Share Your Greatest Dirtbag Moments
Take a moment to join The Toast in remembering your dirtbag years.
In seventh grade, Meghan Hood taught me how to use Bath & Body Works body spray as a flamethrower — you stand in front of a lit candle and then spray Vanilla Mist at it, creating a beautiful, hovering flame sphere. After we set her cabinet on fire, her mom made us take it outside.
Enjoying a party, 2008
When I was fourteen, I split both my kneecaps open rollerblading home from a garage sale where I had just purchased a Dave Matthews CD. I did not know how to use the brake while rollerblading; every time I wanted to slow down I leapt off of the street and flung myself onto the nearest patch of grass. This strategy worked until it didn’t.
When I was sixteen, I totaled my car when I reached down to change tracks on a Jason Mraz CD. My friend Emily was riding in the backseat, and broke her sternum. She had to quit her job at Oberweis Dairy that summer because scooping ice cream hurt her chest. She started smoking Camels that year. I didn’t approve of it, but then I started smoking Marlboros the year after and I didn’t mind so much.
When I was seventeen, my friend Kyle put an entire turtle cheesecake in the dryer to see what would happen. The dryer broke.
When I was eighteen, my buddies Mark and Tristan and I dared each other to grind out our cigarettes on our forearms. I did it four times in one night. I still have the scars. It wasn’t a very good idea.
Beach Bum Phase
On his 21st birthday, Toast publisher Nick Pavich wore at least one puka-shell necklace. On my 21st birthday, I [redacted]. Nicole was never a dirtbag.
“Once I set the corners of an envelope on fire,” she said, “but it was only to give it an ‘aged’ look for a history project.”
Enjoying a party, 2009
When I was 22, my friend Jon and I made 100 newspaper boats and floated them in my parents’ pool, then set them all on fire. The ashes clogged the pool filters and we had to have a pool repairman come fix it.
What did you set on fire? What structures did you jump off of that were never meant to be climbed? What did you bootleg, where did you go for off-campus lunch despite the fact that you were supposed to stay on school grounds until senior year? You can tell us.
Tags: being an unbearable teenager, dirtbags, meta
In 10th grade my brother and I ditched school to go to a spring training game. Our mom only figured it out because exactly half my face was sunburned.
In college we used my friend's frat house's deep fryer to fry everything in sight. Pies, burritos, cookies, cookie dough, a whole apple, anything we could find.
Here's the most dirtbag photo of myself I could find
<img src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/1927695_510146021149_2186_n.jpg?oh=cc713c788e018203fc54aefe89c9d889&oe=544ABFFE&__gda__=1414562549_23cfdd615502be8cbd90fb866d72e320">
This is the greatest.
I've also been to at least 3 Warped Tours.
When I was 16, I drank too many free samples of Yoo-Hoo at Warped Tour, when I was already dehydrated and sunburned, and ended up puking in a trashcan. Other people thought I must have been drinking, and I went with it because I thought it made me seem cooler.
I went to my first Warped Tour at 13. I told my parents we were going to the aquarium.
JAYA
I am currently making your exact facial expression at that girl's "High Rollin'" shirt.
Wait, what was the best deep-fried thing?
Probably the hand pie? I think we also tried to make soup dumplings, but with beer.
The thought of a frat house with a deep fryer fills me with deep, unending dread, but that actually sounds potentially interesting. Did it work at all?
Surprisingly, it was the only frat house that did not have some fire accident while I was in college.
Total Dirtbag! Also, loving the "High Rollin'" photo bum bomb. High Rollin' allllllllllright!
In 2001, my friends and I jump roped with a flaming rope that had been dipped in gasoline. Someone threw it across the yard, where it landed on and burned a hole through a pine needle-covered trampoline.
In 2002, I went to a Hoobastank concert.
I'm really late to this entire post, but I'm shocked anyone wrote ANYTHING after this. You have defined all that is Dirtbag
This is the best thing that I've read all day.
This is not about dirtbags (despite my long-lasting love for terrible teenage dirtbags), but the ad on this page says "3 THINGS THAT REPEL MEN — Learn the 3 Female Behaviors that Make Men Lose Interest Immediately…" I was actually tempted to click, but also the url was enchantmen.com? Is this already a thing? Have I missed it? At any rate, I was pleased that repelling men is now something the ads are getting behind.
lol wait it wasn't ENCOURAGING you to repel men???
<img src="http://i58.tinypic.com/2d7c64j.png">
omg
congratulations, these are the ads that are on your website
I'll take care of it. Next time you can email me directly at [email protected] if you see an offensive ad.
Can you get us some that ACTUALLY give us tips to repel men?
I am working on that EP! Nothing would give me greater pleasure.
<3
I did Misandry Fashion Month in February. I have tips up the yang: http://wearingitall.tumblr.com/page/7
Is it….floral pants? Strapless tops? Slight sunburns? Tiny purses? Blonde hair with bangs? Being in a hotel?
WHO CARES ALL OF THOSE THINGS ARE AWESOME.
YOU CAN ONLY PICK THREE
I WILL TRY THEM ALL.
Mixing your prints repels men. It confuses their eyes, so they're not sure if you're really there. If you stand really still, they'll just walk on by.
It's called "power clashing," and I do it because I can.
<img src="http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/1973d5vblej75gif/ku-medium.gif">
IDK, that apparently-repellent lady looks pretty happy about it.
I'm taking notes.
She is happy because she found the secret of walking to the darn bus stop in peace.
Sign me UPPP
I never quite shone to the level of dirt-baggery of my older brothers (one of whom I discovered in the kitchen at 6am trying to light a piece of paper on fire from the electric burner since he didn't have matches, and the girl who had snuck in and spent the night wanted a cigarette, he must have been about 17 EDIT – I am quite sure he wasn't 18 yet because that is when my mom kicked him out of the house)
But when I was about 14 two friends and I mixed up chemicals in plastic bottles and threw them into ditches waiting for them to explode.
Around the same time I also did the great flaming hairspray trick, which caused an unfortunate rift in the neighborhood friend group, after we were caught by her dad and she blamed us.
My older brother once snuck out of the house and forgot his keys. It was 2 in the morning and I was up reading under the covers (on a school night! I was being a baby dirtbag) when all of a sudden there's a knock on my window and a male voice whispering my name and "Let me in." I did not know true fear until that moment. I came very close to having to change my sheets, let's just put it that way.
I light pieces of paper on fire now
I am so pumped for this thread. Sadly I was not a dirtbag at all. I think probably the closest thing to dirtbag I used to do was sneak out in the middle of the night just to drive around. Sometimes I would take my sister with, and she would insist that we get slushies and scratch off lotto tickets when I was old enough from the 24 hour gas station in town. Probably the only time I ever felt cool in high school was the time I skipped out on an AP Stats study session the night before the exam to drive around with this girl I was in love with until 3 AM.
I DID THE SAME THING. Snuck out in high school, late at night, to go on looong drives in the country. By myself, with music. It was awesome, no regrets.
I didn't tell my parents this until a few weeks ago and they were HORRIFIED. But this was after my parents told me that when they were teenagers BOTH of them were brought home by police, multiple times, and my dad once snuck out to see his girlfriend when his city was under martial law, so.
There is literally nothing better than driving around in the country. I still do this when I go home to visit my parents, including the sneaking out even though I am an adult woman now.
Unfortunately my parents caught me with some frequency (not caring about being caught sneaking out maybe makes this story more dirtbag) and my mom was always enraged. To be fair, driving around on country roads in the snow at 2 AM in a 17 year old junker Honda is maybe not a great activity for teens, but JEEZ MOM LEAVE ME ALONE.
When my husband and I were first dating, we used to drive around the back roads of SE Connecticut late into the night, often at high speeds. Neither of us had any money (I was still an undergrad), so it was an enjoyable way to pass the time.
My husband and I do that still. We go on drives just for no reason other than to look at stuff and talk.
Yes to the nighttime sneaking out & getting caught – well, only by my mother who made some comment one morning about the noise I made climbing back in my bedroom window and how I better not ever let me father find out. Thanks, Mom!
Much of my paycheck from my high school job (waitressing, naturally) went to funding this habit.
God, I didn't even sneak out. I feel like such a Nicole right now.
I would occasionally skip school with some of my friends and we would drive to another county to hang out, thinking that if anyone asked us we could be like "oh, we have a service day in our county."
REBELS
You were a better dirtbag than I. I only skipped school when I had more or less soft permission.
Our school mitigated some potential skipping school by having "free periods" for the older kids, where you could make your schedule so that you got an hour and a half without any classes. It was like skipping class, except you didn't have to break any rules!
We had something like that too, which I mostly used to hang out with teachers I liked. But the 'soft permission skipping' thing I did was this: if you were a senior in National Honor Society at my school, you got what was essentially a good faith absence pass. The idea was that if you were all caught up in one of your classes (I'm pretty sure you had to have an A in the class), you could use the NHS pass and go to the library or another classroom to work on other classwork. I had managed to combine my 'squeaky clean honor student' image with 'talented, tortured artist', so I used my pass all the time to skip out on classes to 'work on my art'. Obviously I never really worked on my art and just hung out with my friends who had lunch or study hall during those periods or with my art teacher who I idolized, or had tea with the librarian.
Looking back, I am pretty amazed at how much freedom I got in high school to just wander off.
I liked when it resulted in a longer lunch period, because then we could drive all the way to the Noodles and Company or to the Chinese bakeries on the other side of the highway. You know, adventures.
It's the dirty little secret of the good kids – they let you do whatever you want! I don't know about you, but I definitely squandered that trust by breaking very few rules. My friends and I did sneak off campus for lunch a few times, though. That was pretty hard-core.
I remember the exact moment I discovered the extent of my Good Kid powers: the end of 8th grade, we had a sub in English class, and my music class ran late. The music teacher wrote us a pass to our next class, so I just flashed the pass at the sub and said it was a pass to my clarinet lesson. Then I went down to the band room and watched the boys in the jazz combo rehearse for graduation. (Obviously I had crushes on ALL of them, the dirtbaggier, the better. Sigh.) It was my first attempt at flagrant rule-breaking and it felt so amazing. ("I have a clarinet lesson" became my go-to in the years to come. I really did practice at home, and play in the band…but our band teacher was a little disorganized about scheduling lessons, and sometimes a girl just needs a day off of gym class!)
Of course now I am a teacher and this all makes me feel like a real jerk to the teachers I lied to. But such is youth.
You want to hear something insane? When I was in grade THREE, we had "open periods" where you could go to any classroom for an "enrichment activity" or something. My friends and I figured out pretty quickly that we could just not go to ANY activity, and either sit in the bathrooms and talk, or wander the halls, and if a teacher came along the answer was always "we're on our way to/from the bathroom from Mrs. X's class" and we never actually got caught. Eight years old.
What. Was this public school?
Yes, actually! For a SEMESTER we did this and no one seemed to notice! Or care!
Oh man, my bff & I were honor students & our English/Cont. Speaking teacher had neverending faith in us & would send us on "errands" during school hours because obviously we wouldn't take advantage of her, right?
This backfired famously once when we went to the zoo instead & brought back toys/souvenirs for our classmates so everyone EXCEPT HER knew exactly what we were doing.
it was called "Honor Study Hall" when I was in high school. I was free to wander around the halls and hang out in the smoking lounge (smoking lounge! in the 70's, a breezeway between buildings, lots of stuff being smoked) I had a good kid image especially contrasted w/my older brother the BAD kid.
It only happened once a semester for three semesters, at most! I was not really a dirtbag, just had some slight tendencies. I'm reading other people's stories about skipping a class regularly and I just get flashbacks to my anxiety dreams about HS.
SO MUCH sneaking out and driving around. SO MUCH.
I had friends ("friends" may be too strong a word) who would sneak out to drive when they were 12/13. I was always TERRIFIED they would come by my house and ask me to come along, but they never did. They probably had me sized up pretty well.
I did not know how to use the brake while rollerblading; every time I wanted to slow down I leapt off of the street and flung myself onto the nearest patch of grass.
I did that too, until I landed (partly) on a neighbour's cat.
In high school we decided to have a Senior Skip Day where we would all skip class en masse for the whole day. I went to a tiny all-girls Catholic school run by nuns, where you needed a note from your parents if you were 10 minutes late for class, and we weren't allowed to leave school grounds for lunch until senior year and even then we were only allowed to go as far as the church 2 blocks down the street, so this was a completely extraordinary endeavour.
IIRC, all but 3 or 4 of the seniors went through with it. We took the bus downtown and had lunch at Eggspectation and then eventually splintered up into smaller groups and went off to do our own thing. My friends and I ended up at a café and were glared at by old ladies because we hadn't changed out of our uniforms so it was obvious we were skipping.
The nuns freaked out and summoned all our parents for an evening meeting all "What is happening to our girls?? What can we do, because this is a slippery slope, one day you cut class and the next you're shooting heroin into your eyeballs." One mother tore the principal a new one because the school had called her to say "Your daughter has run away" instead of "Your daughter cut class along with virtually every girl in her year." My parents weren't really bothered; I remember that when I told my dad some girls hadn't skipped, he said, "They sound like jerks." (Although I think the girls who didn't skip got the better end of the deal, because they were allowed to leave early anyway, and didn't get in trouble for it.)
Then we all had to write an essay on why Senior Skip Day was totally wrong. I was really fed up by this point and wrote something like "It wasn't a big deal at all, we needed to let off some steam because this school puts so much pressure on us, did you know the rate of eating disorders in this school is several times the national average?"
I was a pretty shy, risk-averse young person with overprotective parents, so I didn't have the wherewithal to get up to many dirtbag shenanigans. I'm surprised they even let me have rollerskates since we lived near a very busy street at the time.
I was a pretty shy, risk-averse young person with overprotective parents, so I didn't have the wherewithal to get up to many dirtbag shenanigans.
You and me both, pal. On senior skip day in high school, which was an Institutional Thing by that point (so edgy) despite the teachers' eternal quest to squash it, I skipped the huuuuuge party to go on a bike ride. Suuuuuch a Good Kid.
Bike rides are so much more fun than parties though!
YES! The Cut Day thing happened to me too … our senior class president, who was the music pastor's daughter and pretty much the straight-line-iest thing since uncooked linguine, tried to organize it, until our nazi-bitch headmistress said that anyone who tried to skip would not be allowed to graduate. (Oh, private school.) We called it off openly, and no one really had any intention of cutting after that to my knowledge.
So the morning of the formerly-intended skip day, I think I left home late or something ("late" for me meant "not 30 minutes early"), but I walked to school all 4 years, and the driveway to the school could be clearly seen from the headmistress' office window. She CALLED MY MOTHER and said "I haven't seen Alli yet today, she better not be skipping class or she is in Big Trouble." My mother – in one of the only instances I'm aware of where she has ever defended me to anyone – reamed her out and called her a control freak (ironic, if you know my mother, but hey) and to shut up and stop threatening straight-A students that have ever only gotten ONE demerit the entire 4 years of high school.
I think I high-fived her when I got home from school that day.
I REALLY feel like we may have gone to the same high school, depending on which Eggspectation you went to. Any chance your school colors were gold/white?
I was really fed up by this point and wrote something like "It wasn't a big deal at all, we needed to let off some steam because this school puts so much pressure on us, did you know the rate of eating disorders in this school is several times the national average?"
Dirtbagginess followed by subsequent shaming of authority figures is the best kind of dirtbagginess.
Oh, this speaks to my heart of hearts. A big feature of my dirtbag years was getting hopped up on Jolt (we were a surprisingly chaste bunch when it came to illicit substances, or more likely, too lazy to jump through the hoops of acquiring them) and going to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport very late at night (this was pre-9/11 when literally anybody could just roam around the airport at all hours), riding the automated train around for HOURS, being generally obnoxious to the few weary travelers who just, jesus christ, wanted to be HOME already, and engaging in petty vandalism, generally of the sign-stealing variety.
I also loved late-night airport loitering and sign stealing! Kindred dirtbag spirits.
I also participated in some sign-stealing in my short period of dirtbag years! The boy I had a crush on was in a band named after a street near our school, so naturally that sign got stolen on the regular.
I've been one of those late-night travelers (usually at IAH though), and I always like to see kids goofing around on the trains and stuff. Beats listening to the Hank-Hill-sound-alike telling me to not leave my luggage unattended.
When I was 13 or 14 my friends and I were hanging out on top of this 6 story parking garage (like you do) and decided it would be hilarious to spit at the people below. We got the particularly shitty ex of a friend shortly before security discovered us. He angrily asked what were doing, assuming it was more destructive that it was, and my friend for some unfathomably reason starts pretending to slur her words and says 'oh we're just parked over here officer' and stumbling around like she was drunk. Which she wasn't, she would just do this any time she was confronted about anything I guess cuz she thought it was funny. He told us the cops were on their way and we ran down and away as fast as we could. For the record I am suitably ashamed of myself for spitting on strangers (but not on that ex, fuck him.)
My girlfriends and I are such dirtbags that we invented the word sheezebag to describe our various skunky maneuvers.
Like Nicole, I was A Good Kid. My only dirtbaggery really ever came about because of my terrible, terrible Not Boyfriend, absolutely a dirtbag, and it involved a lot of smooching etc. in the MOST inappropriate places and lying to my parents about it later.
I also liked blink-182 a lot. I regret that.
I was also a Good Kid and not a dirtbag, mostly. But I did attend a My Chemical Romance concert at age 16, to my utter shame.
One summer on a road trip from New Mexico to Colorado I made my mom listen to the entire Blink 182 collection in chronological order, and when we ended I'd start from the beginning again, FOR THE ENTIRE RIDE. She was a saint. I also met my husband because I was wearing a blink 182 shirt, so it ain't all bad!
Oh my god, immediate canonization for Mom Saxena
I wore a Blink-182 shirt to the first day of my freshman year of high school. NO RAGRETS
At 14 I went to a Halloween party, got drunk on Jungle Juice, and threw up on the front lawn, right in front of my crush while dressed like a slut. I can't even remember what my costume was supposed to be, just that it was mostly lingerie.
EDIT: I forgot that my friends use to go to the minimart that sold you anything you could put on the counter! They always made me do it, even though I was the youngest. One time a girl and I switched shirts in the car first so I could wear her more low-cut shirt. I went in, got six packs of Marlboros, couple bottles of Wild Irish Rose (fortified hobo wine) and flashed my tiny tits at the dude behind the counter.
Oh god even seeing the words Wild Irish Rose in text is making me nauseous
Thanks sophomore year of college
Cady Heron?
HAHAHAHA! OMG. This is hilarious because I watched Mean Girls for the absolute first time just YESTERDAY and I did not make the connection to my own behavior. I was much more of a dirtbag than Cady.
I went to India and didn't wash my hair for three months. It does NOT start cleaning itself, and when we stayed in a 'nice' hotel I left a stain on the white pillows. No photos exist, sadly.
In grade 5, Dirtbag Robbie and I talked all our classmates into jumping out the first-floor window. It faced onto the parking lot at the front of the school. We did this while momentarily unsupervised, at 3:30pm.
Therefore, there were parents. Parents who were arriving to acquire their darling children, and were instead greeted by a cavalcade of ten-year-olds plummeting seven feet, landing in front of the basement window to the principal's office, and giddily darting through the front door to do it again.
This was not the first – nor the final! – time I would be told "We have called your mother."
But it might be the best and most decisive.
Runners-up:
– the first time I lit myself on fire by accident at girl guides
– the time the boy around the corner dared me to ride the too-high hill on a borrowed bike and I crashed into the post-office box at the bottom with my face.
– any of the things when I was actually a teenager, it is a minor miracle I survived.
The mental image this story brings up is great and I am giggling about the giddy ten-year-olds leaping out the window again and again. High five to you and Dirtbag Robbie!
Goddamn I could go for an Oberweis ice cream cone RIGHT NOW.
SIXTH GRADE DIRTBAGS – hardcore delinquents shown here sticking it to The Man. Humble author at far right.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/AQswInr.jpg">
I took a picture almost exactly like that of boys in my 6th grade class! Truly a pose for the ages.
This is the most precious thing I have seen in my entire life.
Fun fact – the guy next to me is named Zach Morris.
