Exploring the idiot youth of rural america (some HSTNGS content, but not a HSTNGS thread)

Sort of a detached confessional i suppose. As the product of this (partial) upbringing, I'm thinking that the bizarre combo of bored kids/nothing to do leads to mindnumbingly stupid behavior and insane overactive self-stylings that would never happen in a city with functional entertainment.

So, a tribute, if you will. Or maybe a safari.

Remember after dude shot his friend in the head and those other dudes fried their buddy with house current and they interviewed kids in Cottage Grove who said, "well, we have parties where we throw knives at each other; I guess we're just lucky no one's been hurt..."?

haha yeah cottage grove was sort of in equal running for bad place to raise kids status.

oh look: http://www.myspace.com/wickedwacked187ninja

representing the Inver Grove Heights juggalo massive

srsly you start w/one myspace page and its down the rabbit hole for sure

I think I told the upstate NY version of this behavior as related by a classmate of mine in college who knew some kids who spent an afternoon in a sealed garage huffing butane and kerosene, which is a bad enough idea on its own but got even worse when one of them decided to light up a cigarette.

I keep sending J links to HSTNGS real estate; for some reason, she doesn't think it's as funny as I do.

nice

did we ever figure out how many members of our grad class are dead from bizarro causes? i think it is like 15 or so maybe?

xpost hahahahahaaa

Does "driven to suicide" count as a bizarro cause? How about "murdered by drug dealers"?

Because if you're getting to 15 you know about WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more deaths than I do (unsurprising since you're still in MN).

basically drinking and driving (aka "road tripping") was our main pursuit...just throw a case of busch light in the trunk and drive around on minimum maintainance roads cuz the sheriffs never drove on them...

but in the winter, the beer would freeze all friday during the day in your trunk...so at night we would basically set the defroster on high and then line the dashboard vents with beers to thaw them out.

so basically you had to have the passenger "tend" the beers like roasting a pig, sort of turn the busch light cans every 5 minutes so they would thaw correctly.

i just imagine us driving around wasted through snowbanks on basically dirt roads listening to urge overkill and roasting beers on our dashboard....what a weird thing.

yeah a bunch of us used to drive up to the rocky horror picture show (lol) every weekend smoking weed and drinking and driving while breaking speed limits and throwing cans at random dudes at intersections. so weird and stupid in retrospect, and yet we never got caught.

i just imagine us driving around wasted through snowbanks on basically dirt roads listening to urge overkill and roasting beers on our dashboard....what a weird thing.

that... sounds amazing

as an eventual safety precaution because the dude who owned the car got super paranoid we would take turns riding in the trunk with the beer and passing cans out through a hole we had ripped in the seat lining.

wait who was this

was it D4n My3rs?

St4ff0rd, d4ve U554t1s, br14n l3gl3r, sometimes m00kie

ah that makes a ton more sense!

(I was trying to figure out who in our class would do that who wasn't us!)

d4n my3rs was almost always sober when he did insane things in his car, and it was usually in the middle of the day. the best time was when he was driving like 70 at noon down the residential street by m3lli55as house and hit a spot of gravel and powerslid across some dudes lawn. said dude comes running out to yell at us and we take off. d4n takes great offense and decides to drive back and whip shitties on the dudes lawn, at which point the cops arrive and dan leads them on a high speed chase BACK TO HIS HOUSE and gets arrested as we are trying to unlock the front door.

so i had to walk back to 2 a day summer football training. dick.

hahahaha I remember that! Wasn't it 4ndy 3ll1st4d's dad who did the yelling/cop calling?

maybe? was he a drunk? or am i thinking of someone elses dad

I remember he hated 4ndy (which, you know... I kind of get that, but maybe part of the reason 4ndy acted the way he did was because his dad was an ass) but I don't remember any drinking.

lol I'm now remembering 4ndy's "charity drive" where he went door-to-door in his neighborhood collecting money that he then used to buy a skateboard

sara should really swing by and fill in the details of the times we used to drink malt liquor in her parents garage (well, sara was smart enough not to) and then go on our ill-informed PUNK RAWK destroy the golf course rampages (again, sara smarter than the rest of us).

xpost yeh i have to admit i have some grudging respect for that!

i am going to FIGHT THE MAN by booting the hell out of the green on 7th hole. TAKE THAT CORPORATE AMERICA

looooooool

I don't remember ever being there for that! (I do remember the wine cooler benders at T4r4 3n3dy's house, though, and slipping all the way down her carpeted steps while creating a horrible friction burn on the inside of my forearm on the bannister...)

I was an idiot youth of rural america, for sure.

basically drinking and driving (aka "road tripping") was our main pursuit...just throw a case of busch light in the trunk and drive around on minimum maintainance roads cuz the sheriffs never drove on them...

^This, basically.

