Introduction

Marilyn Monroe was entombed on the day I was born. I’m about as old as the first computer video game (Spacewar), LEDs, The Jetsons, audio cassette tapes, the internet, Taco Bell, Spider-Man, and silicone breast implants. I’m about a year older than Doctor Who (the TV show), lava lamps, and the computer mouse.

And civil rights.

That’s my generation; I was a child in the 60s.

shrug

Yes, I probably should have written this when the anniversary would have been a nice round 50 years, but it took me longer than I was expecting to figure out what I wanted to say (and I continue to revise a decade later). Now, I know:

  • You have your nature.
  • You have your nurture.
  • You have your emergent properties of their interaction.

And that’s about it, really.

I know that it’s been said before, but I just wanted to say it too.

The rest of this book simply fills in the details.

* * *

So if you’re just here for the stories about my oddball life and you are not interested in the more systemic view that ties it all together, then you’ll want to skip ahead. The story chapters should be easy to identify within their first few lines, and you can just ignore the remainder (which would be almost everything outside of the Story Part).

After all, this book is quite like a chicken: some parts are lighter than others, some bits process more easily than the rest, and sometimes you need to bring home a whole bucket just so everyone can find a piece that they want (with the coating that they prefer) and then you can stick the leftovers in the fridge for when you get more desperate. Also, some folks like to eat gizzards, hearts, cartilage, or to obsessively worry away at the periosteum (and even dig into the marrow). Who knows, this book might lay an egg. Plus it pecks into crap to look for seeds.

Clearly, a lot of life fricasees down to deciding when to push an analogy too far.

* * *

It was perfectly safe for me and my brother (Jeff) to burn a gasoline-sprinkled, firecracker-laden, six-foot-tall toothpick sculpture in our backyard, because there was no reasonable way for us to predict such mystical influences as the flammability of the model glue, the jack-in-the-boxing of the flaming wreckage whenever one end of a springy arch burned away, the need to run over and pull the dog out of harm’s way, and the blazing bits that hurtled into the dry, dead tree in the neighbor’s yard whose branches dangled menacingly over the old leaf pile.

Talk about your dynamic opportunities for personal growth. If only this sort of thing had happened daily, instead of just a few times a week, I might have developed better strategies for coping with interpersonal rules.

Okay, that look on your face (well, not on yours perhaps, but most certainly on theirs) suggests that I’ve just leapt too far, so let me fill in the gap a bit.

 * * *

What you learn about concrete objects will teach you something about dealing with more abstract ones. While this is true at any age, you have to start simply; after all, you can’t honestly expect a kid to thoroughly navigate a sophisticated set of branching consequences (i.e., to fully anticipate what the wind, dog, glue, and sudden-release-of-mechanical-energy-stored-in-an-elastic-object might do, both separately and in permutations). They first have to experience some of these sorts of complex events, and of course live through them, otherwise the point is moot.

(OK, here’s another chance to skip straight to the Story Part.)

Once survived, these concrete examples (ideally) warn them about the potential risks that might occur in similar circumstances, where those associations become more abstract over time. (Language development research shows that our appreciation for metaphor and other figurative forms grows over the entire course of one’s lifespan.) So the physical safety issues simply walk point on the kid’s need to develop mature strategies around less tangible types of risks, such as finding out whether their significant other (not just the sculpture) is held together with volatile adhesives before they take the risk of setting that person on fire. (Figuratively, one might hope.)

Therefore, I am a better person today for having laid incendiary siege to my learning environment. With that in mind, then, I can say with some confidence that the whole toothpick episode was entirely worth it.

So, as you grow (and not just “get”) older, the tricky part is to generalize this risk-assessment skill to run a different kind of maze, one that involves gracefully navigating emotional, spiritual, social, and other non-physical obstacles without subjecting your neighbors to a brilliant cascade of smoldering debris. In fact, the most common thread binding this story collection would be my (mis)adventures in and around the development of this (dis)ability. It’s about how my way of thinking/feeling/believing affects whether people and other things get (and not just “grow”) hurt or not.