I went to college with a Zach Morris! He was heckled by everyone (it was a tiny school and we all watched Saved By the Bell in the afternoon). I'm pretty sure he transferred less than a semester after enrolling.
Nothing says "badass" like a Hard Rock Cafe shirt.
PETE
hi nick
INCREDIBLE.
I want to know what happened to the kid in the middle, who is either thinking, "This is so stupid, why are we doing this, I hope no one tells my mom," OR he's thinking, "This is so stupid, I have a joint in my backpack, can we please finish so we can go smoke behind the gym."
oddly enough, he is the only one of the group who I'm not now Facebook friends with, but a quick search shows that he now works for the US Embassy in Ukraine, so…uh, hope that's going well for him.
I was not even remotely a dirtbag, but all my male friends were. One time I sat in a rose arbor near our school theater for like four hours before Fiddler on the Roof pit rehearsal, and one guy hung Funyons on all the roses to make a Funyon Tree, and some other guys threw chicken in my hair and it was gross, and I had such huge crushes on all of them.
I went to an all-girls' catholic school, which required uniforms. I would regularly just sleep in mine so as to save on valuable getting-dressed time in the morning. Thus, I would go without showering or changing my clothes for 4-5 days in a row.
Also, one time we blew up a condom on the back of the bus and it flew out the window and we all got in trouble. I was terrified of rebuke at all times, so this put me off of dirtbagdom for quite some time.
More recently, my senior year in college I lived in a hovel of an apartment. We only had one fork between four of us, so instead of BUYING MORE FORKS we would instead negotiate for fork-time. "do you have the fork?" became an oft-shouted refrain in our household.
I had a friend in middle school who used to suck on flavored condoms. We loved playing with them!
My then-boyfriend (now-husband) invited his brother and SIL to dinner at his apartment. Shortly after their arrival I realized he only had one plate, one bowl, etc. (I lived 2.5 hours away at the time and hadn't spent enough time at his place to notice this before.) "There's only one of me," he said defensively when I questioned him.
Fortunately "dinner" actually meant takeout, so we all ate out of the containers.
oh my god, do you have the fork
Seriously! What is the Fate of the Fork?
Fittingly, that house was torn down the year after we lived there (the landlords let us finger-paint the walls! What a great home for adults.) so I imagine that it is buried somewhere in the rubble. RIP fork.
we did the condom balloon thing on a bus to a Latin convention. We got in extra trouble because there were middle school kids on the bus too. :( Then we got in trouble for watching Office Space on the bus TV.
Drove my car through the garage wall into the laundry room.
Coerced wealthy friend to take us out for a fancy dinner; hid the valet ticket from my mom.
Stephanie Tanner, is that you?
Terrible confession: I read the Principia Discordia when I was about 15 or so. This great religious text by LSD-addled hippies led me to think it was hilarious to occasionally take items in one part of a large retail store (Target or Walmart) and place it somewhere totally at random, to add a sense of whimsy to the world.
I would also take pictures of rubber ducks on peoples things in communal spaces at college, take a polaroid picture, and leave them a picture (and no rubber duck).
It's amazing that anyone still likes me.
haha yes. I didn't even go as far as foolish gestures, I mostly hung around in Barnes and Nobleses or in Media Play, which used to exist, reading that and Subgenius pamphlets and that Shwa World Operations Manual thing and whatnot. more thinking about being a dirtbag than actually being a dirtbag.
oh! I got heatstroke on vacation in New Orleans when I was fourteen and almost passed out on the street. nobody noticed except to step over me. later I was pleased as I imagined this meant they mistook me for someone who was full of drink and drugs, as I would have liked to be.
Hahaha, subgenius pamphlets! I wonder if anyone still reads either of those things anymore.
Oh! I also used to change the wallpaper in my college computer labs to a random drawings from Exploding Dog. I did that when I was 20 though, not sure if that counts as particularly teenage-y (or dirtbag-y). I would giggle though because it would irritate the student assistants.
EPISKOPOS 4 LYFE, YO
Baby!Starrag was like 'This book changed my life' re: the Principia Discordia. He was a die-hard Discordian for a few years and, in his endless quest for prestige and honorifics, invented an incredibly long 'craft name' (or whatever the term is). It had tons of the requisite invented post-nominals. (Typing that lot out would be the most embarrassing thing I have ever done; thus, I have purged it.)
I was really into drawing apples with a "K" on them for awhile. Also, the number 23. Ohh, being a teenager with the internet..
YES! My idea of "mischief" for the past few years has been swapping political signs on people's yards (although I've never done it). Oh, you're a Republican? Here's an Obama sign for your yard! I wonder how long it would be until they noticed…
Is it wrong to still think that Principia Discordia is awesome? Like, I'm too lazy to be an actual Discordian, but still.
At age 22, in grad school and fully should have known better, I drank a liter of wine, followed it up by a bunch of Jello shots, fell asleep on the couch at a party and had my friend pour me into a cab and take me home. I threw up on the stairs to my basement apartment, threw up into my own clothes multiple times, and cried like a child. My friend is a saint, who put my clothes in the wash, put me to bed, and then went back to the party. It was 11 pm. Dirtbag failure.
Not sure I ever qualified for dirtbag status in high school, but when I was 19 (20?) my friend Nick and I climbed onto the roof of a Starbucks after it had closed, and dared each other to pee off of it onto the drive-thru lane below.
Easier for him than for me.
I knew a girl who had preternatural aiming abilities and when drunk could line up beside the boys and shame them by doing designs.
One of my greatest wishes is that I could gain the ability to pee standing up. It for sure would have helped my dirtbag golf course underage drinking years.
My friends and I went snowboarding in 8th grade one Friday night with no chaperones (after school program!). We were in a major black eyeliner and hair dye phase at the time. We went to the ski lodge adjacent IHOP, ordered ridiculous amounts of food, paid with handfuls of change and left our bras in the water pitcher. I still feel bad about it! But it felt amazing.
RATTIE PAWS
I know I am old because I am horrified that you left bras behind, because bras are not cheap!!! – unless you are a tween wearing cotton bras that are like, under $15, which I assume you all probably were.
I was never a dirtbag as a teenager, so I've felt compelled to make up for it in my 20s. I don't think I'm doing that good of a job.
So far my greatest dirtbag moment consists of drinking/smoking on the roof of a condemned building, which we accessed by climbing out of my friend's bedroom window (lovingly named Roof of Doom because it was DEFINITELY dangerous). After we drank all the beer, we decided to drop the bottles through a hole in the roof and smash some against the wall of friend's building.
I like your icon. What would you call two of them?
It was freshman year and I was sitting in Christianity class. I suddenly felt something hit my hair and I reached back to figure out what it was. The guy who sat behind me grabbed my hand and said, "Don't!" He then took a pair of scissors off the teacher's desk next to us and proceeded to cut a giant chunk of my hair out. It turns out he had been spitting his gum in the air and catching it in his mouth, but it went astray and landed in my hair. His solution was an impromptu haircut. The teacher saw and he ended up getting suspended, but I didn't really care. I didn't even bother to have my hair fixed, I just walked around with a big section of it missing for months.
The next year my best friend and I got caught stealing stuff at a grocery store. This same dude worked there as a bag boy and when he saw us being led out in handcuffs he almost died laughing. I hate that kid.
In 10th grade the girl who sat in front of me in class would lean back and shake out her hair all over my things. I got really sick of having to pick her hairs out from my books and notebooks, so I finally told her that if she didn't stop shaking her hair I would cut it. She didn't believe me, so the next time it happened I grabbed my scissors and lopped off a few strands.
I didn't get in trouble for it, which completely baffles me to this day.
In high school sophomore health class, the kid behind me kept snapping me with a rubber band, and eventually I decided I was going to wheel around and cut his rubber band with my scissors. He panicked and jerked his hand back, and he barely got his fingers out of the way of my scissors before they closed. He looked at me with wide eyes and whispered, "Holy shit, you tried to shank me." That was not what I was trying to do, but I let him believe it.
A kid who sat behind me in 7th grade orchestra cut off a chunk of my hair and I totally never noticed. He told me a year later and I didn't believe him until he called witnesses.
There was a cafe not far from my high school where people would go for coffee/ditching class (it was really close by, so I'm not sure why it was never busted by staff except that obviously they didn't care at all). Totally a dirtbag place to hang out even though I wasn't ever really able to commit to full Dirtbaggery.
The one moment I had was one of the regular other-students had brought over a pair of wooden training swords from whatever martial art he was pretending to do, and he was talking about how much better whatever martial art he was doing was way better than Western ones. I beat him at sword fighting with my half-remembered fencing lessons. That was pretty hilarious, he was SO MAD.
This is an especially good one because it ends in the Humiliation of A Man.
that sounds like something that would happen at Feminist Festivus
I was SUCH a good girl until Year 12 (senior in high school), when I got a boyfriend and ditched Wednesday afternoon maths class literally every week to go pash him in the park across the road from school. How we never got caught I will never know.
oh and like everyone else I rolled up the waistband of my school uniform skirt to make it like 7 inches shorter than it was when I left the house.
To amuse my visiting friends, I used to pay my younger brother to light his hand on fire (spraying it with…bugspray, I think? and then lighting that). It only cost a dollar!
Said friends and I also once body-slammed the door of an abandoned house in. It was complicated because the door used to be at porch level, but the porch had rotted away. They were smoking cigarettes. When we got in the house, we found a bunch of Hawaiian-themed decorations from the 80s. I can't remember if we stole any.
Another friend and I went through a period of walking to the liquor store pretty much every other day, smoking these terrible German cigarettes that felt like inhaling glass and talking about how sad and cold we were. I had to hang around smoking outside the liquor store while she went in, because I was not yet 21. We also sometimes bought 40s from a pizza shop and then drank them out of the paper bags they came in.
A thrifty dirtbag! I like that.
<img src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/184711_938318904448_3933565_n.jpg?oh=789aed22f07353e2a8db8bd3eff93e17&oe=544A2528&__gda__=1413567496_9be6fb2f8f25e4244fc23fc999c68858">
I'm sorry, everyone, but not even that long ago–maybe 2011?–I went to a ska concert WITH A WRISTBAND ON.
When I was 16, before I got my license, I stole my dad's car from the airport bus shuttle lot while he was out of town and proceeded to drive around with my friends (SOME OF WHOM ACTUALLY HAD CARS, WHY WERE WE DOING THIS) on a Friday night and managed to end up sliding sideways down a hill through a string of front yards and straightened out just in time to crash into a tree. No photographic evidence available.
Then this happened in college, not sure if it qualifies as brotastic or dirtbaggish or both or neither. Your author sits in the back right, sporting an unfortunate dirtbag chinstrap beard:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/OvuAp15.jpg">
When I was 11 I spent the entirety of the bus ride on a 5th grade class trip learning the del the Funky homosapien rap breaks in Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz instead of learning about the history of Colorado.
When I was 16 I used to pretend to be my mom to call myself out of class so I could nap in the back of my friend's car.
When I was 17 a boy invited me to break into an abandoned sugar mill in the middle of the night because he wanted to make out but I went because I liked looking at exposed pipes in old buildings.
When I was 18 I told my mom I was babysitting but really drove two hours to see a band play an acoustic set at an Apple store.
Also when I was 17 I worked at Famous Footwear in the mall and used to conduct heelies races with the guys who ran the pretzel shop after closing hours.
When I was 22 I went to Warped Tour for the first time.
To be fair, I did see Del in concert recently and his rap breaks in the song are pretty fucking fantastic.
I worked at Hot Topic and we had a sweet deal going with the dudes at the pretzel place wherein we would trade band stickers for pretzels and soda. Mall Life.
I used to hook them up with new shoelaces in exchange for unlimited pretzel bite refills. Simpler times.
My greatest dirtbag moments as a teen all involved going swimming in my underwear. Which I still do if it's night and there's a body of water and I don't have a bathing suit.
Hell, I've swam in my underwear in broad daylight. Amazingly, nobody seemed to care.
Lol "moments"
I dunno, like…1996-2004?
Also when I first lived alone, I had one good knife that I just used for everything, so I'd just stab it into my cheap ikea dining room table so I'd always be able to find it (in the horrible mess that was my apartment). This went on for…a long time. Until the knife died, basically.
I think I still have dirtbag flare ups.
(So drunken mess dirtbag doing genuinely kind of shitty things — sex in the walk-in! Trying to buy jewelry made of human bones! Just…stupid — with occasional bouts of boundaryless pragmatism? While on some dumb youth group camping thing I once broke into a strange house with a friend so we could use the bathroom. We left it cleaner than we found it, but still.)
That's amazing and probably a great burglary deterrent. If I broke into a house with a giant knife impaled into the dining room table, I would assume you were an assassin and turn around to go rob somebody else.
Yes but you'd have the assassins only knifeHilariously I just realized this was in like…2008. I think…I think I might still be a dirtbag. Like I've learned the trappings of civilization, but only in a parrot-mockery kind of way, mostly aimed at getting treats of some variety. Laydeez.
*whispers* That is literally true for everyone I know. I'm not convinced there's any other way.
I was also a non-dirtbag, but I was friends with a most magnificent dirtbag, about whom I had to write a song called "Dropping a wiener dog" because of that time she asked to hold someone's dog and then dropped it on its head from a terrible height, saying only "oooooooops" in this incredibly bored tone of voice and then, once it was clear the dog was uninjured, looking away into the distance as though seeking for some meaning in the events that had just transpired.
She also once dyed someone else's sink completely black when she decided THAT VERY MOMENT, at someone else's house, was the moment to dye her hair. Around the same time she made a huge deal out of wanting a helicopter ride for her birthday, got her parents to subsidize the massive expense for herself, a parent, and two friends, and then decided MOMENTS BEFORE we were about to board the helicopter, after the hour-long drive to get to the place, that she no longer wanted this at all, and we promptly went home.
Later I was the only one of my friends who had a driver's licence and we lived in the sort of town where it was totally normal for a 17 year old girl to drive a pickup truck. The McDonalds was two blocks from the high school, but obviously we had to drive, because dirtbags do not walk when it is possible to get a ride. I was always pretty concerned with the state of my truck and did not allow food inside, even though it was two blocks, because I knew something would happen, like it always did.
One day, halfway back to the school, I hear from my other friend in the back make a reprehensive noise.
I look back to see my dirtbag friend slowly, slowly guiding a french fry dipped in mcflurry into her mouth.
"Don't," I said, knowing exactly what would happen.
Just as slowly, a drip of McFlurry fell to the floor of my truck.
"Oooooooops," said my dirtbag friend, and proceeded to cover it up with her shoe instead of doing anything about it.
I haven't seen her in a few years.
Wow. She sounds like dirtbag GOLD! That weiner dog story has me dying with laughter!
I guess there was the single day I decided I was goth, only I didn't own enough black clothing, so I wore navy blue pants and a black tank top with a white bra that showed too much, and also black lipstick.
We were camping at the time — apparently I pre-planned this — and my mother took one look at me and had absolutely none of it.
I spent the whole drive home sitting in the back of the car looking sulky and listening to prog metal on my discman, refusing to say anything to the despots who had so little appreciation for my edgy self-expression.
Got to this bit: 'Nicole was never a dirtbag.“Once I set the corners of an envelope on fire,” she said, “but it was only to give it an ‘aged’ look for a history project.”' and laughed out loud.
I nicked two dark blue lipsticks from Miss Selfridges in Bromley, SE London/Kent (depending on your view of Bromley's location) when 14. I love that I thought I needed two. "I might use one whole dark blue lipstick up all the way. Better get another." I wasn't that much of a dirtbag compared to some of my friends, though.
Tash carried a hammer around with her ALL THE TIME, just in case she needed to commit violence against men. She nearly did one time – some dirtbag boys pissed into a bottle on the train home from school and threw it over me, and she went after them with it! They all leapt from the train though and thus did not get their brains deservedly beaten out. Tash did a lot of things. In fact, when Tash got married, her maids of honour's speech was literally a list of all the dirtbag things she did.
Tash sounds AMAZING.
I once burned the edges of a letter to give it an aged look for an Edgar Allen Poe project. I did manage to drop a bit of paper on my nightgown, though, and that nightgown now has a little hole in it.
TASH, come join us here, please.
(TWO blue lipsticks. Perfect baby dirtbag logic.)
I had sex next to a donkey behind a travelling circus tent (the donkey was not involved, it just provided cover from other people around) The guy (who I'd just met) broke my glasses while we were going at it before we got busted by a security guard & then I had to wear sticky tape around my glasses for the rest of the summer.
When I was 14 I lit dryer lint on fire to see if it would burn. It burned so quickly I couldn't let go and ended up with a blister on the tip of my thumb.
I once ran out of lighter fluid and resorted to using broken up bits of a Duraflame log to start the grill. I was 28. (I let the charcoal burn for a very long time before putting food on the grill for fear of Duraflame sourced cancer)
When I was 14, my boyfriend and I were on the same bus and we would sit in the back and light the ratty dangling strings of our jean hems on fire. This would have been 1998/1999 so we're talking Jnco-style stovepipe jeans. The bus driver would freak out and come to the back asking if anyone smelled fire and we'd pretend like we had no idea what he was talking about.
My first concert ever in middle school was a Sugar Ray/Orgy concert.
I KEEP THINKING OF STUFF
In college I was the designated soda can weed pipe maker.
I broke a pair of glasses in a mosh pit while The Offspring was playing.
I can definitely still sing all of the words to that "like they do on the discovery channel" song.
The floodgates have been opened, we'll all be coming back to this thread for weeks.
You're so right–it's all coming back to me in a kind of smoky haze.
I still love that song. It popped up the other day while I was dancing with my infant daughter, which is when I realized how terrible it is.
I got my braid stepped on in the mosh pit of a KMFDM concert at Roseland. Ah, memories.
JNCO-STYLE STOVEPIPE JEANS
Guys I genuinely thought these were the absolute coolest from age, like, 12-14.
I have not done a lot of purposeful dirtbaggery but I have been called out a few times for non-purposeful dirtbaggery, and those stuck with me to the point where I feel nervous in liquor stores, despite being past legal age.
Accidental dirtbaggery- I once tried to take a fake $1M bill from a gas station because I had been given one once as a joke and so assumed they were ~free~
Some cousins and I rode bikes on the golf course (at night) that I lived off of as a youth; I had no idea this was bad because as far as I was concerned it was my backyard, but we got called "TEENAGE DELINQUENTS!"That was also the day I learned what the word "delinquent" was. (I was prob 12)
there was also one time when I accidentally read a bunch of dirty jokes to my grandparent-aged English family friends who were unable to cover their utter embarrassment but it was several more years before I learned what "horny bastard" ACTUALLY meant (I thought it was a monster with horns).
monster with horns
Bless your innocent self. I remember being about 12 at a sleepover, and when a character in the movie we were watching said he was horny, all the other girls started laughing… I had to quietly take my friend aside so she could explain to me what "horny" meant.
Does this count? I am also wearing an American Flag cape.
http://t.co/W0pTsiWj5g
I was a dirtbag already by age 10. My mom made me go to a summer day camp that I thought was stupid, so every day at snack time I would sneak off, find an empty classroom, and read whatever books I found in it until it was time to leave. Eventually I was kicked out of day camp. This freed me up to ride my bike down to the creek to read with my feet in the water, and spend a lot more time practicing piano (obsessively playing songs from Phantom of the Opera).
i have wasted my life
Me too. :-( Someone actually said this to me once when they found out how much of a goody two-shoes I was (still am one, I'm afraid). I didn't even have dirtbag friends.
I GIVE YOU ME IN HIGH SCHOOL NICOLE
http://t.co/3VF0F5lIfZ
I have since gone on to have a very rewarding and fancy life, non-dirtbag adventures aside.
In just a few short years I went from that to having a bird on my head in Fancy Hotel Rooms
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bt4ZMrhCEAAKyne.jpg
Yes we are the same. I guess I did have some dirtbaggy friends but I was too afraid of *gasp* Getting In Trouble to really hang out with them that much. I was just oodles of fun.
Me neither. I was a very dull teenager.
Yeah, that was me too. Definitely no dirtbag friends when I was a teenager — even now, when I hang out with my friends from high school whenever we're all in town, they let their parents know they'll be back late. The most rebellious thing we ever did was go out to lunch after some school-authorized activity instead of going straight back to school.
