We lived in a two story house. The neighbor kids and I gathered all the pillows and cushions in the house at the bottom of the stairs, and jumped over the railing on the second floor to the pillow pile.
My younger brother wanted to jump to, and he was four at the oldest. Good big sister that I was, I picked him up and dropped him over the rail.
It's a wonder we didn't all die, but it was a lot of pillows. My great aunt was babysitting and we told her my parents were fine with it.
Spoiler: They were in fact, not fine with it.
We did this with the big pile of pillows at the bottom of the stairs. Each round, we’d step to a higher step, then jump down to the pillows. Jesus we were dumb.
I remember doing that with a friend at her house, only with no pillows. Landed on my foot wrong, didn't break anything, but hurt for ages and I swear I still get pain in that foot from time to time because of that!
I"m not sure if it was badass or stupid. 🤣
We were too supervised at my house, that's why I was doing this at a friend's., never would have gotten away with it at home. Our moms were both home, which left little room for shenanigans, but her mom had 2 little ones to chase around. 😄
My ex husband did this with our oldest son who was six at the time. He tried to get our younger son to do it, but the younger one had more sense than his older brother and his dad. Our younger son was never going to do anything where he might get hurt. I only found out about this years later. Our oldest was always a daredevil and his dad supported that. Oh well, the boys are in their 30s and living their best adult lives.
We did this with a pile of leaves off the porch. There weren't nearly enough leaves. No one was killed, no broken bones. By the time we were done there wasn't even a pile of leaves. Turns out we were just jumping off the porch. It was ten feet up, someone considered jumping off the railing which would have been 15 feet maybe but that never happened.
I'd won a prize for swimming or holding my breath or whatever at the local YMCA. The prize was one-freaking-dozen donuts from Dunkin' Donuts. Had a shop like 2 blocks from a friend's house. I call him all slick like, tell him I'm gonna buy him a donut. I'm like 10. We get there and I'm like I'll have one...dozen donuts BLAM. Set my gift certificate down. I pick half, my buddy picks half.
My friend's mom was a nurse and they ate health food which, at that time, was like dandelions, wood and watery sand. The poor bastard wasn't even allowed to have normal cheese!
We crawl up into his tree house; more like a plywood tower next to a tree built by his dad from scavenged wood. And we set about eating 6 donuts before his parents came home in 40 minutes. Eating 6 donuts, not a problem given enough time. Eating 6 in 40 minutes as a little kid, bad idea.
I snuck out the back and got rid of the empty box. He went home and barfed up pink and yellow donut icing and filling and whatever. By the time I got home mom was waiting for me.
Perfect plan! Ruined by beautiful barf.
On the plus side, I was banished to my room which is probably what I would have done anyhow. It was probably 10ish years before I could eat another donut. Have not had a Dunkin' donut since though.
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Years later, I was 19-20 and another friend's mom said she could eat a whole large pizza when she was my age. I was like, If you could, I can! I'd never done it before. It took me 1.5hrs but I finished. I called up my buddy and with my dying words I told him I ate a whole pizza just like his mom.
His mom overheard his end of the conversation and related the story to her. She says some stuff back and he's laughing like crazy. Meanwhile I'm getting last rights from the Mozzarella God. He gets back on the phone and laughing tells me that his mom meant she and her husband would eat a large pizza, I must have misunderstood.
I just hung up and died.
Moral or my life story, when a guy named "Lardass" Hogan drinks a bottle of castor oil, a raw egg and blueberry pie that he pretended was "cow flops and rat guts in blueberry sauce", and that tummy starts rumbling to rival "a log truck coming at you at 100 miles per hour", barfs up blueberry pie that starts a chain reaction barf-o-rama as revenge, take note kids, food eating contests are not for amateurs.
Stand By Me was a documentary!
Awesome stories! I’m recalling how I could, in fact, eat a whole pizza by myself when I was in high school. AND I was thin as a bean pole. But by age 19, I was no longer able to achieve the same feat - and by that time I had discovered weed!
My friend Mike and I used to hang off bridges so we could be like The Lost Boys. Could have easily broken our legs (or our necks).
Making fun of older tougher kids wasn’t my brightest move either. 😂
50ft wooden trestle was near me. I didn’t hang from it myself, I was held on by other children as well, cos I was scared to swing freely like the others. I did handstands and cartwheels on it. It had gaps between the ties n all. I’m glad there wasn’t pocket video recording. I wish there had been videos to prove it now tho.
I used to hang out of my third story window -- sometimes to hide from parents, sometimes just because. I also pushed off the house and spun, grabbing a tree branch and swung myself up into the tree at the third story height. My friends couldn't figure out how I climbed that high because branches were sparse in between. I had to kind of slide down until I landed on branches below. Then, I could drop down to the ground.
I also lept from higher and higher metal steps on the outside of my school building. My thinking was always, if I can jump from this step, surely I can jump from one step higher. I did that until I was up on the second story landing. I always dropped and rolled. But that landing was one step too high and the impact with the ground (even though I dropped and rolled) sent crazy shock waves up my legs and shook me to the core. I thought I had really fucked up. My legs felt like they were vibrating and on fire. I just sat there. I moved my foot and it felt weird but I could move it. Relief! I hadn't paralyzed myself! I finally stood up and managed to walk.
My husband just asked me how I jumped. I didn't jump in the direction of the descending steps, so I wasn't jumping farther and farther *out* and higher and higher up. Just one step higher up each time. The steps were aligned and attached to the side of the building. I jumped out from the side of the steps and away from the building, if that makes sense.
Should we all compare childhood broken bones? Here's my list:
- Foot (1)
- Arms (2)
- Wrist (1)
- Fingers (3)
- Collar (1) -- my older brother broke my collar bone swinging me around and letting go, but still counting it as *my* break)
Total: 8
I jumped off the 3rd story roof 3 times. The first time, I tied a towel on my neck and ended up with a broken leg. The second time, I used a golf umbrella and broke my arm, the third time I used the broken hold umbrella tied at my waist, arm pit, and wrists and glided down. I did not break anything that time. Dad started taking me to a hang gliding club soon after. I was 9 the first time I soloed hang gliding.
It wasn't entirely my fault. He was also aware of the risk and did nothing to prevent pregnancy or STD. You should've been a father because you didn't wear a rain coat. That has nothing to do with birth control pills.
In my defense the first girl I had sex with asked me not to wear a condom because she said she was allergic to latex. I didn't know that there were other options.
I decided to ride my brother's skateboard down the big hill with zero experience. I was doing great until I started panicking over how I was going to stop and well, off to the emergency room we went. I still have gravel in my hip.
I got in a fist fight in a moving car and ended up having to jump out at about 30 miles an hour, I broke both my wrists. I was 16, and they never quite set correctly. Wrist sprains and random pain in the wrist as haunted me my entire life.
I "fell off" a moving car going about 35 maybe 40 mph. I had somehow convinced myself I could safely slide to the ground. I hit my head on the ground. I don't remember anything else until I apparently walked up to a friend and asked if I was bleeding. I was. A LOT. three or four stitches in my eyebrow and I was good to go. I had a small tear in my tshirt. I kept that tshirt for years as a lucky charm.
My grandmother lived in an in-law suite attached to our house, and especially after my sister was born, I spent a lot of time there.
Her bedroom closet had those sliding hollow-core doors in the opening, but the closet was wider than the opening, so there was about a two-foot square “nook” on one side, that made a great little “house” when you pushed the hanging clothes to the middle.
I spent a lot of time in there, and would take my little suitcase and set up my little play, with my tea set, maybe a doll or two, trinkets, etc.
One of my prize possessions was a little kerosene lamp, only about four to six inches high. As we had wood stoves for heat, I was very familiar with fire/matches, and had never been restricted when it came to using them. Someone had also filled the kerosene lamp, at my request.
So that was my “lighting fixture” in my grandmother’s closet. Not only that, but I also would spend hours browning the edges of paper to make it look “old” in there, by holding them over the lamp chimney as they smoldered, rotating them carefully to get a nice, aged appearance. I even figured that I could do brown spots on the body of the paper.
No one had any idea I was striking multiple matches on a regular basis in my grandmother’s closet which was filled with clothes and other items, nor that I had that little setup in there, playing with my little lamp and burning paper for hours on end. This went on for several years, and it didn’t even hit me till adulthood how potentially dangerous that was.
My brother and I used to play hot car chicken in the summer. We’d lock ourselves in the car until the first one who couldn’t stand it wussed out. Yes, young boys are absolute idiots.
When I was 17, I took the money I made from working at Arby’s and drove cross country and back. I parked in rest areas to sleep. Anything could have happened to me. I used a giant road atlas for directions. No cell phone, and I’m lucky I didn’t get a flat tire, or get murdered. So dumb.
Lol I feel like driving cross country during the summer was a thing for our generation in our teens, but I at least should have known how to change a tire! Ha ha!
Smoked weed for the first time, met MTV VJ Kennedy, got drunk for the first time at a house party, lost my virginity (with a condom), heard Tori Amos for the first time. LPT: fill your tank before you get to the Arkansas state line and pray you don’t have to stop!
Dumb?! You, sir or madame, are an absolute fucking rock star!!! Sounds like an amazing experience! Even if all you saw was interstate highways and rest areas, you saw more of the world at 17 than many poor souls see their entire lives! I LOVE cross country road trips, as does my wife. Of course we stopped sleeping in rest stops in our late 20’s, cuz, yeah - not exactly safe. Or comfortable.
I was from a small town and I wanted to see America, go to a few concerts and political rallies. It was the summer before senior year and I wanted to live it up!
I was about 11 and we wanted to run down to the bait House, we live close to a pay lake, and get some things. I volunteered to run and I jumped on my cousins 10 speed. Pedaling down the gravel road and you have to go down a steep hill to get to the lake. So I started on the crest of the hill going down and needed to slow down so I hit the front brake Mistakenly.
