Asklemmy

Not so much as a child, but as a teenager. Once I could drive I didn’t quite have the same level of supervision and was really really able to have a lot more freedom. I’m pretty cautious person in general, but had a friend that was definitely not and was obsessed with college parties in high school.

We lived about an hour and a half from a college town so every now and then my friend wanted to drive up there and check out the parties. To be honest, there really weren’t a lot of parties going on. However, she did remember the house that had a party that she had gone to previously, so we would just show up at this house every now and then and hang out with the guys that lived there (party or no party).

Here we are 16 or 17-year-old girls showing up to these random college guys’ house. Thankfully, nothing ever happened, but it certainly would’ve been easy for something to happen.

Before the age of 20: Made gunpowder and made our own enormous firecrackers/hand grenades, played with matches, climbed to the very top of very tall trees, whittled with knives all day long, cutting into high pressure car tyres with knives, made “bazookas” with firework rockets and shot them after other kids on the street, made petrol powered go-carts and raced them on public streets, disappeared out to play all day and came home for dinner, swam in lakes, climbed rocks with sheer drops into the bay, disturbed enormous ant-nests and got bitten all over (I’m sorry ants, that was a shit thing to do), dipped our fingers in melted wax, placed small stones on train tracks and waited for them to get pulverised, played a crazy game that involved throwing knives into the ground right next to bare feet, chopped firewood with sharp axes, burnt large holes in the carpet in my room (turned out a piece of tin foil was not sufficient insulation for burning sparker powder), did a lot of sleeping outside, threw each other into forests of nettles for fun, crawled through drain pipes running under the road, skateboarded down hills on country side roads, built our own skateboard ramp out of doors and nails that were sticking out ready to impale us, walked on thin ice because we liked the cracking it caused, did night time hikes through swamps, wild water rafting, sprayed burning gasoline out of bicycle pumps, played with aerosol cans and lighters, flew gliders age 15, got drunk a lot from 15 onwards (not at the same time as flying), took down the school computers with a homegrown “virus” (that’s being generous, a few scripts that modified autoexec.bat to make all the school’s computers print “teachers are dumb” instead of booting; it still caused them to call in “the experts”, got into fights and ended up going to A&E after being hit in the head with an iron rod, raided countless pear and apple plantations, played with magnifying glasses in the sharp sun and lit up a great deal of forest floors, rode cars down old train tracks, shot guns, shot air rifles, shot bows, shot cross bows, shot sling shots, maced each other, built large swings that threw us over a cliff side and four-five meter drops into water, played around inside a nuclear-protected naval bunker and accidentally activated the emergency lock down alarm, tipped over an army truck after being let out to to “do a bit of terrain driving” by our staff sergeant, set up and blew up 600 kg of TNT to demonstrate the effect of a MRLS cluster bomb in front of the Danish Queen (fun story, it blew her hat off from the pressure wave), fells asleep behind the wheel after a full day of firefighting training and ended up putting my army jeep into a field, made friends with a Soviet diplomat who tried to pump my brother and I for information about our dad’s job as a military attaché (unfortunately the colonel got sent home to Russia after being made persona non grata) - though he did teach us how to ski in the process, set up our own 380V electrics for a enormous LAN party we organised and electrocuted myself, dialled into a lot of weird BBSes to exchange all sorts of pirated software with anonymous network users, war-dialled various remote systems and tried to hack our way into them, drove all over Europe in various wrecks (accidentally smuggled weed over several international borders, which was especially frustrating as I didn’t touch the stuff and didn’t even know it had been brought), did magic mushrooms and had amazing times and dreadful bad trips (fuck MAO inhibitors), went exploring in a fenced off zone that carried nuclear warning signs (Paldiski, not long after the wall came down), detonated gas canisters of all shapes and sizes, etc etc

It was a fun childhood, to be honest, and I’m grateful for it.

Stuck a housekey into an electrical outlet to pretend I was driving a car. Not sure how I didn't die, honestly.

rode on the trunk of my dad's sw with several other children.

When I was a kid I was told that if I professed my love for Jesus publicly that I would be ridiculed and possibly physically harmed. I grew up in suburban America

Pretty sure people still believe that and are teaching that to their kids today.

lol

A lot of LSD

Walk and ride my bike alone to school from about the age of six.

With some friends, I built an “unguided SAM launcher” using some wood, a lot of aluminum foil, some metal rods, and a bunch of model rockets, and we tried to shoot down stunt kites we were flying near it.

We’d have probably gotten DHS called on us if we did it nowadays lol

Build a flamethrower with a super soaker. Swim with sharks.

Freedom.

Lawn darts

Walking alone around the river bank, with a kitchen knife on my belt. I was "adventuring".

Made a trebuchet that almost destroyed a neighbor's car. Tried to build a fuel-air bomb out of kerosene and a shotgun shell. Made napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. Huntes squirrels with a .22 rifle.

Weird childhood.

Ate fried veal brain all the time: it's sooo good! Since the CJD outbreaks that's something we learned not to do.

I have a scar just under my jawline from when I almost speared myself in the neck while jumping into a copse of trees amid a hail of paintball fire. I crashed through a big broad leaf to see a branch snapped off right under it, the breakage accidentally a sharp point. I should have speared myself right through the brain but I twisted and grazed myself.

built a sledding track that required some tricky drifting at the end to avoid going onto the major highway the semi-trucks use.

How Gen-X do we wanna be here? You should see my sacro-illiac injury or the gnarly plate in my arm. Or hear how I dislocated my shoulder or bent the back of all my cervical vertebrae when I fell onto the concrete.

Play on the streets unsupervised have knives, playing on building sites and similar and that was about at a guess 6 or 7. We also played in the local park and generally got up to mischief.

Launched real bullets out of my slingshot at a dumpster

To be fair that was still dangerous. One actually went off.

Also dumped rubber cement over a kids bike and lit it on fire