I have since acquired a friend who was absolutely a dirtbag teenager and from her stories, I don't think I would've liked it much anyway, to be honest.
I have always been a very noncommittal dirtbag and I am sure that this is the reason I still have plenty of dirtbag incidents at 23. I nearly flunked out of high school because I decided that my time was better spent watching Target Women and Merlin and going to IHOP. The buffer zone is a dark place. It's probably best that you never dabbled in dirtbag.
Lord, me too. I aged many a history project that exact way, and the worst thing I did in high school was illicitly leave campus for lunch after finishing an AP exam early.
At 16, while attempting to parallel park my 1997 volvo sedan outside of a Panera, I bummed into a Jeep Grand Cherokee, shattering my headlight and leaving scratches all over the Jeep's bumper. I left a note with my dad's contact information instead of mine and then forgot to tell him. A few hours later, the cops called our house looking for him.
I do not remember if I got a bread bowl.
When I was 17, I hit another car in the high school parking lot. I was going super slow and trying to park but it was icy and -20 degrees, so when I bumped the wheel well of the car next to me, the plastic just shattered. I told the police liaison at my school and then called my mom. Her response was: "Well, [that kid's] parents should have never bought him that car. This is what happens when you buy a 16 year old a brand new Cadillac for his birthday."
The cops? Why would they call the cops?
Maybe that's a dumb question – the closest I've been to that is that I opened my car door into the car next to me, there was a tiny indentation in the other car, so I left my contact info and drew picture of the car with an arrow pointed at where the dent was to explain. Later that day, the dude who owned the car called me and said not to worry about it, but thanks for the drawing.
So I fully expected a call from the car's owner (should have alerted my father either way, of course) but it turns out the driver of the Jeep was another 16 year old taking his mom's car to a panera (and/or its environs) and when he saw the scratches in the Jeep bumper he freaked out and called the cops.
The scratches, btw, were crazy minor- you could have done similar damage with a fork.
When I was about 17, I was riding home on my shitty bike and the brakes stopped working. I smashed into a sports car parked on the curb, and the handle of my bike made a neat puncture wound in its taillights. The baby class warrior in me looked at the car, looked at the big-ass house it was parked in front of, and kept going.
Junior year of high school, my friends and boyfrand and I skipped prom to go to Steak n' Shake, and bowling, and then to somebody's house to watch 10 Things I Hate About You (I think. Boyfrand and I made out for most of the movie anyway). It poured rain the entire time and we sat there delightedly and cackled about people's prom pictures and hairdos getting ruined, and then we were jackasses at the bowling alley (we got into a trick bowling contest and I distinctly recall attempting to bowl while someone else carried me on their back. There were also blindfolds involved at some point) and it remains one of my fondest high school memories.
Clearly, we should've set more things on fire, though.
edit: there are pictures, they will not be posted.
This sounds like perfection.
Actually I think most of these emphasize how I was a good kid, but here goes:
In third grade I decided the spelling worksheets were pointless busy work (they were) and refused to do them for a month.
In 5th grade we had to write out new "goals" in our planners every single week. I had the brilliant idea of filling them all out ahead of time and was genuinely shocked when my teacher wasn't impressed with my forethought.
Senior year of high school I was allowed to take both Spanish and Orchestra in the same period, because they wouldn't fit in my schedule any other way. I was supposed to switch between them every other day. Sometimes I went to neither.
Ah! Your third grade spelling worksheets reminded me of one of the most purposely dirtbaggy things I did. I didn't like my stats teacher junior year of high school so I wrote all my homework backwards (word order was mirror image but the letters were not).
Beautiful. What art! Also, dang.
Third grade spelling worksheets reminded me of my earliest (good student) dirtbaggery–when I was in elementary school somewhere in the third to fifth grade range, we were supposed to get our daily reading logs signed by our parents every day. I did the reading but was awful at remembering to get them signed so I just forged my mom's signature every day and carried on.
When I was four I used to light matches in my dad's brown Ford Econoline van just to get the 'happy birthday' smell out of blowing them out. My dirtbag phase stopped pretty early on and I have taken up the goody-goody mantle since then. :(
That is the best smell in the world.
In 9th grade I was disciplined (detention, maybe? The years have been unkind) for smoking cigarettes in the parking lot with my friend [REDACTED] who liked to stick nails all the way up his nose. We were both clad in black JNCOs with a critical mass of chains, and I often revel in how much my fourteen-year-old self would HATE what I've become.
Oh my god, 14 year old me would be disgusted with 29 year old me. I wish I could go back in time and let her know.
Ah, the stories that a certain Taco Bell men's room could tell…
When I was 12, I cut school for the first time. My friends and I went downtown, and there were dozens of people all over giving out free samples of Rolaids. We gathered up armloads of them, then went to the (now-long-defunct) Lafayette Mall and dropped them into the fountain from the balcony. Mall security dragged us in and threatened to call our parents, but we refused to give them our names so they eventually just let us go.
After that, we went to this metalhead store Stairway to Heaven and bought skull rings.
Mostly when I cut school in high school, though, I just went to the library. Not very dirtbag.
Oh my god, I was such a dirtbag. Here are but a few examples of my shameless dirtbaggery.
Ages 15-18 – Did not pay for a single movie because my dirtbag friends and I realized we could sneak in a side door.
Age 16 – Skipped French class almost daily to hang out at the boardwalk, preferably near a sign that said "No Loitering." Wrote the name and phone number of my frenemy directly on the boardwalk. Strange men started calling her house, my parents found out and made me go to the boardwalk and scrub out the number.
Age 18 – Snuck into an abandoned factory to smoke a joint, because nothing is cooler than doing drugs in an abandoned factory. Heard someone come in after us (it was for sure a homeless guy who lived there), freaked out and escaped through a hole in the wall.
Addendum to your first one: snuck into MANY R-rated movies before the age of 17, even though the bored teenage dirtbag cashier would surely have sold me a ticket.
That's the great thing about movie theatres, 75 per cent of the people who work there are teenage dirtbags and they don't have any interest in your dirtbag activities.
My friends and I were really into mild to moderate vandalism, but we did it to get justice for terrible things that had been done to us and our friends.
For example, the local newspaper did not give my sports team enough coverage, so we went to the reporter's house and covered his front door with cheese from a can.
That is beautiful
I was the "good one" in a group of dirtbag friends.
Many things happened in my friend's basement: stabbing the couch with a knife (several times), my friend heating up milk in a Snapple bottle cap (that he was holding) and then promptly burning both his hand and then his leg when he threw the hot milk into the air. My parents used to let me have co-ed sleepovers, which involved a lot of burning pretzels, salami, and chocolate in the fireplace and putting porn on every TV. Late at night they would drive through our yard (!) and knock on my window to freak me out. That stopped when my dad put boards with nails on the lawn.
These are the same friends who, in college, smashed a hole through the dividing wall in their kitchen so they could take flying leaps through it onto the couch in the living room.
Oh god, and then my friends were, like, the ASSHOLES of Disney World when we went on a band trip junior year. I'm pretty sure they got a guy fired.
I am laughing so hard at the hole in the wall thing
The landlord didn't have them pay a deposit when they first rented the house. (???!!!!!)
When I was 14 I lit dryer lint on fire to see if it would burn. It burned so quickly I couldn't let go and ended up with a blister on the tip of my thumb.
Oh, man. I also blistered the tip of my thumb when I was 14, though I was throwing a match into a bottle of hand sanitizer to see what would happen (flames. flames happened). This was while my dirtbag friend and I were burning a bible my grandparents had bought me for Christmas, using a bottle of Grey Goose we'd stolen from my parents as accelerant in between swigs. (We then smeared the ashes on my neighbors' windows, writing 666.)
Anyway, kids are stupid, and drunk people are stupid, and drunk kids are especially stupid. That's what I learned as a teen.
Read "dryer lint" as "an actual dryer," was SUPER impressed.
I was mostly not a dirtbag because when I wasn't busy being a hardcore nerd I was A TEENAGE REVOLUTIONARY! Interestingly enough I barely remember these incidents but my friends and parents remember them vividly. Here are the highlights:
In 6th grade I apparently made our new social studies teacher cry on the day I was protesting the very important cause of [something?] and turned my desk around backwards in nonviolent protest and would not turn it back. This teacher by the way was a very nice lady and our year of hazing apparently turned her tough as nails and awesome as all get out. I regret nothing.
I complained that our 7th grade history class was too dull and apparently staged a stunt where I brought in a pillow and a blanket and took a very staged nap to get my point across, after did the classwork.
In 9th grade I fought my creative writing teacher on my right to not say the pledge of allegiance. Apparently so did my little brother 5 years later. WHOO HOO DIRTBAG REVOLUTIONARIES.
I think I regularly didn't wear shoes at school from grade 9 through Sophomore year of college, including in the very disgusting bus plaza.
In 9th grade we talked our english teacher into letting us create a weeklong womyns commune at our friend's house as part of a writing assignment and we read Herland as our book. It nearly ended all our friendships and was GLORIOUS.
I refused to sit in my desk and sat on the floor instead. I talked an english teacher into letting me swap classes with a friend taking a chemistry class. I used to bail on my "Diversity and Tolerance" class by asking my teacher where she got her information from, pointing out wikipedia isn't a valid source and then she would excuse me to "go to the library". I'd then sit in the hallway and insufferably and pointedly read Neruda or Plath.
Ok dirtbaggiest- I stole a packet of hall passes and used to write hall passes for my friends. I made out with a friend of mine during free period next to the theater and when he was getting under my shirt, all the kids apparently in theater class got released to go to work in groups and we got super caught. I decided in middle school I was going to become a witch which was really just an excuse to light things on fire in my room. I melted a part of my carpet and also had to flip a shelf in my bookcase to hide the smoke damage.
God. I was SO. COOL. and I didn't even know it.
Oh god, I was a dirtbag leftist/progressive nerd too, and this is bringing up so many other memories.
-making a point to not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance which played in our classrooms every day, which I thought was brainwashing and not really up the standards of true democracy, if you cared about that sort of thing. I went to school with a lot of military kids, so that went over well.
-going on diatribes about how nationalism was inherently destructive (I didn't and still don't have any problems with racial/ethnic IDs, which, hey dissonance)
-quoting "hell is other people" and laughing about it
-generally musing about existentialism
Also, as had been posted before, I was definitely the kind of teenager who sneered at teenagery things (and the fashion trends/fads of the time) to pretend I wasn't lonely when I was SO LONELY.
I'd also have conversations with my mom about why Asians need to get into political and civic engagement in the US or else people would walk all over us (I was starting to read Asian Am stuff around this time) and while that isn't particularly dirtbag-like, my mom reacted to me like I was being an Annoying Hardcore Dirtbag. So there's that.
She was probably just tired and worried about me not being able to make money to support myself. I would constantly critique her driving though, which, while the critiques were correct, were very annoying.
I stood for the pledge but around 5th or 6th grade started leaving out the "under god" part in my recital. Also would just say it really fast to get it over with, and then stand around looking painfully bored waiting for everyone else to finish.
I stood for the pledge but left out "under god" AND refused to put my hand over my heart. SUCK IT, CAPITALISM.
(I am so glad you guys are here with me.)
I stopped reciting the pledge or putting my hand over my heart in elementary school, on the grounds that I knew damn well the US did not have liberty and justice for all and I was not going to go around lying about it. I then spent eight years waiting for someone to challenge me on this and no one ever did. I had a whole speech and everything. I was so disappointed.
My father who was a much more successful teenage and college student dirtbag was similarly disappointed by his high draft number. He never got to actually be a conscientious objector. He retaliated by talking my (future) mother into letting him use her VW Bug to smuggle draft dodgers to Canada.
I always wound up being the lone leftist voice in civics class "debates." Like the one on flag-burning, where the main argument of everybody else was "that's not very nice," and "you could just write a letter to the newspaper instead," and my point was, "of course it's not very nice, that's why they bothered to MAKE A LAW saying it was ok, you guys suck and hate freedom."
TEENAGE MARXISTS UNITE! AND CRUSH THE PARENTS!
I am so glad other people went through the pretending-to-believe-in-wicca-to-light-shit-on-fire phase! So fun.
BEHOLD I AM QUEEN DIRTBAG:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/5NsM2Oh.jpg" title="Hosted by imgur.com" />
I paid for my share of the booze at this party via check, with "dinner" written in the memo line.
I have that teeeshirt! Dirtbag uniform!
Partying on the beach, our one remaining male friend in the group, who as we later found out secretly wanted to bone one of us and was storing up his sense of increasingly insane grievance against her, put lit sparklers in his ears to be funny and accidentally set his hair on fire.
I had a mullet and wore red parachute pants. This was not the 80s, either.
I dated the tiniest, scruffiest, most glorious metalhead who was apparently repeatedly stopped by the cops for "looking like a vagrant" (don't even get me started on the police in my town, they were a bunch of criminals and a bunch of them actually got caught stealing from a FISH RESTAURANT. Like, actual fish. Who does that?!)
I spent a lot of time driving around at night with my friends through the center of town, drinking slushies, looking at shopping carts people had thrown in the swamp, and wondering why everyone was asleep.
One time, my boyfriend-at-the-time and a couple of our friends got our hands on a go-cart and drove it through the woods while at the same time eating kraft mac-n-cheese out of a giant plastic bowl. Then we went to shoot his dad's gun off into the woods. Later, I pierced everyone's ears. It was a glorious dirtbag day and I didn't even get to see the bicycle jousting, which I had been told was part of that earlier morning.
Oh god KD dirtbaggery. Did you ketchup it too?
We didn't do bicycle jousting, preferring instead a form of demolition derby involving bicycles, aka How I Got My First Concussion
I keep trying to think of anything dirtbaggy that I've done but most of the things from high school involve the Latin Club and that might automatically make those actions not dirtbaggy (things I did with the Latin Club: had shopping cart races in grocery store parking lots late at night, left weird messages or objects in random people's mailboxes, made Wal-Mart page us over the loudspeaker, etc)
College/ grad school featured more "drunk girls talking about Kafka and throwing up on the sidewalk" than dirtbaggery. However, I do know that putting the eraser end of a pencil into a flame until it's hot and then smooshing the heated eraser onto your desk or palm is weirdly satisfying.
I was a painfully well-behaved youth, but all my quasi-dirtbag moments involve Latin, so.
High school: I spent a lot of time pointedly reading Teach Yourself Latin in my French class because I was so above paying attention to the rest of those losers trying to conjugate parler.
College: I was on a study abroad semester to Rome that culminated with a giant dirtbag scavenger hunt in the wee hours of the morning all over the city. Options included peeing off the Tiber island (bonus points if a girl did it; the queen dirtbag of the group was proud to accept the challenge) and earning money as a street performer. Penalties for insufficient dirtbagginess involved doing pushups on the cobblestones between chugs of jugged red wine so vile that some concerned German tourists stopped us and said, "Do you realize you're not actually supposed to drink that?"
I went home early because I was that kid.
High school Latin Club trip to Rome was dorkily uneventful. Except for when we briefly considered lifting a smart car, carrying it up a big flight of steps and leaving it in front of a museum (can't remember which one… something in Rome I think. The one with the scale model of ancient Rome in it). Trying to figure out if it makes us not dirtbags because we didn't do it (too wussy) or actual dirtbags because we didn't do it (effort and planning are anti-dirtbag)
oh dude, the fascist museum with the creepy mini-Rome! I think a random smart car would have improved it. It would be like giving Mussolini the finger, which is totally dirtbag, in the best possible way.
My husband and his friends made flame throwers out of backpack-style super shakers filled with gasoline. It was fun until the gas melted the plastic. We built a fire so large at my friend's parents' cottage, it melted the water pipes several feet underground. The fire had tires and other accelerants added. This cottage was really an old farm. We'd get beater cars for cheap and then drive them around the field, trying to crash into each other. I know what size of tree you can safely run down. Before my time, they actually set a car on fire. So when my husband hears someone fret about the possibility of a car bursting I to flames, he'll dismissively wave his hand and say "It takes a lot more than you'd think for a car to catch on fire."
my early teen years were just a blur of putting all my clothes into the washer with three packets of black RIT dye, smoking clove cigarettes, waitin for my lungs to start bleeding. most of my dirtbaggery was conceptual though since I didn't really get going with the drinking until late college. and it was hard to maintain a really foul dorm space until I had a single.
oh I think my late-blooming dirtbag apex was when I was in Amsterdam full of mushrooms in a phone booth waiting for what seemed subjectively like years for my friend to finish her tearful daily phone call to her dumb French boyfriend who had a sideline smuggling pot over the Swiss Alps, she said? that might not have made any sense. We had not showered for a week because our cheap hotel room only had a sink and the bathroom down the hall only had a toilet. Now that I think back on this with a decade of wisdom, it is possible that there was a shower down the hall as well. but we did not think to ask because we were full of drugs.
I am commenting as an anonymous guest because my dirtbaggery was pretty epic and I also should definitely not have survived teenagerdom. At 15, I seduced my first girlcrush via her boyfriend by suggesting a threesome she most definitely didn't want but the two of us did. At 16, I was at this insane houseparty where different floors were devoted to people on different substances (basement/acid, main floor/booze, 2nd floor/blow) and after pissing in the pool and shaming chubby girls in the hot tub, I decided to steal one of the host's easily tote-able sound systems. At 16 or 17, I forget which, I devirginized this poor blonde boy at beach week who predictably became obsessed and spent the rest of the week making fun of him to his guy friends. And then, at 18 or so, I threw my bf's laptop off a balcony, smashing it into tiny pieces, because I had caught him messaging somebody on adult friend finder. Those are just the few that jump to mind.
I was never a dirtbag, but I've made out with a few, starting with that goth-wannabe at a party when I was 15 and drunk off 2 wine coolers (hello, 80s!).
This may be why I feel such a spiritual kinship with Nicole, but am completely fascinated by Mallory.
OMG, "15 and drunk off 2 wine coolers" was precisely my introduction to underage drinking! Hello 80s, indeed :D
Held an illicit party where someone tried to shotgun a can of Red Bull and burned it onto the pot-lights in my friend's kitchen. We cleaned everything else up, but Jenny's mom noticed the brown substance caked onto her lights – this is how we got busted.
Other than that, just your normal underage drinking, mostly.
also, a lot of "punk rock" concerts by the dirtbags I had futile crushes on at some Greek restaurant that for some reason would let teens have punk rock shows in it. It was great.
Oh, and my high-school car, which I let all my friends write song lyrics in Sharpie around the interior. My father despaired. Fortunately it died of unrelated causes so there was no resale value anyway.
this reminds me that my mom let me write on my bedroom door in high school, so it was full of angsty lyrics and inside jokes. At one point I wanted to color it all black so I started in the corner with a sharpie but got bored and it started to run out so I abandoned it.
I covered the ENTIRETY OF MY BEDROOM WALLS with…everything, really, CD notes, posters, drawings, bits clipped out of magazines, stickers, stuff written on the walls, you name it. My parents were amazingly tolerant of my nonsense and I removed it all at some point in early college and they painted over the rest. No harm done. Thanks, mom and dad. <3
On our next-to-last night of high school my dirtbag friends and I made a horror movie called Death Hike. It involved death and hiking. I had to be killed off first because I had a final first thing in the morning. We also made interstitial commercials, as if our film was airing on television on Sunday afternoon, including a Bud Light commercial involving hair spray and an open flame.
Oh my god, I wouldn't even know where to begin. In 8th grade I started stealing Monarch cigarettes from 7-11 (that's when they still displayed the cheap brands on the counter). I would also steal vodka from my mom's untouched liquor cabinet to mix in with Slurpees, which we would drink at Martina's newly-divorced-dad's condo (or, her newly-divorced-mom's condo, which was conveniently a few blocks away).
I think my dirtbaggiest moment was in junior year of high school when, after only having my license for 2 weeks and driving my sister's car, I dropped a Slurpee (vodka-free, I swear) and when I bent down to pick it up, I pulled the whole steering wheel too. Ended up driving down an embankment, across a driveway, through the garage and into the side of a house. When the homeowner came out to see what happened, I shamelessly asked her to dispose of approximately 14 empty cigarette packs before my mom got there. She obliged and stuffed them in her bathrobe pockets. That woman is the patron saint of dirtbag teenagers everywhere.
