Jul 27
So I notice today that Nick and his friend Calvin, shown on the left, decided to make masks out of masking tape. It even makes sense on the name alone. 
Got me to thinking about my childhood, and the strange things that passed for a good time during the summer. I have loads of stories I could tell, but I really want to hear about your weird adventures as kids. Share!
When I was a wee lad, one of our favorite summer time activities was building bike jumps. By “build” and “bike jump” I of course mean we placed a piece of plywood angled against a log. My bicycle of choice was the Huffy Grand Prairie. I jumped that clunker so much that the handle bars were bent down from the landing impact. I still can’t believe none of us neighborhood kids got seriously injured jumping mountain bikes with log-plywood ramps. Seriously good summer time fun!
What a way to clean out the pores. C’mon. You know it’s gotta work!!
During my summers we lived near a forest of solid blackberry bushes 15 feet tall. I made a “plow suit” from old leather clothes and anything else that the thorns couldn’t penetrate – plus a helmet & boots. I’d then walk all over through them making miles of trails & rooms within the solid mass. I could later go explore the trails without the suit on.
I grew up in a farming community and we had a ditch that ran along two sides of our property. That ditch made for a lot of fun when my brothers and I were kids. We used to swim in it, ride our bikes in it, even try to catch the little guppies and tadpoles that grew in it when the water wasn’t running. I was never brave enough to crawl through the culverts that ran under the road but I knew other kids who were! Such good times!
WTF!!!
testing something
Way back around the turn of the century, when people were still looking forward to 2 Matrix and 2 Star Wars sequels, when Britney Spears was still attractive, and when a young member of the Ivory Tower, George Bush, was the leader of the Free World, my friends and I hung out in an abandoned cinema. We had so many firsts there; our first kisses (not with each other, mind you!); our first time drinking beer; our first cigarettes; our first 20-foot-jump-off-the-second-floor-onto-a-pile-of-mattresses-on-the-previous-level (surprisingly we never seriously injured ourselves in there!).
I’ll never forget the day we first discovered it; we needed to shimmy along a fallen tree-trunk, in order to get across a pretty deep river.
It was bricked-up eventually, but we’ll always have the memories of essentially being the lords of such a grand old piece of land.
Ya, don’t try that mask after you start to get facial hair . . . ouch!
Myriad of things before I discovered the sin of video games. Used to go to a local pond to catch turtles and frogs, until I stepped on a rock that cut my toe to the bone. Skin flapped back off that toe, thank god for stitches!
Then there was the whole klepto phase where me my friend and his brother went up to a strip mall with a duffle bag and decided it didn’t matter what was in it, but we had to fill it. Was fun until we almost got busted. Grew up in Detroit, these are the things kids did.
Then there was jumping off of neighborhood garages, riding bikes down hills and into ramps for big air over ditches… Hmmm… now that I think about it, video games have saved me from being either locked up or missing my man-bits. Thank you Final Fantasy VII! From then on it was a combo of stuff like all nighters with friends (sometimes in shifts), swapping on/off for Dynasty Warriors 3, Team Fortress Classic, Diablo, EverQuest, nWo Revenge, Goldeneye 007… Ahhh, the good ol’ days where you played games in the same physical room as your friends.
Nick is off to a way better start than me.
My Neighborhood was pretty much ground-zero for the housing market crash. When around ten years ago, they started construction on like 30 houses nearby and just stopped. I really do mean STOPPED, they took all the fancy bits, loaded it on this big truck and left leaving these deep gnarly holes in the ground. We had the most awesome super-soaker fights in the ‘trenches’. The kid who would akimbo a collection of bright colored squirtguns would always win.
I got bored one day when I was really young, so I went upstairs got in the bathtub nude with magic marker in hand (the really fat one) and proceeded to draw strips all over my body. I went downstairs being so proud, and still nude, and in front of my mother I stretched out my arms an said, “Look ma I’m a tiger!” I don’t remember too much after that.
Another time me and my older brother hated our new baby sitter so my brother made a fake eyeball and veins out of play doe and I laid on the floor and acted like I was in pain with this fake eyeball, my baby sitter came back in from outside and had a heart attack. Grounded again!
I used to get with my friends and wonder through the drainage tunnels near our houses. wanted to see what lived in them and how far they went.
That is the cutest thing i see in a long time. wonder if his sister saw and rolled her eyes like girls do when they see us do funny stuff like that. plus its another pic to show his future GF’s, wife, and kids.
We once stuffed a pair of my school trousers with other clothes to pad them out, stuck shoes on the end, then had them sticking out of a chest of drawers. We added a small speaker, connected to a microphone, which a friend had hidden with him inside a cupboard. I would run into someone elses room (I went to boarding school) shouting something along the lines of “Patrick’s stuck, come help!” then as people came in Patrick would moan meekly into the microphone “Help..I don’t even know how this happened”…Good times, at least until our Housemaster came up to see what all the noise was. Then they were bad times.
When I was a kid way back in the 70′s a bunch of my friends and I bought the Star Trek the Original Series model kits that had a phaser, a tricorder and a communicator that you could build. I know they weren’t to scale but they were perfect for our little hands. We then would go out into the Maine woods near where we lived and pretend to be on away missions.
When weren’t doing that we were out in the woods looking for Bigfoot. Yeah I know, wrong coast, but we looked anyways.
lol
Some of my friends and I used to fill 20oz pop bottles with gasoline, poke a hole in the cap, and write messages on the brick wall of the abandoned school next to my place. Then light them on fire, of course. Or sled down wooded hills on inflatable rafts or sleds constructed from wagons (so you could steer!) and ski halves. Or roll down big hills in giant tires.
lets see…. there was the time I electrocuted myself…. that was fun….. ok electrocuted is a bit much I electrified myself is more acurate. You arn’t a man if you can’t look back at your life and think of at least three times where you cann honestly say “I’m surprised I didn’t die”
I was a good kid who occasionally did bad stuff. I used to shoot at things with my BB Gun through a knot hole in our backyard fence. One day I “accidently” shot out the back window of a big old Cadillac. I haven’t seen that BB Gun since….
also… the masking tape masks…… yeah kind of creepy…. save that for halloween
when i was a kid we dared my younger brother to stick stuff in outlets. once day we were at a trailor court my grandparents managed and we messed with empty trailors. he fried so many sockets he had this weird blue glow outline for days….
One of the funnest things I did as a kid was to build lego structures, blow them up with small firecrackers, video tape the explosion close up, then play it back frame by frame. It was fun to watch the progression of the explosion, smoke, then fire, then the thing actually flying apart. Then the game became designing the next house to make a cooler fireball or better scatter of the debris, etc.. Good times.