‘If only we had that video camera’ was the second sentence that emerged from Luke’s mouth as I looked up at him through dirt, blood and matted hair. The first had been ‘Holy Shadwell! We’ve killed him!’ but after I demonstrated that I could breathe, talk and move most of my limbs, his concern for my health quickly melted into regret that he’d never get to sell the television rights to what had just transpired.
I was a 14-year-old freshman in high school; I had just hurtled down the steep (and at times nonexistent) slope of a 25-foot-tall dirt mound in fetal position. I was able to accomplish this amazing feat of athleticism not because I was a highly skilled yogi, but because I was crammed into a brown, reeking Rubbermaid trash barrel.
The casual reader, who has probably been inundated with ‘Jackass’ episodes and who likely considers Tom Green to be ancient history, may scoff at my epic journey over Dirt Falls. And why should he not? He’s seen his heroes on MTV, VHS and DVD take greater risks and receive worse injuries than the broken nose that I, due to a tragic misdiagnosis, still sport today. Unfortunately, thousands of teens also see and emulate these ‘heroes’ every day. And this, O gentle reader, is among the great tragedies that plague our nation’s youth.
Considering my past, you’d probably say that I’m as qualified to warn kids against imitating the stunts they see on TV as Trent Lott is to speak at an NAACP rally. Well, you’d be right. But you’d also be wrong. I certainly don’t think kids should be forcing model cars into their rectums (unless they’re of consenting age, of course), electrically shocking each other’s genitalia (ditto) or doing whatever else those jackanapes on the show do simply because they think it’s funny. Shows such as ‘Jackass’ corrupt and pervert the imaginations of our youths and should be banned from television.
Otherwise, how are these kids going to learn to think up insane stunts for themselves?
When my friends and I were young teens, we didn’t have Johnny Knoxville, we didn’t have Tom Green and we didn’t care for the WWF. My parents wouldn’t even let me watch ‘Beavis and Butthead’ they feared the show would be a bad influence. We did, however, have imagination, creativity and the desire to stave off the monotony of our lame suburban town.
We certainly weren’t delinquents, though; we had jobs, we did well in school and we never got in trouble with the law. All we needed were a few household objects, and we could provide each other with (mostly) harmless, wild entertainment for hours.
We’d douse the seats of each other’s pants with lighter fluid, toss a match and proceed to run around with our asses on fire, screaming and laughing hysterically until the fluid burned out. And if the heat became too much, we could simply sit down and snuff the flames. This method never failed, except on one occasion when Luke’s screams of pain sent Nathan into such fits of laughter that he wet his pants. And how did he solve the problem of that unsightly stain on his crotch? Lighter fluid, match … poof. Dry as a bone. Sure, these stunts were immature and childish, and kids all over the world play with fire. But we had never seen it done before, and it was undeniably and purely fun.
Today, however, kids have become junkies for extremity. Hightowering a hotel bathroom (for a detailed explanation, please see http://people.bu.edu/
futhman/hightower.html) or mooning a crowd of elderly driving range patrons simply won’t satisfy them anymore. They’ve come to expect violence and stupidity as facts of life, and they’ve been robbed of the innocent pleasure that my friends and I and countless other youths once received by simply lighting each other on fire.
Sadly, the generation that has made a fortune by commercializing its own stupidity is at fault. Its members send a doubly dangerous message to kids: don’t think for yourself, but you can do everything that we do. My friends and I were pretty damn stupid, and we took a lot of risks, but our 15-year-old faculties contained us. We knew our limits, and through a series of trials and errors, we became all too familiar with our pain thresholds. But today, the mass marketing of stupidity has made ‘self-discovery’ a foreign phrase to kids as well as making me, at a mere two decades old, sound as cantankerous as Warren Zevon.
My schoolyard chums and I often flirted with the idea of pooling our resources, buying a video camera and attempting to market our then-special brand of teenage insanity. Looking back, however, I’m glad that we never preserved our deeds for posterity. In my memories resides an innocence that I’m neither young nor stupid enough to recapture, but upon which I gaze fondly nonetheless. I only worry that today’s youths, bombarded with violence and stupidity by every network from MTV to CNN, won’t be lucky enough to bask in the glowing, fleeting glory of a flaming heinie.