Were we pals in high school?
Dirtbag: stole my mom's car to tag bridges with a gay boy I had a huge crush on.
Went to a rave instead of prom. Wearing Doc Martens that matched a dress I'd sewn myself.
Refused to read "Crime and Punishment" in AP English because SMH.
Bumped into my history teacher at a gay bar, who had just turned me in to the principal for thinking I was dealing E.
I had no idea until these comments about "I lit something on fire once almost" what a dirtbag I was. Hi!
I'm not sure if this is dirtbaggy or just awesome, but one of my youth group leaders (!) had a red Mustang convertible (the new kind, right when the 2000 models came out) and we would pack like 5 or 6 of us in that tiny car and do donuts – and backwards donuts! – in the church parking lot, blasting Nelly's "Ride Wit Me" before youth group started.
oh my god i had such a crush on that youth group leader. despite the fact that he was married.
Oh and my best friend and I would go to the mall and wear all black and bicycle chains as necklaces, and swear near small children just to scandalize their parents.
that's pretty dirtbaggy.
I also had an attractive youth group leader who used to do this! Right down to the choice of music. His car was way less cool, though.
When I was 14 or so my friend's parents were going to a car show in Louisville and brought my friend and I and another friend along and got us our own room at the Brown Hotel, which is a really, really nice hotel. It's the hotel in the movie Elizabethtown, if you've seen that. They were remodeling a couple of the floors so we snuck in via the service stairs and loitered and moved things around to mess with the construction staff. Then we went and snuck into the ballroom and got caught by a security guard named Rex, who proceeded to show us all the other places we weren't allowed to go and then we just hung out for a while. Rex was definitely a dirtbag.
When I was in my early teens, a friend and I used to stand at my third story window and throw pennies at people walking on the sidewalk below. Occasionally we hit them.
Oh, I also used to go to the last five minutes of my eleventh-grade French class after driving around for 75 like a dirtbag and getting Wendy's and tell the teacher it was because I was needed at my sister's junior high, which was nearby. I must have done that seven or eight times. She did not catch on.
I challenged twelfth-grade French Language Arts and got a 92 on the exam, so I guess I didn't miss much.
Oh I suspect she caught on, but she just didn't. care.
Wait, are Canadian teachers paid enough to care? American ones aren't.
I would like to give this particular teacher enough credit to think she caught on. I actually don't know how much Canadian teachers make! I should ask my teacher friend.
In my experience, if you're acing the class Canadian teachers don't care. My science teacher used to compliment my shitty anime drawings (done in sharpie!) that I made during work time.
Sharpie drawings reminds me that I ran a small side-gig in high school drawing sharpie tattoos on people. The most popular design was flames around each wrist a la Chester Bennington (?) from Linkin Park, in a variety of colors.
In 2004, a fellow dirtbag and I were feeling kinda down, so I pulled a bottle of wine from the stash hidden in my dorm room, and we left campus to sit and drink it on James Dean's grave. Hung out there in the (shockingly low-security) cemetery until I was sober enough to drive home, but still uninhibited enough to steal somebody's stone angel lawn sculpture on the way back to campus. Dirtbag friend used it as a doorstop for his freshman dorm room until he dropped out.
when we were 11 & 12, my brother and i decided to perform science experiments by mixing chemicals in the toilet of our only bathroom, with the idea we could just flush it if anything bad happened. we did flush it and we broke the only toilet in our whole house.
For some reason this one is making me laugh the hardest.
we learned nothing from this, i'm pretty sure we did it again the following year
Once when I was eight I tried to climb my house using a jump rope tied to a flag pole and I made it to the second story window before the flag pole broke and I fell all the way down and landed in a flower pot. The flower pot broke and I was thoroughly bruised. I cried.
Another time when I was also eight I tied a giant pink bucket to the handle of the garage door and sat in it and I made my three-year-old sister push the button to open it so that I would be lifted into the sky. A neighbor saw us and called my parents, which was rude.
I was mostly not a dirtbag, to my great chagrin
Sophomore year of high school I lied to my parents about doing a math project at a friend's (do be fair, we did do the project. poorly.) and sneaked off to watch her friend's shitty band at possibly the sketchiest venue I've ever been to. We pulled it off without a hitch until I told my stepsister about it almost a year later during one of our periods of getting along and sharing. When we started arguing again she told the parents and I got grounded for two weeks. A year after it happened.
I worked as a closing shift manager at a ColdStones later in high school. We had a scheme going with the rest of the nearby restuarants and the movie theater that we'd just swap each other for shit. So i could see a movie for an ice cream, or get a burger at Johnny Rockets.
Senior year I had a free period that I spent either lounging on the quad, engaged in a standoff with our security head or in the ceramics lab making tiny figurines for my friends.
I also went to three Warped Tours. And made out with a bassist from one of the DIY stage bands while wearing a TMNT shirt I'd cut up and stitched back together with safety pins.
and then there's the five trips to Burning Man
and also the mohawk in college.
<img src="https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/1933766_509080980499_2488_n.jpg?oh=1f68258ffa08ffefaad8257b7904f922&oe=543B38B2">
I think you get at least marginal dirtbag cred here, for the Warped Tour shirt/makeout alone.
YES I was also a shift leader at Cold Stone in high school! We used to swap ice cream for booze, chinese food, and sandwiches. I stole those 10 lb bags of gummy bears and pans of brownies for personal use, and I would bring gallons of ice cream to parties.
I stole a chair at one point (idk?). And I once stuck hundreds and hundreds of gummy bears to the windows so the manager would have a shitty morning.
jesus, I was a shithead.
When I was 17 I was driving aimlessly around because I didn't want to go home because I had FEELINGS. I went to my former best friend's house who had recently broken my heart and so I wasn't speaking to him and parked a couple houses away so I could stare at THE PLACE WHERE HE LIVED while listening to sad music. Then I saw his car pull up and he started to get out and I threw the car in reverse and blindly drove, hitting the street sign and denting my mom's car before peeling out. I could not come up with a convincing excuse for the dent. Whatever it was, it basically had neon "lying" signs all around it.
I had been a spectacularly good kid in high school, and one day my senior year I got to school and sort of realized that I just didn't want to go, so I didn't. I walked around the city by myself all day instead. I didn't actually do anything dirtbaggy, just kind of wandered around for like eight hours before going home. The next day I discovered that after three years of my near-perfect behavior and a desperately adult-pleasing affect, nobody in the attendence office cared whether I had a note or not. I started doing this on the regular (in my mind it was constantly, but probably it was once or twice a month maybe), usually going nowhere and doing nothing but avoiding school and other humans. I definitely went to the art museum at least once and the downtown library several times.
When I confided to one of my friends that I was doing this, he wanted to do it too, but he was even goody-goodier than I was and insisted we call into the attendence office at the beginning of the day pretending to be each others fathers and excusing our absences. Then we went and flew kites on a golf course. There are no words to describe how non-dirtbaggy this is.
Awww, I had a friend who was really good at pretending to be people's dads. It was great.
I only got detention once in high school and it was for cutting gym class all week by hiding in the school library.
Our high school had a really strict attendance policy where you would have to arrange to make up unexcused absences minute-for-minute with the teacher whose class you missed. The few time I skipped class senior year, my teachers were like, "You don't have to do it" because I was such a goddamn goody two-shoes the rest of the time.
In middle school, my best friend and I attempted to summon spirits with an Ouija board. When the spirits failed to tell us which of our classmates had crushes on us, we lit it on fire. Her dad came into the kitchen, took a look, and said, "Girls, what is the ONE RULE of the house?" and she sighed the way only pre-teens can sigh and rolled her eyes and mumbled, "'don't set things on fire in the house.'" We threw it on the concrete porch and watched it burn.
She and I also collected roadkill in a Radio Flyer wagon so that we could bleach the skulls to use as offerings/decorations in some backyard Wiccan rituals which maaaaaaaaaay have once set a pile of leaves on fire in her backyard.
Also, in an plan inspired by some Calvin & Hobbes, we dug a tiger pit in the backyard. We got tired about six inches into the pit and determined we were too tired to even bother filling in the pit – we knew we'd come back to finish the job later. We just dragged a lawn chair over the hole so that we'd remember where it was. Her brother sprained his ankle in it later that day. Dirtbag win.
I would say that we were dirtbags, definitely, but that's fibbing. She was the dirtbag. She wore those sneakers that had wheels in them (Heely's?) to school and skated from class to class. A hall monitor stopped her and told her he was writing her up and she looked him stone cold in the face and said, "do you even know my fucking name?" He did not. She skated off, laughing and shouted "FUCK YOU."
She was an inspiration. I'm going to do some dirtbaggery in honor of her.
I, TOO, WAS A PREADOLESCENT WICCAN DIRTBAG
when my parents yelled at me i would stare at the carpet determined to light it on fire with my mind, and i read a lot of ~teen witch~ ya lit
Sometimes I just marvel at the amount of emotional energy I spent concealing my wiccan accessories/activities and how little my parents would have actually cared about any of it. I interpreted their indifference and mild amusement as scorching judgment. I used to keep all my Silver Ravenwolf books and my baggies of herbs from the natural-foods store in a bright orange toolbox with a lock on it and a note inside explaining everything in case they opened it.
My sister has all the dirtbag moments. I was the good boy. I guess my dirtbaggiest thing in high school was when I told a friend that I would only drink three Bacardi breezers at the next high school party if she wore cherries on her ears in the cafeteria. She did, so I did.
Three. Whole. Bacardi. Breezers.
Oh, and I was involved in the collective dirtbaggery that was our weekly year-wide letting off steam parties at whoever's parents were out of town's house in high school. We destroyed the roof of a very nice house in Knightsbridge, and then got all pissed off with that dude because his parents complained to our parents when they got home and found all their walls ruined by water damage. Like, whatevs.
When I was 20 I shaved my head on a dare (with a cash incentive) because none of the guys I hung out with would do it. Later I ended up hooking up with a guy because we had the same hairstyle. We were caught making out in the hall by the ex-nun that ran my dorm. I am not Catholic but I lived in a Catholic dorm. Catholic kids are capable of awesome levels of dirtbaggery. My friend used hymnal pages as rolling papers, for example.
I went to a Creed concert. Intentionally.
creed arms into a sea of haters
When I was 10 My best friend's parents had HBO. Whenever I stayed over for the night we would watch the porn that came on at midnight. It took me years until I understood why the one girl wanted to sit on the guy's face. This was back int he 80's. Does HBO have porn anymore?
Second story:
When I was eighteen years old, I talked my best friend into jumping the border with me to go to New York to see a girl I was Internet In Love with. We only had our birth certificates, like, a change of underwear each, and a copy of National Geographic, on which I was quizzed at the border (Snow Leopards).
I told my mother that I was going to a friend's housewarming and an art opening, which, strictly speaking, were both very true points. I did not tell her why I wouldn't be home on the Sunday night, and for ten years she never asked.
We got to NYC from Toronto and spent 36 hours in Queen's with this girl, which was horrifying and fun and hollowing-out in equal measure, and then we went home on the night bus.
I was late for my English exam on Monday but it was entirely worth it.
My mother found out over coffee at a church lunch about ten years after the fact, and it was spectacular.
When I was 14, I tore a hole in my Union Bay cut off cargo pants because I fell off a Razor Scooter. A few months later, I tried to dye my black hair with Kool-Aid. It didn't work, but stained all of my mom's good towels.
I would also like to proudly proclaim that just a few months ago, at the wise old age of 28, I drunkenly put my neighbor's bike in the tree in their front yard.
I was never a Dirtbag as a youth and any acts I committed that had even a whiff of Dirtbaggery left my mind reeling and my bowels spasming.
The dirtbaggiest thing I've done on my own was have a small gathering of friends (literally 6 people including myself) over when my mom went away for the weekend to her high school reunion several hours away. We indulged in a single bottle of wine and half a bottle of one of those disgusting premixed "mudslide" beverages. Again, among six people. I was 19.
I was not the dirtbag in this story (see above), but with the same friends a few months earlier, I was the designated driver and my friend J was so drunk she made me pull over so she could puke. We were on a deserted backroad in northern Massachusetts, halfway home from the party and less than a mile from her house. Of course, after J finished puking, the car wouldn't start, so my slightly less drunk friend had to walk to J's house, fetch her dad, his car, and some jumper cables, and then we had to awkwardly interact with J's dad while we jump-started the car.
just FYI I am sending my Mom this entire thread with a note saying LOOK HOW EASY I WAS.
We are so thrilled to be able to assist you in this.
I was thinking of doing the same thing. "Look, look how well-behaved we were!"
That's a dirtbag move right there.
When I was 10, my friend and I smoked grass in our hangout in my parents garage. Admittedly, it was lawn grass rolled in post-it notes and was a complete failure, but the dirtbag intent was there.
Oh god, in 7th grade my friend and I smoked business cards. Just… rolled them up and lit the end on fire. In her bedroom. Using my mom's business cards. Sorry, mom.
me too!! except it was printer paper.
For at least three years in a row, every 2nd of February I used to take a totally fine t-shirt, cut the sleeves out, shred it with scissors in random places, and write slogans all over it with red abd blue-inked pens.
The occasion? I was commemorating Sid Vicious' death.
my friend in freshman year of high school and I saw a Sex Pistols documentary and then walked around calling each other cunts for like, months. We were 14 and thought we were awesome.
Hi everyone who knows me in real life. Superbowl Sunday 2006: <img src="https://scontent-a-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/l/t1.0-9/1910225_510610739930_1465_n.jpg" alt="Dirtbaggery">
I am a serious professional now, okay. But these footsie pajamas were purchased in the "husky boys" section of Target and I still have them.
YES
I'd like to be your friend, this looks like an awesome party except for the football
got drunk out by the lake and fell in a snow bank and the next morning realized that both the lenses were gone from my glasses.
I was never much of a dirtbag, sadly – but did go through a phase of deliberately damaging stuff around the house (cutting up pillowcases, etc) when I was about 3, purely for the satisfaction of making my mark on stuff. I still remember my dad's shock on finding me scratching up his nice, shiny wooden chest-of-drawers with a set of keys.
At the start of high school, a group of us (ok, we were in a 'band') used to hang around and smoke basil rollups in a vain effort to be cool. I still don't really understand the logic behind this.
Actually, scratch that – just remembered I was the kid who used to pierce her ears with drawing-pins in French class.
I once tried to smoke a cinnamon stick out of general rebelliousness. I do not recommend this.
In high school, we snuck onto the golf course at night with one club each, grab a bunch of balls from the range, and play "night golf".
It was great the first couple times, but then they called the cops and we almost got caught, and then the course installed these big floodlights on the driving range that they left on all night. So that was the end of that.
In college, my life divided between a group of punks i hung out with (ie, smoked behind the Dairy Queen with) in high school and more standard-less Menthol smelling friends. At 4am, the punk friends decided we should have an after party skinny dipping in Stephens Lake. At some point, a girl got pissed at her ex and threw an empty 40oz the dude. "Fuck you Matt!" It hit me instead. Probably because I was trying to make out with him.
Concussed, bleeding and drunk, I still did not want to make any of these assholes drive me home, so I put on my Social Distortion t-shirt (couldn't find my shorts!) and walked the mile back to my apartment when I realized my KEYS were in my shorts. Also? My mom had been visiting that weekend, and freaked out over the amount of unlocked windows I had, so she had gone around earlier, securing each one. The only window she hadn't touched was a tiny 1.5' x 1.5' window that was about eight feet off the ground with no possible holds on the wall. Also? She was coming back by at 7am (it was now 5:45) to drive me back to Oklahoma for the weekend. And did I mention I had no pants?
In a stint of resourcefulness only known to the exhausted and desperate, I noticed a stack of pallets behind the dumpster. I made some sort of lean-to ladder out of them, managed to hoist my not-exactly-tiny body in, only breaking the window frame in two spots. I laid on the bathroom floor for the next hour, half asleep, half stunned, until 7am, when I heard my mom knock. I put on a change of clothes before I answered the door and when she commented that it looked like I had a rough night, I shrugged and said, "Whatever."
Oh. When I was a sophomore in high school, I sneaked off campus to go to lunch (AT THE MINI-MART 2 CHILI DOGS FOR .99) in the trunk of a 1971 olive green Chevy Nova driven by a double-denim wearing senior with a pedophile mustache.
my friends did the trunk thing so often they had a name for it, a la riding shotgun:
riding cuisinart
I was never super dirtbaggy, but during middle school I hung out with the dudes next door and when our parents were all out we would find random stuff in the garage and chuck it from the roof onto their driveway just to watch it break.
They also practiced a lot of pro wrestling moves on each other, and I mostly just watched and laughed when they hurt themselves, but once my friend tried to do a takedown on me (in a semi-flirty way) and I ended up flipping him over my head; he asked me what the hell I thought I was doing and I laughed in his face, said "Kicking your ass, duh" and walked off.
When I was 11 or so (and thus old enough to know better), I drew all over our pink bathroom tiles with my mom's black kohl pencil.
In 9th grade, I had the bright idea of pouring cranberry juice onto a maxi pad and sticking it in my friend's bathroom before a party, to gross out all the boys who were coming over.
As college sophomores, my roommates and I put a hole through a wall in our dorm room, decorated with hub caps we found on the street, and played beer pong on the floor in our carpeted hallway.
I was a bored goth drama kid in high school. That was the closest I got to dirtbaggy, skipping class and wearing mesh tops. But when we skipped class it was mostly to do things like make mix-cds and paint things to leave as public art items.
However, my Dude lived in a frat house (against his will, but still), set an infestation of carpenter ants in said house on fire with gasoline, and had friends that littered said house with bb gun pellets shooting at cans, so I feel like my exposure TO dirtbag gives me cred I never earned myself.
we didn't even have a plan, but my friend T. (letters lopped off to protect his reputation) and I really wanted to do a senior prank at our high school, and were pretty sure the way to start was by scouting out the school grounds at night. In all black and ski masks, of course, because this was a Secret Mission.
Long story short, we got spotted, and the guy who spotted us noted that we were in all black and ski masks and so, instead of ignoring us like you probably ignore two skinny teenagers in shorts, called the cops. And SIX cop cars came (did I mention we'd chosen to pull this idiocy in a low-crime suburb with a gold plated police department?). And we ran. And they found/guarded our car. And we wound up at a friend's house telling desperate lies about an impromptu sleepover over the phone to our parents, before we learned that the cops had already run the plates and called home. And we were busted.
The crowning moment came when we were on our way into the police station with our dads and the cops informed us that they'd actually put a dog on our tail, which (thank heavens) lost the scent when we ran through some water at some point.
The other crowning moment was when I heard my dad, outside the room where the police were grilling us, tell a cop "well, I did much stupider things than this at 18, but we're not gonna tell the boys that."
Having steadfastly repressed any and all dirtbag urges throughout high school it is only in the last two years or so that I have been able to fully live up to my dirtbag potential. My greatest moment, the recentness of which is in itself highly dirtbaggy, was probably when I slammed four shots of whiskey immediately prior to having a friend stick and poke a hashtag on my ass.
Second greatest dirtbag moment: I still love it????
Re cigarette burns: after my high school boyfriend broke up with me (for my second best male friend), but still insisted on being Best Friends (and sometimes making out), during one coffee date I casually smoked four cigarettes and put every one out on my wrist, keeping eye contact the whole time.
I know.
I may have hit my peak dirtbag years preteen – raised mormon and about to be baptised at age 8, I desperately wanted to get everything out of my system before having all those sins washed away. So began several months of picking spit-out gum off sidewalks to chew, trying drags out of abandoned but still smoldering cigarettes out of public ashtrays, making tons of prank phone calls to toll free numbers from payphones, dumpster diving behind convenience store for discarded snacks and candy, and, my personal favorite, developing a catchphrase greeting/farewell: "See you in hell, fuckers!"
Prank phone calls to toll free numbers! That was how I dirtbagged, too. We exclusively prank-called Hair Club for Men, for reasons that are lost to time.
