contextless core memory dump (don’t doxx yourself, keep it relatively vague)
got punched in the face for playing keep-away with a school lunch cookie (I was being really annoying about it)
Being 6, walking through the dimly lit gem vault at the natural history museum on a quiet day and wanting to curl up on the carpet and sleep in there
Shoplifting 3-packs of Bic lighters, then throwing them at a concrete barrier to make them explode. Broad daylight, alone.
This girl I met online when I was like 14. We were in the same forums and kinda developed crushes on each other. Eventually we both realized we'd probably never meet IRL, and we both had more feasible options in town. We opted instead to help each other land the ones we wanted. Which, in the end, wound up being just a case of picking each other's brains about how teenage boys and girls are.
I think she wound up dating her local crush for a bit. Mine turned out to be gay.
Mid September, 2001. I asked my dad if "everyone is sad about 9/11" includes the cows in the field. He looked at me and said yes, even the cows are sad.
Regularly played soccer in the parking lot with a few friends and one of their dads. The dad would play us 3v1 and say that if we won, he'd buy us each a pack of Pokemon cards. He let us win, but we didn't know. He offered us triple or nothing. We took the bet, and he hustled us and told us not to be greedy and press our luck.
getting facts-and-logic'ed into admitting to myself that I was not straight by a like, very overbearing junior or senior, as a freshman in hs.
I just like, wouldn't hypothetically rule out dating my friend or something and I guess lack of visceral disgust was an immediate tell. She was kind enough to not blab about it. I asked if my friend felt the same way eventually, after much prodding from her. It was a no. I think I cried, which was very rare back then. And I told nobody
I am queer as fuck it turns out so ig she kinda nailed it. I often wonder what happened to her, we only really talked for like a few months freshman year but it was a very formative time.
Opening a new savings account after a family move (back then, people encouraged children to save their pocket money to teach the value of thrift)
I mentioned to the banker were I had had an account in the old city, and he told me that they were in a lot of trouble. It was part of the Savings and Loan fiasco of the late 1980s.
I remember some kids stopped bullying me in third grade because they learned I could draw dinosaurs pretty well
If only we were all so lucky 😔
Autumn of 1969, sending encrypted letters to the Chronicle.
At an arcade for a friend's birthday, my dad told me and my friend that if anyone made fun of friend's brother's condition, we could beat the shit out of them and he wouldn't tell anyone.
Same outing: Like 6 other kids helping me beat the arm wrestling machine
I saw my mother naked at 7yo so I started crying and pretended to have fainted (because I saw that in a cartoon), then my grandpa told me I will see more naked women in the future while laughing
I took a sip of my own piss because the doctor had me pee in a cup during an appointment. I had no concept of urinalysis and just assumed he was thirsty, leaving me with the question "well does it taste good?"
I think I was four at the time.
Well, how was it?
I remember it being mostly salty but with a subtle, yet extremely distinct flavor that was somewhat similar to bile.
I developed a one of those celebrity crushes on Sarah McLachlan after listening to Fumbling Towards Esctasy during one of my lonely summers between the school years. I thought her voice was so pretty and the more I listened to it the more convinced I was that she was a lesbian. I was utterly devestated when her wikipedia page contained no mention of being gay or bi. In fact, she was married to a MAN. I remember being in a funk over this for a couple days afterwards and deciding to interperet the album through my own sapphic lens, even if the artist herself was not that way at all.
Very normal twelve year old boy behavior.
Renting video games and movies at the local version of Blockbuster, and then watching all those stores shut down as internet access became widespread. I still remember the store, crappy red carpet included. They even tried Blu Ray rentals, including a Blu Ray player or PS3 rental, as a last ditch effort to stay in business, but went bust anyways.
Also remember riding my bicycle up the steepest hill in history as a five year old. Went back to that hill as an adult decades later. It actually barely was a hill, I was just a weak and small five year old.
Ah, the spine of a blockbuster video game rental box peering out like an old trophy, the unreturned spoils of childhood trickery
Me and my friends throwing a giant dildo on top of the roof my friends house, we never retrieved it
Epic airsoft gun battle where a bunch of us hopped in the back of a friends pickup truck to track down some other people running around the neighborhood
Watching Weird All Yankovic perform "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" in like 3rd grade and noticing an older girl (middleschool or older maybe) with super short pixie cut hair and crushing hard
making an ant village out of sticks at my summer camp and genuinely being distraught when it collapsed after it rained
accidentally snipping off my eyebrow trying to pantomime what someone else in my cabin did (snip off their eyebrow)
one of my synagogue friends getting sent home from camp early for shooting at one of the Israeli counselors (inactive-duty tyrant larper) with a longbow (he missed) (beast mode anyhow)
Throwing a deodorant can in a pile of burning leaves in middle school. It booms
I learned how to hawk loogies and one day at lunch, I did it on the jungle gym at lunch. Hit another kid right between the eyes. He looked so upset and I felt terrible
Same year, there was one boy who was bigger than the others and he liked tickling others. One boy was on the ground laughing so hard and I tried to pull him off because I hated being tickled. The bigger kid threw his hand back and hit me and I saw a flash of stars for the first time.