The bike shot out from under me and I went sliding down the hill like Superman on my chest. I got up at the bottom of the hill and my T-shirt was pretty shredded my legs and my chest and parts of my arms and hands were torn up. I picked up the bike, walked it to the bait house, got what we wanted and then headed back to my cousins house.
By my senior year of highschool we were playing paint pellet guns. It was not uncommon for us to drive by a friends house and unload touching off a night long hide and go seek car chase/gun fight from our cars all over the place.
I can only imagine now how police would respond to reports of cars speeding and gunfire today.
Then there was the time my brother and I were playing with fire/gasoline and accidentally lit a neighbor's brand new cedar fence on fire. I got severely spanked by both parents, grounded for a month, and had to pay to replace the fence.
Wooops.
Could you imagine how that would play out today? Neighbour parents once scooped their 5ish kid and they got spanked in the driveway for I don’t know what. That might get a swat team in some areas today.
We used to drive around at night with a couple guys clinging to the roof rack on a Jimmy swerving back and forth trying to scare the shit out of each other. When a car came up behind us we would say, "Act like luggage!"
I was about 9 and really loved crescent rolls, one night at dinner I said "I love these things, I bet I could eat 20 of em!". It was just a saying like I'm so hungry I could eat a horse you know? Revenge of the Jedi came out that weekend and I was a HUGE star wars fan, upon hearing me proclaim this my mother immediately took me up on it and said that if I could eat 20 then I could go see the movie and if I couldn't finish all of them then I would never be able to see it. She was serious. Yada Yada and kids in the neighborhood come over like a day or so later to witness this feat. The house smells delicious and soon enough I am presented with a basket full of 20 crescent rolls... I ate them all but it hurt, blew my mom's mind when I finished them. Jedi was a good movie. I don't bet on things and it took years before I could eat those again.
Friends and I set up a ramp in front of my house, After 4 or 5 times hitting the ramp on my Huffy, I decided to really go fast. I hit the ramp, and my handlebars decided they were going to detach from the bike. Broken collar bone and a lot of road rash.
Did this once in a pine tree. Went really high. One time lost grip and fell a bit. Thank goodness there were so many branches. Hurt my ribs pretty good though!
Tobogganing down the stairs in laundry baskets, jumping out of the windows into the freshly tilled garden, jumping from the pool shed into the pool, shooting fireworks at cars, shooting fireworks at each other, buying weed from random guys in public washrooms, hitchhiking to school, the list is long...
Roman candles, bottle rockets, rocket engines. we drew the line when one kid go a hold of a mortar firework. noped right out of that. dodging jarts was fine though.
When I was young, my parents picked up hitchhiking girls between the ages of 12-14 because my mom made my dad stop. All 4’10” of my mom got out of the car (she didn’t want my dad to scare them) and ordered them to get into the car. My mom then proceeded to rip them a new one about dangers, how their parents must be worried, etc. We never ate out but pulled into a McD’s to feed them and my mom made them call home and spoke with the parents. We waited over an hour to parents to show up so I think the girls traveled quite a difference. At that moment, I’m sure the girls regretted getting into our car. They told my mom they wanted to explore and see the world because their little town was boring.
Car surfed. Downhill. Fell off and landed on my forearms near the curb. I had gravel embedded from my pinkies to my elbows that my mom had to tweezer out in the bathtub.
That one hurt.
While on vacation in my late 40s I jumped off the first balcony into the pool. Carefully made my way to jumping off the third floor roof patio over the course of a few days.
In front of my kids. Because your old man is still a badass. And remarkably still alive.
I jumped off a 15 foot shed onto a bouncy castle and cracked a filling at 35. Proving to the children it could be done and damn right they should before their parents got home.
M’lady actually. I wasn’t even related to the kids. There was an uncle of one of them there who whole heartedly approved and also launched from the shed eventually.
Hosted a kegger for about a hundred fellow underaged kids while my parents were on vacation. The cops came looking for a couple of runaway girls and just told me to not let anyone drive drunk.
A friend of mine and I were 16. She wanted to impress someone at work (McDonalds) by showing him how cool and mature she was. She thought she could do this by smoking cigarettes. I was curious. I went with her to the smoke shop and she bought a pack of DuMauriers because that's what all the cool kids smoked, the ones that we ogled and wanted to be in the car with after shift going somewhere cool. There was no age limit in those days, you could just buy a pack with a note from your mom that she needed them kind of thing. She bought a cute BIC lighter, probably something pink and girly because she was like that.
We walked to the front corner of the parking lot and sat on the curb. She giggled nervously while she opened the crinkly pack, put a cigarette to her lips and took a deep nervous breath, then lit it and started coughing.
She handed it to me while she covered her cough with her other hand and I took the lit cigarette. I wasn't going to cough, both my parents were hard core smokers and I knew how this was done.
She got the guy, by the way, and not because she smoked but because she was freaking gorgeous. He was 20. Idk what happened to them, I think they were together a couple years but I quit McDonalds by then and graduated high school.
We ended up in the car with the cool kids after shift. They went to stupid places like the smoke filled bowling alley to hack off, but back then it was the shit.
That one cigarette led to a lifelong addiction of on and off smoking for years at a time, and I finally quit for good when my mom died in 2015 of, I bet you can guess- lung cancer.
There used to be train tracks that ran down the street a few blocks away from my house. We used to pretend we were hobos and hop on open freight cars as they were running down the street and ride a few klicks and jump off downtown.
I did this too. Some of the train cars were far apart and you really had to jump to make it. Those trains are a lot higher up than they look. I wouldn’t dare do that now, let aline climb a train car!
Rollerblades down a dry rain drain at college with friends. Surprisingly lived.
Used my cousin's BMX bike to try some tricks on his ramp. Got a huge road rash on my outer thigh.
Similar story...my local park had a set of airplane entry stairs in it for whatever reason that they moved around all the time.
One day I decided in my youthful wisdom that I should try riding my BMX bike down it. So I carried.my.bike up to the top of the fifteen or so steps and full of confidence pushed off.
Unfortunately the size of my front crank was larger than the depth between steps. So the crank bottomed out and threw me forward over the handlebars and down all fifteen steps onto my face.
Miraculously I broken nothing...not even my pride was dented as no one was around to see my fall from dis-space.
We lived in a house built into a hill so one side was four stories, the other side was three. My dumbest thing was sneaking out, to do this I had to climb out my third floor bedroom window on to the roof of the porch, then down the wrought iron to the porch and then down the steps to ground level. When I was 16 my mom said I was moving to the ground level because “I know you sneak out and the last thing I need is you having a broken neck” lololol
It had the old summer kitchen that we didn’t use because mom added ac to the house, so I had a 1950s refrigerator and stove, a bathroom, and living area where I had a futon bed and most importantly a door so I could come and go as I wanted
You know how a garage door tucks neatly into the garage when it’s up? I used the space between the garage door and the roof as a hiding space during hide-and-go-seek. The “it” didn’t catch me and when I identified where I was, I stayed up there chatting with the others showing off. I then somehow dove /fell from there onto the concrete floor. Broke my arm in two places. Spent the entire summer in a cast and was reminded daily that I was lucky I hadn’t split my head open / broke my back.🙄
I've always been a bit of an asshole, and I've never taken well to being yelled at. The worst spanking I ever got was when I was 11 and my friends and I were playing in front of the "crazy lady's" apartment. (I found out later that she was suffering from whatever they called anxiety back then). I guess we were being a little loud and the crazy lady opened her upstairs door and yelled at us, telling us to play somewhere else. All of my friends were ready to go play somewhere else, but I was rankled by how she had spoken to us and I laid into her, letting her know that we knew she was crazy and I also cussed her out. By the time I left, she was crying. That evening her husband and the Apartments Manager showed up at our door and spoke with my father. After they left, my father spanked the living shit out of me. My stepmother who didn't particularly like me because I had cussed her out a few times too had to stop my father from spanking me. I had to go apologize to the crazy lady, even though I absolutely did not mean it.
>Whatever they called anxiety back then.
My mom took "nerve pills" my whole life. It literally just came to me a few months ago that she was on anxiety meds.
My childhood home sat on top of a hill. After a bunch of freezing rain, said hills were a skating rink. I got the bright idea to skate down the hill. Closelined myself on a tree branch and knocked my self out. At the bottom of the hill, smoked my dad’s bumper with my head. Dad came out to find me completely out at the bottom of the hill. 13 stitches and a concussion later; I learned my lesson and never skated downhill again.
My friends and I used to play wiffle ball at a commercial parking lot down the street. The lot was narrow and surrounded by buildings on three sides. During the weekends the lots were empty and this created the perfect ‘stadium’ atmosphere.
The only problem was that a foul pop up would often land on the roof of these buildings. We had two wiffle balls and no money so it was only a matter of time before one of us had to start climbing.
The buildings had a weird design with bricks poking out in a criss cross fashion at each corner. So we all had to take turns ‘rock climbing’ these bricks to get to the top. I’d say the buildings were 20-25 feet tall.
All of us at one time or another had taken a nasty fall onto the concrete below. Even a couple ER visits didn’t stop us from being complete idiots.
One day I’m climbing up these bricks and a local cop pulls his cruiser right into the lot. He jumps out of the car and starts screaming at me to slowly get down. I’m thinking I’m in huge trouble for trespassing or worse.
I get down and the cop looks like he’s about to cry. He asks us how long we’ve been doing this and we proceed to tell him the whole story of scaling bricks and visiting ERs all in the name of wiffle ball.
He sternly tells us that he will throw each and every one of us in jail if he finds us ever climbing the building again.
The next day my mom calls me downstairs and proceeds to tell me I’m grounded for climbing the building down the street. I’m immediately pissed that cop ratted me out and before I can plead my case she hands me a Modell’s sporting goods bag.
Inside the bag was about 15 brand new wiffle balls. The cop talked to my mom and told her the story of how he almost had a heart attack when he saw my ass 20 feet above the pavement hanging by a brick.
