Teenage pyromania: C/D

He Wasn't A Pyromaniac (He Just Loved Arson' Around With Matches)

Sorry....

Also, we would spray one of our hands with this strawberry-scented air freshener and light it on the stove, producing a Johnny Storm effect ("Flame on!"), then quickly rub the burning hand with the other to put it out.

We both survived to adulthood with no tragedies.

A large tree.

http://www.webspawner.com/users/forestcustominterior/oak%20tree%20logo.jpg

A swimming pool.

http://www.jacksons-camping.co.uk/kidstuff/images/pool.jpg

A cricket scoring hut.

http://www.slrcricket.co.uk/images/scorea.jpg

I was more of a childhood pyromaniac too -- this popped up today http://blogs.vocalo.org/gspitzer/2010/08/clever-apes-3-%E2%80%93-playing-with-fire/35424

I had completely forgotten about setting fire to virtually everything i could afford to waste when I realized that this is "a thing" kids go through. I didn't have siblings, so I thought all of the weird things I did were just things I did.

Please note: I never actually ruined anything, I just liked to watch stuff burn, little stuff: pieces of paper, food, leaves, little insignificant stuff no one would miss if I burnt it to ash. One day I had a brilliant idea. I took a long thing of kitchen twine and wrapped it around the trees in our considerably wooded backyard. I had the plan of making this crazy knot around all of the trees and setting it on fire. What a fantastic idea! No one would miss the string and I would get a fantastic light show!

My friends and I used to roam through the woods near my house armed with hairspray and bic lighters. We set fire to rocks and tree trunks. Good times.

Also, I once set my own hand on fire and had to quickly shove in my friend's toilet.

I had siblings and I still burned things. Our stove didn't have working pilot lights, so we always had lots of matches in the kitchen to light the burners with. Strangely enough, the kitchen was the same room where I was left for hours to "do the dishes" after dinner.

To avoid clearing the table, I'd burn things for HOURS in the sink, and wd light candles and use the hot wax to stick toothpicks together into rafts which I'd float in the sink. I think the last straw was when I accidentally melted a plastic rain ponch in our basement (doubtless my mother thought I was doing laundry) and Mom smelled it and caught me and lost her shit because I could have burned the house down.

The moral of my story is: don't send your children to other parts of the house to do chores.

Man, what's up with childhood pyromania? Doesn't anyone want to know if I lit my backyard on fire?

Amanda, I feel like your story is unfinished. Did you light the twine on fire? Did you burn down the entire town? What happened? ha xp1

I left it unfinished so someone would ask! My dad stopped me before I could get too far, and I had to sit in my room and think about what I had done. Or almost done. :(

These are good stories, btw. Keep em comin. If we were all friends from the block imagine what things we would have set on fire!

Apparently my friends once threw a burning bottle of rubber cement into a storm drain and therefore set an entire storm drain on fire.

I, unfortunately, missed this event.

You're lucky you had cool friends who liked to blow shit up. Was this in high school or gradeschool?

I didn't have any friends on my block except this one girl who was a totally insufferable braggart. One time she was boasting about her family's new VCR and then she told me that her dad was taking her to see Air Supply and I was just I CANNOT TAKE YOU ANYMORE, MISERABLE BRAGGART.

You're lucky you had cool friends who liked to blow shit up.
Not always a good thing, I realize

http://a3.vox.com/6a00fae8ba9105000b00fa9677cc930003-500pi

lol

This was probably in 8th-10th grade? By eleventh grade I think we had moved on.

So is this pyromania just related to the general teenage need for wanton destruction? Or did we like the pretty light too?

I was not a teenage pyromaniac, so I cannot answer that question. My parents' thorough shaming about the trees worked on me.

Huh. So how old were you when all this went down?

note: even though my belief was basically, if you ruin something important, ur doin it rong

i was probably 8? 9? this was also during the era of balloon animals, stilts, carpentry sets, anything to stay busy

My friend Kris and I did the hair spray/spray paint flamethrower thing.

A group of my friends apparently burned down a hay bale while on a Boy Scouts field trip and got caught and had to pay him back. Fortunately I wasn't in Boy Scouts.

