the difference between when we were young, and nowadays ...

[Hugh_Lebowski]

[underpants]

1. No kidding

I pay the neighborhood kids top dollar for every hobo they bring me.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. What's the going rate?

I might want in on this action

[underpants]

5. Depends if they have transferable fingerprints

That Dustin is one sick little f’er let me tell ya.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

6. Alright, well just DM me the rate schedule then (nt)

[underpants]

7. 😆

[Rizen]

3. What is this "going outside to play" you speak of?

Does that mean texting?

[Hugh_Lebowski]

4. Not sure ... might be a euphemism for playing video games ...

I've never actually had kids, so ...

[d_r]

14. No.

Some video games are "open world" so you can go wherever you want to and explore.

[Yavin4]

8. Blame car culture. This video explains it better than I can.

&t=1s

[Niagara]

9. My great grandfather use to haul for Studebaker.

He would drive one and would tow the other to his destination. One day during one of his pit stops, a hobo climbed into the 2nd vehicle that was being towed. This hobo ended up passing away during the trip and my great grandfather was put in jail for possible murder. The coroner determined that the hobo died of natural causes and my great grandfather was then released from jail after the report.



So, even though my great grandfather didn't bring a dead body back to the house, he did tow one unknowingly for awhile.



True story.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

10. Hey, you know, who HASN'T inadvertently transported a dead body from one place to another at SOME

time in their life?

It's just a rite of passage where I come from.

That IS a good story though ... other than the dead person part I mean. Of course.

[Coventina]

11. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to survive to adulthood.

Going down to the crick to fish in the predawn dark all alone.

Day long bike rides through Seattle.

Hikes into the forest all alone.

Walks across frozen lakes.

Playing in alleys and other unsavory places.

Lordy, I don't know if my parents were too trusting or just oblivious.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

12. OMG you have no idea how many times I could've died ...

Esp. driving, as a teen ... on fairly serious drugs, fairly often. My friends deemed me 'the dude that can ALWAYS DRIVE!'. So ... I had to live up to that moniker, often.

And I spent 3 years in Hong Kong from 13-15, just going WHEREVER. Buying pot from sailors in Wan Chai, stuff like that.

But yeah, all that stuff you mentioned too. As an only child, I did tons of crazy stuff, all alone ... just go off into the forest by myself, or ride my bike places I told nobody I was going.

Good times, man

[Coventina]

13. OK, your stories definitely top mine! I was too shy and withdrawn as a teen to ever

get involved in the party scene.

But in my single digit years?

I was what they call now a "free-range child."

[Hugh_Lebowski]

15. Oh yeah, we all were free-range back then. At least in the fairly sheltered areas I lived in CA ...

Hong Kong was an exception, but in the early 80's ... it was pretty damn safe .. I mean, for a huge city mostly full of impoverished people, it was REALLY safe. Or it seemed that way. Or maybe it was just because I was white, I dunno.

I don't believe in the concept of 'someone looking out for me', but I gotta say ... it's a trip what I got away with, danger-wise in my life.

So far, anyway.

[wnylib]

16. Free range childood

There were no girls near my age in my neighborhood during my grade school years, so I often played with my brother, who was 3 years older. He was also a natural born gymnast. He boosted me up the trunk of a neighbor's oak tree, then followed to show me how to crawl the branches to the roof of their storage shed. From there, he demonstrated how to drop to the ground and roll. I trusted him completely and it worked, so we did it again until another neighbor called my mother.

He took me to an abandoned construction project a few blocks from our home, where the excavated foundation holes had filled in with water, forming two ponds. (This was a forbidden play area, so naturally we went there.) He tied together some "driftwood" (fallen tree branches from previous storms) to make a raft, then took it across one pond for a test run before letting me join him. Halfway across it fell apart and he swam to shore soaked and muddy. I helped him sneak into a basement window where he waited while I sneaked clean clothes to him to avoid letting my mother know what had happened.

He also took me to the bank of a creek, near the forbidden ponds, to slide down the bank on our sleds. The bank had saplings growing on it that I had to stear around. We had a contest to see how fast we could go to make it across the narrow creek at the bottom of the embankment.

We were city kids, but nobody stopped us from exploring my grandparents' farm alone when we visited. My brothers, both older than me, showed me a petrified tree trunk in the woods and fossil rocks on the creek bed. They also showed me a garter snake which I carried back to show my mother. She was on a lawn chair with her lunch plate on her lap, which went flying when she jumped up screaming at the snake. Then grandpa gravely warned me that he had seen copperheads on the farm that resembled garter snakes and told me how to tell the difference.

I slipped into the pigpen to see the piglets and, fortunately, my oldest brother was just outside the fence near me. He lifted me back outside the pen just before mama pig reached me, snorting up a storm over my presence near her babies.

In my free range teens, my best friend in junior high and I took scarey chances, like accepting a ride from a couple boys we had just met who were 5 years older than us. We gave them our phone numbers, but when one of them called my house, my mother freaked out over his age and how we met and ended all contact.

And so on. Somehow we survived.