Are You a Victim of Your Past?

[AcidFlashGordon]

MEMORIES OF A REPRESSED AND ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread Mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE ... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option ... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.

I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone
Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot? He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.

Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked (physical abuse here too), and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka trucks were made tough ... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two-week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.

Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive.

How sick were my parents? Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes?

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we survive?

 

[Skip]

Good stuff today, I think someone is in a good mood thinking about moving to Texas...lol

 

[kyletxria1911a1]

6for6

 

[Pilgrim]

We drank from the garden hose and never got botulism.

We lit our own firecrackers and never managed to set fire to the entire neighborhood or blow our fingers off.

We played on rusted jungle gyms without the slick rubberized coating yet we never got tetanus.

We skateboarded without helmets, gloves, and those ridiculous knee/elbow pads. If we fell, we got scraped, cried, and got up to ride some more.

The first time I saw anyone on a bicycle riding a helmet was a cop... and we thought he looked like a dipshit.

It was customary for our dads to buy us a pocketknives for our 8th birthdays but we never managed to stab ourselves in the eyes.

We shot BB guns in our suburban backyards but never turned into psychopathic shooters.

We never tattled on bullies... we just grouped up and ambushed the guy at the bike racks.

 

[AcidFlashGordon]

We skateboarded without helmets, gloves, and those ridiculous knee/elbow pads. If we fell, we got scraped, cried, and got up to ride some more.

Reminds me. My "first" skateboard was made by taking one of those old steel skates apart at the sliding joint (that should confuse the 'youngsters') and nailing it to a 2 x 4. Worked for a while but then, while sitting on it going down a hill, hit a small pebble, the "skateboard" stopped immediately but I didn't, and ended up with a 2" splinter in my ass. Luckily my parents weren't home at the time because there was a full-length mirror in the hall closet door and I stood there, looking between my legs and removed the splinter myself.

 

[M. Sage]

We drank from the garden hose and never got botulism.

We lit our own firecrackers and never managed to set fire to the entire neighborhood or blow our fingers off.

We played on rusted jungle gyms without the slick rubberized coating yet we never got tetanus.

We skateboarded without helmets, gloves, and those ridiculous knee/elbow pads. If we fell, we got scraped, cried, and got up to ride some more.

The first time I saw anyone on a bicycle riding a helmet was a cop... and we thought he looked like a dipshit.

It was customary for our dads to buy us a pocketknives for our 8th birthdays but we never managed to stab ourselves in the eyes.

We shot BB guns in our suburban backyards but never turned into psychopathic shooters.

We never tattled on bullies... we just grouped up and ambushed the guy at the bike racks.

You'd have been branded a coward. Bullies were handled mano a mano when they finally pushed you one too many times. And then they left you the hell alone.

 

[Dawico]

I don't know how we survived without hand sanitizers on every verticle surface.

 

[Pilgrim]

Even back then us "small frys" understood the power of "force multipliers"

 

[Pilgrim]

Reminds me. My "first" skateboard was made by taking one of those old steel skates apart at the sliding joint (that should confuse the 'youngsters') and nailing it to a 2 x 4. Worked for a while but then, while sitting on it going down a hill, hit a small pebble, the "skateboard" stopped immediately but I didn't, and ended up with a 2" splinter in my ass. Luckily my parents weren't home at the time because there was a full-length mirror in the hall closet door and I stood there, looking between my legs and removed the splinter myself.

LOL. That must have been a sight.

 

[TxBigfoot]

I'm only 32, but it was still different when I was a kid. I probably had more knives when I was a kid then I do now. Me and my brother loved to throw Chinese stars at a target we drew on a board. We also used to melt lead weights and pour them into a molding we carved into wood in the shape of an arrow head. Did anyone else used to play bb gun wars with friends, I'm still amazed that an eye never go put out.

 

[kyletxria1911a1]

still carry the bb to this day it happened in 76

 

[zembonez]

We took .22 rifles to school on the bus and worked on them in shop class.

We also made Bowie knives in shop class and got extra credit on our grade for them.

Nobody ever got shot or stabbed.

