I woke up one day (in the last few years) with a feeling as though I'd been electrocuted. I went to see the GP (much younger than me) and described it as "being like a mains electric shock". She said, chuckling faintly, "I hope you've never had one of them". I forbore from saying "Of course in the
One guy i used to know one time decided to throw a full fire extinguisher into a currently burning bonfire. I wasn't there at the time, but i heard the results from like, half a mile away.
Yeah that happened on one of our bonfires. We used to keep a couple of old doors back till it died down then jump our bikes over what was left. One year when I was about 12 I had to drag an 8yo out of the fire by his parka hood. Simpler times
As a kid we used to soak tennis balls in lighter fluid and play flameball. In a later year I introduced the game to my Phi Delt brothers...alcohol and flameball do not mix.
Everything I did as a kid was dangerous by today's standards 🤣
Rooftop jumping, Jumping off roofs, shingle tossing,car surfing, car sledding, car skiing, train hopping,ice climbing,going out in -15° with just a thin coat and nothing else, Creek/river diving/swimming, bottle rocket fights, etc 💀
Making weapons like sticks,metal pipes and nunchucks and play fighting with them.
Sliding down stairs at Mach 10, playing Chicken with our bikes, shooting each other with BBguns,rolling down a hill in a tire.. that's all I can remember right now that me and my friends did. 😅
I spent many hours in like 6th grade playing "throw your self down the hill"
You just run, jump, and then let your body ragdoll as you go down. Then wed judge each other's performance based on amount of flips and how painful it looked. It was basically pushing pratfalling into sport territory.
all climbing same skinny tree at the same time and on the count of three 'pushing out' with legs to bend it and lower us safely to the ground like a group parachute
flame ball. We would pump lamp oil into basketball soccer balls, volleyballs, and then play with it until it melted much like Musk and Trump are doing with our world.
Swimming alone in the river and jumping off a tree branch into the river. It was definitely not really deep enough to be jumping, and it moves VERY fast. I have no idea why we survived
Riding shopping carts down a cement hill and jumping out before they slammed into the parking garage, building IEDs (Claymore's we called them) out of tuna fish cans packed with black powder and buckshot which we used to blow up trees, playing on the train tracks and avoiding the 3rd rail.
Put pram wheels on wooden fishboxes. Raced them down a steep hill with the ocean at the bottom. As a concession to safety, we did sometimes have someone whose job was to watch out for cars (it was a single-lane road, so if a car came, you had to steer into the ditch).
Rural Texas: At about age 10-12 we were given shotguns and sent down to the creek to shoot water moccasins. Totally unsupervised by any adult. Imagine.
Blind yard jart challenge. Stand in circle and one person throws it up in the air and you run… with your eyes closed. So much danger on so many levels. Perfect for young kids.
Riding our bikes against traffic on 2-lane highways. We'd switch lanes when they got too close, then weave back into the oncoming lane. I may have been dead all these years and never noticed it.
The joy of jumping off high objects on my bike. Ramps, decks, & steep hills. Nothing was safe. Didn’t even have a dirt bike. Me on my girly purple bike with tassels, pedal breaks, and a banana seat, following my cousins around doing tricks.
Felt like flying.
For a brief time, we would climb a tree and then walk it's strongest branches to transfer to a branch of the neighboring tree. Crazy. I wasn't aggressive like the other guys trying this. Can't remember ever doing an xfer. Massachusetts.
Just to be clear: walking a branch, we had higher branches to hold onto, so it wasn't a balancing act. It was assessing the strength of the walked branch and the other tree's branch to step onto. Crazy!
this doesn’t really count as an activity i guess, but our elementary school field shared a wall with someone’s backyard and they had a tree with these orange fruits on them that we would steal and eat. have no idea what those were to this day, but i’m not dead so i guess they weren’t poisonous lol
dodging lawn darts. group of kids would huddle up. someone in the group would throw a lawn dart straight up then we'd scatter. the goal of the game was not to get impaled. good times
Tbh I was always a pretty cautious child but my mom and her brothers used to put each other in suitcases and then push them down the stairs. Her brother also would set himself on fire while riding his bike sometimes
1) writing on the sidewalk with Smarties™
then licking it off.
2) setting up a Hotwheels™ track on the stairs
then rolling M&Ms™ down it into our mouths.
We played in the swamps around a large commercial nursery. Years later found out that they were actively dumping dioxin containing fertilizer into the swamps. Still fenced and inaccessible to this day. Who knows what the effects were, but both of us have had neurological issues.
Tag football on concrete, bombing down hills on bikes, sledding on city streets after blizzards, climbing downed trees after severe storms, urban parkour, backyard boxing, skateboarding wherever we pleased, no helmets ever and no adult supervision.