Which is not an entirely obvious thing to point out about this book; that is to say, it’s not trivially true of every book just because almost all of them involve people and their problems (one way or another). Some folks are much better pilots than I am, so they are less likely to have any sort of unusual problems around this kind of pathfinding. Their stories, then, are much more likely to focus on more complicated skills; for example, even if you already communicate well with some people, there are higher-order problems that can crop up.

Which all comes down to saying that this book is about (a) childhood thrillseeking behavior (b) as it matures with the risk-assessment centers in the forebrain (c) as those risks shift to address increasingly complex matrices involving people’s feelings. Then add the bit about this happening (d) in a brain and body with relatively spectrumy/healthily-psychotic/empathic/highly-sensitive processing.

And while the physical aspects of these stories (such as the injuries and explosions) are all just metaphors for the process of learning to deal with non-physical challenges (like keeping a friendship from blowing up), I will not belabor that in the book, so you can read this material at whatever level you prefer without my pestering you about it one way or the other. (Usually.)

* * *

For what it’s worth, there is no “cure” for us, which is just as well (from my perspective) because I like being this way. Besides, any research efforts that I might have made in that direction would likely have involved dangerous experiments with dubious chemicals, whistlingly high voltages, various classes of fire, antiques of questionable provenance, increasingly sharp objects, and ruggedly individualistic lifestyle choices. I was once on the brink of developing a ten-point plan, but steps three through nine suffered severe burns when I took the case off of the laser printer to watch it work. (Step seven will never be the same.) It seemed like a good idea at the time.

That said, thrillseeking itself is a perfectly normal mammalian thing to do, and in fact it is so common that some less-than-perfectly normal mammalians do it as well. Just ask any (perfectly normal or not) mammalian to tell you their story, or stories, about how they almost died in childhood. I know very few who don’t have at least one such story of grievous injury, and the most intrepid surviving daredevils often have several such tales, each of which goes with its own set of scars.

Please keep firmly in mind that I’m not talking about anyone who has really suffered through some sort of illness or tragedy, fatal or otherwise, that wasn’t their own stupid fault. This book is not intended to make light of those people or events; it’s dedicated to all those kids like my brother and me who, for reasons not properly exposed until now (sorry about saying “exposed”), have time and again engaged in stunts from which any sane individual would have fled shrieking (or at least laughing maniacally), stunts which seemed to be designed from the outset to maim, bruise, mangle, ruffle, fold, scrape, staple, concuss, and mutilate their all-too-willing participants. Some of these events rise to a level that experts refer to as “taleworthy catastrophe.”

And none of these stories is intended to get anyone to actually try anything; in fact, I beg you to avoid repeating these events, and ask you to notice that each of these stories has a moral which is usually something along the lines of, “Don’t do this!” Not that story morals ever really stopped anybody, but I am making a good faith effort to indemnify myself (and my heirs and assigns, or whatever).

* * *

Thrillseekers are like a dog, a cat, and a raccoon, all rolled up into one curious carnivore. They’re obsessed with rummaging through other people’s stuff and taking home the best things for later experimentation. Such animals love to be stimulated by their environment. Just take a look at a cat playing with string, or pulling all of the tissues out of a box, or consider the lengths to which animal caretakers go to keep gorillas from being bored, such as giving them towels and reams of paper to play with. It actually takes a highly trained mind to sit around and think of nothing for any length of time without going absolutely nuts.

Humans tend to need sensory stimulation, or they go berserk. Thrillseeking children just seem to need it more. These kids are often described as accident-prone or unlucky (when not foolhardy, overly expensive to maintain, or too clever for anyone’s good). Far from being unlucky, however, they are the children who survive to tell the tale. Even though I’ve been mangled to varying degrees in a wide variety of interesting ways, I’ve always been lucky enough to heal so well that the accidents have had no permanent physical effect, other than the ritual scars and healed bones, of course, and the parental grey hair. (My dad says that he skipped grey and went straight to bald.) Luck only determines whether some unpredictable factor is going to come along and throw a monkey-wrench into the works, such as with the toothpick sculpture.

What this all comes down to is that thrillseeking children are paramount tempters of Fate. They are not merely interested in the entertainment of the moment, but in the massive potential for living through hours of excitement if something should hopefully go quite and utterly wrong.

So, whether you simply browse the stories off the top, or make a determined effort to dig into the theory, I hope that you enjoy yourself.

[Dedication]

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