Young and Dumb

For the past couple of days, I have been noticing a nice, fall weather that we have been lucky to have in South Dakota. With that, it sure brings back the memories of old, especially the days with the boys in Minnesota during our high school years.

Watching that Highlight tape sort of sparked an interest about the past. Up to that point, I took those memories for granted. Hell, it was only a few years ago, but now, some of those images on that video are 10 years old now. To me, it puts things in perspective. Watching the tape, I grew sad, thinking that we'll never re-live those moments again, but at the same time, I laugh -- because we were young and dumb.

But there is always something about the fall season that makes me a little bit excited. I do not know if it was football season at school, playing our 3-on-3 games of football at Mike's house, or simply road tripping up to Dawson to visit the ladies over there. The fall season has always been an enjoyable one in my mind -- with deer hunting around the corner and the trees turn color, it's just been wonderful.

Thinking back on all the dumb things we've pulled back in the day, I cannot imagine doing the same thing again. I mean, "what were we thinking?!" Some of that stuff, we could have easily gotten thrown in jail for -- now we've somewhat matured, it's just uncomprehensible to think that we did those things. Now days, whenever I head to Minnesota to visit, we get drunk (now legally) and talk about the old times.

Some examples:

"The Pizza Ranch" incident. Some were involved, others weren't -- but it all came down to the mixings of different salad dressings and somehow, SOMEHOW, somebody plugging the toliet with paper towels. Robb will argue to this day that we had nothing to do with that and I believe him. But the salad dressings -- guilty by association. We all got hit up with that -- Rick crying and we each had to pay $5. What a joke.

"The Abandoned House/Sanitorium" runs. Okay, maybe we were illegally trespassing here. But God, what fun! The Abandoned House was just a few miles where Mike lived, and this place was right next to the river. It was a beautiful place to have a farm -- sprawling pasture to the river, just sort of isolated. We used to take young freshman girls out there and scare the crap out of them -- of course, this was all planned ahead of time. The basement of that place was creepy, kind of reminded me of "The Blair Witch Project." The Sanitorium, well, that place is torn down now, but it used to be this huge hospital which treated TB patients back in the 1920's through the 1960's. This place was empty for years when we used to run around in there, spray paint on the walls, broken glass everywhere. Again, we used to set things up where people would go there ahead of time, paint their faces, and we'd bring people out there to scare them. Mike even had the balls to run up on the roof and run around -- but again, the basement of that place...

"The Dawson Trips" -- Ha, yes. We went up there because Robb wanted to get hooked up with "Spuds," and Mike once dated a girl up there. A couple of these trips were well documented on videotape, once for fun, the other when Sean, Robb, and I got stranded up there for the Super Bowl when it began to snow like hell. Classic moment -- "Spuds'" boyfriend was coming to Dawson and we were all there, so when he showed up, we hid behind the garage and when the boyfriend got inside,

Mike: "Make a break for it, Sean!"

Robb and Tony: "Go, go!"

(Everybody runs, jumps into Sean's car)

Mike: "Don't spill the beer! Don't spill the beer!"

Robb: "Haha, we made it! Woo-hoo!"

Everybody: "Yeah!!"

I'm not sure about the beer thing, since it was frozen anyway!

"The Raft Trips" -- okay, this was the epitamy of everything we had done when we were younger. The first year, Mike, Kevin, and Robb all took off down the river on a make-shift raft. It took them a while to get home (wasn't it 3 days?), but the boys documented the trip through a journal, which I actually have a web site of. The second year, I joined the group, so we had four people on a raft, but Kevin spent most of the time being pulled, hanging with the coolers. We encountered some heavy rains on that trip, especially when we were by a bridge. I jumped out and tried to steer the raft towards the shore underneath the bridge -- all this time my dad and brother were out looking for us, they were actually on the bridge but we couldn't hear them since the thunder and rain were so loud. After the rain stopped, the river really flowed, and we got hung up in a tree that fell into the river. Robb and Kevin got out so they could get the raft out of the tree, but the river was gushing so fast, they had to hang on to the tree to avoid getting swept away. During this time, Mike and I were taking pictures of them and eating animal crackers...yeah!

There were so many more memories of the past, too many to list them all. But if I can think of a good one, I'll post 'er.