Squeezed down the gap between a house and electricity substation with my friends and fireworks. We let them off including something labelled ‘the loudest firework on sale’.
Chased from the estate by the people in the house who must have thought the world was ending. Hearing came back the next day.
Army/War 🤠- BB guns shooting at each other n graduating up to pellet guns ( leather jackets n goggles) -safety first ya know🤣🤣🤣🤣 lived on top of hill n rode red wagons down the street- some are still limping from how they stopped 🚗🤷🏽♂️good times n now they do it with controllers on TV-kidsrsofttoday 🤔
Where I lived, we had a "tributary" of Clear Creek that runs from Central Colorado eastward through Coors Brewery and a bit past it. It was fast moving water. During the Summer months we would get a large truck tire inner tube and ride it before it came to Coors. Great fun!
My siblings and I liked to go onto construction sites of new houses being built in our neighborhood. I was five when I remember getting caught. My muddy shoes gave me away!
My old house had a SUPER OLD swing hanging from a dead tree. We used to lie on our stomachs and swing on it over the snake-and-coyote-infested ditch beside my house. Nobody in the neighborhood knew how long the swing had been there but it was at least 30ish years.
Riding bikes w no brakes down the red dog driveway (super steep) -and if u don't know red dog, it's coal mining waste subjected to heat..sharp and very hard lol
Shooting cars at night with a super soaker. Only water because we weren’t THAT dumb. We were chased by a minivan on our last outing. I can’t imagine doing this today.
Me & my brother dug a 14 foot tunnel through a bank that the trains ran over.I was 5 and he was 7.Back then,trains would pull up to 420 boxcars with 5 or 6 engines & sometimes 2 or 3 cabooses.We'd have to wait forever to get to the road on the other side,so we dug that tunnel.We could have died! 😳🤷
Me and my two siblings would tie two bikes together and then tie me to the bikes. They would drive their 'tandem' bikes and I would run behind them. It only went wrong one time, when a car drove onto our road and drove into the rope between the second bike and I so that I smashed against the car
I was a gymnast and pole vaulter. Pretty much was into anything dangerous. Also grew up on a farm and had access to explosives and guns. Honestly nobody thought I would live this long and that includes me.
Homemade bike ramps with a suspiciously thin board at the bottom of a hill…jumping them on huffy bikes that were not made to hold together dropping out of the sky from 5-6 feet. Oh…and helmet shmelmet…not sure how we survived the 80s.
Dirt clod fights, with rocks in the clods (technically illegal, but "I didn't know it was there" was the excuse.) "Annie-Annie Over" with 3"x12" log over roof top- always the chance it'd break a window
We played "Capture the butcher knife" in the 60s. There were a million kids on my Orlando block, we only had grass lawns and a couple of trees, but "flags" didn't really work. So, stabbing things was the solution. No one ever died.
My neighbor and I would climb to the very top of the apple tree next to my house and make it sway back and forth until it practically touched the roof of my house. Exilerating!!!
I shot cal. 22 rifles with a friend in his driveway. We were both range shooters, but we were also 10 years old, so in hindsight I'd call it stupid and dangerous.
This was in Denmark, so I have no idea how the hell we had access to guns and ammo after school.
Playing outside after dark.
Playing swords with sticks.
Experimenting with electrical/electronic devices (not my best idea).
Bicycle jump stunts (also not my best idea; still wore protective gear though).
Climbing trees and treacherous forest/rocky terrain.
I grew up just fine (I think (?)).
Tying a flying saucer with 30 to 40 feet of rope behind a snowmobile possessing 40 to 70 HP, on a frozen lake - pinning the throttle, then turning sharply!!! Good times, good times …
A game called “World.” We’d draw a circle with a line down the middle. 2 people would stand on either side of the line. Taking turns, we’d take turns throwing a knife as close as we could to the other person’s feet, redraw the line & take possession of the captured part until 1 was forced out.
riding my bike around and not using my hands all throughout the neighborhood. also, ding, dong, ditch, only because one time our neighbor chased us through a row of trees and freaked me tf out hahaha.
Climbing to the top of very tall trees with thin branches.
Playing with pipe bombs (yes).
BBGun and CO2 pistol fights (no one lost an eye...but still...)
I agree with the commenter that said parents now would be horrified by what we considered normal play. Derelict factories and houses, train tracks, the docks and piers. All fair game
I have a few not previously mentioned. Riding saplings. Two climb up the sapling and when high enough that the sapling is bent it half an the top is near the ground one of us lets go and the other hangs on for the ride back up.
Then there was the time when I managed to get a 12’ tall Christmas tree up 12 stories and into the apartment …through a window, by rope, at night, when the folks were not home and the tree was 4’ taller than the elevator.