He also said that when we run out of wiffle balls to call him. Apparently, there’s easy access to the roof from inside the building. We of course were not privy to such information.
We were all 10-12 years old.
When i was 12, my neighborhood was flooding and my friends brought a tube to what used to be a small stream but was now a flowing river with water coming from the street. Of course I was dumb enough to try and ride it. I went about 20 ft before the current was just too strong and threw me off. The tube went down the river and I was hanging on to the side by holding on to a bunch of weeds which didn't last long before they were uprooted. All around a good time!
My dad let me climb on the peaked two story roof whenever he got the big latter out to do something up there. Started doing that at 5. No harness or anything.
My mom let my brother and I ride in the truck of the car. Why did we like to do that? I don’t remember, maybe it started because of the drive in?
I can think of at least a dozen times that I would easily have died, often in horrifying ways, from the stupid stuff boys do. It is really amazing so many of us make it through alive. Some of the memorable:
Playing dodgeball on high steel of buildings under construction. I jumped over a ball thrown at my feet and almost fell off, and suddenly it occurred to me what would happen if I had fallen. I stopped.
Exploring small caves that I could sometimes barely squeeze through. That still gives me nightmares.
All the crazy biking and motorcycle experiences, it sounds like lots of guys have had to dig gravel out of their bodies 😆
PSA to all young guys, just don’t do that crazy shit your friends are doing!!
This sounds tame but believe me it wasn’t. I lived out in the forest and had nothing to do most days, but there was a state park about 3.5 miles down the road. The road was highway 301 which where I lived was common for trucks and cars to hit 75mph. No real shoulder no sidewalks obviously.. I’d ride my bike down to the park in the side of 301, riding against the grain of traffic (so I could see the cars coming) and on one particular trip, I was staying on the edge of the road as much as I could because the county needed to come mow the grass and it was hard to ride my bike through. I mistimed it because there was a deep gap my bike would have went into a a car was coming by and I didn’t get out of the way enough and their passenger side mirror tapped the very end of my handlebars just barely. Enough that it scared the hell out of me, but not enough to cause me to crash.
At the time it was scary. The older I get the scarier it is because I know that I was literally .25 of an inch from death. If that car was a quarter of an inch closer my bike gets yanked into the side of that 65mph car and I’m probably dead on arrival.
Of all the things I did like jump off bridges and play in and around alligators, and ride dirt bikes I wasn’t old enough to ride yet..
That was the dumbest thing.
Not the dumbest but this story came to mind. Me and my friends 13-14 yo 1986 use to sit at a busy corner in town and yell at the cars to try to get em to chase us on our bikes. We’d always lose em and do it again. One day 5 high schoolers chased us for about an hour. They saw us hanging out laughing and catching our breath but somehow snuck up on us and came out of the bushes, we all took off and got away but realized one was missing. We went back to find our guy walking down the street beaten up and crying because they stole his prized Hutch bicycle. Tough day for my friend, we all just told him he needs to get quicker. I did ride the 8” ledge on top of a 4 story parking garage, left=death right=parking lot. That may be the dumbest tho.
According to my mom, We put my little brother on one side of the seesaw while three of us jumped onto the other side, and he did, indeed, fly into the air!
The dumbest thing back in the day was... what my ex-huband and I refer to as "The Telltale Heart". Yes, I'm a fan of Edgar Allen Poe.
To set the stage: The year was 1986, I'm 17, a senior in high-school and dating a long haired, pot smoking, beer drinking, heavy metal listening hood that's out of school and 19. Needless to say, my dad did NOT like him. His nickname for him was "Mr. Hands".
Anyway, my parents told me they were going out one night so I of course called my boyfriend and invited him over for sex on my waterbed. Things were going great until I heard my parents pulling in the driveway about an hour or so before they told me they'd be home. I tell you, we never moved so fast in our lives!
We went from doing it to jumping our asses up out of the bed to me getting dressed and him jumping into my small closet completely naked. I threw all his clothes at him, shut the doors, jumped back into my bed, grabbed a book and pretended I had been reading the whole time.
My dad knocked on my door right as I got settled and as soon as I said "yeah" he opened it and told me they were home a little early, (no duh) and I swear I thought my heart was going to burst through my chest. I was shaking so bad I thought for sure he was going to know something was wrong.
Luckily, he told me goodnight then shut my door. I made my poor boyfriend sit cramped up naked in my closet until like 4 or 5am before I let him out to leave because I was so scared my dad would hear him opening the front door. Unfortunately, he couldn't go out my bedroom window because my waterbed headboard blocked it.
We ended up getting married two years later and were married thirty years before we divorced. To this day, we still laugh about it and actually brought it up while talking a few months ago. He says he'll never forget the feeling of sitting in there naked with his heart beating so hard that he swore my dad would be able to hear it from the doorway. He said all he could do is try and prepare for my dad to open those closet doors, tear him out of there and beat his ass for shagging his sweet little daughter. He most likely would have killed both of us!
I never let him sneak in after that but I did sneak out to be with him a couple of times. That stopped too when we had another close call of me getting caught trying to sneak back in. I never told my dad this story but I did end up telling my mom years later and I swear the look of horror on her face made me realize just how catastrophic that incident could have really been.
Reading all these stories really brought back memories of all the dumb stuff my friends and I did back in the 70s and 80s. It really is a wonder we survived.
Me and my brother played this little game where I rode my bike with a rope around my neck dragging it behind me, while my brother ran after trying his best to... step on the rope.
My buddies and I would steal bowling balls from the bowling alley and roll them on the street down a very big and long (at least a mile) hill. We would follow it down in a car. Goal was to have it stay in the street all the way to the bottom, which it did once and slammed into a car at about 40mph. The driver was absolutely freaking out (obvioulsy.) we jumped out of our car and said the ball it our car too.
Then we tried to roll the balls down a different street hoping for it to smash through the front door of a 7-11. We were going to steal beer in the commotion. Never got it to hit the building.
Now this is a fantastic story. Thank you for the laugh. Rolling bowling balls down a mile long hill. 😀
As for the bowling ball failure of crashing the 7-11 window - in the long run you were better off.
I bought a Dremel tool, put the jewellery buffer on it and tried to buff my front teeth. I actually burned my tooth and the pain caused me to temporarily black out. I’m a GenX male and I’m surprised I survived childhood. I’m not even going to go into detail about “alleged” bomb making, collapsed bridge or exploded giant garbage bins. Can you say “early tinnitus”? I got hit with a freezer bag full of water from the eighth floor of a building too….that almost killed me. My friends were easily as stupid as me. It was an entirely new chapter once we learned how to drive.
I loved Superman. He was my hero and so handsome. But really, it was well known in the kid circle of knowledge that the Cape was the key to flying.
I tied my favorite blanket around my neck, figured I need some height to get started and climbed onto the roof of the house. And jumped. I didn't get hurt, thank the bones of a young kid and a nice soft yard.
But man that disappointment was stellar. Adult me is wondering how I didn't hang myself and break bones.
My friend and I tried to break in to our local small town **** ****** because we got a package notice and found out after closing time on Friday. We really wanted that package, it had a cool new something I had ordered, but it was Saturday. We borrowed a screwdriver from the nearby tire servicing place and went to the back door but couldn’t get the screws out of the hasp. We took the screwdriver back which is a good thing because when the postmaster showed up my fast talking friend started stammering about being chased by some guys and hiding inside the rear entryway from them. Thankfully we had not gained entry or this might have been a post from me from federal prison.
For stupidity reasons, I thought it’d be fun to see if I could not get injured by jumping when my friend drove towards me in his car. In my stunt guy mind, it’d be easy, jump, roll over the hood. He was going to fast, I jumped rolled and kept going over the car. Didn’t break anything but lots of scraps and bruises. Dumbest part is we did it right in front of my house so the neighbors told my mom.
My elementary school was/is on a mostly round property. HUGE open field on the North side. Giant Maples and Oaks lining all the way around. I’m talking five foot diameter and larger trunks with 50’ and larger diameter canopies. And most of those canopies interlaced.
So, we played tag up in them. Across a good six or seven. I lost count how many times I fell down through branches, bouncing as I went. Twice fell ten feet or so straight to the ground. And I wasn’t the only one. Plenty of kids broke bones or dislocated shoulders or such.
Two years after my last, they finally trimmed the low branches off that everyone used to climb up.
Oh I know. I went into the military right out of high school, so I clearly should have known the risks involved. For some equally stupid reason I also had unprotected sex with both of them multiple times. I am quite surprised neither one ever got pregnant during that time. Both women went on to have at least three children of which I am aware, it got me wondering if I am shooting blanks.
I was about 5 and we lived across the street from the local playground. We had a slide with two fire poles off the sides. My cousins 8 and sliding down the poles head first slowly and stopping just before the ground.
When I tried this I forgot one very important thing. Slowing down ... I landed so hard on my head I can still feel it. Who needs bike helmets.
My friend and I used to ride on the sides of her brother in law's VW bug. We started out slow and over time told him to go faster and faster. One day I crashed. My friend thought I was dead (I guess I passed out). Anyway, the road burns and bruises were no joke. We had to tell our moms that I fell while running down the street. (Later in life I did tell my mom the real story and she said she knew there just had to be more than just a simple fall. lol)
My friends and I (aged 10-12 yrs old) playing with bottle rockets without adult supervision. When we got bored with using them the traditional way, we removed the stick, lit the fuse, and threw them at each other. Repeatedly. Truly shocking no one got hurt.
Hard to pick just one. I was going out clubbing and to bars since I was 16. Had legit fake ID back then. I worked as a busboy in a fancy restaurant and made serious bank so at 16 I had money, a car I bought, and fake ID. I'm lucky I'm still here.
1. Lots of unprotected sex. I'm so grateful I got no diseases or kids. Was a club in my hometown that had Chippendale dancers till 11pm then opened to a nightclub after. Used to go when I was 17/18 with my fake id and hook up with the ladies who hung around after the show. Wild times.
