I often reflect on all of the stupid things I have done when I was younger, and in sharing these stories with friends I have realized that many people have done some really dumb things-and yet today they are normal, productive members of society. I'm kind of fascinated by this duality, or maturation, or whatever it is, and this is something I hope to come back to at some point. But I also thought it might be fun to have a repository of the dumb things we do as kids. I only hope that I can capture the humor that I feel when we tell these stories.

I've had this domain for a couple of years now and have been wanting to write about this stuff and not made the time, but I read something today that made me want to finally start writing here. I read somewhere today that a company was doing "testing" involving smashing a shopping carts into a wall, and they apparently set a record by doing so at up to 70 mph. If only I had known there was a record to shoot for...When I first got my license I was a bit insane, and found my way into all kinds of trouble. My first car was a 73 Ford Maverick, that I bought from a mechanic at the station down the street from my house for $800. It was primer black and had a souped up engine (a 302 with 4bbl carb, high rise manifold, Hurst shifter, mag wheel and eagle GT tires). It was really too much car for a 16 year old, but I couldn't be talked out of it and I bought it with my own money.

One of the things my friends and I would do for fun was to smash shopping carts. There was a large shopping plaza with a supermarket at the back of it, and there was a huge, mostly empty lot to the side of and behind the supermarket. It was perfect place for doing dumb things in your car and not getting caught (in the days long before there were security cameras everywhere, obviously). I would cruise the rear parking lot, looking for that helpless shopping cart that had strayed from the pack and drive up to it slowly, giving it a few gentle nudges to get it into the proper alignment, then I would inch up to it, gently let the clutch out and floor it, blowing through 3 gears, getting the cart up to about 60 mph and just at the last second I would hit my brakes and turn away, sending the carriage smashing into the back wall of the supermarket. At that speed, the carts would seemingly explode into hundreds of pieces. Needless to say, we could only do 1 or two at a time before we'd flee to avoid arrest.