A note going forward: The things that get discussed here happened a long time ago, and anything depicted here would likely be beyond the statute of limitations (what exactly is the s.o.l. for vandalism and senseless destruction?), and if it weren't, then everything depicted here is probably just fiction.

One of the themes I wanted to discuss was senseless destruction. I know that I am far from the only teenager that destroyed things for amusement. I'm not entirely sure what that was all about, really. Pent up subconscious anger? Some sort of expression of disrespect for the world? Destruction as art? Boredom? I'm not sure but I hope that eventually someone might read this and shed some light on these tendencies. What I'm really interested in though is the idea that a person can transform from literally being exactly like Beavis and Butthead, to something approaching Ward Cleaver or Father Knows Best. That is a complete 180, but I know that many have made this transition.

Today's story is about a walk through the woods on a beautiful day. In the suburb I grew up in, there were quite a bit of woods, that at some point in the 70's and 80's had a few different subdivisions built. My friend lived in one, and I lived in a different one, and between our neighborhoods there was a few thousand acres of woods. This was the early 80's, so if you weren't inside watching MTV or talking on the phone (pretty much the only reason to go indoors), then you were probably playing in the woods. We lived kind of far from anything cool to do (the mall was too far to bike to), and in the woods we kind of ruled the place. No parents or adults or cops, just the kids and we could pretty much do anything we wanted to out there. Come to think of it, the birth of my deviance took place in the woods. More on that later I guess.
Like any self-respecting 13 year old at the time, my friend and I both had wrist-rockets. For anyone that doesn't know, a wrist-rocket is a bad ass aluminum framed sling shot, that was completely illegal in the state I grew up in, and had to be purchased in the next state over. The ideal ammo is heavy ball bearings, about 3/8" diameter I think. The plastic handle of the thing holds about 100 or so of them. And of course rocks work ok in a pinch.
So anyway, my friend and I are out in the woods, its a beautiful late afternoon, the woods are quiet, and as we walk along the old single width trail we come to a huge scar in the woods, a new, harsh, ugly cut into the earth, with roots of freshly ripped out trees still sticking out of the ground. What the fuck is this? So we start following the new "road", and its soon obvious that we stumbled on to the leading edge of a much larger development. There were roads everywhere. We were walking around in the earliest stages of what would become a new neighborhood of about 200 homes. This neighborhood development would go on to be the scene of much mischief, all through high school. But on this particular day we walked and walked, marveling at how freaking big the scope of it was and what a drag it was that "our" woods were essentially being cut in half by the march of progress (and the pursuit of the yuppie dream, a 4 bedroom home, of a size just a little bigger than everything else in town). After surveying the whole thing, we eventually came upon the culprits that had wreaked such havoc on our woods. All of the road building equipment was just sitting there, all parked close to one another, with no operators around, or security guards in sight. We were about a mile into some fairly dense woods, and nobody was around but us...and our wrist-rockets. Over the course of about 20 minutes, we smashed every window of every machine out there. Every single one. None were spared. It was an absolute glass bath. And then as it got dark, we went home, and that was it.