I think I was the same, LL! Pre-teen/adolescent. My brother went through his destructive phase slightly later and got in biiiiig trouble as a teen for things like smashing windows out of an abandoned car. I preferred fire for its transformative powers, over brute force (at least I like to think).

Did anyone else have bonfires as lol midwestern teenagers? I think this is part of the appeal. For teenagers this seems pretty outward manifestation of secret inside feelings, but still. Not sure that's true for kids?

This thread needs some Bruce
Dude was way into fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5PoIrcyd34

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p2gu51Ji3s&feature=related

We had giant family bonfires on Halloween for most of my life. We'd invite our school friends and their families, and my dad would burn the annual brushpile from all his clearing & tree-cutting activities of the previous year that were piled up to dry all summer. I'm talking, he had to call the fire department a couple of days before and warn them that he was going to have this thing, so no one would accidentally call in a fire sighting.

People would come over after trick-or-treating and have hot dogs and Chex mix and conversation and FYRE.

That's awesome.

That sounds idyllic! xp

this thread makes me think of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pJ5wwwsZQ

and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3zo5KvtJX4

Please note: the fire of Bruce Springsteen and the fire of setting the backyard on fire are not the same. I was way into the pretty light, not much into the fiery loins, although it's possible that this also coincides with my childhood BOSS MANIA, so who knows.

Do all kids do this? Clearly there are several of us, but are we just birds of a feather?

It sort of was! We didn't live in a neighborhood, but sort of in the country without sidewalks or anyplace to walk TO. You had to give people a reason to drive to your house and get together, so we did.

Some male classmates of mine lived nearby and thought they were a) awesome and b) super into hunting and "jungle commando" activities, and they'd sneak through the woods and watch us, or sneak around front and toilet paper our driveway while we were in the back yard. One year, one of our neighbors at the party heard them and decided to double-back to his house, get his bb gun, and out-sneak the sneakers. I think they ran pretty fast once a couple of them got pegged with bbs.

lol midwest.

Laurel this is poetry, I preferred fire for its transformative powers, over brute force (at least I like to think).

interesting phrase structure (i'm thinking about this because i am trying (and failing) to get ready for work)

All kids do this and it ends when the burning piece of paper they throw into the metal waste basket flame-leaps higher than they ever thought it would.

I used to light a candle just to have the material for wax fingertips - I'd dip the wax fingers in ice water for as long as I cold bear and then touch the back of my sister's neck with my cold waxy fingers. Then I'd try to peel off the little cups in one piece and stack them up.

omg i totally did that too, but i didn't have a sister
i played the piano with my wax fingers

I did wax fingers as well.

I also one pour melted wax into this little jar I had, in successive layers from different colored candles. I was an artist. I still have this jar somewhere.

that should be "once poured"

Oh lols I did that too, with the wax on fingertips! Candles, maaaang.

I would also fill up my plastic Victorian tea set with water and, when I was supposed to be going to sleep at night, would instead play all kinds of imaginary games that involved trying to sip it as slowly as possible, trying to drink from the cup the wrong way around (or upside-down, or lying down, and usually spilling most of the water), or pretending it was alcohol and acting the way I thought a drunk person would act at a faaaabulous party. This has nothing to do with pyromania and everything to do with being a kid who spent a lot of time alone/feeling alone.

Note: I had never ever seen a drunk person in my life. I don't even know what I thought I was emulating, I think I thought you were supposed to have a better time than everyone else and be more colorful and more...lively.

Aw, that's adorable.
I did that too, in my own way, in my cardboard house that I built and cleared room for in the attic. My companions were little stuffed mice with tutus on (I had two). Sometimes my dog would join me.

That was before I had discovered fire.

I was also really into cooking at the time, too. My parents got a Cuisinart and I was really into it and smelling the spices in the spice drawer.

My bedtime throughout most of my childhood was like 8pm. I wasn't tired at 8pm. As long as I kept quiet enough and didn't turn on any lights, I could pretty much do what I wanted until my parents came upstairs to bed. I did not light fires in my bedroom, though.

I used to do lots of shots of grape and/or apple juice and pretend to get really drunk.

