Asklemmy

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

go to school in America

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

Jumping on the street while a car is quickly moving towards me in an attempt to jump on top of it and look really cool

Climbing trees! I'd end up climbing mostly up to the top...

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

A lot of LSD

Play on the roof 🤷‍♂️

made my nokia mini phone to explode by triggering the circuits inside

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

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

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

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

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

ran a Tor exit node. chatted on Bluelight. took over a (small) botnet. tripped on research chemicals.

I used the internet without an ad blocker.

Don't ask any Gen-Xer or older. Surviving dangerous stuff was a minute-to-minute activity for us.

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

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

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

Gen x with boomer parents who barely parented, so…. Everything?

How’s this for a list? I swear every one of these is honest to god true and I did them all.

• jarts
• Being kicked out of the house for the entire day with zero supervision
• ice fishing / pond hockey. We decided if the ice was safe or not. Like 10 year old kids…
• being allowed to ride our bikes on literally any road except for highways
• riding bikes on the roads with no helmets
• being allowed to go literally anywhere we could get to on our bikes
• being given firecrackers
• carrying and using real guns on the farm at about 10+ years old unsupervised (22s and 410s - the 12 gauge unsupervised wasn't until I was older - like 16ish)
• riding with no seat belts
• riding in the back of a pickup truck
• riding in the way back of a station wagon
• riding on the edge of a tailgate with our legs dangling over (we used to drag our sneakers on the road and make white lines by burning off the rubber soles)
• riding on the side edges of the bed of a pickup
• holding ladders and whatnot onto the roof & tailgate of a pickup (like not tied down - the kids held it down)
• working / playing all day in the summer sun with no suntan lotion
• making jumps and going off them with bicycles
• jumping over our friends with said bicycles and jumps
• riding three wheelers (they stopped making them because they were so dangerous)
• mean green machines
• candy cigarettes
• buying real cigarettes for our fathers from a vending machine
• drinking from the hose
• we we had “real” ninja stars and we hucked those things at everything
• we had real knives at very young ages - like maybe 5?
• I had a real slingshot early. Like 5ish. That thing could kill. Dangerous af.
• I always had a bow and could use it as soon as I could draw it. My friend was lucky enough to have a compound bow. Totally cool to walk around with bows and shoot shit.
• I learned to use a chainsaw around 10yr old
• drove tractors unsupervised at about 8 yr old
• drove tractors on the road
• learned to drive a real car (Datsun pickup truck - stick shift) at about 10. Unsupervised on the farm. Not allowed on the road. We used to drive it fast and do donuts and shit. Parents and grandparents didn’t care - we were just having some fun. “Be careful and don’t crash into trees” was all I ever got warned about.
• siphoned gas with a hose
• sprayed herbicides pesticides and fungicides as a teenager with no mask
• being allowed to camp outside in the woods for the night with friends
• being allowed to make campfires at said campouts (we cooked hotdogs and ate them)
• going to concerts with older brothers (anyone’s older brother) at young ages (basically once you started getting into music - 10ish?)
• carrying a house key with you since day 1 of kindergarten
• being a latchkey kid - I came home alone and took care of myself and my younger sister by about 3rd grade. Before that we got dropped off at grandmas house after school. If we had a problem we just called grandma on the phone.
• allowed to cook anything anytime since about 5
• it was a responsibility to light the wood stove and keep the fire going in the winter.
• mowed lawns unsupervised since a young age. 8ish maybe?
• used weed whackers about the same time
• had a dirt bike at 13ish. Allowed to go anywhere unsupervised
• totally cool to swim unsupervised or even alone once I learned how to swim
• totally cool to eat things that had fallen on the ground - the 5 second rule definitely applied
• it was ok to drink at home a little bit with friends as a teenager. Like a sleepover or out in the woods. Better than drinking and driving. Getting shitfaced wasn’t cool, but drinking some of dad’s beer / liquor was - as long as we didn’t drive. Party at a friends house? Gonna be booze? Ok if parents are around and nobody drives.
• when tromping around the neighborhood-I didn’t have to tell my parents where I was. They didn’t care. There were no cell phones either. If our parents wanted us they’d yell. If that didn’t work, they’d call neighbors and once they found out where we were last seen - that neighbor would yell.
• people had chicken pox parties (I never went to one but they happened - I think I got it from my sister)
• monkey bars - big ass ones at least 15 feet high. Hard packed dirt underneath. Totally could bust your head open or break your back if you fell off one. Wicked dangerous. Was actually scary to climb to the top but you bet your ass we all did it, otherwise you were a pussy and got picked on forever.
• huge Fn seesaws - like would go up in the air maybe 6 or seven feet
• those spin-y things in the playground-dunno what they were called. You know all the kids piled on, others grabbed the bars and spun the shit out of it. We all got dizzy and tried not to whack our heads falling off.

I dunno, that’s all just off the top of my head.

As a 7 year-old in rural Manitoba I went cross country skiing on an old rail road track in town. I got to the edge of town and just kept going. I always knew where I was and just enjoyed exploring. I eventually got to some cross roads that I recognized as being close to a friends house, so I just headed to my friends house. I ended up going about 7-10km on this ski trip. My parents ended up getting a surprise phone call from my friends mom tell them where I was 😆

Launched real bullets out of my slingshot at a dumpster

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

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

Make pipe bombs. It was dangerous then, too.

Go to school

Our school playground didn't have a rubber ground. Or mulch. Or wood chips. No. We had gravel. Like little rocks gravel. And a swing set. A big one. Recess for us was jumping as far as we could into gravel.

We also had wooden monkey bars that gave you splinters. We tried to skip bars, and if we were lucky, land on the gravel. If we weren't lucky, we would fall into a hornet's nest. Hornets loved those old wooden playgrounds.

But perhaps the greatest piece of school yard entertainment was the steel merry go round. We'd have one of us try to hang off of it horizontally with 3 or 4 of us sping it. Lose your grip and fall off? Where would you land? You guessed it. Face first into the gravel.

That thing would get hot enough in the summer to fry an egg, but as much as we enjoyed eating our breakfast that way, we lost it before the end of 8th grade. A kid from a neighboring school crawled under theirs and tried to grab the axel while it was turning. It ripped his hand clean off. But still, those were the days.

Lawn darts

GenX - here's a few:

Lawn darts. Unsupervised play over 1/4 mile from home at age 8. Unsupervised play over 1/2 mile from home at age 10 with a BB gun. BB guns as paintball weapons. (no eyes were put out). Riding a bicycle to school on a highway shoulder from grade 7-9. Latchkey kid. Going fishing with a neighbor (retired man) as an adolescent for 2-2 summers. (Ps. We fished and talked.)