I went to a friend's Halloween party and had terrible back pain which was keeping me from enjoying myself until I thought of using whiskey as a painkiller, and then vodka. This was my first time drinking heavily and it turns out I'm a total lightweight. I eventually stumbled out of her party bus (like a tour bus, but just parked in a lane next to her house and used as a place for us to drink/smoke/sleep), and back to her house to throw up four times in the bathroom (I felt like hell but still cleaned up, which I suppose isn't very Dirtbag of me.) I hadn't really said to any of my friends at the time where I was going, so I think they freaked out slightly until they found me wandering back to my boyfriend's car to sleep it off.
also MALLORY you are AGELESS. You are clearly a supreme witch goddess who will walk among us mortals indefinitely, we are not worthy.
This is revelatory stuff right here. Before The Toast, I never had the words to accurately describe my adolescent self. But like a flash it hits me, I WAS A TEENAGE DIRTBAG. No more pretending I was "kind of a hippie/grunge/stoner girl." I embrace it. I flaunt it. Again, I WAS A TEENAGE DIRTBAG. More and more I am finding a home here with you Toasties.
So my friends invited me on a road trip to California with some dude and I declined, and what Dude neglected to mention to them is that he was involved in something called the Green Parrot Murder, where he and his brothers put on trenchcoats and tried to hold up a bar and wound up killing the proprietor (google it).
While they're out unknowingly harboring a fugitive, they call me and insist that I go out in the middle of the night to some strange girls place, knock on the door, and pass some cryptic message ("Grayson Jones says the wind blows past fuck it I dunno"). The door opens and this pretty young thing is there crying and she tells me that she's happy to know he's safe, also she's quite scared and the FBI is probably watching us, which was probably bullshit because as this thing eventually wrapped up I learned quite a bit about the incompetence of law enforcement.
When I think about the stupid shit me and my moron friends got wrapped up in back in our teens, that event tops the list of dirtbaggery.
I was a pretty good kid, but when you grow up in Oregon, you are bound to be a bit of a dirtbag at some point, no matter how good you are. Highlights:
-Age 6, nail a plastic sandwich baggy to the mantle above the fireplace, and light it on fire, watching flaming drips fall onto the brick hearth below (older brother's idea.)
-Age 13, on a camping trip with a friend's parents, sneak out at night with a group of boys who had somehow obtained a car, and spend hours "doing donuts" in a nearby parking lot.
-Age 14, get my parents to drive me to the movie theater with boyfriend, then leave the movie immediately to go find a pile of dirt to roll around and make out on for 2 hours
-Age 14, smoke weed using a pop can (something all Oregonian children are born knowing instinctively how to do.) Hose friend down with Lysol afterward when we remember he will be going home to his dad, who is a cop and his dog, who is a drug-sniffing dog.
-Age 14, make horror movies about psycho killers after stealing my dad's video camera. Stain the driveway with ketchup and get grounded until I scrub it off with bleach.
-Age 15, write permission slips in my own handwriting for any kid who asks, pretending to be their parent and letting them leave school early.
-Ages 13-18 inclusive, so many things involving a microwave and/or candles I can't even. Also things involving skateboards and bicycles.
-Age 16, skip school every conceivable moment to go home and do things I won't type here, some illicit but mostly sexual. Once just to watch Gorillas in the Mist and ad-lib lines for the gorillas.
-Age 17, leave prom early to go home, get drunk on rye, and take many showers with a boy.
-Age 17, help a friend floss her teeth with a strand of hair after using chewing tobacco during a weekend choir retreat where we were supervised like hawks and couldn't get away with smoking cigarettes, leading to severe nicotine withdrawal. During that retreat, we also had a late-night conversation about oral sex and all the free shit you could get from Planned Parenthood, and the very-religious moms who had been sent to chaperone us were scandalized and convinced we were possessed by Satan, and wouldn't look us in the eyes or speak to us for the rest of the trip. It was glorious.
I emphasize, I was a really, really good kid who never got into trouble.
"Mallory enjoying herself at Parties" needs to become a meme. Like sad Keanu or strutting Leo.
I saved the best/worst stuff up and got two books out it:
Stolen http://www.anvilpress.com/Books/stolen and Whitetail Shooting Gallery http://www.anvilpress.com/Books/whitetail-shootin…
Burn down the school, mistake your cousin for a deer and shoot her, attack a boy with a dildo because you like his hockey bruises…
(I wasn't the dirtbag, if we're honest, but I did keep track of what the dirtbags were doing.)
I spent my senior prom in the auditorium parking lot, sitting in the back of my pal Schmitsky's pickup truck, drinking beer and hucking the empties at the happy, well-adjusted kids who were heading to the gym to have a magical night.
Oh yeah, oh man, the cigarette thing! A guy I dated who was more of a loser than a dirtbag, he wasn't awesome enough to be a dirtbag, was mad at me because I sent him home from a party at my apartment (it was the most dirtbag apartment, we had a houseplant that we used as an ashtray and watered solely with beer) because I wanted to bone this pissed-off dirtbag who was repeatedly stabbing a knife into our hardwood floor. So I boned the floor-stabber (I later married him) and then the next day my loser boyfriend was pissed at me for it even though it was well within the stated rules of our relationship, and he burned his arm with cigarettes and then convinced me to burn my arm to, like, prove I was sorry I guess? It is my only dirtbag scar.
I got my second tattoo, of an ant, instead of participating in the first national elections I was eligible to vote in.
The number of us whose dirtbaggiest tale goes something like, "I cut class to go to the library," is, well, about what I would expect.
This is what my best friend and I did almost every Friday afternoon. Such rebels.
My dad was a probation officer in the Chicago Juvenile Court system. I really couldn't compete.
I once got grounded for going to the library without permission. Thankfully, I have much dirtbaggier stories that balance that one out.
I cut class to go to the quilting classroom and sew with my friends.
A lot of stealing signs and relocating them. There was the: Ten Commandments sign from what I'm pretty sure was a preacher's yard but the kids mom appreciated the "Thou Shalt Not Steal", a lot of For Sale signs, a giant flag (the kind they put up for new subdivisions) and put it in another friend's yard. The following Monday in French class, that kid said the lake patrol pulled up to their dock asking about it..
Setting off fireworks in an empty lot and moments after leaving being pulled over, also in a driveway. Figuring out if you drop bottle rockets in the lake they make a satisfying thud. The first time we went ghost riding when I scraped up my forearm and the car almost ran over my leg.
Stealing pumpkins to make carve awesome Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert jack-o-lanterns. Getting drunk and making dudes mad when I insult their college football teams. Smoking cigars on the balcony and stinking up the whole hall.
Some general music dirtbag-ness. In 2004 I went to Warped Tour mainly to see Coheed and Cambria. I've also seen Incubus and Dave Matthews Band in concert multiple times. Like, a combined 7 times. One of those was last week. I've loved Blink 182 since I was about 9. Sublime is a surefire way to cheer me up.
I wasn't a dirtbag until I moved 3000 miles away from my hometown to attend college in Oregon, so it's not really all that dirtbaggy, and more or less "naive southern girl attempts to 'find herself' via super cool big city kids and a massive amount of drugs and booze".
There were parties at the base of Mount Hood in abandoned quarries. Breaking into high-end condo construction sites and spraypainting the walls. Moving tools around. Ordering a breathalizer online and attempting to see who could blow the highest number. Holding open the drivers side door while driving and puking up a gallon of Carlo Rossi wine. Duct-taping carving knives to our hands and having knife fights. Absinthe-fueled strip twister, complete with nude puking in the neighbors bushes at 5AM.
Burning Man, twice. Now that is a place for awful dirtbag shenanigans.
In 12th grade (1992) I got a tennis ball stuck in my mouth. It fit in, but it was awful getting it out.
The only seriously dirtbaggy thing I ever did: a theatrical rival of mine in town was playing the Baker's Wife in a production of Into The Woods my senior year of high school. I went, sat in the second row, and TOOK OUT A BOOK during "Moments In The Woods". I WAS THE WORSSSSTTTTT
Other entry level dirtbagging: drawing on my Vans/Chuck Taylors with sharpies, elaborate sugar packet/salt shaker sculptures at 24 hour diners, getting kicked out of a Wal-Mart at 3 am for "liberating" all the giant bouncy balls from their end cap prison in the toy aisle.
I love your book gambit. That is perfection!
I hope you made a show of moistening your fingertip on your tongue before flicking the pages.
One year I and a carload of cross country teammates blew off the post-Regionals pizza party to fire an air rifle in Ryan's backyard. I think it was Mark (if it wasn't Mark, it should have been Mark) who ended up shooting the robin.
But I was never going to equal the teenage dirtbaggery committed by my dad thirty years before. Dad, the inveterate golf ball thief and bestower of cruel nicknames.
His sophomore English class was held three stories up. One fine Spring day, the teacher announced she would absent herself for a few minutes to retrieve some forms from the mimeograph room. When she was quite gone, Dad sprinted out the door, pelted down the fire stairs, and arrived outside at the patch of field directly beneath the classroom windows. As he tugged off his shoes and hurled them in opposite directions, an accomplice in the room yanked wide one of the windows and disarrayed the desks and books near it.
When the teacher bustled back in, arms full of forms, the accomplice greeted her with a cry.
"It's Sullivan!" he said. "My god! He went mad! It's too horrible!"
The teacher picked her way past the upturned desks and peered out the window. My father lay thirty feet below, limbs splayed, shoes blown off, tongue jutting, jaw contorted.
"When you're quite ready, Mr. Sullivan," the teacher called. And then she passed out the mimeographs and finished out the hour, while my father's body lay defiantly in the grass.
That teacher's my new role model.
My first car, at 17, was a '92 cherry red camaro with a primered bumper, leopard print seat covers, and a tendency to blast rob zombie. I dunno man, that car was more of a dirtbag than I was, I was just a catholic school girl that didn't know she was a homo yet. I'd challenge dudes in souped up honda civics to drag race at stop lights, and once had to be towed off a beach because I tried to hide the car by parking on sand so my friend and I could skinny dip. If that car could talk, it would be like a cross between K.I.T. from knight rider and an 80s teen movie dirtbag with a sleeveless vest and a heart of gold.
I'd watch the hell out of that movie and I love your name and everything about this comment.
haha thanks! yeah a movie about a protoqueer teen dirtbag and her talking car's suburban hijinks would totally rule
If the tag line contains the words "protoqueer teen dirtbag" it can't lose
Me and my friends joined the school newspaper staff together in high school, and instead of doing any work ever we installed emulators on all the school computers and played Mario Kart during the periods we were supposed to make an actually decent publication.
We would also frequently trick the ancient newspaper teacher into thinking all the computers were broken, and then we'd just cut class.
Also there was the time that several of my friends got interrogated and suspected of planning some sort of school shooting or coup or something, when they were actually just excited about Halo 2 coming out the next week.
Oh! And one time there was a mosh pit at a school dance (I dunno, teens are dumb), and a senior picked my scrawny ass up and hurled me through the air, and I flew into a poor girl standing on the periphery and broke her nose. She had a good laugh at me a year later when I got my own nose broken.
OH MY GOD I TOTALLY FORGOT MY DIRTBAGGIEST THING. It is a long story (kind of).
My senior year of high school, there was a class trip to Paris. I got a job at a movie theatre (where I met several delightful teen dirtbags) to save up money to pay for it. It was held over February vacation. Ahead of the trip, several people asked the teacher who was coordinating about drinking. We were all 17 and 18 year-olds, so drinking alcohol would be legal in France. He hedged and said, "Since it's a school trip, you can't drink" while repeatedly winking and then saying, "So if I encounter you out of your hotel room late at night, you better have a stick of gum in your pocket [to hide your booze breath]."
With such clear-cut instruction, nothing could go wrong! As soon as we arrived in France, everyone else did their darnedest to acquire alcohol. My friends and I were the Good Kids though so we did not engage in the revelry right away. But of course the morning after our first night, we were jealous of all the adventurous kids. Some boys drank some beers at a restaurant! The class president kissed an old French guy at a liquor store in exchange for a bottle of vodka!
This was not to be borne. The second night, my friends and I left the hotel to go to a wine bar. We split half a bottle of wine among the six of us and then headed home. It was not even midnight, but lo and behold, outside the hotel, who was standing there but the teacher. My stomach dropped. He asked where we had been; we answered taking a walk. He looked at us silently for a moment, then said, "Go to your rooms and stay there the rest of the night."
The next morning, everyone on the trip was ushered into the hotel's lobby and the teacher told us, "Everything that's happened stays on this trip. No one's in trouble, but from now on, bedtime is bedtime." Later that day, our hungover class president puked in the Louvre.
It seemed like everything was going to be ok. However, several weeks later, one of the girls who had shared in the bottle of vodka had her photos developed (yes, it was that long ago) and discovered that after she had passed out, the other gals had drawn phalluses on her and taken pictures. She confided in the "cool" teacher who promptly informed the administration and all the girls (including the victim) were suspended. Those girls parents angrily demanded that ALL the kids who had had a drop of alcohol on the trip should also be suspended (even though the rest of us didn't, you know, drink ourselves into oblivion or humiliate our supposed friend).
This led to a school-wide witchhunt for any alcohol-use. In a secret meeting amongst my friends, we pacted to deny any wrongdoing and say nothing of our evening jaunt to the wine bar and our consumption of approximately 2 oz. of wine each. We successfully avoided punishment; anyone who admitted to drinking was suspended for a day and stripped of any titles (which meant that our class president, class vice president, and class treasurer were all impeached).
If I had it to do over again, OF COURSE I would brazenly admit to what I did and inform the administration that I would accept their ludicrous punishment as exactly that–ludicrous. My college apps were already in; I was leaving the school forever in two months, and most importantly I hadn't done anything deserving of punishment. But it's hard to have that kind of perspective at age 18, at least it was for me as a lifelong goody-two-shoes.
Class trips = dirtbag petri dishes! I was on my high school yearbook staff, and we would regularly travel to journalism conventions along with the newspaper and photojournalism staffs. Hotel rooms were designated by the drugs being consumed in them ("That's the whip-it room, that's the pot room…"). Drama raged about cheating girlfriends and boyfriends. People routinely stumbled into our morning sessions hungover and covered in hickeys. Good times were had by all.
I had an art teacher on a class trip to New York tell me (so that I could tell everyone else) before we left that she didn't want to deal with any "nic-fitting teenagers", but that she didn't want to see or hear about us smoking, but that she wasn't going to go out of her way to catch us at it.
Oh, God. You just reminded me of our class trip in Terminale (12th grade). I was primarily the Consigliere to everyone's dirtbagness, as I was the school goody two shoes and my mother (a teacher) had organised the trip and was accompanying us. Amiong other things I
-distracted my mother from the two cases of champagne being druink on the upper deck of the bus
-distracted my mother from the girl so drunk she had to be propped up by about six people on the walk back to the youth hostel
Dirtbaggiest trip ever. And it was legendary.
I was generally a very wholesome straight-A Mormon choir nerd, so my crimes of dirtbaggery were relatively minor and easily excused because of how good I usually was and also having two legit dirtbag older brothers. My friends and I went through a phase where we would steal lawn signs, ornaments, and the occasional ugly planter and then leave them in front our other friends' houses. When I told my parents what we'd been up to (because I knew they wouldn't care), my mom just said, "Don't get caught."
Our greatest crimes involved writing nonsensical Backstreet Boys lyrics (from their first album, which was like 5 years old by this time) in people's driveways with sidewalk chalk and accidentally sparking a prank war with these douchebag boys we were sometimes friends with. Our greatest achievement was forking my archnemesis' front yard, and when he and his friends got me back by throwing all the broken forks and a bunch of signs and stomping all over our muddy recently re-seeded front yard, my parents made me get him to come over and help my dad plant the lawn again. It was pretty sweet justice.
We also got really into "chalking" and would escalate the danger of the places we would write messages. Main streets in our town during red lights, the shoulder of I-205, and in the parking lot of the local Applebee's we frequented, while it was still open (curfews), writing "I <3 Dave" about the 20 year-old waiter who would flirt shamelessly with us for tips.
I am a born goody-two-shoes. I think the closest I ever got to dirtbaggery was in high school, when my recently-ex-girlfriend and another girl and I all told our parents we were sleeping over at each other's houses and spent the night driving all over town. We ultimately ended up at Brazos Bend State Park, where we all got out and laid in the road to watch a meteor shower, except that it was cloudy so no meteors actually put in an appearance. Also my ex-girlfriend tried to touch an armadillo that wandered into the road near us and I flung myself bodily across the hood of the car yelling "NO DON'T LEPROSY." In retrospect it is a miracle that none of us were eaten by an alligator.
I did get in trouble at school for public making out once, but it wasn't very exciting. The assistant principal called our mothers, both of whom cracked up and said something along the lines of, "MY kid? Are you sure?"
i wanted to be a GOTH WICCAN DIRTBAG so hard when i was 10-12 but the only black clothing I owned was a t-shirt that said KEY WEST in blood red letters which combined with my camo cargo shorts [2004 was too much] did not produce the desired effect
HOWEVER, my dad lived a hardcore dirtbag life through high school and college and my favorite dirtbag dad story was when he mooned his little brother dave through an apartment window and dave tried to smack his ass THROUGH THE WINDOW with a tennis racquet, shattering the window into my dad's tender dirtbag butt.
I sold mix tapes of bad 80s songs to all the straight girls I was in love with… and skateboarded to the point of being kicked out of/off of a lot of property.
My dirtbag phase began abruptly after a childhood of feeling extreme guilt for any misbehavior and ratting out myself and fellow kids for the mildest infractions. My dirtbag phase may be ongoing.
That said, one time, I was in Sears with my mom, and I shoplifted a plain black t-shirt, size large, by cleverly tucking it into the bib of my overalls.
Not all dirtbags are cool, you guys.
One time in college, I didn't have a roommate for part of semester, so I moved in a semi-homeless male friend who used the time I was in classes to creep into another student's room and eat the care packages his mom sent him. (The guy blamed his own roommate.)
The dirtbag ripple effects here are glorious.
This one's not mine, but: my husband's teen-bedroom closet was FILLED with angry, angsty sharpied sayings and "poetry." Before his parents renovated, it was the most glorious thing! He was a BAD TEEN. One time, he got arrested, because he and his friends went to a construction site and set a fire extinguisher on fire. Reader, super-duh, I married him.
Please explain how one sets a fire extinguisher on fire. (Is it just pure force of spiteful will?)
The way he tells it, they set the handle on fire, and it smoldered and melted a little. Just enough to attract the attention of a passing cop.
I have been remembering my own dirtbaggery all day. I don't know when I even found the time to insufferably correct people's grammar! (But I did.)
-I decided I hated my 9th grade French teacher, because he was from, like, Newport News, but had "lived abroad" so had this bizarre faux-pan-European accent. He was a pretty boring teacher, too–lots of everybody going around the room and repeating the same phrase, one by one. 20 kids monotoning "Yes, it is snowing," one after another is horrifically dull no matter what the language. I had a lot of opinions about this and other aspects of his teaching style. So, one day I pierced my nipple in class.
I did not get busted at the time! It took a couple of days for the rumors to get around. It was, as I realized it would be, horrendously awkward for the school to address this in any way, and there was no way to prove I had done it. They still called my mom, who was disgusted and horrified. I think we all learned a thing or two about how you teach a language that year.
-I used to crunch up and swallow glass as a party trick/lunch break trick/ one time for a memorable summer camp talent show. I did not die, but my teeth have wear patterns that are upsetting to dentists, and I refuse to explain them.
I think we need a step-by-step on how to discreetly pierce your nipple during French class.
Somebody upthread was talking about how they pierced their own ears in French class. Clearly I missed the boat here.
In 7th grade, my friends and I used to go to this one guy's house after school and set stuff on fire while listening to Def Leppard's "Pyromania." We were very literal children.
At 15, I got super-drunk on Southern Comfort in a cemetery, went to KFC, and then went to a school dance and threw up on a nun. Luckily, it wasn't my school.
I broke up with my high school boyfriend in the cafeteria after eating most of his waffle fries.
Oh man. Every time he sees waffle fries now…
The summer before I went to college I worked at a scrapbooking store at the local mall and started hanging out with a total dirbag who worked at The Children's Place (lol). He would give me rides and we'd take cups out of the food court trashcans and get free refills (gross!!) Halfway through the summer he admitted that he had a girlfriend but she was on a mission trip in central america.