I was the drunk driver during a lot of these trips, and I would usually drive out to some creepy abandoned church in the middle of nowhere (well, every possible destination was in the middle of nowhere, I guess). Five of us would fit in my car and we'd get a 30-pack of Natural Light or Busch or whatever and go through most of during the drive and finish off the rest of it in a friend's garage later. The hardest part was getting the beer in the first place. The one with the most courage to walk into a gas station and try to buy beer as a 16-17 year old was also the one who was most babyfaced out of all of us. Luckily we were friends with half of the gas station cashiers in town.

When I got rid of the roadtrippin' car, I was about to hand over the keys to my dad (he was going to donate it to a church) and gave the interior one last check and found a full joint sticking out between the seat cushions in the backseat.

The stench of hotboxin' + Christmas tree air freshener plagued my car for a long time

+ febreze

oh man, my life might have been v.v. different had I grown up with Febreze

<3in this thread guys

Remember after dude shot his friend in the head and those other dudes fried their buddy with house current and they interviewed kids in Cottage Grove who said, "well, we have parties where we throw knives at each other; I guess we're just lucky no one's been hurt..."?

― her performance (ie, her pubes) stood out for me (HI DERE), Friday, July 10, 2009 12:11 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark

i remember this! well, not the kid with the knives, but the other stuff :-/

Completely loving this thread. OH GOD COTTAGE GROVE.

Our strawtown in my neck of the Cities was Blaine.

also: hanging out in vermillion w/bros, and lighting the road on fire because why not we're in vermillion lol

then someone threw a trashcan off the roof of a bar

as an eventual safety precaution because the dude who owned the car got super paranoid we would take turns riding in the trunk with the beer and passing cans out through a hole we had ripped in the seat lining.

― Bo-rad Crewcial Overdrive (jjjusten), Friday, July 10, 2009 12:26 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is completely amazing btw

I grew up in a beach resort town with a population of ~ 1000 in the off season and like 25K during the summer. So all winter, we would get cases of beer and cruise a specific circuit that went down the town's main street and to the boardwalk, or we would have ridiculous "parties" in cul-de-sacs or half-built houses in half-built housing developments (got pulled over once on the way home from COUNTY BAND practice because we were kids in a blue car (my stepfather's) and there were reports of kids in a blue car getting crazy and leaving empty beer cans and liquor bottles in a cul-de-sac and that was totally us, but in a different blue car (my boyfriend's) so we feigned innocence and didn't get in trouble, take that cop!). But then in the summer, somebody was always friends with somebody else who was renting a house for a week or the whole summer and suddenly it was like John Hughes-style, ridiculous, underwear in the trees type drunken ragers. We hardly ever partied on the beaches, though, because the police busted up beach parties really quickly.

around '95-'96 -- about 5 of us are in a friend's big ass Econoline van, barreling up I-55 on a road trip with a full cooler stashed two (or three?) rows back serving as a foot rest for the dude doing the beer dispensing. at some point - probably 5-6 beers in - the driver asks for another. the beer man declines, saying he thinks the driver has had enough. mind you, the concern here wasn't really about safety. the guy in the back is essentially just fucking with the driver (fought like brothers, these two). the back and forth continues, featuring steely-eyed stares via the rear-view mirror, mom joeks and full-on cursing the day each was born. finally the exasperated driver sets the cruise control, looks over at me in the front passenger seat and suggests i grab the wheel. he then proceeds to stand, stroll back to where the cooler is, sits down and puts his arm around the guy he has just spent the last 10 minutes dog-cussing (I've since moved over into the captain's chair). he cracks open a cold one and finishes the entire thing before belching, grunting a "fuck you" and returning to the driver's seat.

maybe you had to be there, but massive lols all around.

The first summer beach house party I ever went to I was 15 and I remember thinking, "This is some Sixteen Candles shit here..." in wonder and awe and then I got really drunk on grain punch and had to ride my bike to my lifeguarding job the next day, which suuuuucked.

In rural northeast Ohio, seems like most of our boredom-time idiot-youth crap revolved around either a) fire or b) guns. My friend Matt and I used to walk along the railroad tracks shooting out ceramic insulators on electric poles with a .22 rifle, or just take his brother's shotgun into the nurseries and shoot at groundhogs, empty crates or whatever.

We also once built a homemade flamethrower out of a garden sprayer filled with gasoline.

Railroad tracks and rural idiot youth culture are a baaaad combo.

That reminds me of hanging out with a neighbor kid and walking around our development while he randomly shot arrows up into the air and occasionally into the sides of people's houses. He also, for reasons I am unable to even guess, always had bottles of amyl nitrate in his pockets.

