Stupid Human Tricks

Cherry and I were discussing the time I murdered a salmon in Alaska…I was telling her that my SIL and I hit the fish in the head with a rock, hoping that would be kinder than leaving the poor fish to flop around and suffocate in the open air. This brought up the topic of suffocation for pleasure…how some people like to suffocate themselves just to the point of almost losing consciousness, because it gives them a high.

This reminded me of a very stupid trick my girlfriend Neva and I used to do, when we were in the 6th or 7th grade. I don’t know where we got the idea, where we heard of doing this…maybe at a pajama party or something, but when there’s nothing on TV and it’s too hot to go out and play? Let’s just kill a few brain cells, ‘K?

Here’s what we would do. I would bend at the waist, with my hands on my knees, and hyperventalate until I felt light headed. Then I would quickly stand up straight against the wall, with my arms crossed in front of my chest. Neva would then push my arms into my chest, forcing me up against the wall, and expelling all of the air out of my lungs, until I would pass out. Then it was her turn. Usually we were unconscious for so little time that we would just kind of slump over, but once I slid down the wall and scraped up my back, kind of like rug burn. Even though you were only out for a moment or two, I remember having long, vivid dreams, and waking up feeling spacey and like I had been out for hours.

Now I look back at this, and I think of the things that could have gone wrong, how we could have done serious damage. (Hey, this was before I tried taking Latin and French….maybe I killed my foreign language brain cells!) How we could have died due to our supidity. How incredibly stupid we were. And I hesitated to even tell you all this dumb story, because my mother reads my blog. And even though I’m 40 years old, and an adult, I don’t want to get in trouble. But, my mom lives about a thousand miles away from me, and has surely done some really dumb things in her life, so she probably won’t kill me. Plus she doesn’t want Maya to grow up without a mother…unless she’s planning on replacing me with a smarter one…

I wonder…does remembering these stupid things in my past make me more likely to be an overprotective parent, or will it lend me the grace to not kill Maya when I hear about her stupid human tricks someday?