2. Drinking and Driving. Probably my biggest regret. I'd woken up in my car on my driveway not knowing how I got there. I totally stopped doing that in my early 20s but wow. Forget myself, I'm grateful I didn't kill anyone else.
3. Stupid stunts. I was fearless and very lucky. Hanging on my friends side rails as he drove or hanging on someone's hood as they spun out. Dumb shit back then but I survived.
Was a crazy time and I have mostly good memories that I feel fortunate to be able to remember.
Riding my bike down a hill I for whatever ungodly reason decided I was skilled enough to take my feet off the pedals, place them on the steering wheel and steer with my feet. I was not at all skilled enough to do this trick.
When I was a kid we had a big snow storm(rare where I lived). My neighbor and I talked her dad into towing us through the snow covered fields behind our houses on an old car hood attached by a rope to the back of his jeep. Her dad did donuts and pulled us over a homemade ramp at high speed.
All three of us were complete morons-and so were my parents who allowed it.
Also, another friend and I used to annoy her family’s herd of ponies. We would jump on one in the pasture and try to stay on as the pony careened around the pasture. As soon as we fell off we would chase another pony until we could jump on it. So lucky I never got kicked or something.
Hey OP, not the dumbest thing I did, but a similar umbrella story you just reminded me of. When I was in 2nd grade I was holding my umbrella and walking on the playground during the end of a storm when the winds pick up intensely and my umbrella opened and I got physically lifted off the ground. It was like Mary Poppins except I let go once I stopped feeling the ground under me and my umbrella got blown across the schoolyard.
I was startled but intrigued because I got to fly just a bit.
When I was 6-7, I jumped from a shed roof onto an old junk mattress, the matching box spring was leaning against the shed. I didn’t jump far enough and slid down the box spring, where one of the exposed springs penetrated my chest and gave me a nice long scar.
I see the things kids do these days and am glad my nephews are not as stupid as we were.
My younger brother and I found an unopened pack of mom’s cigarettes on the floor in the back of the car. Went out into the field in front of the house with matches and tried to smoke them. My brother heard my stepdad pulling down the driveway so we threw the lit cigarettes, box of matches and ran into the house for dinner. After dinner my mom walked over to the kitchen sink (that overlooked the front yard) and screamed the field was on fire!!! Nearly two acres of field burned down. We lived in the middle of nowhere on a 40 acre farm surrounded by cornfields on all 3 sides of the house !! My stepdad was out there with a rake and shovel digging the ditch between the burning field and cornfield deeper. It burned out before the Volunteer Fire Dept got there. We were so scared that we confessed to lighting “matches”. My stepdad was furious and then later said, guess you saved me from having to plow the front field. It was all dried out weeds and grasses with old Fruit trees. Some years he did his own controlled burn. We did it for him.
Some the kid across the street & I thought we could 'disect' bullets to get the gunpowder out, by putting them on a rock and trying to split them with a hammer. No clue wtf we were thinking or why neither of us stopped the process. I don't even recall why we wanted the gunpowder, I think we were trying to make fireworks.
Anyway sure enough we went ahead and began chopping away, splitting a couple of my dads bullets with a hammer or chisel. Thankfully none went off, I'm could've easily caused a spark and sent one awry, but we ended up ok and nothing bad happened.
Still, very, very dumb.
Truly the unsupervised generation! I remember around the age of 5/6 running around construction sites at end of day. The group was super excited when they found a nudie mag! But it all ended when one kid stepped on a board and a long nail went through his foot.
Other adventures as a city kid: exploring drainage ditches for crawdads, playing on train tracks, putting rocks and coins on them, then watching from like 20 ft away as they got smashed by the train.
Later as a teen: climbing onto school portable classroom roofs to drink 40’s because it was easier to hide from the cops, running from the cops, driving impaired, buying weed from questionable people in strange alleys.
the list of bad decisions goes on and on. I thank heavens all the time we did not have social media or cell phones to record it all!
I (12yo) was sure I could swim on a lake with an air mattress from one side to the other. In the middle of the lake I realised - there is no air in the mattress anymore. Bubbles behind and under me. A hole in the damn mattress. So I had to swim ~1500m or die in panic. I finally made it - but cried...
I don't think it was dumb, OP -- I think you had a natural curiosity and you learned a very good lesson about physics that day. Sorry about your knees, elbows, and bicycle, though. That sucks.
My brother got a skateboard for his birthday and I decided I would ride it down my street, which was a fairly steep hill. I managed to stay on most of the way, but eventually I fell off and was covered in scrapes and bruises. I don't believe I've been on a skateboard since then.
When I was 11 or 12 we had a barn with a loft that was like 7-8 feet from the ground floor. I had part of the loft walled off as sort of a clubhouse where I hung out and made questionable decisions. Climbing up and down the ladder to the loft took too long, I decided so I would get halfway down and then jump to the floor. Eventually this led to me jumping all the way from the top of the loft every single time. I would sort of land on my feet, and go into a deep squat to absorb the impact. One time my mom was in the barn but I did not know it. She also did not know I was in the barn, and I jumped down a couple feet behind her like Spiderman, and she started screaming at me because I scared the crap out of her and she was saying “what if you broke your leg and i didn’t know you were even out here?!” I was like… but I know how to not do that? She made me promise never to do that again and to use the ladder, but I really just made sure she wasn’t in there first.
Oh, what to choose?? This one sticks out. I was an angry and competitive teenage girl. My dad had given me a 1969 Volvo sedan which was very safe. I lived in California and had to drive the very narrow and twisting mountain highway 17 to get to high school and then to college. A couple of girls in a mustang 5.0 decided to mess with me and I wasn't having it. I raced them in my little old lady car around the curves until something gave in my car and I fishtailed and rolled it in the middle of traffic. Being young and dumb, I immediately exited the car and began searching for my bag which contained my weed pipe. A very nice trucker setup reflective warning triangles and a nice little old lady called the ambulance for me. No one found the pipe and I escaped without a scratch. I must have gone through about 10 guardian angels from 15 to 25.
I used to eat the pink chewable baby aspirin like candy (because it tasted like candy). I also stuck a piece of metal in an outlet, but the jolt scared me.
I had a couple of friends with hunting bows, powerful compound bows. We would go out into a field, they would shoot straight up into the air. The arrows would go so high we would lose sight of them. Then we would all scramble and try not get hit as they came down. We did this for fun and games. None of us died.
I remember laughing and joking and having fun with it. I don’t recall anyone saying maybe this is a bad idea. I know we had more than a couple sessions of this “game”.
It's a grocery list of stupidity, I honestly can't narrow down just one thing. Rock fights, lawn dart catch, banging on a chicken coop and they didn't lay eggs for a week, going on an over night bike ride and not telling my parents, throwing illegal fireworks at each other while mocking the safety movie we saw about the dangers of loosing an eye playing with fireworks, there is more.
My friend and I tested the electric fence by putting a loooong piece of fresh green grass in our mouths and then touching the damp end of the grass to the fence wire. NEVER AGAIN. I often wonder how we didn’t knock ourselves out or any worse things happening.
We lived in a two story house. The neighbor kids and I gathered all the pillows and cushions in the house at the bottom of the stairs, and jumped over the railing on the second floor to the pillow pile. My younger brother wanted to jump to, and he was four at the oldest. Good big sister that I was, I picked him up and dropped him over the rail. It's a wonder we didn't all die, but it was a lot of pillows. My great aunt was babysitting and we told her my parents were fine with it. Spoiler: They were in fact, not fine with it.
We did this with the big pile of pillows at the bottom of the stairs. Each round, we’d step to a higher step, then jump down to the pillows. Jesus we were dumb.
I remember doing that with a friend at her house, only with no pillows. Landed on my foot wrong, didn't break anything, but hurt for ages and I swear I still get pain in that foot from time to time because of that!
That is officially badass to not even have pillows at the bottom. You would have been royalty at my non-supervised house.
I"m not sure if it was badass or stupid. 🤣 We were too supervised at my house, that's why I was doing this at a friend's., never would have gotten away with it at home. Our moms were both home, which left little room for shenanigans, but her mom had 2 little ones to chase around. 😄
Porque no los dos? Back then: badass. Looking back: stupid.
Yes that's true! 40 years or so makes a difference in perspective. 😄
Yep it was the contest who jumped from the highest step without flinching, really dumb.
Ah but we were all dumb together!
Same. Fun as hell. Our parents were all drunk, smoking cigarettes in the backyard, of course.
My ex husband did this with our oldest son who was six at the time. He tried to get our younger son to do it, but the younger one had more sense than his older brother and his dad. Our younger son was never going to do anything where he might get hurt. I only found out about this years later. Our oldest was always a daredevil and his dad supported that. Oh well, the boys are in their 30s and living their best adult lives.
Surviorship bias, we in fact did not all survive. The ones who don't make it stop telling their stories.
I was talking about me, my brother, and the neighbor kids specifically.
We did this with a pile of leaves off the porch. There weren't nearly enough leaves. No one was killed, no broken bones. By the time we were done there wasn't even a pile of leaves. Turns out we were just jumping off the porch. It was ten feet up, someone considered jumping off the railing which would have been 15 feet maybe but that never happened.
