Report: Dumbass Things Young People are Doing

Our youngsters might be falling behind internationally in terms of standardized testing, but when it comes to devising innovative ways of injuring themselves, the next crop of Western Civilization’s brood overfloweth with savants. Two really nifty activities you should look into are vodka eyeballing and train surfing.

Vodka eyeballing is a party fad wherein you hold a shot glass over your eye socket, tilt your head back and guzzle 80 proof potato liquor directly into your skull.

What’s so astonishingly stupid about this practice is that it doesn’t even have a pleasurable sensation to accompany it. For instance, I’ve never tried cocaine before, but I’m told you feel confident, powerful and euphoric, all of which are emotions I regularly try to induce through jogging and listening to Electric Light Orchestra. If there were some kind of vegetable that prompted “feeling like God,” you would adjust your diet accordingly, wouldn’t you? So there are at least some benefits to developing a crack addition and hawking your wife’s jewelry.

Conversely, vodka eyeballing just hurts. A lot. The alcohol is literally being absorbed through your cornea. While my optometry training is spotty at best, I suspect filtering poison through your retina might someday necessitate stronger contact lens prescriptions.

The great benefit of cornea-sucking, you see, is that because you’re shooting it directly into your head, it bypasses your lazy, inefficient stomach and rapidly spills into your bloodstream like an overflowing toilet. Your digestive system is just a cumbersome middleman you can downsize. Instant drunk.

This raises the curious specter of a situation in which you couldn’t possibly wait forty-five seconds for a shot of vodka to screw you up anyway. No, you need it now. RIGHT NOW.

I don’t even have enough family members to die in a fiery bus crash to need that sort of immediate respite from emotional turmoil. (They’re all Protestant, after all, and thus breed at controlled levels.) If worst came to worst I could run into a bar, scream “GIRLFRIEND EATEN BY COUGAR!” and chug the nearest bottle of single malt until I passed out or found a replacement girlfriend. I figure between my sprinting record, the ready abundance of bars in Washington, and my own gifted communication skills, from start to finish this whole process would take a maximum of four and a half minutes.

And that’s from a wholly stand-still position. If you were already at a tavern or had a liquor stash at your house you could get schnockered in no time flat. For my teetolling readers, a shot of alcohol isn’t like some kind of slow-acting allergy medication. You drink it. And then you get drunk. The whole process takes about as long to microwave and eat a burrito.

For a while in Europe there was a fad to soak tampons in vodka and then administer them rectally so that the alcohol would immediately blitzkrieg into the bloodstream. I think I speak for everyone in hoping that each and every single person who ever tried this, without exception, immediately died. It is even more dangerous, stupid and painful than vodka eyeballing, and it’s a good example of why we should re-authorize Natural Selection next time the matter comes up in Congress.

The other new fad, equally brilliant, is train surfing. Now, when I say “train surfing,” you are probably conjuring the wrong mental image. Most likely you are inferring that by train surfing I am referring to train hopping, which is a perfectly respectable form of travel wherein you run alongside a freight train clutching a stick and bindle, jump into the boxcar, then ride across our great nation until a gang kills you and tosses your dismembered corpse somewhere near Dearborn, Michigan.

No, no, train surfing is on the outside of the train. Sometimes even on the bottom. The junkiest of adrenaline junkies cling to the bottom of the train and ride it as if gripping the underbelly of a giant iron cobra. If you move any part of your body half an inch and manage to brush something below, the latent kinetic energy coursing through you would within microseconds blast your body to pieces like throwing a ripe watermelon down an escalator. There is not a large margin of error for this particular hobby. One good solid erection could inadvertently scatter your limbs across seven miles of moist I-told-you-so railroad tracks.

The reason for all this stupidity, by the way, is not a general decline in Western civilization, as anyone with arthritis is usually quick to point out. Seventeen-year-olds were blazingly imbecilic in 1850, 1920 and 2000 BC. In fact we’re doing a lot better because “civilization” (rules and buildings designed by people who survive past thirty) has over time imposed restrictions on teenagers who would otherwise raze neighboring towns to stave off boredom in between football games.

