of staying alert while moving through the brush. At one point, I was turned to face them as I walked forward. I managed to step into an electrified cow fence, causing me to squat down violently and hurl my rifle over my shoulder. My arms and legs ached for an hour afterwards, but it was nothing compared to the utter embarrassment. To their credit, the coursies managed to [mostly] hide their smirks.
When I was 11 or 12 (that is, old enough to know better) I had to mow the lawn with a gas mower. It took about 30 minutes, and right after I had finished and turned the engine off, I looked down and noticed the muffler (which looked like this) simply screwed into the engine. I wondered if it came off easily so I reached down and tried to get a good grip on it to twist…
Same result: blistered my entire palm. :smack:
When I was ten, my neighbours had their field baled: round baled. For those unfamiliar, here’s a round bale : You can also see the machine which wraps the bales, and the final, black-plastic wrapped bale of silage.
The bale wrapper would, well, wrap the bales of silage and then automatically tip them off, where they would roll a small distance. However, the land was quite hilly, so sometimes the bales would roll all the way to the bottom of the hill.
One day, the smartarse farm contractor that was doing the baling tipped off a bale which began to roll down the hill. He told me that I should run after it and stop it before it rolled into a hedge.
I believed him.
And I sprinted as fast as I could, and overtook the rapidly accelerating bale and stood at the bottm of the hill, hands out, waiting to stop this one and a half tonne ball of grass which was thundering down on me. I can only imagine that my expression was similar to the one on Bill Murray’s face in Groundhog Day, when he steps in front of the truck. But I firmly believed I could stop that bale, and that this was an important thing to do, and I would be heralded as the great bale saviour, and applauded.
It steamrollered me.
Oh. My. Dear. God. I have tears in my eyes, I laughed so hard at this.