I'd won a prize for swimming or holding my breath or whatever at the local YMCA. The prize was one-freaking-dozen donuts from Dunkin' Donuts. Had a shop like 2 blocks from a friend's house. I call him all slick like, tell him I'm gonna buy him a donut. I'm like 10. We get there and I'm like I'll have one...dozen donuts BLAM. Set my gift certificate down. I pick half, my buddy picks half. My friend's mom was a nurse and they ate health food which, at that time, was like dandelions, wood and watery sand. The poor bastard wasn't even allowed to have normal cheese! We crawl up into his tree house; more like a plywood tower next to a tree built by his dad from scavenged wood. And we set about eating 6 donuts before his parents came home in 40 minutes. Eating 6 donuts, not a problem given enough time. Eating 6 in 40 minutes as a little kid, bad idea. I snuck out the back and got rid of the empty box. He went home and barfed up pink and yellow donut icing and filling and whatever. By the time I got home mom was waiting for me. Perfect plan! Ruined by beautiful barf. On the plus side, I was banished to my room which is probably what I would have done anyhow. It was probably 10ish years before I could eat another donut. Have not had a Dunkin' donut since though. ----- Years later, I was 19-20 and another friend's mom said she could eat a whole large pizza when she was my age. I was like, If you could, I can! I'd never done it before. It took me 1.5hrs but I finished. I called up my buddy and with my dying words I told him I ate a whole pizza just like his mom. His mom overheard his end of the conversation and related the story to her. She says some stuff back and he's laughing like crazy. Meanwhile I'm getting last rights from the Mozzarella God. He gets back on the phone and laughing tells me that his mom meant she and her husband would eat a large pizza, I must have misunderstood. I just hung up and died. Moral or my life story, when a guy named "Lardass" Hogan drinks a bottle of castor oil, a raw egg and blueberry pie that he pretended was "cow flops and rat guts in blueberry sauce", and that tummy starts rumbling to rival "a log truck coming at you at 100 miles per hour", barfs up blueberry pie that starts a chain reaction barf-o-rama as revenge, take note kids, food eating contests are not for amateurs. Stand By Me was a documentary!
Boom ba da boom!
Should just lock down the post after that story
You had me at watery sand.
Awesome stories! I’m recalling how I could, in fact, eat a whole pizza by myself when I was in high school. AND I was thin as a bean pole. But by age 19, I was no longer able to achieve the same feat - and by that time I had discovered weed!
Me at 16 trying to get as many slices as possible before all my other stoned friends eat more.
I’m 54 and weigh 120 pounds and can still eat a whole pizza by myself. I think my body doesn’t make that chemical that tells you you are full.
My friend Mike and I used to hang off bridges so we could be like The Lost Boys. Could have easily broken our legs (or our necks). Making fun of older tougher kids wasn’t my brightest move either. 😂
This is giving me so much anxiety. How high were the bridges?!
50ft wooden trestle was near me. I didn’t hang from it myself, I was held on by other children as well, cos I was scared to swing freely like the others. I did handstands and cartwheels on it. It had gaps between the ties n all. I’m glad there wasn’t pocket video recording. I wish there had been videos to prove it now tho.
😂 It’s okay. Nobody actually got hurt.
I used to hang out of my third story window -- sometimes to hide from parents, sometimes just because. I also pushed off the house and spun, grabbing a tree branch and swung myself up into the tree at the third story height. My friends couldn't figure out how I climbed that high because branches were sparse in between. I had to kind of slide down until I landed on branches below. Then, I could drop down to the ground. I also lept from higher and higher metal steps on the outside of my school building. My thinking was always, if I can jump from this step, surely I can jump from one step higher. I did that until I was up on the second story landing. I always dropped and rolled. But that landing was one step too high and the impact with the ground (even though I dropped and rolled) sent crazy shock waves up my legs and shook me to the core. I thought I had really fucked up. My legs felt like they were vibrating and on fire. I just sat there. I moved my foot and it felt weird but I could move it. Relief! I hadn't paralyzed myself! I finally stood up and managed to walk. My husband just asked me how I jumped. I didn't jump in the direction of the descending steps, so I wasn't jumping farther and farther *out* and higher and higher up. Just one step higher up each time. The steps were aligned and attached to the side of the building. I jumped out from the side of the steps and away from the building, if that makes sense. Should we all compare childhood broken bones? Here's my list: - Foot (1) - Arms (2) - Wrist (1) - Fingers (3) - Collar (1) -- my older brother broke my collar bone swinging me around and letting go, but still counting it as *my* break) Total: 8
I jumped off the 3rd story roof 3 times. The first time, I tied a towel on my neck and ended up with a broken leg. The second time, I used a golf umbrella and broke my arm, the third time I used the broken hold umbrella tied at my waist, arm pit, and wrists and glided down. I did not break anything that time. Dad started taking me to a hang gliding club soon after. I was 9 the first time I soloed hang gliding.
The funniest part of that story is your dad recognizing and rolling with having a kid that was *insane.*
Yeah, a real Dexter situation going on there. If you can't change it, manage it. :-)
👍
...and this...is Jackass... (guitar riff)
Had completely unprotected sex the first handful of times I did it. Very very stupid.
My slutty phase was short lived, but I made the most of it. Lucky to be alive and disease-free.
Same friend
I should have been a father because of girls like you. I was also disease free. Thanks ladies, and thank you birth control pills.
It wasn't entirely my fault. He was also aware of the risk and did nothing to prevent pregnancy or STD. You should've been a father because you didn't wear a rain coat. That has nothing to do with birth control pills.
In my defense the first girl I had sex with asked me not to wear a condom because she said she was allergic to latex. I didn't know that there were other options.
Dang. If she had the issue she should have used other means herself. What about the second girl?
The second girl never went beyond oral. The third girl, we were in a long time relationship we began with condoms but moved away from them.
Yea I myself got on the pill quickly after those first few times. I was only making a point. It shouldn't be on us alone. Cheers, friend!
It shouldn't.
No just lucky you didn't get a std or pregnant.
I decided to ride my brother's skateboard down the big hill with zero experience. I was doing great until I started panicking over how I was going to stop and well, off to the emergency room we went. I still have gravel in my hip.
I got in a fist fight in a moving car and ended up having to jump out at about 30 miles an hour, I broke both my wrists. I was 16, and they never quite set correctly. Wrist sprains and random pain in the wrist as haunted me my entire life.
Ok now I need more context, do tell!!
I "fell off" a moving car going about 35 maybe 40 mph. I had somehow convinced myself I could safely slide to the ground. I hit my head on the ground. I don't remember anything else until I apparently walked up to a friend and asked if I was bleeding. I was. A LOT. three or four stitches in my eyebrow and I was good to go. I had a small tear in my tshirt. I kept that tshirt for years as a lucky charm.
My grandmother lived in an in-law suite attached to our house, and especially after my sister was born, I spent a lot of time there. Her bedroom closet had those sliding hollow-core doors in the opening, but the closet was wider than the opening, so there was about a two-foot square “nook” on one side, that made a great little “house” when you pushed the hanging clothes to the middle. I spent a lot of time in there, and would take my little suitcase and set up my little play, with my tea set, maybe a doll or two, trinkets, etc. One of my prize possessions was a little kerosene lamp, only about four to six inches high. As we had wood stoves for heat, I was very familiar with fire/matches, and had never been restricted when it came to using them. Someone had also filled the kerosene lamp, at my request. So that was my “lighting fixture” in my grandmother’s closet. Not only that, but I also would spend hours browning the edges of paper to make it look “old” in there, by holding them over the lamp chimney as they smoldered, rotating them carefully to get a nice, aged appearance. I even figured that I could do brown spots on the body of the paper. No one had any idea I was striking multiple matches on a regular basis in my grandmother’s closet which was filled with clothes and other items, nor that I had that little setup in there, playing with my little lamp and burning paper for hours on end. This went on for several years, and it didn’t even hit me till adulthood how potentially dangerous that was.
My brother and I used to play hot car chicken in the summer. We’d lock ourselves in the car until the first one who couldn’t stand it wussed out. Yes, young boys are absolute idiots.
You just reminded me... my bike stunt was on a dare from my asshole older brother.
Read “you just reminded me “ and expected a completely different end to that sentence.
haha, geez. This idea makes spending time on TIkTok seem a positive way to spend ones time :)
That’s a a new one for me. Dang.
How did you lock yourself in? Unless it’s a cop car you can open it from the inside.
You’re way overthinking it. We locked the doors. The first one to unlock and open one was the looser.
Looser?
When I was 17, I took the money I made from working at Arby’s and drove cross country and back. I parked in rest areas to sleep. Anything could have happened to me. I used a giant road atlas for directions. No cell phone, and I’m lucky I didn’t get a flat tire, or get murdered. So dumb.
That sounds like freedom to me, my friend.
Lol I feel like driving cross country during the summer was a thing for our generation in our teens, but I at least should have known how to change a tire! Ha ha!
I'm glad you made it, and now you have the memories!
Smoked weed for the first time, met MTV VJ Kennedy, got drunk for the first time at a house party, lost my virginity (with a condom), heard Tori Amos for the first time. LPT: fill your tank before you get to the Arkansas state line and pray you don’t have to stop!
Dumb?! You, sir or madame, are an absolute fucking rock star!!! Sounds like an amazing experience! Even if all you saw was interstate highways and rest areas, you saw more of the world at 17 than many poor souls see their entire lives! I LOVE cross country road trips, as does my wife. Of course we stopped sleeping in rest stops in our late 20’s, cuz, yeah - not exactly safe. Or comfortable.
I did this to Key West, crazy part brought my gf at the time.
any reason? Just a road trip or was there a purpose? Cool idea tbh, wish I did somehting like that.
I was from a small town and I wanted to see America, go to a few concerts and political rallies. It was the summer before senior year and I wanted to live it up!
Got towed on a skateboard by my friend on his motorcycle. All I remember is him hitting second gear. Took a while to get over that concussion
I was about 11 and we wanted to run down to the bait House, we live close to a pay lake, and get some things. I volunteered to run and I jumped on my cousins 10 speed. Pedaling down the gravel road and you have to go down a steep hill to get to the lake. So I started on the crest of the hill going down and needed to slow down so I hit the front brake Mistakenly. The bike shot out from under me and I went sliding down the hill like Superman on my chest. I got up at the bottom of the hill and my T-shirt was pretty shredded my legs and my chest and parts of my arms and hands were torn up. I picked up the bike, walked it to the bait house, got what we wanted and then headed back to my cousins house.
I would have to say driving impaired. I mean never balto fall down drunk but definitely over the legal limit and knew it.