Making hydrogen gas and filling balloons by using the old version of drano with aluminum and lye and putting them in a glass soda bottle with the rubber balloon held tight around the neck of the bottle. That had the occasional explosion.
Moving up to trash bag balloons filled with hydrogen gas made from HCL & mossy zinc swiped from the school’s science lab.
On to starting thermite fires on fire hose stanchions, using a slingshot to fire firecrackers across the street from the 12th floor apartment to the building across the street
Going into the baranca to cut off lizards tails with a butter knife we stole from our moms good silver ( won’t miss it never uses it ) . Thought we were doing science experiments 🤦♀️
The one that comes to mind right now, we would race our bikes towards a brick wall, going as fast as we could, and then slam on the brakes at the very last second.
The winner was whomever got closest to the wall the fastest without touching it
Five of us in a Mini Moke with failed electrics on a bush drive.
Bonnet comes off, scooper dips can into petrol tank, passes it to guy on carby filling duty perched on front guard, guy on other side provided headlights with a dolphin torch. The driver wasn't drunk.
Before that it was mostly bombs.
Playing tag while climbing huge trees... Sometimes we would be 20 to 30 ft up in the trees smacking each other.... It's amazing we all survived those years
We used to rent a golf
cart and drive around Naples, the Pinetamare area, at night for hours in a drug addled area full of bars and people being out when I was in elementary school. It was pretty wild and exciting tbh.
Honestly, I can’t think of any activity we did as kids that wouldn’t be considered danger today. Explored old quarries, abandoned buildings and grain silos, double-dog-dare in front of oncoming trains, rode double down Suicide Hill with no hands… we just called it playing.
Going to school and not getting shot, oh, wait, nope, nobody has guns here so that NEVER HAPPENS. ☮️
Yeah, we just screwed around with matches, or ran on the first day of ice like a bunch of dumbass kids, maybe dial random phone numbers and giggle and hang up, but not the emergency line ofc.
Comments
Rooftop jumping, Jumping off roofs, shingle tossing,car surfing, car sledding, car skiing, train hopping,ice climbing,going out in -15° with just a thin coat and nothing else, Creek/river diving/swimming, bottle rocket fights, etc 💀
Sliding down stairs at Mach 10, playing Chicken with our bikes, shooting each other with BBguns,rolling down a hill in a tire.. that's all I can remember right now that me and my friends did. 😅
You just run, jump, and then let your body ragdoll as you go down. Then wed judge each other's performance based on amount of flips and how painful it looked. It was basically pushing pratfalling into sport territory.
Also breaking bottles on the train tracks, that was always good fun
I was the goalie.
If you held up the line, someone took the mattress.
Felt like flying.
...I don't know how tf we didn't die.
I only almost died… 3 or 4 times??
then licking it off.
2) setting up a Hotwheels™ track on the stairs
then rolling M&Ms™ down it into our mouths.
-BB gun wars
-Exploring storm drains and lighting fireworks & improvised incendiary devices while inside them
Chased from the estate by the people in the house who must have thought the world was ending. Hearing came back the next day.
Catching a chucked shingle in the face at ten paces, really wakes a feller up.
ok what kind of diameter are we talking?
This was in Denmark, so I have no idea how the hell we had access to guns and ammo after school.
Playing swords with sticks.
Experimenting with electrical/electronic devices (not my best idea).
Bicycle jump stunts (also not my best idea; still wore protective gear though).
Climbing trees and treacherous forest/rocky terrain.
I grew up just fine (I think (?)).
Jumping off the rooftops of 2 and 3 story houses
We were very stupid children 😁
Playing with pipe bombs (yes).
BBGun and CO2 pistol fights (no one lost an eye...but still...)
On to starting thermite fires on fire hose stanchions, using a slingshot to fire firecrackers across the street from the 12th floor apartment to the building across the street
The one that comes to mind right now, we would race our bikes towards a brick wall, going as fast as we could, and then slam on the brakes at the very last second.
The winner was whomever got closest to the wall the fastest without touching it
Bonnet comes off, scooper dips can into petrol tank, passes it to guy on carby filling duty perched on front guard, guy on other side provided headlights with a dolphin torch. The driver wasn't drunk.
Before that it was mostly bombs.
cart and drive around Naples, the Pinetamare area, at night for hours in a drug addled area full of bars and people being out when I was in elementary school. It was pretty wild and exciting tbh.
Riding in the way back of the station wagon and falling out when they went over a speedbump.
Talking to strangers without hesitation.
Jarts
Yeah, we just screwed around with matches, or ran on the first day of ice like a bunch of dumbass kids, maybe dial random phone numbers and giggle and hang up, but not the emergency line ofc.