Railroad tracks and rural idiot youth culture are a baaaad combo.

cf they guy I mentioned on another thread who disappeared between 8th and 9th grade because he passed out on the train tracks and had his legs cut off

also mint HS fun - the hair spray flamethrower trick, preferably outdoors. My friend bert (this is prior to HSTNGS so we were pretty young, maybe 10?) had one blow up in his hand and escaped injury until two days later when his entire hand turned into a shiner style slick purple bruise.

We used to use the hairspray (or spraypaint) flamethrower to melt duplicate GI Joe and Star Wars action figures when I was like 12. We also used to wrap model rocket engines in duct tape and set them off in the street.

tho i have not relayed it on the highschool drinking thread i was super clean in h.s. and we had a lot of fun anyway but i'm still mad jealous of some of you guys in a sense.

i just saw J just3n IRL!

his doggie is cute!

haha cad, I lived some of this stuff and I still get jealous of some of John's stories!

Henry has discovered that he can puncture a beer can w/his little puppy teeth like a beer vampire so he is prob heading down the same dangerous road as me o_O

see gbx m@tt and gff have met my dog WHY DO U SHUN HIM SO

SEND HIM TO BOSTON AND I WILL MEET HIM

going to college in a remote MN town led to many of the same/worse escapades as well, the most brilliant of which is when we were at the local bar and pushed my just turned 21 friend to the point of unconsciousness because he claimed we could not "break him" in front of a crowd of rugby players (bad call). So after he puked into an empty pitcher (which is a noise that you really cant describe) he just passed out, like 300 pounds of dead weight style passed out across the table. The owner comes over and starts yelling about how he is going to call the cops and send him to detox at which point I have an aha leverage moment and say "oh yeah well I'm only 19 and I have been drinking here all night and for the last year or so" and he responds with "well then you are really going to be fucked when the cops come and btw never set foot in here again dummy." and i get all sheepish and o_O and help drag dead weight dude out of the bar.

hahahahahaha classic

let's be sixteen and get lit and gun a sled to ninety lol

you guys are gonna be hilarious grandpas

can't wait tbh

yah rly.

the first time i ever got stoned i was probably in 8th grade, and this total hesher ne'er do well that lived right by my house was to blame. He tells me to wait at the end of his driveway because he has to bike over to this eric dudes house. I watch him bike there (which takes like three minutes, he disappears for like 5 minutes into the house, and then bikes back reaaaallly slowly, weaving and occasionally tipping over, making frequent stops. all told it takes him, no exaggeration, a half an hour to bike maybe half a mile, and when he gets back he looks totally freaked out and terrified. I ask him whats wrong, and he tells me that he's freaked out because the sky has turned completely black just above the horizon (this is not true). he continues to babble about how the line of darkness keeps moving around. So at this point i am figuring that the pot he had was laced with something dangerous (because i dont know shit about drugs at this point and have only had grade school health ed to inform me about stuff) and starting to get worried about what i should do and if he is going to be ok and etc. which lasts until i realize, and explain to him, that the moving line of darkness in the sky is, in fact, his own hair.

a year later the dude whose pot we smoked got confused and burned his parents house down by filling the kerosene heater with gasoline.

OH DEAR.

xpost Reiterating what's been said about five-state right-brain drain towards Twin Cities, note this is one huge reason high for LGBT population, farm teams send their ephebes up to town to play for the majors.

LOL C4rlet0n stories... My experience of visiting there was East Coast kids playing at rural assholism or forming ironic stunt bands (a GNR tribute called Guns and Butter for ex), very much due to who N's friends were.

HESHERS

GET CONFUSED

also I aorta figured that wrt gays and mpls. I know that is true of all cities but it seems more pronounced here due to the stark contrast between urban and rural

Mpls in particular might have a high per capita relative to many many cities.

i have a feeling an "idiot youth of urban america" thread would end in tears. :-(

Man, I don't even know where to start.

iry ended in tears at least eight times while i was in school so

trying to remember what my "urban idiot youth" stories were... um, my friends and i would regularly go up to the revolving restaurant at the top of the times square marriott marquis and laugh at the tourists. how did we afford it? probably some ill-spent babysitting money.

One time I went to this beach bonfire at the end of my freshman year of college where these dudes had a two-wheeled trailer stuffed full of the furniture from their college hall/house, including a gigantic pile of 1/4" plywood and other lumber that their lofts had been built from. Also several couches, mattresses, chairs, bookshelves (and books), desks, various stolen objects from businesses in town (for example, a broken lion statue from in front of a chinese restaurant, and one of those giant Coke bottle-shaped cooler display things), all kinds of shit.

They proceed to drink whiskey and start the biggest bonfire I'd ever seen at that point, dropping the couches on top of the raging stack of plywood and posing for pictures in the flames, throwing spray paint cans and lighters in the fire... the coals were like knee-high at one point. The Coke bottle was mostly foam rubber in the bottom and it made really weirdly colored flames. This being on the shore of Lake Superior there was a pretty good wind going that only made it bigger.