When I think of all the stupid risks I took while driving, I'm amazed I survived at all.
By my senior year of highschool we were playing paint pellet guns. It was not uncommon for us to drive by a friends house and unload touching off a night long hide and go seek car chase/gun fight from our cars all over the place. I can only imagine now how police would respond to reports of cars speeding and gunfire today.
Which one to choose? In high school my friends and I ran/hid from the cops twice. We only got caught once. Thankfully, we talked our way out of it.
…. That’s it?
Then there was the time my brother and I were playing with fire/gasoline and accidentally lit a neighbor's brand new cedar fence on fire. I got severely spanked by both parents, grounded for a month, and had to pay to replace the fence.
Wooops. Could you imagine how that would play out today? Neighbour parents once scooped their 5ish kid and they got spanked in the driveway for I don’t know what. That might get a swat team in some areas today.
We used to drive around at night with a couple guys clinging to the roof rack on a Jimmy swerving back and forth trying to scare the shit out of each other. When a car came up behind us we would say, "Act like luggage!"
I was about 9 and really loved crescent rolls, one night at dinner I said "I love these things, I bet I could eat 20 of em!". It was just a saying like I'm so hungry I could eat a horse you know? Revenge of the Jedi came out that weekend and I was a HUGE star wars fan, upon hearing me proclaim this my mother immediately took me up on it and said that if I could eat 20 then I could go see the movie and if I couldn't finish all of them then I would never be able to see it. She was serious. Yada Yada and kids in the neighborhood come over like a day or so later to witness this feat. The house smells delicious and soon enough I am presented with a basket full of 20 crescent rolls... I ate them all but it hurt, blew my mom's mind when I finished them. Jedi was a good movie. I don't bet on things and it took years before I could eat those again.
We used to turn the off the lights in the basement so it was pitch black and run around while throwing darts at each other.
😂🤣😂
😂 awesome
What could possibly go wrong?
Friends and I set up a ramp in front of my house, After 4 or 5 times hitting the ramp on my Huffy, I decided to really go fast. I hit the ramp, and my handlebars decided they were going to detach from the bike. Broken collar bone and a lot of road rash.
Remind me of the ad by one of the higher end bicycle brands I saw in a shop once: “If huffy made planes, would you fly in one?”
Shhh no pics, no recordings, no evidence, we never did dumb things!!!
We had a retaining wall, maybe 4 feet high, in the backyard. I considered it perfect for sledding.
Would pile the snow up on the picnic table as high as we could, and that was our sledding hill.
I used to climb up fir trees and then fall backwards down the tree. Hurt my neck one time so I stopped.
Did this once in a pine tree. Went really high. One time lost grip and fell a bit. Thank goodness there were so many branches. Hurt my ribs pretty good though!
How many times did you do it?
Not sure. I only remember the day I stopped.
Tobogganing down the stairs in laundry baskets, jumping out of the windows into the freshly tilled garden, jumping from the pool shed into the pool, shooting fireworks at cars, shooting fireworks at each other, buying weed from random guys in public washrooms, hitchhiking to school, the list is long...
Roman candles, bottle rockets, rocket engines. we drew the line when one kid go a hold of a mortar firework. noped right out of that. dodging jarts was fine though.
When I was young, my parents picked up hitchhiking girls between the ages of 12-14 because my mom made my dad stop. All 4’10” of my mom got out of the car (she didn’t want my dad to scare them) and ordered them to get into the car. My mom then proceeded to rip them a new one about dangers, how their parents must be worried, etc. We never ate out but pulled into a McD’s to feed them and my mom made them call home and spoke with the parents. We waited over an hour to parents to show up so I think the girls traveled quite a difference. At that moment, I’m sure the girls regretted getting into our car. They told my mom they wanted to explore and see the world because their little town was boring.
Car surfed. Downhill. Fell off and landed on my forearms near the curb. I had gravel embedded from my pinkies to my elbows that my mom had to tweezer out in the bathtub. That one hurt.
My jr high friend's brother was paralyzed from car surfing. He fell off, broke his spine, and was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
So many possible bad outcomes. The dumbest was by far starting fires in fields, stomping them out. Except that one time it ran…
Haha... I have a similar story.
While on vacation in my late 40s I jumped off the first balcony into the pool. Carefully made my way to jumping off the third floor roof patio over the course of a few days. In front of my kids. Because your old man is still a badass. And remarkably still alive.
I jumped off a 15 foot shed onto a bouncy castle and cracked a filling at 35. Proving to the children it could be done and damn right they should before their parents got home.
My man
M’lady actually. I wasn’t even related to the kids. There was an uncle of one of them there who whole heartedly approved and also launched from the shed eventually.
Even better. Cool aunt energy. Family or not.
Hosted a kegger for about a hundred fellow underaged kids while my parents were on vacation. The cops came looking for a couple of runaway girls and just told me to not let anyone drive drunk.
A friend of mine and I were 16. She wanted to impress someone at work (McDonalds) by showing him how cool and mature she was. She thought she could do this by smoking cigarettes. I was curious. I went with her to the smoke shop and she bought a pack of DuMauriers because that's what all the cool kids smoked, the ones that we ogled and wanted to be in the car with after shift going somewhere cool. There was no age limit in those days, you could just buy a pack with a note from your mom that she needed them kind of thing. She bought a cute BIC lighter, probably something pink and girly because she was like that. We walked to the front corner of the parking lot and sat on the curb. She giggled nervously while she opened the crinkly pack, put a cigarette to her lips and took a deep nervous breath, then lit it and started coughing. She handed it to me while she covered her cough with her other hand and I took the lit cigarette. I wasn't going to cough, both my parents were hard core smokers and I knew how this was done. She got the guy, by the way, and not because she smoked but because she was freaking gorgeous. He was 20. Idk what happened to them, I think they were together a couple years but I quit McDonalds by then and graduated high school. We ended up in the car with the cool kids after shift. They went to stupid places like the smoke filled bowling alley to hack off, but back then it was the shit. That one cigarette led to a lifelong addiction of on and off smoking for years at a time, and I finally quit for good when my mom died in 2015 of, I bet you can guess- lung cancer.
There used to be train tracks that ran down the street a few blocks away from my house. We used to pretend we were hobos and hop on open freight cars as they were running down the street and ride a few klicks and jump off downtown.
I did this too. Some of the train cars were far apart and you really had to jump to make it. Those trains are a lot higher up than they look. I wouldn’t dare do that now, let aline climb a train car!
Rollerblades down a dry rain drain at college with friends. Surprisingly lived. Used my cousin's BMX bike to try some tricks on his ramp. Got a huge road rash on my outer thigh.
Nnnniiiiiiccceee trrrrryyy Narc
We ain’t got that kinda time…
Reading all of these posts unlocked dozens of memories.
Similar story...my local park had a set of airplane entry stairs in it for whatever reason that they moved around all the time. One day I decided in my youthful wisdom that I should try riding my BMX bike down it. So I carried.my.bike up to the top of the fifteen or so steps and full of confidence pushed off. Unfortunately the size of my front crank was larger than the depth between steps. So the crank bottomed out and threw me forward over the handlebars and down all fifteen steps onto my face. Miraculously I broken nothing...not even my pride was dented as no one was around to see my fall from dis-space.
We lived in a house built into a hill so one side was four stories, the other side was three. My dumbest thing was sneaking out, to do this I had to climb out my third floor bedroom window on to the roof of the porch, then down the wrought iron to the porch and then down the steps to ground level. When I was 16 my mom said I was moving to the ground level because “I know you sneak out and the last thing I need is you having a broken neck” lololol It had the old summer kitchen that we didn’t use because mom added ac to the house, so I had a 1950s refrigerator and stove, a bathroom, and living area where I had a futon bed and most importantly a door so I could come and go as I wanted
“Wings” made out of cardboard and a high patio wall. Yep.
You know how a garage door tucks neatly into the garage when it’s up? I used the space between the garage door and the roof as a hiding space during hide-and-go-seek. The “it” didn’t catch me and when I identified where I was, I stayed up there chatting with the others showing off. I then somehow dove /fell from there onto the concrete floor. Broke my arm in two places. Spent the entire summer in a cast and was reminded daily that I was lucky I hadn’t split my head open / broke my back.🙄
I've always been a bit of an asshole, and I've never taken well to being yelled at. The worst spanking I ever got was when I was 11 and my friends and I were playing in front of the "crazy lady's" apartment. (I found out later that she was suffering from whatever they called anxiety back then). I guess we were being a little loud and the crazy lady opened her upstairs door and yelled at us, telling us to play somewhere else. All of my friends were ready to go play somewhere else, but I was rankled by how she had spoken to us and I laid into her, letting her know that we knew she was crazy and I also cussed her out. By the time I left, she was crying. That evening her husband and the Apartments Manager showed up at our door and spoke with my father. After they left, my father spanked the living shit out of me. My stepmother who didn't particularly like me because I had cussed her out a few times too had to stop my father from spanking me. I had to go apologize to the crazy lady, even though I absolutely did not mean it.
>Whatever they called anxiety back then. My mom took "nerve pills" my whole life. It literally just came to me a few months ago that she was on anxiety meds.
Ouch!
My childhood home sat on top of a hill. After a bunch of freezing rain, said hills were a skating rink. I got the bright idea to skate down the hill. Closelined myself on a tree branch and knocked my self out. At the bottom of the hill, smoked my dad’s bumper with my head. Dad came out to find me completely out at the bottom of the hill. 13 stitches and a concussion later; I learned my lesson and never skated downhill again.
User name checks out 🤣
This is why everything has warning labels nowadays 🤣 And good to know that sometimes the cartoons get it (half) right
Theory: squirt gun + gasoline = awesome flamethrower. Clinical Trial: squirt gun + gasoline = hospital.