I did a cartwheel in class during a dance party and crashed into the corner where we piled the desks.
A kid accused me of stealing his pencil and got his friends to treat me like shit. His mom and my mom went to the same gym and they had logo pencils because Jazzercise was a thing. One of the kid would talk shit to me during silent reading time. But my mom taught me to curse after school and the next day I told him to shut the fuck up. Didn't get caught either. My only regret is that I didn't steal that pencil.
seeing my mom's used maxi pads in the trash and calling 911
Oh, that is funny.
When we were little, my neighbor was sticking peanuts up his nose, throwing his head back and then blowing them out like a rocket. Watched my brother imitate him, but he shoved the peanut WAY too far up and he had to go to the doctor to get it removed.
My parents still blame me decades later because I didn't stop him. I maintain my innocence.
Running around at my friend's house, I tripped and slit my leg open on a small rock. I looked down and instead of blood, I saw white. Then the blood poured out. Somehow managed to avoid stitches.
My friend's dad dug up the rock later and it turned out it was a boulder.
as a child i went to pick up what i thought was a pinecone but was in fact a very big slug (it was dark out). i screamed and then my grandpa laughed at me. where i live now i only ever see tiny slugs sometimes.
had a similar situation with what i thought was a rubber snake toy. i scared the poor snake so bad picking it up so quickly. I can't blame this one on it being dark out as it was in broad daylight
Driving over a big bridge and my sister opened the car door
Coming up with the setting for a game of pretend and it was literally just communism
Totally thought I was being kidnapped, but had to play along (sing along) to The Real Slim Shady on repeat for like an hour in the car. The song still makes me weird.
some fuckass game on the ps2 that was not spyro (nor ape escape as I vividly remember playing that) that was a collectathon (I genuinely can't remember any further even though I've scoured through my dads old stuff)
fishing a big teal rock out of a tree in the schoolyard (someone elses yard that intersected into it) and thinking it was aquamarine so we broke it into pieces between us three. the one guy in the mix got too cocky and tried to threaten us to call the cops which would make us give him our rocks (he thought he deserved them) but we just stopped talking to him. still have the rock.
never actually bothered to identify it
being eight-ish years old, bouncing on my parents bed while eating marshmallows. I decided to start throwing marshmallows into the light fixture while It was on, of course. My mom found me on the bed, halfway through my jump shot and just about beat the brakes off my ass, with her flip flop. Afterwards I had to help remove the fixture, clean the caramelized sugar off of it, and then reinstall it. The whole time, tears just running like a river.
One time I was at my great grandmothers house visiting family I had never met (I was five or six). My great grandma lived out in the boonies in north Mississippi with no electricity, no running water, outhouse on the edge of the property that moved locations once its current spot had no more room. She had a cuckoo clock in the hallway and I was afraid of it. I remember sneaking down the hallway where it was, and when it went off I screamed and started crying. I remember telling my mom that her Uncle Erskin and her Uncle Claud both beat me. I remember her uncle Claude calling me a derogatory term from the late 1800s, used to demean black men particularly. It took me 30 years to remember the term correctly, and then look it up to see wtf it was. Fuck you Claud. Greatest Generation my ass.
I remember not being able to convince my mom to let me have ice cream for dinner so I held my breath till I nearly lost consciousness, fell down and cracked the back of my skull hard enough that I got mildly concussed and had to get a half dozen stitches on my head to fix it. I don’t remember how old I was then, but I’m 46 now and I can still feel the scar on the back of my head.
I hope you can have ice cream for dinner now.
And I’m really sorry they hit you.
Oh hell, this was like 35 years ago. Shit was just different back then. Maybe it was all the tetraethyl lead pollution in the air or all the paint chips we collectively ate because our parents wanted us to build character or some shit. I’ve never spanked my kids, so the very little bit I got spanked stopped there.
my dad (trying to advocate for me) having a 4-hour long conversation with a teacher about my accommodations that played out like when a chatbot gets caught in a dead-end and refuses to iterate
hitting my friend (aforementioned face-puncher) with a visitor lanyard (multiple times) (stimming) on an overnight field trip where the school didn't let me have my ADHD meds
also duping the Terra Blade for this friend on Terraria Mobile with the old chest glitch
the couch that my parents had when i was very young (younger than 6) was poorly upholstered and had some staples or something that were not flush. i was sitting on the couch and swinging my legs and hitting one of them with my achilles and it hurt like a mf
I think i stole every game manual from every game i rented when i was young
My cousins introducing me to Dragon Ball when I was 5.
