except I also used to put on his smoking jacket, put on Sinatra and read Playboy.

Only years later would I really what a caricature of masculinity that was and how big of a fraud he is.

in that we could think through this idiocy before actually doing it?

...both for kids sharing a dumbass challenge/thrill and for everyone else to find out about it and circulate warnings (with alarming pictures)?

I'm sure my merry band would have tried almost anything, had we access to the info….

was asphyxiated after trying to get high off of gasoline.

Put a bunch of blocks of dry ice in the double sink to make the drops of acid cooler...


four of us sat down in the dry ice heads below the smoke chilling in it. after a couple minutes we all started feeling really fucking woozy...

Apparently it sucks all the oxygen out of the air

I was a teen.

Coca Cola and paracetamol would get you high, it never worked for me. /sigh

I think some of us became possessed.

my parents were good for the seconal and codeine. My best friend's parents were big on amphetamines.

My mother - who took great pains to tell us that the ads on TV were all lies - swears this happened:

I had a bad inner ear infection. The doc called in Tylenol #3 and antibiotics for me; I was to get 1/4 pill of the T3. My mother told me to take the pill crumb and my ear would stop hurting and I could sleep. She says I starting jumping up and down, screaming, "Commercial! Commercial! Commercial!"

I just remember the ear infection

Well that, and play in traffic.

I remember going away to some far off place. I seemed to be gone for a real long time. When I recovered consciousness - it took a while to remember where I was and what was going on. Even though it seemed like I was gone for a long time, it was maybe 5 seconds.

We probably should have been more closely supervised. Looking back, that was a really stupid thing to do.

It dates at least to the thirties from stories I have heard.

Probably before that.

getting worse.

I think what it is is that we are being more disconnected from each other and from life generally, with each passing generation. It confuses us, we are lost.

I think it was called The Secret Language of Children (not the one by Shapiro) - anyway, it was primarily about linguistics and how there is a vast lore of children's games, rhymes, etc and how they are spread (an example: a skipping song popular in my grade school among 2nd graders featured Nixon and Johnson, but none if us knew who they were or who made up the song). At any rate, things like spinning until dizzy, holding the breath until nearly unconscious, other consciousness-altering games are common in children across all cultures, and always have been - and why is poorly understood.

#1, 2, and 3.

There's a reason we don't let kids control society.

Look at the mess our country is in.