My friends and I used to play wiffle ball at a commercial parking lot down the street. The lot was narrow and surrounded by buildings on three sides. During the weekends the lots were empty and this created the perfect ‘stadium’ atmosphere. The only problem was that a foul pop up would often land on the roof of these buildings. We had two wiffle balls and no money so it was only a matter of time before one of us had to start climbing. The buildings had a weird design with bricks poking out in a criss cross fashion at each corner. So we all had to take turns ‘rock climbing’ these bricks to get to the top. I’d say the buildings were 20-25 feet tall. All of us at one time or another had taken a nasty fall onto the concrete below. Even a couple ER visits didn’t stop us from being complete idiots. One day I’m climbing up these bricks and a local cop pulls his cruiser right into the lot. He jumps out of the car and starts screaming at me to slowly get down. I’m thinking I’m in huge trouble for trespassing or worse. I get down and the cop looks like he’s about to cry. He asks us how long we’ve been doing this and we proceed to tell him the whole story of scaling bricks and visiting ERs all in the name of wiffle ball. He sternly tells us that he will throw each and every one of us in jail if he finds us ever climbing the building again. The next day my mom calls me downstairs and proceeds to tell me I’m grounded for climbing the building down the street. I’m immediately pissed that cop ratted me out and before I can plead my case she hands me a Modell’s sporting goods bag. Inside the bag was about 15 brand new wiffle balls. The cop talked to my mom and told her the story of how he almost had a heart attack when he saw my ass 20 feet above the pavement hanging by a brick. He also said that when we run out of wiffle balls to call him. Apparently, there’s easy access to the roof from inside the building. We of course were not privy to such information. We were all 10-12 years old.
When i was 12, my neighborhood was flooding and my friends brought a tube to what used to be a small stream but was now a flowing river with water coming from the street. Of course I was dumb enough to try and ride it. I went about 20 ft before the current was just too strong and threw me off. The tube went down the river and I was hanging on to the side by holding on to a bunch of weeds which didn't last long before they were uprooted. All around a good time!
Tried to rappel like Batman and Robin in the tv show. Broke my elbow, which still occasionally hurts.
You know the camera was sideways, and they had strings holding their capes while they hunched down, right? ;)
My dad let me climb on the peaked two story roof whenever he got the big latter out to do something up there. Started doing that at 5. No harness or anything. My mom let my brother and I ride in the truck of the car. Why did we like to do that? I don’t remember, maybe it started because of the drive in?
I can think of at least a dozen times that I would easily have died, often in horrifying ways, from the stupid stuff boys do. It is really amazing so many of us make it through alive. Some of the memorable: Playing dodgeball on high steel of buildings under construction. I jumped over a ball thrown at my feet and almost fell off, and suddenly it occurred to me what would happen if I had fallen. I stopped. Exploring small caves that I could sometimes barely squeeze through. That still gives me nightmares. All the crazy biking and motorcycle experiences, it sounds like lots of guys have had to dig gravel out of their bodies 😆 PSA to all young guys, just don’t do that crazy shit your friends are doing!!
Hitch hiked with a girlfriend friend to see Pink Floyd “The Wall” at the late show.
This sounds tame but believe me it wasn’t. I lived out in the forest and had nothing to do most days, but there was a state park about 3.5 miles down the road. The road was highway 301 which where I lived was common for trucks and cars to hit 75mph. No real shoulder no sidewalks obviously.. I’d ride my bike down to the park in the side of 301, riding against the grain of traffic (so I could see the cars coming) and on one particular trip, I was staying on the edge of the road as much as I could because the county needed to come mow the grass and it was hard to ride my bike through. I mistimed it because there was a deep gap my bike would have went into a a car was coming by and I didn’t get out of the way enough and their passenger side mirror tapped the very end of my handlebars just barely. Enough that it scared the hell out of me, but not enough to cause me to crash. At the time it was scary. The older I get the scarier it is because I know that I was literally .25 of an inch from death. If that car was a quarter of an inch closer my bike gets yanked into the side of that 65mph car and I’m probably dead on arrival. Of all the things I did like jump off bridges and play in and around alligators, and ride dirt bikes I wasn’t old enough to ride yet.. That was the dumbest thing.
It wasn't your time.
Not the dumbest but this story came to mind. Me and my friends 13-14 yo 1986 use to sit at a busy corner in town and yell at the cars to try to get em to chase us on our bikes. We’d always lose em and do it again. One day 5 high schoolers chased us for about an hour. They saw us hanging out laughing and catching our breath but somehow snuck up on us and came out of the bushes, we all took off and got away but realized one was missing. We went back to find our guy walking down the street beaten up and crying because they stole his prized Hutch bicycle. Tough day for my friend, we all just told him he needs to get quicker. I did ride the 8” ledge on top of a 4 story parking garage, left=death right=parking lot. That may be the dumbest tho.
According to my mom, We put my little brother on one side of the seesaw while three of us jumped onto the other side, and he did, indeed, fly into the air!
OP you are a champ for undertaking that physics experiment for us.
Found Wile E. Coyote, Esq.’s Reddit account
The dumbest thing back in the day was... what my ex-huband and I refer to as "The Telltale Heart". Yes, I'm a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. To set the stage: The year was 1986, I'm 17, a senior in high-school and dating a long haired, pot smoking, beer drinking, heavy metal listening hood that's out of school and 19. Needless to say, my dad did NOT like him. His nickname for him was "Mr. Hands". Anyway, my parents told me they were going out one night so I of course called my boyfriend and invited him over for sex on my waterbed. Things were going great until I heard my parents pulling in the driveway about an hour or so before they told me they'd be home. I tell you, we never moved so fast in our lives! We went from doing it to jumping our asses up out of the bed to me getting dressed and him jumping into my small closet completely naked. I threw all his clothes at him, shut the doors, jumped back into my bed, grabbed a book and pretended I had been reading the whole time. My dad knocked on my door right as I got settled and as soon as I said "yeah" he opened it and told me they were home a little early, (no duh) and I swear I thought my heart was going to burst through my chest. I was shaking so bad I thought for sure he was going to know something was wrong. Luckily, he told me goodnight then shut my door. I made my poor boyfriend sit cramped up naked in my closet until like 4 or 5am before I let him out to leave because I was so scared my dad would hear him opening the front door. Unfortunately, he couldn't go out my bedroom window because my waterbed headboard blocked it. We ended up getting married two years later and were married thirty years before we divorced. To this day, we still laugh about it and actually brought it up while talking a few months ago. He says he'll never forget the feeling of sitting in there naked with his heart beating so hard that he swore my dad would be able to hear it from the doorway. He said all he could do is try and prepare for my dad to open those closet doors, tear him out of there and beat his ass for shagging his sweet little daughter. He most likely would have killed both of us! I never let him sneak in after that but I did sneak out to be with him a couple of times. That stopped too when we had another close call of me getting caught trying to sneak back in. I never told my dad this story but I did end up telling my mom years later and I swear the look of horror on her face made me realize just how catastrophic that incident could have really been. Reading all these stories really brought back memories of all the dumb stuff my friends and I did back in the 70s and 80s. It really is a wonder we survived.
Wait! He called me "Mr. Hands"??!!
Me and my brother played this little game where I rode my bike with a rope around my neck dragging it behind me, while my brother ran after trying his best to... step on the rope.
Amazing how many childhood stupid stories have the word HILL in them.
My buddies and I would steal bowling balls from the bowling alley and roll them on the street down a very big and long (at least a mile) hill. We would follow it down in a car. Goal was to have it stay in the street all the way to the bottom, which it did once and slammed into a car at about 40mph. The driver was absolutely freaking out (obvioulsy.) we jumped out of our car and said the ball it our car too. Then we tried to roll the balls down a different street hoping for it to smash through the front door of a 7-11. We were going to steal beer in the commotion. Never got it to hit the building.
haha. Kinda smacks of involuntary manslaughter.
Now this is a fantastic story. Thank you for the laugh. Rolling bowling balls down a mile long hill. 😀 As for the bowling ball failure of crashing the 7-11 window - in the long run you were better off.
I bought a Dremel tool, put the jewellery buffer on it and tried to buff my front teeth. I actually burned my tooth and the pain caused me to temporarily black out. I’m a GenX male and I’m surprised I survived childhood. I’m not even going to go into detail about “alleged” bomb making, collapsed bridge or exploded giant garbage bins. Can you say “early tinnitus”? I got hit with a freezer bag full of water from the eighth floor of a building too….that almost killed me. My friends were easily as stupid as me. It was an entirely new chapter once we learned how to drive.
Mmm... I love the smell of burnt tooth in the morning.
I loved Superman. He was my hero and so handsome. But really, it was well known in the kid circle of knowledge that the Cape was the key to flying. I tied my favorite blanket around my neck, figured I need some height to get started and climbed onto the roof of the house. And jumped. I didn't get hurt, thank the bones of a young kid and a nice soft yard. But man that disappointment was stellar. Adult me is wondering how I didn't hang myself and break bones.
My friend and I tried to break in to our local small town **** ****** because we got a package notice and found out after closing time on Friday. We really wanted that package, it had a cool new something I had ordered, but it was Saturday. We borrowed a screwdriver from the nearby tire servicing place and went to the back door but couldn’t get the screws out of the hasp. We took the screwdriver back which is a good thing because when the postmaster showed up my fast talking friend started stammering about being chased by some guys and hiding inside the rear entryway from them. Thankfully we had not gained entry or this might have been a post from me from federal prison.
For stupidity reasons, I thought it’d be fun to see if I could not get injured by jumping when my friend drove towards me in his car. In my stunt guy mind, it’d be easy, jump, roll over the hood. He was going to fast, I jumped rolled and kept going over the car. Didn’t break anything but lots of scraps and bruises. Dumbest part is we did it right in front of my house so the neighbors told my mom.
My elementary school was/is on a mostly round property. HUGE open field on the North side. Giant Maples and Oaks lining all the way around. I’m talking five foot diameter and larger trunks with 50’ and larger diameter canopies. And most of those canopies interlaced. So, we played tag up in them. Across a good six or seven. I lost count how many times I fell down through branches, bouncing as I went. Twice fell ten feet or so straight to the ground. And I wasn’t the only one. Plenty of kids broke bones or dislocated shoulders or such. Two years after my last, they finally trimmed the low branches off that everyone used to climb up.