Shortly after that he picked me up for an evening adventure which consisted of some serious tresspassing at the local private airport and laying in the grass by the runway waiting for a plane to land (until the police came and we ran a mile through the wetlands and I cut myself climbing over a barbed wire fence while every Death Cab For Cutie song played in my head). My parents were out that night but I had forgotten my keys so I made him wait with me until they got home (causing him to miss his curfew). His dad called my dad at midnight and was LIVID. I don't think my parents ever found out where we were but they must have wondered why I came home covered in mud and bleeding. Sometimes there are perks to being the good child.
Thankfully I outgrew most of my dirtbag ways, but he has continued his (sending me his narcissistic smut to critique, internet stalking, and a yearly "happy new year" sext).
Also, we used to put lunch trays under the rear wheels of our (front wheel drive) cars, pull the emergency brake, and then proceed to do donuts and drift around the parking lot. We also shot off a lot of fireworks at each other. I removed all the surface nerves from my left knee trying to jump over a bottle of something in the high school parking lot on my little brother's dirt bike. And finally, I met my first partner when i helped her sneak out of a sleepover, and then throw large rocks over the fence, until we broke a much-beloved porcelain deer. "we're united by crime," i would tell her.
After my sophomore year of high school some friends and I burned all of our text book in the 'woods' (a strip of like 10 trees) near a friend's house. The police came and we all ran out and hid in a stranger's back yard and used their pool when we realized they weren't home.
When I was seventeen my best friend and I went to a VampireFreaks party. That's a social-networking site for goth kids. She was on it, I wasn't. But I had a black slip-dress with purple lace, and some fishnets, so what the hey.
The party was lame, so we left. We walked up and down Queen Street and ended up hanging out with two homeless punk dudes around our age. We spent the night with them in their nest of bedding underneath a statue of Winston Churchill, where cunnilingus occurred, and then we went back to North York and my boyfriend's place.
Holla atcha Toronto dirtbags!
In the space of one week in 2007, I: 1) manic-panic dyed my hair with fire-engine-red highlights; 2) Didn't Make The Assigned Group Outline For AP European History; and 3) stole my mom's car, drove it across three states to visit my BF at his college in CT, and 4) we slept in the back of the [tiny subaru] because his roommate wasn't willing to be randomly sexiled on a wednesday night by a high schooler wearing too much eye-makeup.
Pretty sure dating someone in college while I was in high school really helped me become a better douchebag than I would have otherwise.
I wasn't a dirtbag until I moved 3000 miles away from my hometown to attend college in Oregon, so it's not really all that dirtbaggy, and more or less "naive southern girl attempts to 'find herself' via super cool big city kids and a massive amount of drugs and booze".
Did this post the first time? No? First time poster, I think. I don't know. I work in IT, this all baffles me.
I'm from Indiana.
1) My friends and I constructed a fire lantern and lit it in a cornfield. It floated up fifteen, maybe twenty feet, exploded into flames, and immediately crashed to the ground. I yanked off both of my converse sneakers and started smacking the flames out and one of them caught fire and burned up.
2) We used to duct tape together as many cheap fireworks as we could and light them all at once. Did you know they sell fireworks everywhere in Indiana?
3) One time I microwaved an egg in a cup of water because boiling it on the stove seemed like an unnecessarily slow process and when I took it out it exploded in my face and I had to wear an eyepatch for 2 weeks.
I and a buddy of mine used to be really into breaking into old factories and sewers and crap to… hang out? Smoke weed on top of dirty machine parts? Whatever it was, we were very for it, until the day I got completely goddamn lost trying to meet up with him and wound up slowly driving my parents' car back and forth through a gated community at night with a crowbar and boltcutters lying in the backseat until I got pulled over
I did the envelope thing too! Only I held the lighter up for too long and it burned a hole in the edge.
In grade 11 two friends of mine moved into a sketchy basement apartment with long shag carpet and no kitchen. I'd say 90% of my dirtbaggery happened there: notably, smoking weed out of a lung made from a Sobey's bag and a pop bottle and chugging Canada Cooler out of the 2L plastic bottle it came in.
It was also pretty common to light the fuzz of your socks on fire and to drink Colt 45 out of paper bags.
Was skating with my cousin and she pulled over to bum some weed off Brad Renfro. He asked her out and she skated away, laughing.
Reading this article and the comments has made me realize I not only have been but still am a dirtbag and have been so my entire life. I have many moments of dirtbaggery, but I will share one of my earliest and best here.
This story is from when I was in preschool, so either three or four years old. According to legend, I was in the cafeteria, trying to eat my lunch, and the kid next to me (a Boy) kept talking to me. I ignored him, but he would not shut up. He kept going on and on, so I calmly took apart my sandwich, bit a hole in the middle of my bologna, and hung it on the kid's ear. Reports say he immediately stopped talking. His eyes swung over toward his ear, and then he began to scream at the top of his lungs.
I don't remember that part. I do remember walking the green mile to the principal's office, past the rows of kids hanging up their backpacks and whispering to each other about what I had done.
The principal called my mother, told her something serious had happened, and when she left work and rushed over to the school, he informed her I had "assaulted a child with lunchmeat."
I was sent home but not punished.
I feel so goddamn old when I read shit like this and think to how in middle school nobody gave a shit when we assaulted each other with rocks
Not in the improvised earring way either
I am crying laughing at my desk over this one. Bless your tiny dirtbag heart.
i really LOVE this story with all my heart.
I'm attempting to stifle laughter at work, mostly just wheezing/gasping, this is hilarious.
I lit a lot of things on fire in my youth, but it was more inspired by trying to live authentically in a The Craft inspired aesthetic. Lots of smelly candles and satchels of herbs and whatever.
I was always a big fan of needless Sharpie graffiti though, along with covering my Jansport with useless band patches and riding on someone's lap in your friends pick up truck because the back is for losers of course. My dirtbag apex was maybe the time I wore a velour leopard print spaghetti strap dress and drug store press on nails to the 10th grade winter formal.
freshman year i rolled out of my loft bed and onto the floor below while drunk during a fire drill in the residence hall. i also dislocated my knee cap while trying to flip a couch in the kitchenette while completely sober.
My best friend and I "invented" a way of speaking where you only said the vowel sounds and glottal stopped the consonants, and we spent an entire summer using this language, including using it to torment and insult our peers. WE WERE DIRTBAGS AND NERDS SIMULTANEOUSLY.
I DID THIS TOO AND WE USED IT TO TALK ABOUT THE BOYS WE WERE DATING WHEN WE WERE ON DATES WITH THEM
when i was 15, my parents weren't home so i went driving (without my driver's license) and crashed the car my grandparents had just bought for me
Oh my god, SO not a dirtbag. The closest I got was going out all night to just like, hang out at the park in the summer. I didn't even skip class until I was 18 and was *allowed* to sign out.
Sophomore?Junior? year of high school I went over to my friend Brian's house, where about four of us decided to build a cannon. When we loaded the cannon with a screwdriver and shot it up Brian's driveway, which was long, rather than landing in Brian's driveway, the screwdriver shot all the way into the street and we're lucky we didn't kill anyone. When one of the boys went to recover the screwdriver, it was melted into a twisted piece of metal and plastic.
Holy crap, I have so many dirtbag stories, in retrospect. I did not realize I was a dirtbag teen until this moment, but I totally was a dirtbag teen. Revelation!
This rules, I don't think I ever got to cannon level though I DID teach a bunch of local kids how to make rockets with a bunch of gunpowder and a plastic bottle
They kinda implode as they zip off, it's pretty awesome
I was a Good Kid in high school, and only moderately dirtbaggy in university. The most dirtbag thing that comes to mind was putting dry ice in plastic pop bottles with a little warm water, and throwing them off a roof just before they exploded. And then learning later that someone nearby had called the cops to report that they'd heard gunshots.
There were also a bunch of student pranks, but I'm not sure they were precisely dirtbag-ish.
Oh, also we crashed the Santa Claus parade every year. I guess that's a kind of dirtbag thing to do?
I guess this is the thread where I explain my dirtbag concussion. Last monday I got drunk off of whiskey and cheap bear with my friends, then we biked to a local piercing/tattoo place and they got new septum rings. We then went across the street to another bar where we drank PBR and made friends with drunk dudes and I ate too many peanuts. The rest is a little foggy because on our way biking to another bar (without helmets) I launched over my handlebars head first into the ground, my friend told me I sat up, puked and couldn't answer questions about what day it was or where we went (the alcohol contributed to this), so they called an ambulance and I went to the ER where I got cat scans and had a concussion! I remember waking up in the ambulance and saying "I'm so stupid!!" I'm ok though, just thoroughly embarrassed and wearing my helmet always. It has been a dirtbag summer.
last year on July 4th my friends and I modified some fireworks and blew up whatever we could find in the street, including one Mr. Potato head and a giant bag of pretzels. I had to work the next day at 6:30 am and let's just say I wasn't completely sober.
My dirtbag friend, after drinking a few 40's freshman year of college, crashed her bike into a parked car and chipped half of her front tooth off. She didn't have insurance so had to wait a week to get money to fix it, we called her chippy for a while.
In high school my friends and I would go to a shopping center and play hide and seek in Ross and Old Navy until we got kicked out. Ross couldn't care less, Old Navy not so much.
Also last week I had a bowl of life cereal and a PBR for dinner.
You're the best and I hope your brain feels better!
it's much better now thanks <3
oh yeah i also have a stick and poke tattoo that I did on myself with a sewing needle
when i was 18 i dropped a lit joint on the seat of my girlfriend's mom's car and burned a huge hole in it
Once my friends and I took out one of those pop-out plaster ceiling tiles from the oldest part of our high school and brought it home? Another time we put little tea light candles on a baseball diamond at like 11 pm and ran around the diamond screaming. We were also stage crew/tech for our high school shows, which gave us an aura of dirtbag that was perhaps not entirely warranted. (Thanks to the all black clothes and heavy eyeliner.)
Low level dirtbag, would not have done any of this on my own. I owe it all to my dirtbaggier friends.
when i was 19 (last month) i was stoned and backed into a car in the vintage stock parking lot in front of some people. i got out, pretended to write down my info on a piece of paper (really all i wrote was "sorry") and drove away
Mostly I was your classic GOODIE GOODIE however, my dirtbaggiest and most shameful admission is that when I was 12 my best friend and I would steal cigarettes from her dad and smoke them in her basement washroom.
We'd light vanilla candles and spray ourselves down to mask what we were doing but eventually we got caught when we kept circling around his cigarettes in the kitchen and trying to inconspicuously snatch a few.
Luckily he just said I know what you're doing and if you stop now I won't tell your parents / my friends Mother. So we did and that was that.
When I was fourteen my friends and I did the 'cinnamon challenge' at our local Starbucks. I ended up spitting cinnamon mush on the floor while disgusted employees looked on.
That same year I slept over at my friends house with some of her dirt-baggies friends. They got drunk off of her step dad's crappy bear and then called another friend over to supply weed. They couldn't smoke it in the house, so instead of simply smoking in the backyard we all hopped into the back of a pickup truck and drove around looking for a place where they could get stoned- which ended up to be a ditch in a public park.
When I was 15, I told my mom that I was staying over at a friend's house for the weekend, but we drove over to the next state to go to a music festival. She found out a couple months later.
When I was 16, I got drunk and then hung out in a McDonald's until after they were closed (my friend was the shift manager) and then ate a bunch of free food.
I skipped class a couple of times by waiting in the bathroom the whole period.
OH YEAH, one time, I threw out my report card to hide a bad grade, but my parents found out THE SAME DAY.
I was a pretty lame dirtbag.
When I was 16 I totaled my parent's Suburban because I was rescuing diet cokes that had fallen over in the backseat. I felt the greatest loss was the Bryan Adam's CD I forgot in the CD changer when the tow truck took the wreckage away. But it was probably scratched by the accident anyway. This all took place less than 100 yards from our home.
In grade 11 two friends of mine moved into a sketchy basement apartment with long shag carpet and no kitchen.
I'd say 90% of my dirtbaggery happened there: notably, smoking weed out of a lung made from a Sobey's bag and a pop bottle and chugging Canada Cooler out of the 2L plastic bottle it came in.
We also lit the fuzz on our socks on fire frequently and drank Colt 45 (a cheap, revolting beer) out of paper bags.
Skipped school with my friends and got caught because we just went to my house, which was directly behind our school, and the alarm went off when we went inside.
Made my mom smoke pot from a tinfoil pipe and took pictures of it.
Crashed my car while spazzing out listening to Melt Banana after a particularly rough barista shift at the mall.
Blew off my sort of long distance boyfriend (?? relationship status indeterminate at time) to go to a rave on Padre Island during Spring Break with a dude I'd just met the night before.
Probably a bunch of other rave-related things I can no longer remember. The list of dirtbag raver moments would be long indeed.
Despite being rather quiet and shy growing up, I was a bit of a dirtbag. When home for the summers from boarding school in England, I more often than not snuck out most every night, often just to bike to 7-11 to get a Slurpee with some of the neighborhood kids, but sometimes to sneak into a girl's room or bike over to her place so she could also sneak out, and then we'd bike to the playground on Marshall Rd. (which was always deserted at night) to make out and smoke cigarettes and drink peach schnapps or whatever could be taken and not missed.
Probably my dirtiest dirt bag moment came my last year of boarding school in England. By this point, I'd started coming out of my shell a bit. Whereas all through third, fourth, and fifth forms I'd been painfully aware I was the only American at the school (and were I to momentarily forget, there were plenty of Englishman around to remind me), but the lower and upper sixth forms I suppose I'd passed all the British trials by fire and had been largely accepted (despite being from "a colony," being "a ginger" and freckled and obviously of lowly Irish descent).
Anyways, if you were a bit of a shit at school, you'd get Saturday detention. We had a half day of classes on Saturdays, and afterwards most of us would participate in whatever sport we were doing that term. It was almost summer, so I probably should have been doing cross-country running (which by this point meant walking along with the New Zealander who would oversee our runs while on his gap year), but I'd been some kind of a prick (honestly can't remember what I did, but it's probably safe to assume I'd said something I shouldn't, probably to my housemaster or biology professor) and had gotten Saturday detention. Unsurprisingly, none of the teachers really wanted to oversee this kind of thing, and others doubled as rugby or running or rowing coaches and were otherwise unavailable, so the duties of overseeing the shits in detention fell to another upper sixth form student (one of the drawbacks of being a school prefect) who I knew—a kind, slightly mousy kid, and a mate. Let's just say I took full advantage of him being decent and soft spoken, persuaded him to give me the easiest of the cleaning jobs (most people in detention were given clean up jobs around the school grounds, others in classrooms), didn't even bother to do that, snuck into the park near the school, smoked cigarettes and drank with my girlfriend and some friends who were waiting for me to finish detention so we could go drinking in Oxford, and then, as the coup de grace, took my then girlfriend (who I would later move to Sweden with) back to my room for a bit. I had to show up to meet with the student who was overseeing all of us around three, told him I did what I had not done (and that he didn't need to check, right, because we were mates), and left to catch a bus into Oxford.
I remember being quite pleased with myself at the time. Which I am pretty sure is exactly what a teenage dirtbag would think.
It was really hard to come up with these because I was and still am the least dirtbaggy nerd around. (In first grade our teacher made us all put our heads down on the desk because the class was being too loud—or something—so I put my head down and CRIED.) Nevertheless:
1. Sometimes, when we had bomb threats in high school (which were always at the end of the, thx kids who call in bomb threats), my friends and I would leave school early.
2. Sometimes, when we went down to the library to study Latin, we would *gasp* goof off instead and talk too loudly (I always felt guilty about this…)
Oh, and when I was little, we would pour hot water on ant hills in the driveway. Dirtbag or tiny psychopath?
A lot of mine have to do with getting extremely drunk. Like the time when I was in 10th grade and went to a 12th grade party with a bunch of my guy friends, then proceeded to drink shots with no chaser to show off to the jocks that were there (they were using chasers so naturally I wanted to show them up). Ended up puking off the edge of the balcony, which thankfully backed up to woods and wasn't somewhere people were walking. My friend puked off the balcony next to me, and then we somehow ended up making out, just lying there on the balcony, so other people had to walk around/over us. When my friends dropped me off at home, they just let me stumble out of the car and up the sidewalk. I was too drunk to make it inside, but my stepsisters heard me come home and came out to help me in. Even in my drunk state, I warned them that if they breathed one word of this to our parents I would RUIN them.
Another time, driving around with a few people I didn't know very well, drinking 40s. I believe at some point we were under train tracks? And then we drove around some more, and they threw the empty 40 bottles onto people's driveways (I did NOT participate in that, but I also didn't speak up). Then I threw up a little bit, on myself mostly but also in the car, but DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING about it. To this day I don't know if this kid's other friends were dirtbaggy enough that he couldn't figure out (or didn't care) who puked in his car, or if he knew it was me and was just nice enough to not call me out on it.
I was only a teenage dirtbag when it came to making out inappropriately in public. Sorry to everyone who saw me with my junior-year boyfriend over by the lockers during passing period. He turned out to be a jerk, so.
I WAS a big-time COLLEGE dirtbag! At one point during my sophomore year I earned the nickname "Blackout Girl". I am not sure how that happened. Because I was blacked out at the time, probably. This was in a social circle where blacking out was pretty common, so whatever it was, it had to have been interesting for me to have been crowned the one and only Blackout Girl.
I also streaked across the Quad. Twice. And played strip frisbee regularly.
In 10th grade I got called an "acid head" by someone in our group and it stuck for a while. I remember being really preoccupied with it, like, was I REALLY doing that much more acid than anyone else? In retrospect I think yes, yes I was.
Right after I graduated high school, I was at the grocery store & saw the mom of a girl I had been friends with when I was much younger – we still knew each other in high school, but we didn't hang out anymore, and because I was 18 and the world revolved around me, I assumed this was devastating to both her and her mother. SO I spent half an hour slinking around the store trying to avoid running into said mother, and when I finally decided to be so decent as to say hello, she had no idea who I was.
My best friend pierced my ears with a safety pin in an alley in Soho behind a tattoo parlour, we sterilised (ha!) the needle with Jack Daniels, I was 14. We then proceeded to get day-drunk from the said alcohol and lounge around London like assholes until we got kicked out of a museum for REPEATEDLY using flash photography when explicitly told not to, I KNOW
In high school, my friends and I would spend the evening running around Wal-Mart playing lingerie football, then cap it off by going to Borders and placing sexy books from the erotica section in the reference section. We would choose ones with black and white pictures of artistic nudes on the covers because it would contrast pleasantly with the colorful dictionaries
I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to those retail workers. Thanks for being good sports.
When I was 20, I was a demi-dirtbag with a Grade A Dirtbag boyfriend. The courting ritual went something like this:
He taught me how to throw throwing stars at a tree.
We set off fireworks at a pond near his house.
We got drunk and had sex on a couch with Deer Hunter playing in the background. That's right, the '70s movie with Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken.
This is also the story of how I lost my virginity.
In 10th grade I dropped acid and stayed awake all night in a total stranger's ramshackle barn / crash pad while a TV played all three Demonic Toys movies recorded on a long-playing videocassette and wind whipped in through a hole in the roof patched with a Confederate flag.
I got a C-card from the family planning centre that gave you unlimited free condoms and sold them at the all-girls school I went to, for less than what they would charge in the Pharmacy, I made A LOT
amazing
From the ages of 14 to 18, I hung out with gutter-goths on the SF Peninsula (Shout out to San Mateo Central Park!). Spud, BigD, LittleD, Stimpy, MarTIN (who looked like crackpipe Jesus) were some of the characters in this tawdry play. There are many, many stories. I think my favorite is also the reason why I cannot with any sort of whiskey.
The park we hung out in backed up to a strip mall. One night, after we'd been chased out of the park by the cops, 5 of us ended up sitting around in a circle, in the back of a white van in the strip mall parking lot with no windows or seats, passing around a bottle of JD, followed by a bottle of SoCo to chase it, followed by a bottle of Fruitopia because it was 1998. Repeat.