No, the reason for all this lunacy is literally because the human brain doesn’t fully develop until you’re halfway to thirty. It develops in stages: the adolescent brain bangs out the amygdyala (emotion doohicky) and nucleas acumbens (motivation wossit) first. Those plus acne explain teenagers pretty well. Then, if the odd juvenile actually manages to avoid binge drinking through novel orifices and straddling locomotives long enough to hit twenty-five, their cerebellum and pre-frontal cortex (reasoning and impulse doodads) fully warm up. In other words, your brain is in a state of ongoing hardware installation until about four years past when you can legally purchase a hand gun.

This is also a very good reason for why our armed forces focus on recruiting seventeen and eighteen-year-olds. Because they’re crazy. I am not saying they’re not brave. Be it known that this author is a quivering coward who gives full tuppence to our lads in the field. But “Hey, run up over that trench and charge the Prussian machine gun line” is met with a far more gung-ho attitude from a guy barely eligible to vote than a fellow making housing decisions based on school district performance.

More interestingly, those same bits of your gray matter which prompt a desire for tidiness and a clean living space don’t sprout in males until roundabouts twenty-three. Which makes blinding, glittering sense now that I tell it to you, doesn’t it? At nineteen the word “dust” is to a male wholly academic and about as easily recognizable as a Higgs Boson particle. Making your bed every morning seems like some kind of domestic chore Sisiphis would tend to before commuting to his boulder.

Now, in my high twenties, that tidy-prone brain chunk has finally flipped on. I want to own glassware, plates should not be left out for more than twenty-four hours, and anything on a wall must either be framed, stuffed or mounted.

But back to overall youthful stupidity.

Did I do stupid things in my tween and teenage years? Yes of course. I was in the Boy Scouts, for crying out loud.

Which is a fine organization. Though for the uninitiated, the Boy Scouts of America is mostly dedicated to herding groups of young lads with attention deficit disorder into the woods where they learn to use knives to whittle sticks into slightly duller knives and funnel pyromania into more productive activities like barbeques or dutch oven cooking. I can’t think of a single campout we went on which would not have devolved into Lord of the Flies if we had successfully managed to lock our scoutmaster in his tent. I’m astounded I still have thumbs or eyebrows.

In high school, my particular group of friends and I enjoyed an activity called “Going to the Hef.”

Lake Hefner is one of the few lakes in Oklahoma which is a shimmering, brilliant azure. Most of the rest are either ruby colored (muddy) or a curious algae-inspired emerald hue. Hefner, though, is a water reservoir which suckles the nicer bits of our capital, and so a glorious pristine lagoon which permits only sail boating, fishing or hiding dead bodies in. Motor boats are strictly forbidden. It’s lovely.

A road wraps around its circumference and, not surprisingly, the divots and nooks along that loop attract horny teenagers at night who want to take their clothes off and try interesting experiments with their hands.

I’ll interject here– I never “Heffed.” My singular lakeside fling happened nearly a decade later, at a different lake, and didn’t involve any dawdling, either. It was in uncomfortable proximity to a temporarily vacant archery range and, given my tenure in the Scouts, I didn’t need to put much thought into how several tenderfoots with bows and arrows would respond to finding a couple of bare cheeks in flagrante delicto.

No, back in our wholesome high school years my friends and I would conclude a rousing Friday night of Dungeons & Dragons by grabbing a one-million candle power spotlight, cruise on down to Lake Hefner, and cast a ray of blinding, divine-like scrutiny upon whichever parked car seemed the most tremulous.

For those of you without a frame of reference, flashlight luminosity is measured in candle power, and a normal unit is about 6,500. A 1,000,000 candle power spotlight is to a book light what the Fat Man atomic bomb is to a fire cracker. The luminosity is sufficient to piss off helicopter pilots and distract aliens in nearby star clusters. I’m skinny enough that one time, when we thought I had an ankle fracture, we pointed the beam at my leg, illuminating my fibula and, presumably, forever damaging my cornea about as much as downing 50 milliliters of vodka into it would’ve done anyway.

Casting this magnificent photonic cannon onto parked cars was like seeing still-motion photography, except in much, much funnier poses. The effect was, every single time, utterly hilarious.

And good wholesome fun except for the fact that on several occasions an angry driver, himself nineteen and therefore with an equally underdeveloped brain and an interrupted date, would careen after us waving a tire iron out his window, fully intent on redecorating our faces in the style of a Jackson Pollock painting.

We never got caught. We always managed to sputter away, blaring cool songs over the stereo speakers like Chariots of Fire or Flight of the Valkyries.

And we did other stupid things, too.

My God. We did so many awesome things.