Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I survived; and in one piece. No broken bones, no animal bites, no trips to the ER. Looking back at what I did makes me wonder how I got so lucky.
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It is amazing any teenage boys live to see adulthood, much less old age. They are basically a bundle of hormones with little more than very basic brainstem activity, and they mistakenly think they are immortal. That is a recipe for disaster--yet amazingly most do survive, unless old farts like us start too many wars and use them as cannon fodder. When I look back at the things I and my friends and brothers did growing up, I shudder a bit.
On the other hand, we probably all know at least a few who pushed it too far and never saw 20. I grew up in the American muscle car era, and we lost at least one HS student every year to reckless driving/racing down winding rural roads. Those muscle cars were the most dangerous toys our generation ever owned, hands down, especially since in my teenage years we could legally purchase alcohol at 18. (I'm not including firearms as toys, BTW.)
For those of you who are too young to remember, the American muscle cars were basically big chunks of metal with a huge and powerful engine. They were terrible at holding the road because they had one major purpose--drive at the fastest speed possible in the quarter mile strip, which was a straight line. They were a total disaster on winding roads what with the terrible steering and road handling capabilities, not to mention the crap they called brakes. I never had one, but many of my friends and one of my brothers did, so I rode in quite a few of them. I did own the family car version of one though, a 1970 Dodge Coronet 440, and it was scary on the winding roads even at 40 mph! I wrecked it enough even with the stock 2-barrel 318 V-8, I'm glad it didn't have one of the big Hemis with a six pack on top. That would have been like strapping a Saturn V rocket on top of a VW Microbus--it would not have gone well.
As it was, that car would not do 90 mph if you dropped it out of an airplane at 5000 feet, and yet I still managed to bump into a lot of things with it.
I'm glad I grew out of the bumper car phase once I was in my 20s.