My grandma pranked me and made me believe in the scarlet red spiders that hide under toilet seats and are insta-death if one bites you.
I’m still resentful of that one.
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I think copperheads are absolutely beautiful snakes. But all the near snake bites I’ve had have been copperheads. They blend into dead leaves so well.
My most unexpected injury was when I was helping tear down a tree fort. I jumped down from a much higher height than I should have - because the boys where doing it and I had to prove myself. Didn’t break anything, but I landed on a board that had a nail in it. The nail went through my shoe and the ball of my foot, and poked out the top of my shoe. It took the older kids a minute or two to pull it out of my foot and I limped home.
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We had a literal secret base in a massive sewer system built in the mid 90’s, this stupidly over-engineered concrete pipe system big enough to drive a truck into and have room to spare, and we never thought anything of it.
Many, many years later, I am reminded those were storm drains designed to handle cyclone weather and the little alcove my friends and I had turned into a camping ground, that our parents didn’t care about because they didn’t ring up each other to check if we were okay, because the 80’s and 90’s were cool like that, was actually an emergency alcove for maintenance workers to take shelter in during a storm if they ever got caught out.
I remember the group getting intensely pissed about our super-secret underground base getting locked behind chain fences and padlocks, but considering we’d dragged a bunch of MDF and LDF boards in, nailed and roped it all together, and unless you were a small boy or girl and had all the time in the world, we could have gotten somebody killed, because there always had to be somebody down there to make sure the mechanisms were working as intended, and the network was huge, stretching for kilometers and the amount of concrete, pipes and water down there made radio signals hard to pick up, and mobile phones weren’t exactly a thing right then and there in Australia.
Apparently the maintenance workers were convinced some crazed nutter had taken up residence because they just kept finding dead bugs and food scraps in this ramshackle ‘house’ and they didn’t want to end up in a B-Grade Horror Movie by trapping said crazed nutter underground where they’d turn into a starving cannibalistic crazed nutter before they figured out it was a gaggle of dumb-as kids running around with pop-guns playing Spy Agents …
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This reminds me of my great uncle (my dad’s uncle). We were traveling with him when I was around 7 and we passed a farm that had a basketball court on the edge of one of their fields. I mentioned it and he looked at me with a straight face and said it was because the horses play basketball when you’re not looking.
He was a gem and I miss him.
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“You boys want to see a dead body?”
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I’ll never get over how funny I thought the “do you know where your kids are?” measesages were but now it makes sense.
Stranger danger probably installed paranoia into my brain, and if not, it nailed it in firmly.
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I remember being a little kid and in the summers we were just turned loose. we were outside all day. The moms would just yell outside when it was lunch. And then we knew to be home when it started getting dark. Mom would check me before I came in the house for ticks, snake bites, and other open wounds when I got home. This was in the early 70’s. She be in jail for child neglect now. lol.
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At least we had public spaces to enjoy growing up. I get super annoyed by all the kids who come into the store at night and just goof off and trash things, but honestly…where else are they going to go/what else are they going to do? It’s all urban hellscape parking lots and businesses, with the few public parks turning into camp grounds for the unhoused and the chemically dependent after dark.
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You guys are being very disrespectful to the OP.
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Once Walmart stopped being open 24/7, my hang out spot was the nearby Waffle House, which is arguably more dangerous than Walmart parking lots.
Now that streaming is a thing, I don’t think I’ve spent time with anyone, other than my mom.
VR is bringing us ever closer to IRL .hack and I’m not sure how to feel about that.
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Exactly.
Third places for kids and young adults under 21 have been declining for years and it’s made a huge impact on them socially. They’re also online perpetually and can’t get away from one another, especially in cases of bullying.
So I honestly cut kids these days a lot of slack. When they’re outside playing and making a lot of noise, as long as they’re not doing anything dangerous to themselves or others, I don’t care. I have a few elderly neighbors who complain, but would you rather complain about occasionally noisy kids being outside getting dirty and figuring out the world or complain about them being glued to television and iPad screens?
If all is safe (or safe enough lol, because kids are stupid), let kids be kids.
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Salvage Rights.
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When I was in high school, in a different smaller town, there wasn’t much to do. We had a very cute and “quaint” downtown, so the think to do was make the loop on main street, drive up to Sonic loop around there to see what was going on, then head back to main street and park. Most businesses closed there closed between 5 -7, so we didn’t bother anyone. So yeah. not a darn thing to do. I’m so surprised only a few of us managed to get into real trouble.
I live in a large city, and you’d think that kids would have more to do. Nope, they have even less, because in part of the city it’s just not safe for them - or anyone else. And people wonder why kids get into trouble. Because there is nothing for them.
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During my childhood, the threat of being thrown outside and picking up pine cones or having to put on the “Woodman outfit” to rotate the wood stacks so that they wouldn’t mildew was real and happened more than I like.
Freaking my mother out with the amphibians and reptiles, learning that rattlesnakes are so cute when they get mad and how to safely walk away from them.
There was one time when a giant friendly rat snake came over, my dad kept getting the shovel and slinging them into the ivy but the exact same snake came back.
Poor snake came back one afternoon and I guess my dad had enough since he chopped the head off with the blunt edge of the shovel, I still wonder if he sharpened it just for that occasion.
We also had a pop up camper and, being the children we were, wouldn’t leave for road trips
unless we had our entire mobile N64 and later PS2 setup ready to go, because traveling and sightseeing was fun, but nothing is more important than playing video games. Ugh.
I miss these days, Borders was the store we squatted at because they had a larger manga section than our B&N. Wonder how much money Borders lost because of how popular it was to go reading together, I still see a few people sitting in the manga section and I want to tell them they need to remember to stand up and take walking around breaks.
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I grew up by a big wooded reservation and one time we found a humongous dug out pit. In the winter it’d fill with rain water and we’d all swim it in the summer until it dried up. Then one year there was a bombed out car under water and this one kid found unopened containers of motor oil and proceeded to empty them into the water and we all hated them and they got canceled from the friend group for ruining the swimming hole.
Yah this is a real thing. The loss of the third place for everyone but especially children and teenagers is a concern. The few third places that do remain require money and/or are adult only spaces. There’s definitely community driven all age stuff around my city but sometimes they cost money and they only happen on a fixed schedule.
Growing up, I specifically remember being a menace at my local barns & nobles reading manga all day in the manga section with my friends. Libraries didn’t have manga yet but I could only imagine how much time I would have spent there.
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absolutely not. it’s a literal playground here
This place used to have class.
Now people are just sitting around in a thread they’re supposed to be ignoring, reminiscing over when they first laid eyes upon a butter churn.
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I remember when social media used to be all farm land and mafia warfare.
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I remember when social media use to be people creating Geocities and Angelfire webpages full of animated skull gifs.
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hey thats my website
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