The Invincible Man
I was getting my hair cut this week and the barber was making small talk as he negotiated my sideburns. We were talking about children and their chaotic injuries, and I mentioned my son’s space hopper/slide injury (see a previous Man Feelings for the full tale). He went on to relate some incredible stories of his childhood with his dad teaching him to ride a bike by seating him on it then letting him roll down a steep hill, and another one involving his friends climbing onto a shed roof to imitate an action film and one of them falling and breaking a collarbone.
I laughed as he told the stories and it made me think of all the similar tales from my own youth. Granted, I was mostly the sensible/boring one who stood on the sidelines watching while a friend did something ill-advised, but I still had plenty of examples come to mind. Here’s a couple:
It’s 2006 and my friends and I are all 20 years old and bored during the summer break from university. My friend, who I’ll identify as MP, asked if we wanted to go to his house “to smash some stuff up with a sledgehammer”. I should note that this friend is one of the cleverest, most able people I know, but he also has a streak of daredevil/thrillseeker which is perhaps what led us to the following moment:
The above gif shows the moment of impact (filmed by me) when MP smashed a hole in a can of lighter fuel, lit it on fire, then smashed the burning canister with a sledgehammer. It made a fireball which briefly engorged his entire upper body, and within half an hour of this video we were in an ambulance on our way to hospital trying to think of a convincing explanation for what we were doing while the medics tended to his burning skin. I think he still has a darker patch of skin on his arm to this day.
Years earlier, my pre-teen friends and I used to wander our rural village looking for something to do, and I remember discovering huge piles of vegetation and cut-down trees left by the local council as they worked on clearing a patch of scrubland in order to build houses. We ignored all the warning signs and climbed up these huge, mountainous birds’ nests of tangled branches and hedges, all trying to be the first to the top. Someone would accidentally drop something into the bottom of the piles and we’d scramble down there trying to dig out the penknife or bottle, with the entire structure wobbling precariously as the raw wood scratched and splintered at your skin. I have a vague recollection of someone falling and breaking an arm, but we just carried on.
The urge to be daft
I saw a video yesterday of a teenager setting off a firework on a moving bus and there’s a moment of pure chaos when it begins sparking and exploding uncontrollably and everyone on the bus dives for cover. I guilty recognised the same insatiable curiosity in the person filming it as I felt myself on that bored day in 2006 above, filming MP about to do something silly. “Isn’t it going to explode?”, I hear myself ask on the video. We both knew the answer. The firework video is horrifying on a different level: the selfishness, the true danger, the risk to all the bystanders who didn’t sign up for it. But I did see the parallels: men, and boys in particular, just seem to be innately drawn to doing stupid, dangerous things, and just pretending not to acknowledge the risks.
It would be easy to blame it on bravado: trying to impress others, not wanting to back down and risk not looking “hard”. But in MP’s back garden all those years ago there was nobody to impress. We were three clever young men at the start of our adult lives. But we were also bored and without supervision. It’s a dangerous combo.
I don’t have any good answers about why we do this. I bet every man reading this had a similar tale of youthful stupidity, though (let me know in the comments!). With distance we’re probably able to look back with mild horror at how wrong some of these pranks and games could have gone, but if we’re being honest, we knew that at the time too and didn’t try to stop it. Even now as a 37-year-old man I still find myself experiencing that same sense of “fuck it, let’s see what happens” when I experience that slight edge of chaos and excitement. Again, from the fringes: I’m not the guy who’s jumping into the fountain after too many pints. But I probably won’t try to talk a friend out of it, either…
Mini feels this week
In which Matt becomes Alan Partridge
The builders started work this week on converting my now-empty garden shed into a habitable space, soon to become my home office / music studio. While sorting out their hot drinks for the first morning, I asked the lead builder how he took his coffee. “Unleaded”, he said confidently, and carried on unloading the wood. “Okay great, so that’s one tea with two sugars, and a decaf coffee”, I repeated back. “No, normal coffee”, he clarified. All my builder-banter fell apart as I had to ask “wait, what does unleaded mean? Or do you mean black?”. He had to spell out that he was asking for a coffee with milk but no sugar, surely defeating the point of using a cool shorthand, and also—I’m fairly sure—using that shorthand wrongly BECAUSE IT DOES MEAN DECAF, RIGHT?!
Anyway, I made him his coffee and then went back to my silly little job telling computers what to do. My tip: just avoid slang. It complicates everything.
That’s it for another Man Feelings – thanks for reading! Tell me about any stupid, death-defying deeds you participated in as a youthful man, or share your theories about why men seem predisposed to putting themselves at risk of serious bodily harm just for the fun of it. Until next week!
— Matt