 

[Pilgrim]

My father taught us how to make crossbows out of plank wood, inner tubes, a clothespin, and BBQ skewers. We shot feral cats, pigeons, and rats with them. People in the neighborhood would pay us .25 for every rat we killed...

 

[keith_tx]

When I was a kid, we could actually bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school. I guess they didn't make kids with peanut allergies back then.

 

[RandomHero]

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.

i took a safety and sanitation course during my time in culinary school, and i still to this day, do this.

 

[RandomHero]

I don't know how we survived without hand sanitizers on every verticle surface.

shits the worst. the wipies outside the grocery store near the carts too.

 

[RandomHero]

Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

when i was little i had this friend that EVERYTIME he scraped his knee or cut himself he acted like he was going to die. if we were playing, everything stopped and he had to go home to clean it and put a bandage on it. we could have rode our bikes 5 miles out and a small cut would have made him go home to clean it. me? i would just wipe the dirt off and if there was a clean water source throw some on it and continue on with the activites. he was also the only one of us that wore a helmet everytime we rode our bikes.

 

[ROGER4314]

I carried my .22 Mossberg rifle to school on the bus every Thursday to shoot at Rifle Club. We had a range in the basement of the school where ammo was given to us free. After school, I carried the rifle home on the late bus run.

I never knew what an automotive seat belt was until I was 17 and worked in a quick service auto shop. We took an air chisel, knocked a hole in the floor behind the front seat to install the new safety devices. I thought they were a fad and didn't see much future in them.

Bicycle helmet? What the Hell is that? Now, they tape a piece of foam to your head and call it a helmet.

I loved to go to Riverview Amusement Park, Allied Radio and Lafayette Radio but they were 20 miles away in Chicago. My Schwinn 3 speed racer got me there and back.

I had a fist fight almost every friggin day on the school bus before school. I put one guy ass end first through a bus window. For a time, I carried a sawed off baseball bat about 12" long and I by God used it. That stopped when the older guys graduated and I got my first car....a 1956 Ford.

Air conditioning? We didn't have it in the house or in the car. My parents got a window A/C for their bedroom and sometimes it was so damned hot, I slept on their bedrooom floor. Even as an adult, I bought many brand new cars and ordered them without A/C.

I bought a new car or truck every two years. Gas, two oil changes and they were gone.

I got divorced in 1975 and shopped for a BRAND NEW Chevy truck stripped...........no rugs, A/C and 3 speed standard transmission. It had a radio and heater. It didn't buy it because I didn't want to go into debt. The price on that truck was $2,200!



Flash

 

[deemus]

I rode my Schwin banana seat bike with reckless abandon. From daybreak to dusk. Up and down the concrete drainage ditches, until I knocked out my two front teeth.

Broke the handlebars, flattened the tire. Wouldn't you know it, dad drives by as I pushed it home, where I got my ass beat for riding where I wasn't supposed to be.

Got a knife at age 8. Got a 22 at age 10. Never once did I consider ever using either on another person.

Got spankings regularly, and never hated my parents for one second.

I too drank out of the water hose until I was 20. Never got sick once.

Reached the limit with the bully, then beat his ass till he begged for mercy. I only let it go so long because my dad's spanking for fighting at school was worse than the bullying.

Never used a weapon in a fight. If you couldn't win with your fists, you just lost. If someone used a weapon, everybody jumped in and beat his ass and took his weapon.

Had fights at school, and never went to alternative school. I got "3 licks" and went back to class.

Drove a pickup to school with a shotgun and 22 in the gun rack, in plain view up in the window. On the way home several of us hunted. We never had one instance of gun violence, because everyone shot guns, and understood that when you shoot something, it dies.

 

[ROGER4314]

I broke my left wrist in a fight, nose was broken 4 times, skull fractured from the corner of my eye to the ear, dozens of black eyes, right hand broken in a motorcycle wreck, broke numerous knuckles and ribs, both sides of my collar bone, cracked my left arm and I pulled a bullet out of my right shoulder. Never went to the doctor for any of it and found out the extent of my injuries sometimes years later.

Flash