Bike helmets didn’t get common until 6th grade or so. Same with face guards and mouth guards in anything but football.
We also had a diving board with a full size car spring. A gymnast pal could do double flips off it.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Play on the roof 🤷♂️
Stuck a housekey into an electrical outlet to pretend I was driving a car. Not sure how I didn't die, honestly.
I once set fire to a tissue to see what would happen. Fortunately I'd had the foresight to have a glass of water just incase.
rode on the trunk of my dad's sw with several other children.
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 😆
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Make pipe bombs. It was dangerous then, too.
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.
Girls I was at school with used to get picked up by guys in cars when they were like 12 and 13 so those guys were at least 17. At 17 I wouldn't have wanted to hang out with a 12 or 13 year old girl.
This particular friend of mine was obsessed with older men and getting any kind of attention for men she definitely had gotten into cars with strangers, met up with a random men, etc.. I don’t think anything bad ever happened to her, but she was lucky In that instance. She wasn’t so lucky because she ended up getting addicted to drugs and overdosed and died In her early 20s.
Sorry to hear that. I also lost a friend to addiction who's experiences with older men in her formative years were unfortunately quite negative, which sent her down the addiction spiral and made her seek out more experiences with older men. Those experiences and the addiction both, I believe, ultimately stemmed from her father's actions. His own addiction and abusive, neglectful behaviour being a result of trauma in his early life. I can't speak to your friend's past of course but I imagine men and substances filled a hole in her own life likely left by a similar generational trauma and abuse cycle.
I’m sorry to hear that. Looking back, I suspect it was probably the same or similar with my friend, but I was too young to see or understand it and her and I are coming from upper class neighborhood. These things would be brushed under the rug, not talked about not believed, etc..
Here we are 16 or 17-year-old girls showing up to these random college guys house.
Oh man. It's scary how normal this is treated. I remember having friends with "older boyfriends" and I always felt really weirded out by it. Yet when you're a kid (or teen, in this case) and your friends act like it's normal to want adult boyfriends, you're put in a really awkward position. I wasn't able to fully articulate or even comprehend everything fucked up about it at the time, but as an adult looking back, holy shit. There's an entire hidden social ecosystem where being groomed is not only considered normal, but can be seen as enviable by peers.
Looking back the whole situation, it’s terrifying. I don’t think my parents ever figured that I was in that kind of situation with my friend. We were super lucky that nothing bad ever happened because it would’ve been very easy for us to be taken advantage of and we had no idea.
These guys had to be at least 21 I don’t know how much rent cost there at the time or how much it was to share a house with two or three of your friends, but they certainly weren’t 18-year-old Freshmen and we had to be 17 at best. This particular friend was obsessed with any kind of male attention so for me it was kind of like an eye roll whatever at that time but looking back is like oh my God. Like you said it’s terrifying how normalized it is as teenage girls to get some kind of attention from older men.
I used the internet without an ad blocker.
Holy shit man you shouldn't do that. Stay safe out there
Here take this
Occasionally we would walk the mile home from elementary school. We'd sometimes stop to play in the creek along the way. We made sure not to do that one in spring though because there was a flash flood one year while a schoolmate was playing down there and drowned him.
Don't ask any Gen-Xer or older. Surviving dangerous stuff was a minute-to-minute activity for us.
Dangerous then and especially now, but my oldest brother lit off a firework in our backyard, right near or around when school was getting out. We lived a couple blocks away from an elementary school. It was loud enough that the school thought someone was shooting.
This was mid-late 2000s. I imagine if he did it today, the police would have absolutely arrested him without a second thought.
lol zoomer, oh no, not a firecracker. we had the anarchist's cookbook.
I don't remember what it was, but it certainly wasn't a firecracker. I don't know where exactly my parents used to get them, but they used to get illegal fireworks (illegal in our state) by crossing over state lines, if I remember correctly. Neither me nor my parents remember what he set off, but it definitely wasn't something wimpy like a firecracker.
Edit:
We lived in an area where you had more strict rulings on what is a legal firework to have and shoot off, so we definitely had some stuff that was definitely quite a bit stronger than what we could get in state.
Walking to school alone.
A lot of LSD
Walk and ride my bike alone to school from about the age of six.
Play on the streets unsupervised have knives, playing on building sites and similar and that was about at a guess 6 or 7. We also played in the local park and generally got up to mischief.
Ate fried veal brain all the time: it's sooo good! Since the CJD outbreaks that's something we learned not to do.
With some friends, I built an “unguided SAM launcher” using some wood, a lot of aluminum foil, some metal rods, and a bunch of model rockets, and we tried to shoot down stunt kites we were flying near it.
We’d have probably gotten DHS called on us if we did it nowadays lol
Build a flamethrower with a super soaker. Swim with sharks.
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.
Lawn darts
Made a trebuchet that almost destroyed a neighbor's car. Tried to build a fuel-air bomb out of kerosene and a shotgun shell. Made napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. Huntes squirrels with a .22 rifle.
Weird childhood.