I knew plenty of dudes who would get drunk/high and drive around on back roads with loaded shotguns and "hunt" pheasants.

When I was in high school we used to buy really shitty seedy weed from these two guys who were brothers. They were the last resort, but also often the only option, so we had to go over there a lot. Their house smelled so bad that you could smell it outside on the sidewalk. Not like weed so much as years of B.O. and 12-year-old dogs who had never been washed. They had a crematorium built into their basement and we used to climb in and pass multiple blunts around in it like morons. These brothers were always going to jail/prison, but never for all the drugs they dealt. It was always something stupid. I think the last time I heard from them the older brother had been busted while trying to blow up a tree with a bunch of dynamite.

u rule

also why did they have a crematorium what in the

I was going to say

I don't know, but it was long since out of use. You had to crawl in just a little bit, and then it was a little concrete box.

oh so just the usual situation, got u

Also, do you guys know what chat dumps are?

They look like this:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~mostfran/chatdumps_mining/images/band_bonneterre_1993.jpg
(that's a 1993 high school band playing in front of one in the county where I grew up)

We used to climb up to the top of that thing every once in a while and wonder which kind of cancer we were going to get (chat is leftovers from the lead mining process). Lots of people would take their ATVs up and down the side of it, too.

Here is a poem about a chat dump, published in 1927:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mostfran/chatdumps_mining/images/chat_pile_poem.jpg

One of the great poems imho

Nice. The area I grew up had lots of similar piles leftover from copper mining, and we did the exact same things on them. You used to be able to get into one of the mine shafts at the bottom of one pile near my house, but my parents found out about it and bitched until the city sealed it.

Sweet drums in the marching band btw.

^^^ totally uncool

jesus z s! ot but have you seen the pbs documentary about that town in oklahoma where there's lead-mining byproducts floating around and the gov't's trying to get people to leave but they won't and their kids are all retarded? check it out

actually maybe that's on-topic and explains a lot about idiot youth in some parts of rural america

dammit no xpost notification ON IPHONE

Yeah my parents, love 'em, but they were pretty much the anti-idiot youth or rural america brigade in our town. I got so much shit because they ratted out a friend of mine's sister for jumping her car while driving down a hill (to be fair, it was in a neighborhood, but hey this is the idiot youth of rural america thread).

Eh, that's another story I guess. The area around where I grew up was based around mining, specifically lead and iron, for a long, long time. Since people first settled there, pretty much. When I was growing up there were several nearby towns with names based off of mining (Leadville, Ironton, etc). When I was around ten years old the newspapers and St. Louis news starting to report on incredibly high levels of lead in the water, connecting the dots to mental disabilities, and so on. In a not so subtle move, the nearby towns named after mining combined into one renamed town, named Park Hills.

That an xpost to harbl btw.

The other major problem of the area is meth and pedophiles/incest. Seriously. The neighboring county, Washington County, is one of the counties in the U.S. for meth lab busts, and Missouri as a whole has been dominating the meth lab charts like the Beatles in 1964 for years and years. The incest thing is based more on anecdotal evidence but is incredibly gross.

oh well meth is a thing

my brief sojourn in a montanan ER was like meth 101

i wasted my youth

(massive xxxxxxpost) I'm not sure if HI DERE ever drank in my parent's garage; I know John did. I did NOT know a lot of these other HSTNGS stories, tho, omg. I confess to being just a hair jealous of NOT doing some of those things, though.

I miss drumline SOOOOOOOOOOO much!

Leadville is really the Oldsmobile of town names, marketingwise

How much of the drinking in Sara's garage happened during the summer when I was at German camp/in Germany? Because that would explain why I wasn't there.

lol german camp

WALDSEE BABY

xp what happened while you were in Germany stays in HSTNGS, dude.

http://kottke.org/09/10/how-to-shoot-an-anvil-200-feet-into-the-air

lol

oh lord how is it that I don't even remember this thread...?

http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/chevrolet-chevette-5.jpg

There was a fool in my high school that got himself and a couple other people killed by putting a nitrous boost into a Chevy Chevette. He got in a run with a county Sheriff and hit the boost and of course could not turn the little beast and got the car launched off a turn about 50 yards into a corn field where it crashed like a plane returning to the earth.

I grew up in Muncie. I got a hundred of these kind of tales.

this thread

I remember reading this one day on the way home from work on the train! Great thread.

northfield isn't even that 'rural' come on

oh look: http://www.myspace.com/wickedwacked187ninja

representing the Inver Grove Heights juggalo massive

― Bo-rad Crewcial Overdrive (jjjusten), Friday, July 10, 2009 5:12 PM (3 years ago)

the saddest dead link in the world ;_;

"your homepage is undergoing routine maintanance"--Mom scrubbing out this bitch