Repeat until a quarter to midnight, and we realize we're going to be late to Rocky Horror. The owner of the van was not going, leaving our incredibly drunk asses to try and catch a bus. Except at least one of our merry group can hardly walk. Thankfully, one of my High School besties was working in the strip mall, and was just coming off his shift, and offered to give 4 stupid-drunk people a ride. In his 2 seater Datsun pickup.
Being drunk in the back of a pick up may be one of the worst decisions you could ever make. Lying down and moving at high speeds is not to be attempted while shitfaced. The 3 of us in the back somehow managed to not puke until we got to stoplights. We got to Rocky, they let us in (smelling of booze and puke and clearly being underage), where we got kicked out not long after when someone passed out on the bathroom floor. We all walked (I think? It gets hazy about here) to my mom's tiny 1 bedroom apartment, more horking along the way, and commandeered a floor. Wake up to the worst hangover I've ever had and will ever have, and mom offering up a nice huge greasy plate of fried eggs.
That woman is amazing at punishing a hangover.
I was such a good girl! I had hippy dirtbag parents who had done ALL the drugs and lived in squats and got arrested, and I think I knew I could never live up.
But when I suddenly got hot at 16, I got quite dirtbaggy, and went through a phase where I shoplifted expensive cosmetics and lotions. I also mooned a police car, and got in a brawl on my 16th birthday, where I ended up getting my face smashed against the floor.
My dad and I built a patio boat when I was 15 and we would keep it on the lake in the summer. After my kitchen shift a group of us would drive out to the lake, I knew where the keys were, and take it out to one of the little coves. There would be 10 of us swilling Bud Light and smoking pot and chain-smoking cigarettes and skinny dipping. I'm responsible for a great number of sunken beer cans at the bottom of that lake.
I rocked cargo shorts and a wifebeater constantly, at parties I would put a bottle of black velvet in one big pocket and keep my Marlboro Reds in my other pocket. We used to keep the windows down on our pickup trucks and jump in and out of the windows like dirtbag Dukes of Hazzard.
I have so many dirtbag stories…
That sounds so great, though.
It was fucking awesome.
We were at a party once where once everyone had driven through the broken open forest service gate, my dirtbag boyfriend fell a goddamn tree over the road. If you got close, you could see that you could drive around it, but it was to deter cops from thinking we were having a bonfire (WE WERE) and to keep drunks from driving out of the party. In the morning the boys broke out their chainsaws, cut it into rounds, and rolled them off the road.
I think a lot of my stories toe the line between "dirtbag" and "fucking rednecks".
Lol, I wore a leopard print chemise dress with motorcycle boots and went to prom with my friend who had blue hair:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/hVSJuux.jpg" title="Hosted by imgur.com" />
My dirtbaggiest moments were in my last year of high school.
I stole a life-size Keanu Reeves cardboard cutout from a movie rental store and ran with it down a very busy street right into a cop, then tried to convince the cop that I brought it from home.
I asked my parents to go away for the weekend so that I could have sex with my boyfriend for the first time in familiar surroundings instead of, as I put it, "in the back seat of a car." I somehow convinced the boyfriend to be present for this conversation. Amazingly, they said yes, and when they left my stepdad slipped me $50 and we spent it on pot.
When I inevitably broke up with this boyfriend shortly thereafter, I decided I was hopelessly in love with a girl at my high school. So I had a party and invited everyone she hung out with, then drank way too much sambuca with her and we ended up in the shower with all our clothes on.
YOU WIN
I was never much of a dirtbag, sadly – but did go through a phase of deliberately damaging stuff around the house (cutting up pillowcases, etc) when I was about 3, purely for the satisfaction of making my mark on stuff. I still remember my dad's shock on finding me scratching up his nice, shiny wooden chest-of-drawers with a set of keys.
In 2nd year of high school, a group of us (ok, we were in a 'band') used to hang out and smoke basil rollups, in a futile attempt to be cool. I still don't understand the logic behind this.
i just went through my facebook and all pictures from 14-21 are excellent dirtbag fodder. And often involve costumes. My teen years were weird.
There are some truly epic dirtbag stories here! My hat's off to you Toasties!
My senior year of highschool, myself and six other girls somehow convinced out parents to let us spend the weekend in a hotel to attend the 2 day HFStival (dirtbag music concert) at RFK stadium. As soon as we got there, I promptly dyed my hair purple. I had awesome hair for the 2 weeks it took to wash out.
When I was17 I wanted to see exactly how flammable a paper towel would be, so I lit one in the candle burning on the kitchen counter and it went up in flames in a manner of milliseconds. I panicked and ran for the front door, which was locked because I was home alone after school, which panicked me further until I dropped the flaming paper towel on the carpeted floor where I stomped it out, leaving an enormous scorch mark. When my sister got home she asked me, "why didn't you just take two steps and put it in the kitchen sink?" Because I'm a dirtbag, I replied.
Also, my brother was a dirtbag who convinced me to go fishing for change at the top of a fountain that waterfalls down a bunch of massive steps when I was 2yo and I ended up falling in. My dad had to jump in and catch me before I went over and then we both had to go back to the minivan and change out of our wet clothes while the rest of the family got to take a tour of the U.S.S. Kidd.
Growing up was not the most fun overall, but I had some minor dirtbag moments:
Walking with some friends to one of their houses during lunch to mix amaretto and coke.
Deciding it would be LESS obvious than passing notes in class to practice signing back and forth with my friend across the classroom with our poorly understood ASL. We only knew the letters. We got detention.
Getting into a car accident with said friend driving when we both only had permits. Thinking I spat up blood when it was actually just the Starbucks we bought before the crash.
I've never been a dirtbag. The dirtbaggiest thing I ever did was pretend to be my mom and call myself in sick a couple of times my senior year of high school — it was just a voicemail box, so it was very easy. And I didn't even do anything dirtbaggy on those days, just go back to sleep and watch daytime TV.
Oh, one time a friend and I skipped school to finish our Georgetown applications together on the last day. (I didn't get in. I don't think she did either.)
Oh probably the most dirtbaggy thing I did is that I had some friends who would steal traffic cones, saving them all up in a garage for some big plan. I was too scared to actually steal them myself, so instead I'd drive while they did (not sure why I thought I wouldn't get in trouble for driving if we were caught, but oh well). We'd drive around til we saw some cones, then I'd drive past while my friend leaned out the window, grabbed the cone, and pulled it inside. They got good at doing it fast so I didn't even need to slow down much. We always made sure not to take any "essential" cones though — we only took some if there were lots of cones, and never ones that were actually marking anything important/dangerous.
Then after amassing probably 100 cones, my friend couldn't really figure out what to do with them, so she just covered a friend's lawn with them.
We had an almost identical traffic cone-stealing game. Instead of hoarding them in a garage, we would surround another friend's (parked) car with them.
Oh yeah, smoking behind the convenience store near our high school whose employees would sell to us despite the fact that we were obviously underage, drinking Bartles & James wine coolers smuggled from home in my backpack, trying unsuccessfully to peer pressure into participating the one kid in our friend group who had been raised by loving attentive parents who had somehow instilled actual self esteem and good judgment in him.
i threw ice cubes and unripe mangoes from our windows at children my age when I was nine. The ice cubes were from our fridge. The mangoes were our townhouse's neighbors. I also tried to kidnap a kitten from my aunts' cat. Too ashamed to share at which particular age.
So late to the game but whatevs:
-helped steal a fire hydrant because hey, what's harder than stealing a fire hydrant? It's tough, those things are heavy.
-regularly smoked ciggies in the girl's can.
-tandem skateboarded (sit your butt down on your skateboard, interlock legs with fellow skateboarder facing you, grab each other's arms for steering) down a long hill to zip through a busy intersection and crash into unsuspecting park strollers.
-hide out in park bushes and spray at unsuspecting joggers with water pistols and laugh at their reactions; bonus if you agitated one enough to engage in murderous hide and seek chases.
Because I am An Old, this occurred between late 70's to early 90's.
When I was 13, my family moved to a pre-fab housing development in Connecticut, and my new neighbor Allison and I started breaking into the unfinished houses to hold seances.
Once, I got drunk at a friend's house on whiskey I had smuggled out of my parents' liquor cabinet. No one else would drink it because it was crappy whiskey and we were 16, so I drank…it all? Most of it?
When my mom was coming to pick me up as scheduled (did not think this through!) I stood on the lawn with some other (less) drunk teenagers and my friend's mom, who knew I was hammered and was very scared of my mom. I became suddenly aware that I was not just drunk (manageable!) but, in fact, Too Drunk. I asked, nay demanded, that someone bring me bread.
"Bring me bread! I have to soak up the alchohol."
"Um, I don't think it works like tha…"
"BREAD. NOW!!!"
So I wolfed down 4 slices of wonderbread as fast as I could manage. About 3 seconds later, I puked them all back up. My friend was right. It does not work that way.
As I straightened up and wiped my mouth, my mom's car pulled around the corner. I got in the car, told my mom I had had a great time, but was tuckered out from the pool, and went straight to bed when I got home.
In college I was a regular at an event called Tequila Tuesday, which is exactly what it sounds like. We threw the limes out the window. The grounds crew hated us.
The friend who taught me to smoke did so by saying, "Suck the smoke into your mouth, then pretend your mom just caught you and, like, gasp inwardly." I learned to smoke because the boy I had a crush on (an Irish dirtbag) smoked and I wanted to take cigarette breaks with him.
ETA: I also once [redacted] on a squash court at 2am, hitting the rare dirtbag/snob combo.
I'm commenting for the first time because this thread has given me the total revelation that I was a dirtbag! I always thought I was ineligible because of excellent grades and minimal alcohol, but now I have realized the truth!
It probably started when I was 13 and bought a ticket to see October Sky but went to Cruel Intentions instead, but many of the shenanigans were concentrated in the summer when I was 17. Most of my friends had cars and we all did totally irresponsible shit with them, like take the old busted minivan to empty parking lots and drive really fast with the doors open, then stop suddenly so the doors slammed shut. Or take my friend's checker cab around to garage sales, buy random things, and then go to a field to play baseball with shaken-up diet coke cans.
I also frequently snuck my best friend and/or her boyfriend into my house in the middle of the night, after which we would sneak out again and go wander the trails of the private school near my house. Two of my friends got married that summer (they were 19 and are still married 12 years later), and one of them was managing a fireworks store at the time, so for his bachelor party we went to someone's lake house, drank too much, and set a lot of things on fire with the fireworks he had liberated.
Nothing will ever be as dirtbaggy, though, as the two summers I worked at Baskin Robbins and spent two weeks of the summer manning the BR trailer at the state fair. I'd work 2:30-11pm, stay up til 4am, sleep til noon, rinse, repeat. We had a trade set up with the Asian food cart next door – fried rice for ice cream. It was awful/amazing, as state fairs so often are.
So Nicole keeps making posts about Canadian pornography and the like, and now she’s claiming to have never been a dirtbag. I’m starting to have suspicions–I mean even Anne of Green Gables had dirtbag moments.
I was the mostly good kid who had an Epic Dirtbag Year. I was 17. That year I did these things:
–I took the option to take the required economics course for 4 weeks in summer school rather than doing it for a full semester and you were allowed to miss ONE CLASS. I chose to miss by telling my mom that I was going and driving to my boyfriend's house via blockbuster and we spent the whole day watching bad Stephen King movies and rutting like animals. I even came home at the time I would have gotten home from summer school.
–I wrecked my car and needed to get the hood replaced and all I really said to my dad about it after his entire big long lecture about watching where you're going was "My bad. God." (This got me more punishment, which I took with as much exasperated "LIFE IS MEANINGLESS WHY GROUND ME AT ALL"ness as possible).
–I snuck out the window of my bedroom (which involved scooting across a very narrow stretch of roofing above the concrete driveway and dropping myself bodily onto the lawn, I'm surprised in hindsight that I didn't seriously hurt myself) and told my baby sister (when I made her let me back in through HER window, above the deck in the back of the house, which I climbed up to by doing some seriously questionable acrobatics off deck furniture) that if she ratted me out I would make her the villain in my bestselling novel.
ALSO my senior year I had a marching-band-ennui related fit of dirtbaggery in which I just didn't feel like bringing my instrument out that day to practice because our lazy-ass do-nothing section leader (whose job I basically did because she was never around) never took hers out, so I just stood out there instrumentless and when the band director told me to go in and get it, the dickbag drum major (who I had multiple years of bad interactions with, he was a pompous power-hungry despot who used his position as drum major to terrorize people who didn't put up with him) followed me inside to give me an earful about "respect" and "taking things seriously" and I put my instrument case down in the middle of the band room, flipped him off, quit the marching band, and walked out.
I got sent to the principal's office the next day for "assessment" by the director 'cause I was such a good kid usually that he thought I was having a mental breakdown or something and the principal took one look at me and asked, "Are you new to town?" when I'd lived in the same place since 2nd grade. I was just THAT GOOD, normally, that the principal had never had to deal with me.
MARCHING BAND DIRTBAGGERY. Yessssss perfect.
Here is a picture of me in junior high doing what I did best: hanging out in front of the arcade smoking cloves with my best friend (I'm in the glasses). Note her puka shell necklace and fedora combo.
<img src="http://i61.tinypic.com/20qj9m0.jpg">
Tarot card readings in my catholic high school's stairway; one of the teachers told us to put those evil things away.
Stuff with firecrackers, um, bocce balls stuffed in a bra (mine), and other things that mean I basically will never show up to my high school reunions.
NOT LIKE I WAS PLANNING ON GOING ANYWAY [flicks cigarette at school sign].
OH MY LACK OF GOD, I had completely forgotten the time I scored a fat sticky bag of weed in the hallways of a Catholic girls' school…
… where I was visiting as a guest under the pretense that I was a prospective student.
Catholic schools (especially the girls') are really, really fun places for practicing delinquency. :)
In sophmore year of high school, a group of about 10 friends and I sat in a circle in the middle of the Borders cafe floor because there weren't enough chairs. We made sure to sit in a main aisle to ensure maximum dirtbagginess.
Age 6: Dropped a lit menorah on the carpet. (Result: 15 years of crippling pyrophobia)
Annals of Privilege-Dirtbaggery:
Age 15: Got drunk on underagely purchased tuborg (ughHHH) on the last night of my study abroad program in Denmark, purely to make the Experience seem much more Eurodirtbaggy when picked up by parents at the airport the following day.
Ages 16-18: Regularly snuck into the dorms after study hall to MAKE OUT with my girlfriend, leaving my poor mother waiting to pick me up for up to an hour after she'd just taught a night class. i am filled with so many shames.
Dirtbaggery on another level: my Scottish flatmates, all first years at the university, would go out clubbing and upon their return leave their high heels filled with sundry condiments on the kitchen table, perhaps to accompany the bags of frozen french fries strewn soggily on the floor. This was a regular occurrence in that household. ????
Oh lord, in 1st year I was in halls at (a Scottish) university with 4 of the dirtbaggiest flatmates. The kitchen was regularly carpeted with half-eaten takeout, beer cans, condoms, and, in one memorable incident, a nude sleeping man. By the end of the year we had an ant infestation and some major flat tensions.
Thing is, they were only dirtbag-y after a night out. The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Dirtbag..?
(Disclaimer: I am also Scottish – just not quite as…exuberant, after a night out)
UGH it wasn't even in halls! Selfcatered, not-even-owned-by-the-uni property. And yes, they were perfectly lovely otherwise. What really got me was the inexplicable, but evidently recurring, desire to fill footwear with ketchup. Truly beyond my ken. Is this a thing???
Ah yes, the grand Scottish tradition of filling shoes with condiments. When the nights were long and the winters cold…
(As far as I'm aware it's very much not a thing, and I'm just as confused and worried as you! Maybe I'll ask my dirtbag former flatmates.)
The dirtbaggiest things I ever did were definitely related to being on the stage crew in theater in high school. While the actors were warming up for shows by playing party games, we were gluing porn on the backs of the sets or gathering outside to scream obscenities. Good times.
I'm going to tell you some dirtbag things my brother did as a toddler or young child, because he was definitely the most dirtbag of all the children in my family:
-In the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping, he opened the dishwasher and some kitchen drawers, and used them all to climb up high enough to reach the eggs in the fridge. He then smashed every single egg on the floor, and my parents woke up and got there with a camera in time to take a picture of him holding the last egg above his head.
-He brought so many buckets of mud into the house. So many.
-He climbed out of our bathroom window onto the roof, and lit all the pine needles collected there on fire.
-He vacuumed out the toilet. (he is still living)
Also, after I went to college, he inherited the old minivan I learned to drive in, and one time he took his buddies out to do a bunch of doughnuts in an empty lot somewhere. He drunkenly ran up on a curb and broke part of the bumper and got a flat, and later he told our parents he hit a deer. They believed him until a couple of years ago when I was pissed off at him and told them the truth (BEST BIG SISTER).
Oh! One time he was supposed to be house/cat sitting for a wealthy friend's family while they were all in Europe or something, and he let in all their buddies (SAME GUYS) and threw a huge party in their swanky house, and lit off some fireworks in the basement.
My brother got all the dirtbag genes, I think. He and all those same guys took a trip to Germany once that they absolutely refuse to speak about to this day, I'm sure some mega-dirtbag stuff went down.
This post reads almost prophetic, he started so young! And then it ends with "the lost chapter" in Germany lol i love it
Maaaan, I never did anything even Nicole-level dirtbaggish and am still trying to make up for it now, as an Old. First act of (semi-) dirtbaggery occurred first year of grad school: friends (bff and now-husband) and I wandered around on train tracks at night drinking Cook's out of paper-bagged bottles, smoking cigarettes, and peeing on things. (I did not pee on things.)
My little sister, on the other hand, was a most precocious dirtbag who dabbled in playing with fire at the tender age of 5. When my dad discovered the burnt-out matches and confronted her (to put it mildly) about them, she began to cry on cue and make up a brilliant explanation about how she was trying to have a birthday party for the fairies and how the matches were ones she'd found that had already been used, she hadn't lit them herself, etc.
My dad likes to tell this story — bemoaning his guilt for yelling at an innocent child — to this day. My sister went on to have an illustrious dirtbag career.
My sister went on to have an illustrious dirtbag career
… which I want to hear more about, please
In 2000, my friend Stephanie and I put a CD (Faith Hill "This Kiss" single) in the microwave to see what would happen. My dad got home shortly after the flames were put out. "What's that smell?" He asked. "Science experiment." No further questions.
Later in 2000, Stephanie and I were making plans to jump off a train bridge into the river via phone. My mom picked up the other line and I got a long talking to. A month later a kid drowned jumping off the bridge. 14 years later, I still kind of regret not having tried it anyway.
When I was 15 my friend Kristin told me that if you put a #2 pencil in the microwave it would explode. So we tried it one night when she was staying over at my house, while the rest of my family was out. It did indeed explode and smoked up the entire bottom floor of the house.
We were teens in a resort and retirement town, so my dirtbag memories involve drinking and rolling down the little hills on golf courses, sneaking into swanky hotel pools, and once, a full infiltration of the expensive spa out in the desert. We saw maybe two or three guests the whole time, swaddled in white robes and dark sunglasses, quietly nodding. After a few hours, security started eyeing us and called the cops, so we fled the grounds up a hill, zig-zagging from bush to bush. They've since put up barbed wire along that back fence.
Also HI. I liked to smoke and make pseudo gang signs.
<img src="http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/Niarym/P1150014_zpse5faee81.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo P1150014_zpse5faee81.jpg"/>
<img src="http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/Niarym/P1010047_zps605708dd.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo P1010047_zps605708dd.jpg"/>
I grew up where rural Oregon meets suburban Oregon, so as a teenager, you had to have a car to do ANYTHING.
First there was (is?) the game Bump, in which all of us had muscle cars from the 60s and 70s and when we'd come up behind each other at a stop sign/signal, we had to "Bump" the car in front of us. Like, "Good morning I just hit your caaaar!"
Or the game "……Go!" in which, if you see someone behind you at a red light (and you will, because she just bumped you), and the light turns green, you wait for the very last second of yellow to go, thereby trapping your friends(?) at two red lights.