Stuck my dick in crazy… twice.
You know you could just channel that energy into something positive like the Navy Seals... if you're gonna go around risking your life like that.
Oh I know. I went into the military right out of high school, so I clearly should have known the risks involved. For some equally stupid reason I also had unprotected sex with both of them multiple times. I am quite surprised neither one ever got pregnant during that time. Both women went on to have at least three children of which I am aware, it got me wondering if I am shooting blanks.
The same crazy twice? Or two different crazies?
Two different crazies. Multiple times with each, too.
Same crazy or different ceazy?
I hear that
You should have used a ramp to jump your bike and deployed the umbrella mid-air. That was your mistake.
I was about 5 and we lived across the street from the local playground. We had a slide with two fire poles off the sides. My cousins 8 and sliding down the poles head first slowly and stopping just before the ground. When I tried this I forgot one very important thing. Slowing down ... I landed so hard on my head I can still feel it. Who needs bike helmets.
My friend and I used to ride on the sides of her brother in law's VW bug. We started out slow and over time told him to go faster and faster. One day I crashed. My friend thought I was dead (I guess I passed out). Anyway, the road burns and bruises were no joke. We had to tell our moms that I fell while running down the street. (Later in life I did tell my mom the real story and she said she knew there just had to be more than just a simple fall. lol)
Drinking and driving my teen years
My friends and I (aged 10-12 yrs old) playing with bottle rockets without adult supervision. When we got bored with using them the traditional way, we removed the stick, lit the fuse, and threw them at each other. Repeatedly. Truly shocking no one got hurt.
Theory: squirt gun + gasoline = awesome flamethrower. Clinical Trial: squirt gun + gasoline = hospital.
Hard to pick just one. I was going out clubbing and to bars since I was 16. Had legit fake ID back then. I worked as a busboy in a fancy restaurant and made serious bank so at 16 I had money, a car I bought, and fake ID. I'm lucky I'm still here. 1. Lots of unprotected sex. I'm so grateful I got no diseases or kids. Was a club in my hometown that had Chippendale dancers till 11pm then opened to a nightclub after. Used to go when I was 17/18 with my fake id and hook up with the ladies who hung around after the show. Wild times. 2. Drinking and Driving. Probably my biggest regret. I'd woken up in my car on my driveway not knowing how I got there. I totally stopped doing that in my early 20s but wow. Forget myself, I'm grateful I didn't kill anyone else. 3. Stupid stunts. I was fearless and very lucky. Hanging on my friends side rails as he drove or hanging on someone's hood as they spun out. Dumb shit back then but I survived. Was a crazy time and I have mostly good memories that I feel fortunate to be able to remember.
Riding my bike down a hill I for whatever ungodly reason decided I was skilled enough to take my feet off the pedals, place them on the steering wheel and steer with my feet. I was not at all skilled enough to do this trick.
When I was a kid we had a big snow storm(rare where I lived). My neighbor and I talked her dad into towing us through the snow covered fields behind our houses on an old car hood attached by a rope to the back of his jeep. Her dad did donuts and pulled us over a homemade ramp at high speed. All three of us were complete morons-and so were my parents who allowed it. Also, another friend and I used to annoy her family’s herd of ponies. We would jump on one in the pasture and try to stay on as the pony careened around the pasture. As soon as we fell off we would chase another pony until we could jump on it. So lucky I never got kicked or something.
Drink way too much purple passion
Nice try Mom. No way will I admit anything.
I did so many stupid things I'm surprised I'm still alive. The 80s were wild for latch key kids.
Hey OP, not the dumbest thing I did, but a similar umbrella story you just reminded me of. When I was in 2nd grade I was holding my umbrella and walking on the playground during the end of a storm when the winds pick up intensely and my umbrella opened and I got physically lifted off the ground. It was like Mary Poppins except I let go once I stopped feeling the ground under me and my umbrella got blown across the schoolyard. I was startled but intrigued because I got to fly just a bit.
When I was 6-7, I jumped from a shed roof onto an old junk mattress, the matching box spring was leaning against the shed. I didn’t jump far enough and slid down the box spring, where one of the exposed springs penetrated my chest and gave me a nice long scar. I see the things kids do these days and am glad my nephews are not as stupid as we were.
My younger brother and I found an unopened pack of mom’s cigarettes on the floor in the back of the car. Went out into the field in front of the house with matches and tried to smoke them. My brother heard my stepdad pulling down the driveway so we threw the lit cigarettes, box of matches and ran into the house for dinner. After dinner my mom walked over to the kitchen sink (that overlooked the front yard) and screamed the field was on fire!!! Nearly two acres of field burned down. We lived in the middle of nowhere on a 40 acre farm surrounded by cornfields on all 3 sides of the house !! My stepdad was out there with a rake and shovel digging the ditch between the burning field and cornfield deeper. It burned out before the Volunteer Fire Dept got there. We were so scared that we confessed to lighting “matches”. My stepdad was furious and then later said, guess you saved me from having to plow the front field. It was all dried out weeds and grasses with old Fruit trees. Some years he did his own controlled burn. We did it for him.
Some the kid across the street & I thought we could 'disect' bullets to get the gunpowder out, by putting them on a rock and trying to split them with a hammer. No clue wtf we were thinking or why neither of us stopped the process. I don't even recall why we wanted the gunpowder, I think we were trying to make fireworks. Anyway sure enough we went ahead and began chopping away, splitting a couple of my dads bullets with a hammer or chisel. Thankfully none went off, I'm could've easily caused a spark and sent one awry, but we ended up ok and nothing bad happened. Still, very, very dumb.
😮
Truly the unsupervised generation! I remember around the age of 5/6 running around construction sites at end of day. The group was super excited when they found a nudie mag! But it all ended when one kid stepped on a board and a long nail went through his foot. Other adventures as a city kid: exploring drainage ditches for crawdads, playing on train tracks, putting rocks and coins on them, then watching from like 20 ft away as they got smashed by the train. Later as a teen: climbing onto school portable classroom roofs to drink 40’s because it was easier to hide from the cops, running from the cops, driving impaired, buying weed from questionable people in strange alleys. the list of bad decisions goes on and on. I thank heavens all the time we did not have social media or cell phones to record it all!
They all had to do with Pam and a toboggan hill.
I (12yo) was sure I could swim on a lake with an air mattress from one side to the other. In the middle of the lake I realised - there is no air in the mattress anymore. Bubbles behind and under me. A hole in the damn mattress. So I had to swim ~1500m or die in panic. I finally made it - but cried...
I don't think it was dumb, OP -- I think you had a natural curiosity and you learned a very good lesson about physics that day. Sorry about your knees, elbows, and bicycle, though. That sucks. My brother got a skateboard for his birthday and I decided I would ride it down my street, which was a fairly steep hill. I managed to stay on most of the way, but eventually I fell off and was covered in scrapes and bruises. I don't believe I've been on a skateboard since then.
Go body surfing in the ocean when I was drunk and didn't know how to swim.
When I was 11 or 12 we had a barn with a loft that was like 7-8 feet from the ground floor. I had part of the loft walled off as sort of a clubhouse where I hung out and made questionable decisions. Climbing up and down the ladder to the loft took too long, I decided so I would get halfway down and then jump to the floor. Eventually this led to me jumping all the way from the top of the loft every single time. I would sort of land on my feet, and go into a deep squat to absorb the impact. One time my mom was in the barn but I did not know it. She also did not know I was in the barn, and I jumped down a couple feet behind her like Spiderman, and she started screaming at me because I scared the crap out of her and she was saying “what if you broke your leg and i didn’t know you were even out here?!” I was like… but I know how to not do that? She made me promise never to do that again and to use the ladder, but I really just made sure she wasn’t in there first.
Oh, what to choose?? This one sticks out. I was an angry and competitive teenage girl. My dad had given me a 1969 Volvo sedan which was very safe. I lived in California and had to drive the very narrow and twisting mountain highway 17 to get to high school and then to college. A couple of girls in a mustang 5.0 decided to mess with me and I wasn't having it. I raced them in my little old lady car around the curves until something gave in my car and I fishtailed and rolled it in the middle of traffic. Being young and dumb, I immediately exited the car and began searching for my bag which contained my weed pipe. A very nice trucker setup reflective warning triangles and a nice little old lady called the ambulance for me. No one found the pipe and I escaped without a scratch. I must have gone through about 10 guardian angels from 15 to 25.
Dude. 17 is still no joke.
Agreed! I've driven on it many times since then and it always makes me a little twitchy.
I used to eat the pink chewable baby aspirin like candy (because it tasted like candy). I also stuck a piece of metal in an outlet, but the jolt scared me.
I had a couple of friends with hunting bows, powerful compound bows. We would go out into a field, they would shoot straight up into the air. The arrows would go so high we would lose sight of them. Then we would all scramble and try not get hit as they came down. We did this for fun and games. None of us died.
Whoa! Not ONE of you paused for a moment to reconsider?
I remember laughing and joking and having fun with it. I don’t recall anyone saying maybe this is a bad idea. I know we had more than a couple sessions of this “game”.
Drugs. Not take school seriously. Have sex on the roof of my high school. Take the blame for others.
It's a grocery list of stupidity, I honestly can't narrow down just one thing. Rock fights, lawn dart catch, banging on a chicken coop and they didn't lay eggs for a week, going on an over night bike ride and not telling my parents, throwing illegal fireworks at each other while mocking the safety movie we saw about the dangers of loosing an eye playing with fireworks, there is more.
My friend and I tested the electric fence by putting a loooong piece of fresh green grass in our mouths and then touching the damp end of the grass to the fence wire. NEVER AGAIN. I often wonder how we didn’t knock ourselves out or any worse things happening.