borrowing a meme – dumb shit i did when i was young

Yesterday I commented on a blog post by Ryoku861 entitled “Dumb Shit I did When I was Young.” Her post was funny as hell, and she asked readers to comment on their dumb shit moments. You’d hope this would be relatively difficult, you’d think you didn’t really do too much dumb shit, you’d think even if you did some dumb shit you wouldn’t want to brag about it. You think you’d have wiped those dumb shit moments from your memory. Judging by how many replies she got and how quickly I could think of so many I had trouble picking one you’d be thinking wrong.

And… Coming off a long Christmas vacation no longer a burnt out corporate drone I was looking for a spur back into blogging, and commenting on her post was fun, so let’s see how long I last this time. In the meantime, here’s the short version of the story I posted on her blog “Me, Myself, and I.” As did most of my adventures with brother Mikie, the long version entails so much juvenile violence, profanity, sibling rivalry, animal cruelty (the ants, the ants, chill out PETA members), parental perception, and overall stupidity it deserves a post of its’ own someday. In the meantime thanks Ryoku861 for the prod, and here’s my reply to her post.

We had a tree stump in the back yard that had been taken over by red ants, which sucked because when you got too close they attacked and man they stung! Before the ants showed up that stump was 3rd base in our wiffle ball field, and we wanted it back as spring was getting really close, and with it wiffle ball season. We’d heard my father say we’d have to burn the ants out so we figured we’d help him out. We borrowed the new power mower gas can from the garage and soaked that sucker down!. Brother Mikie had some matches, we got up real close to make sure we could flick a lit match INTO the stump and FWOOOOPH!!!… or something like that….. 10 foot fireball . Luckily we had planned ahead and the garden hose was close by… but we hadn’t turned on the water. After a short fight about whose fault this one was gonna be one of us, I can’t remember which, turned on the water and we managed to keep the fire from spreading. Killed all the damn ants though.

Thought we had it made til we went in the house for supper and Mom and Dad just sat there staring at us. We had no idea why til my father, eyes narrowed in suspicion looked at me, looked at my mother, looked at brother Mikie, looked at my mother, looked at both of us together and quietly and ominously said…”the two a ya’s, what the hell happened to your eyebrows?” Singed em all clean off!