I used a mod chip from our game store to play Dragon Ball GT Final Bout on the PS1.
For me it was when I was like 8 ::: spoiler DBZ spoilers Krillen getting exploded by Freeza right into super saiyan :::
The shower scene with Bulma?
yelling at the TV in my foyer with a friend, trying to sing along to the skylanders drill bot. we kept hearing it because we sucked at the fight
Tying star wars action figures to the ceiling fan with fishing line and turning it on.
Those things would be worth a fortune today
My dad's red pickup truck burned up in the driveway.
I actually cried about it and had nightmares. It was fine, really, no one was hurt and the truck was old. It caught on fire because my dad was burning ditches and his gas tank had a tiny leak. He made it home fine, didn't get burned at all, but the truck burned quite a lot, it was quite charred and my young self was pretty freaked out.
My parents got divorced. One day I was in the kitchen and my dad had just dropped me off and left. My mom just got back from jogging and she came in and smiled at me. Then she had the weirdest expression I had ever seen on her face or anybody's face. She also sounded odd and unlike herself. She said "Your dad is perfectly okay but his car caught fire." He really loved that car.
My mom was a good person but my dad was a real asshole in any number of way. For example - she always had to tediously ask him to pay child support on time. Right then she didn't want to seem like she was enjoying the situation. She tried as hard as she could she couldn't manage it. Her facial muscles were at war with one another and her vocal cords weren't quite cooperating.
I wanted to go see. He had just driven just a very short way so it took us only about a minute or two to walk there. She made me stand on the other side of the street as we watched it burn. And, man, did it burn.
My Dad sent our cat down my childhood slide
Watching an apartment complex engulfed in flames from the balcony of our own apartment across the street/a block away (can't remember exactly how far away it was)
Bouncing a recently sharpened pencil up and down on my desk and suddenly getting stabbed by that pencil and the tip broke off in my hand under my skin (I never got it out)
Broken pencil graphite under the skin is a schooltime experience I do not miss. That shit sucks!
getting so excited after hatching the Century Dragon in DragonVale that I forgot it was 4am and I woke up my Dad who was absolutely ticked and made me uninstall the game (probably for the best tbh)
I stepped on one of my mom's pin cushions as we were watching a movie
stapled my thumb through the thumbnail on the last day of school because I thought it was unset and I pushed up on the staple hole (attempt at Good Samaritan behavior) (it was a curved-back stapler)
daaaamn that reminds me, one of my earliest memories as a kid was somehow stapling the roof of my mouth. and I remember it being multiple staples, somehow. my dad heard me screaming and took them out lmao
Oh god, this happened to me too!
I had to pull it out myself because I was alone at the time and it was probably the beginning of my fear of pointy things
Playing beyblade tournaments during recess and I was the one with the portable stadiun
Watching the important videos Playlist on the tv, it somehow cutting out to an impractical jokers episode and we kept watching it for like 5 minutes waiting for the joke
burning trash on the trash pile
a small firecracker exploding in my hand
winning handily at checkers against someone sober while I was tripping pretty hard
having to pull a car out of a ditch after the driver puked on themself after taking a big hit off a fat joint I rolled
My first time hacking an online game was GunZ online, where me and a friend used a packet editor to capture the death/revive packets, and alternate sending them super fast so the other player gets max exp, then switching off so I can do it to my account.
My absolute earliest memory is me looking up at some dinosaurs in a dark room with flashes of light and loud noises and being terrified, only to get to the end and find out it was an amusement park ride. I never found out which ride or amusement park it was.
The day I finally beat racing my friend to the best swing on the playground. He was typically always faster than me, including after that day.
I totally would have got to pet that cool looking crab if my cousin didn't push me off that rock we were climbing.
Playing with mom’s hair and pretending it was a curtain in her bed while she watched Dateline.
My dog Woody laying in the grass outside the window while I cried about not understanding my homework.
Eating sticky rice and soy sauce at my aunt and uncle’s house, and his bracelet that looked like two snakes.
got interviewed in a bulk thing and my vibes were so immaculate the newscasters commented on me specifically after-action
I think we need to see the broadcast.
without doxxing myself all I can say is I was too enamored with my lunch to not continue eating it during my answer and I also interjected some asides about how good it was in the middle of answering
Idk
Shitting in a bucket to impress a friend, and covering it with sand
Standing in a tree while reading from my English textbook.