I assume I just got this from Raiders of the Lost Ark

Oh, maybe that WAS it! I don't specifically remember but it would make sense.

So, if all kids liked to play with fire and destroy things, how come I never did? I liked watching fire, but the idea of deliberately setting one never popped into my head. I once got angry and destroyed one of my mother's lamps and I was so horrified by my actions that it haunted me for years.

My youngest brother's pyro stage of a few years ago was pretty imaginative. I remember visiting my family and he had filled this 2-liter bottle with gasoline. The plan was to put it on its side, take off the lid, light the gas on fire, and jump up and down on the bottle so he could watch fire come out in bursts. It took quite a while to convince him this would actually be a really bad idea.

My playing w/candles & fire stage ended when I lit all my eyebrows (two), and all my teased & Aqua Net-filled, dyed black gothics hair on fire. It was so FAST. Just a nanosecond of HOT and a whooshing sound and bye bye eyebrows, bangs & front half of hair.

Wow, see I knew there were some more good stories here. I'm very sorry about your hair. I think my fear of that was intensified when my friend's mom lit her eyebrows on fire while igniting the pilot light for their stove. She had pretty major burns.

When I was about 10-11 kids in my neighbourhood apparently used to use cans of deodorant + matches as some kind of flame throwers, until one time the flame went BACK INSIDE THE CAN and blew up in a kid's face. No idea if this ever actually happened but my best mate SWORE she knew the kid whose face still had bits of metal can in it.
I definitely went through a phase of buying matches and lighting stuff when I was a kid, but only small stuff in the middle of nowhere, bits of rubbish etc.

I totally wish I had time to read all the wonderful stories on this thread! Will try and catch up on the bus ride home from work.

I burned the hell out of all kinds of shit as a kid. It was weird because I was totally afraid of burning to death, yet I played with fire in a pretty cavalier manner in my bedroom. One of my favorite games was flicking lit matches at my friends across the room.

My penchant for lighting things on fire turned out to serve me well in my later teenage years -- I was once smoking a cigarette in my bedroom when my father knocks on the door. Obviously I put out out the cigarette and hid it, but the room still reeked of smoke. However, I was able to convince him that I was just "burning paper" and he believed me because, hey, that was probably something I would do.

I was on my way to work when I remembered that I was shunned at a slumber party once because I was lighting bugs on fire. I had just changed schools and was in 8th gr at a public school after 7 years at an all-girls private school. I didn't know these girls very well, and I didn't really have many friends so I was excited when they invited me to the party. Then I let loose with the "let's set bugs on fire" business and they didn't really dig that.

i was just talking with my mom about the backyard and all the time i spent out there, and i reminded her about my pre-teen pyromania and she claims very little memory of it. i informed her that it was the tip of the iceberg of things she didn't know, best we leave it at "i almost tried to set the backyard on fire for fun" and we loled.

My parents had an extensive collection of matchbooks that they had collected throughout their relationship through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. All these places they had been on dates or out for drinks. Not in a fancy display or out in public, but filling up a giant paper grocery sack in a cabinet in the basement. Burned through all those in a year or so. Usually lighting one match to burn up a whole pack, watching the big magnificent flare. They never made a big deal out of it, I guess. Never caught me burning anything else.

I was always setting things on fire out in the woods, but only once did I start setting someone's lawn on fire on a hot dry day in summer. I quickly stamped it out. It wasn't someone who I had any beef with or anything. I just wanted to light some grass on fire and they had a brown patch on their lawn.

Apparently my dad actually burned down someone's field when he was a kid.

I loved sitting up in my room melting plastic cassette cases.

One time I took a roll of toilet paper out into our court to light it on fire. It flamed up really big so I got nervous about getting caught and kicked it into the sewer and walked away. Problem solved! But the sewer was full of dry leaves and they all caught on fire, soon attracting the attention of my mom and one of my friends' moms. They dragged a garden hose down to the street and put it out the sewer fire.

Don't know how I managed to not get in trouble for that one.

those matchbooks would have been a great graphic design primer if I had sat there looking at them and trying to copy them instead of torching them.

lol no way -- burn em all

i hope ilx parents are reading this thread