Also one of my friends had a car with a sunroof and we'd ride around with a big McDonald's cup on the roof, weighted down with a few rocks and tied inside with fishing line. Then we'd act really confused when other drivers tried to signal to us that there was a cup on the roof. We thought it would be great to do with a baby carrier but the effort of getting a baby carrier seemed pretty extreme.
Hey, where are you from? I'm from Dallas oregon!
I don't have any dirtbag things to say, but this article helped to answer an age-old question for me.
Me: I relate to Mallory's not knowing how to stop when skating. I did the same thing.
Spouse: You just drag your foot.
Me: Drag…like…behind you?
My skates had fat plastic "brakes" on the toes, and my assumption had always been that when you wanted to stop, you just tilted your feet forwards, as if you were trying to stand on your toes. Due to physics, this always flung my body straight towards the pavement. I never figured out what the trick was, and I stopped skating.
It's hilarious to finally figure this out decades later. :D
OH MY GOD my world makes so much more sense now.
WHAT
Re: Nicole's fire-aged envelope thing
In elementary school on the playground we played Oregon Trail (basically LARPing the computer game). I made a "map to Oregon" for it–crunched it up and rolled it in dirt to make it look old. I then lit the edge on fire to further age it–holding the burning paper over the toilet afraid my mother would catch me (I was 7). Illicit fire=dirtbag Oregon Trail/ imaginative games/ fear of parents = not dirtbag
I too was a goody-two-shoes teenager. My most dirtbag moment from those years is when I got in a fight with my mom and decided to run away, in ultimate teenage melodrama. I ended up at a bookstore re-reading Tamora Pierce novels until my dad called and asked me to come home for dinner.
I thought I'd been a goody-two shoes my whole life but I recently learned from my parents that I was constantly in trouble in preschool because when the teacher asked me to do something I'd keep doing whatever I was doing and say dismissively "I'll do it later at home."
I also cried until I threw up at my preschool graduation and thus ruined every group photo with my splotchy tear-stained face.
Always having a half full handle of Gilbey's in the trunk of my '81 Honda prelude. Also I was pretty active in the local CB scene. Oh and this was the 90s.
Middle school dirtbag uniform: wide leg Jnco Jeans, hand-me-down Pumas with Everclear and Green Day song lyrics scrawled on them, oversized plaid shirt from the boy's section of JC Penney. Lots of chilling at the skatepark; no actual skating.
My greatest dirtbag hit: When I was in highschool there was a math teacher who was a known creep/sexual predator, I covered his car in Miracle Whip and wrapped it in saran wrap.
Aside from that, my teen years were run of the mill poor punk kid stuff. Stuffing the ballot box so that one of the dirtbaggiest dirtbags out of our friend group ended up as prom king (my dirtbag friends ended up stealing all of the prized from the after prom casino), bringing juice bottles filled with Mad Dog to school, getting into fights constantly, skateboarding from class to class, sitting on top of my desk and refusing to face the front of the room, tearing down the pro-life displays put up by the Catholic church across the street from my house, etc.
This is, like, ultimate dirtbagging.
When I was 14, I wore a white wooly hat for several weeks (at that time wooly hats were very in). But not like a normal person, no, it covered all of my hair, so it looked like I had none at all. I then somehow lost it, but found it two years later in the lost-and-found box. I never took it, it's probably still there.
I once thought it was a great idea to drink cuba libre and then take an ibuprofen. The night ended with me puking in the bus. I think that was two years ago. Could also have happened last year.
My friends and I were also into casual vandalism when we were 12-16. Like painting on school walls, destroying benches or bending all the forks in our after school care kitchen.
In college my friends Tom, Jeff, and I would have some beers and then go hook up a rope to the railing at the top of the dam in Olmos Basin in the middle of Breckenridge Park in San Antonio, and then rappel down it. After a while cops could come, chew us out, and we'd leave. It became a weekly ritual, and we even ended up taking a bunch of friends out and teaching them to rappel too. Not so much dirtbaggy, I guess, as kind of cool.
Age 16- when we had nothing better to do (which was often, in a small midwestern town) my friends and I would drive around after dark taking useless flash photography of pedestrians, just to startle them.
Wait, I've got it. Went to a basement party in highschool cuz so-n-so's 'rents were outta town, drank 12 vodka shots in a row to "catch up", was dared to give a boy a lapdance (pretty tame for us tbh) and really didn't want to so flopped self on couch in protest only to slice my thumb open on a protruding nail and start gushing blood. Instead of going to the ER like a smart kid, and potentially getting in trouble, the older dude that still hangs around at high school parties (you know the one) told me to hold my thumb above my heart and put pressure on it and it would be fine,and he knew cuz he was the safety guy at work. Which I did. Next day showed my friends mum (a nurse) and she told me I probably should have gotten stitches, but it was too late to bother. So I have a fun scar now! And got out of a lapdance soooo. Really wish I had a picture of me drunkenly giving the thumbs-up above my head with a blood-stained dishrag wrapped around my digit, but alas this was slightly before we all had camera phones.Instead have a pic of me and my fam at our Rubik's Cube Party pre clothing swap. I'm the one who looks like a mario kart character.
<img src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/230090_1944572424696_4795969_n.jpg?oh=a3b07fb95c09f9e51eee1abf6103fb9e&oe=5443A248&__gda__=1414227473_5551d22dd8b8a7b1d03b53eec4b9adda" width="600">
I cannot hope to compete with the glorious dirtbags on display here, but I will add two moments from my otherwise squeaky clean youth. (Srsly though, I thought I was a real goody goody, but I came out in 1995 in northwestern PA, which in retrospect is the most fucking badass thing I will ever do in my life.)
1. At 21, I went to my older brother's 4th of July party in Hell's Kitchen with my college friend. I ended up getting so drunk and high that I didn't notice when my brother's friend was hitting on me, which nearly started a fistfight between them. A few minutes later, I proceeded to vomit over the edge of the rooftop, 20 stories up.
2. At 16, after a disastrous queer-drama-filled breakup with my first love, he had the misfortune of sitting behind me on a band bus (because all queer teen dramas happen on a band bus IME). The sound of his voice made me so angry that I turned around and said, very quietly, "If you don't fuck off, I will rip out your eyeballs and eat them for lunch." We are friends as adults, and he still says that was one of the most emotionally terrifying moments of his life.
I was lucky enough to have parents who could afford to buy me a used car. An early '90s Ford Tempo which I promptly covered in bumper stickers with flippant themes such as "Keep your laws off my body", "I love my country, but I don't trust my government", "DARE to think for yourself", and my favorite, "Bad Cop No Donut". How I didn't get pulled over on a regular basis, I'll never know.
On several occasions my junior and senior year of high school I told my parents I was spending the night at a friend's house. My boyfriend and I would then drive to the big city (about an hour away) to party all night at a rave held in some abandoned warehouse. I changed the one to a zero on my birthdate on my ID with ballpoint pen to get in the door because you had to be 18 to enter. This was back when ID's were really simple laminated paper.
The same boyfriend and I went to a friend's house party and dropped acid. We thought we were playing it cool, but obviously people noticed. That friend did not do drugs and was a bit pissed that we showed up to hang out in her basement and do drugs. We laughed it off; it was very giggle-inducing acid. We eventually left that party and went back to my boyfriend's parents house and sat in his room for about 4 hours trying to decide where we should go eat. We dropped acid at so many public functions: proms, graduation parties, a colonial ball. By the time I was 19 I had gotten all that partying out of my system and haven't done acid since.
These are just some of the incidents that I remember. I'm sure we did a lot more dirtbaggy things and we still have lots of inside jokes from that time in our lives. That boyfriend is now my husband. Sometimes bad boys stick.
you married him
that is a great dirtbag twist
i always wondered why i loved the movie Out Cold so much, because it is an objectively bad movie, and i eventually became ashamed. but i have now realized it is a paean to dirtbags. i can love it again.
i was a "good kid" with a post-college dirtbag phase that involved drinking in parking lots and hanging out at denny's at 4 am with two guys called rabbit and stoney. then i hitched up with a cop for years and had to be good. now that we are split, i am free to hang out once again with all my lovely dirtbag friends and go to punk shows and spill beer on people and skate random basement quarter pipes and fall asleep on couches and have sex in car backseats until the cops bust us.
I am just posting to say that I had no idea dirtbaggery was supposed to end at 20, with the result that I am to a great extent, still a dirtbag.
Buying donuts from the all-night donut shop with change. Buying beers at happy hour with "laundry" quarters. Eating raw fish because isn't that the same thing as sushi? Walking around drunk, stopping to throw up and then acting like it was NBD. Buying shoes at goodwill and wearing them until they fall apart. Having sex in a burnt down house. Having sex in my apartment complex's hot tub. Climbing over the wall at night to sneak into the fairgrounds. Going camping and drinking screwdrivers for breakfast. Letting a piercing get infected and then taking my brother's leftover antibiotics. Having sex on my bf's mom's bed and getting caught by her. Riding my bike everywhere and being sweaty all the time. Thowing a sandwich at some random dude after he insulted my roommate. Helping my friend steal some guy's chile pepper plant. Going to the supermarket and eating all of the samples and not buying anything. Stealing toilet paper. I don't know, I'm starting to feel like everything I do is dirtbag.
I'm pretty sure I had some teenage dirtbag moments, but most of them happened while I was also Massively Depressed, so I don't really remember them (turns out depression fucks with your ability to form memories, whee!).
I have also given two separate guys handjobs on the Greyhound (at night, obv). I don't know if that's dirtbaggy or just sad. I have never told anybody about either one, because I know that I would be judged.
Note: these two incidents did not happen at the same time. And one of the guys was a soldier on leave, so it was practically a patriotic incident.
Now that there is supporting our troops!
Said soldier was also a 9/11 truther, so I spent a good amount of time explaining that no, the U.S. government was not involved in a conspiracy to murder thousands of people to invent a reason to go to war. To a guy in military fatigues.
12 hours on a bus is a long time, is what I'm saying.
Don't you judge me
If I am judging you, it is only in the most fabulous way possible. That sounds like a GREAT story and I admire you for having lived it – e.g., did you give him a handie before or after he revealed his trutherism? You obviously don't have to tell, but.
After, strangely enough. He was very receptive to my points (e.g. he said that planes aren't supposed to disintegrate the way the one that hit the Pentagon did, and I pointed out that planes don't usually hit the Pentagon at high speeds; he felt this was a valid point). People gain many points in my book if they're willing to agree that my points are probably better than theirs.
BTW, the bus ride was to spend Christmas with my parents, who picked me up at the bus station. I think that might make it extra-dirtbaggy.
So, Gchatting With My best friend of 15 Years Today:
Me: Katie, what's the dirtbaggiest thing we did in high school?
Katie: I don't even want to remember the most.
Me: Was it the time we stole toilet paper from Sub Shop for our 24 year old boyfriends' punk house?
Katie: Or, when I was nominated for homecoming queen but couldn't use my first pick as a date because he stole a gun from a cop.
Me: The time I hit the car of our high school security officer. The time I backed into a light post in a bowling alley, smoking after zero period.
Katie: When we took adderall before AP English and went back to your house and I kept saying right in front of your mom, "Dude, we should brush our teeth! I bet it feels amazing!"
Me: Oh no, I remember the worst.
Katie: Mr. Frissell…
Me: Yeah. When he gave us $50 to buy concessions for the Amnesty International concert and we $45 on booze and $5 on off-brand soda and chips at dollar general.
Katie: I believe in hell, we're going to hell.
I am hereby requesting that Matt illustrate the best of these. Please?
My first go round at university (I had to drop out to rethink my priorities as minoring in dirtbaggery is not worth the student loans), I lived in Sudbury, Ontario. Which is a rough town.
I dated a busker. He had no money, really. Me neither. So we'd do stuff like go watch the slag run at the mine. For those of you who don't know, the slag is basically molten leftovers of nickel processing. It looks cool at night. Anyway, he wore a poncho and played guitar outside of the liquor store. He would sing me Leonard Cohen songs and give me little paintings he did on cardboard from empty cigarette packs. In my defense, he was really good looking. I didn't even break up with him properly! He invited me to a Christmas party at a friend's place and I blew him off because I decided to take the overnight Greyhound home for holidays. And then I just never called him again.
Sudbury in the late 90s was my prime dirtbag era. I used to drink blue curacao directly from the bottle. Or Sambucca. A friend gave me one of those bartender's spouts, so I could just pour a shot in my mouth directly. I also used to chug a bottle of beer in one go. I never had to buy beer at the bar because random dudes thought it was a neat trick and would just buy me beers to watch me shotgun them. Life skills, baby.
On my 19th birthday (legal drinking age in Ontario), I remember sitting in an empty bathtub, wearing a rain coat and hat and drinking mini bottles of flavoured vodka. Hurray for a time before social media!
We used to go to a bar down by the railway tracks because we wouldn't get hit on constantly there. We played pool with some guys from Satan's Choice. The bartender was really excited when he got Mike's Hard Lemonade for us because "girls like them fruity drinks."
I still have the street sign that my friends stole for me because it was my name. They drugged me with Nyquil hidden in a mixed drink so they could sneak out and get it without me noticing. Wholesome times.
During my 2nd year, at frosh week, I remember turning to my friend while we waited for pizza in the middle of the afternoon and asking, "Are we drunk or sober?" And her answering, "I don't know. It's been days. I can't tell anymore."
I'm not proud of those days, but I really did get a lot of partying done in a short period of time. And now I'm pretty much set for life.
I wish I could give you a dirtbag award
I was hopelessly goody-two shoes in high school. This is how dirtbag it got: My friend and I hid in the bushes outside the church during our youth-group's small-group time where we devised our plan to tell our parents we had to "job-shadow" her teacher-dad for the purpose of hitting on boys at his school. It ended up working brilliantly! Pretty dirtbag by youth group standards.
My younger sister recently thanked me for having been an openly rebellious teenager who drew ALL of our mother's focus. Teen sis quietly did whatever she wanted and as long as her grades didn't suffer got zero grief from our parents.
In retrospect I really wasn't a bad kid but my mother, who is a product of the Catholic school system of the 1940s & 50s, was extra-uptight about the behaviour of her daughter and the potential for Ruined Reputation and Family Disgrace.
A trick I used to like to do was sit on high up railings, hook my legs around the lower bars, and flip backwards. It scared the shit out of people who thought I was going to fall to my death, which I found hilarious. One day, sitting in the choir loft at the all-boys school down the road, I pulled that stunt on the wrought iron railing, not looking behind me. I slammed the back of my head into the decorative iron ball at the top of the spiral staircase landing post and gave myself a concussion.
Projects undertaken at my Catholic junior high school by my friends and I included:
-breaking into the tampon machine and shooting the tampons at passersby out of the school bus window (if you hit the applicator correctly it was like a nerf gun)
-climbing through the roof tiles into the school concession to steal all the candy
-putting a bible in the microwave, set to 15 minutes. Was the teacher more upset by the sacrilege or the safety hazard aspect? We'll never know.
Biggest dirtbag moment: snuck into the backyard of an abandoned house on my street with a friend–and mowed the lawn and planted a flower garden. Such rebels.
As a pre-teen, I used to sneak into clumps of trees around the neighborhood with my girl crush to set off fireworks and burn garbage (?). I still have a burn scar on my right knuckle from setting off a firecracker while holding it betwixt thumb and forefinger (?!).
At 15, I started stealing petty items from big box stores "for political reasons." I spoke often of the Peace Corps.
At 17, I skipped all of my high school classes except English and Aviation (rich kid high school) to hang out at the dog park and smoke stolen cigarettes. I did not graduate high school.
As a senior in college, I started hanging out at the dykey sorority, doing jell-o shots at 2 AM on Thursday mornings and skipping 8:30 AM journalism class, which I got a D in, breaking my four-year-running 4.0 (which my dad still talks about to this day. #NOREGRETS)
I was a total dirtbag last year, at 28, when I made out ostentatiously with my new boyfriend at a party in front of his ex-girlfriend.
To be fair, we were both very much in the intense throes of new love, and high as kites on MDMA.
When I was 19, my friend Brian and I were naked in the hot tub. My little brother's friend Gavin came up and started squirting us with a tiny squirt gun. We did nothing, since it was a tiny squirt gun and we were already in a hot tub.
Then my friend started screaming bloody murder, after being squirted in the eye: it turned out that it was not water in the tiny gun, but Tabasco sauce mixed with vinegar.
Gavin sprinted away. Brian chased after him, running naked through the streets in the state capitol neighborhood of Olympia, WA.
Eventually Brian caught him, and grabbed the biggest squirt gun he could find, with a pump that builds up the water pressure. As Gavin is awaiting his just punishment, his back turned as Brian pumps the gun, he suddenly says "Oh fuck you," and walks briskly into the house. Brian, still completely naked, has started to pee on him.
Another time that summer, we got my car, an '89 Oldsmobile station wagon, stuck in the sand after we drove it out on the beach and started to dance to Wham! on the bumper.
I am only 15 now, and I feel I have not done enough dirtbag things. I still have time, though! Any suggestions? The worst things I've done are changing the Netflix ratings limits so that I can watch Orange is the New Black, recommending "how the mouth changes its shape" to a lot of my friends, and listening to quite a lot of My Chemical Romance. Oh, also,foe the last third of last school year (freshman year), my friends and I, most of whom are various stages of queer and emo and nerdy, would eat lunch outside and make fun of the straight boys playing frisbee.
You are in your prime dirtbag years! Now is the time! Make sure to skip class and go for very fast drives in the country with people you are in love with. Sneak out through windows. Set something on fire, preferably not your house but you do you. Dye your hair whatever possible color you can think of. Go to parties with your game face on (see Mallory's photos, above). Continue undermining Netflix at every turn. Make fun of straight boys playing frisbee always.
We love you dearly. Report back.
Along this note – if you see something interesting, wonder what would happen if it were on fire, and then try to see if you were right. If you see something boring, know that it would be more interesting on fire, and prove yourself right.
Try out different public locations for dying your hair, or for dying your friends' hair, but check to make sure the sink is deep enough to fit your whole head under before you commit.
Set up a twitter account impersonating your high school principal or a local politician to see how long you can maintain the ruse.
Order a Dairy Queen cake over the phone with obscene messages written in icing, then forget to pick it up.
Apply for a credit card under the name of a household pet.
Thanks for the tips! I am planning on cutting my hair short and dying it blue (again). My parents have already sanctioned it and may be paying for it for my birthday, butI'm considering cutting it myself in the bathroom, for effect. Also, two other semi-dirtbag things I remembered: returning to my old middle school and writing on the bottoms of the tables (in Elvish!), and enjoying it to the extent that some of my friends were a bit freaked out, and staying up until 4:30 am with those same friends, on the night before my school conferences. The nerdy caveat to that one is that we had just watched the movie Amadeus, and were discussing the sex appeal of both Mozart and Constanze, and also making very bad puns about Mozart.
I was such a non-dirtbag that during my last two years of high school, I carried around entire pads of hall passes–part of my duties as orchestra aide was to write out lesson passes so the orchestra teacher could just sign them all in a minute–and never once abused the privilege.
When I was 18 two of my best friends went to drink with their friend in another town, and then called me to pick them up the next morning. I picked them up after getting lost for 40 minutes, and on the way home my friend threw up in my car, and on the side of the road when I immediately pulled over. My friends were not really dirtbags either, though; they literally threw money at me because they felt so bad about what happened.
my significant other (real dirtbag childhood, father was a bookie) had a best friend whose mother was in the military. they had seen people in military gear or the like soliciting money, so just assumed as six year olds that they could steal his mother's camo hat and ask people for money in front of the grocery store. they were caught by his friend's mother, who probably publicly spanked them (appropriate dirtbag punishment for dirtbag behavior).
also SO had a dirtbag guy in his art class who was CHUGGING a handle of 151 IN ART CLASS, and the teacher never noticed. he then solicited my SO to assist him in throwing several chairs out the window. he declined, but continued to observe as the kid got 4 chairs out the window. teacher only noticed when he tried to THROW THE ROLLING CHALKBOARD out the window.
he threatened the teacher the next day for calling his mother and just escaped into the massive student population and was never punished. thank you, nyc public school
Oh god, I sucked so much as a teen.
In grade 7, we used to drop Subway bags full of water from the fire escape into the alley beside school – on trucks doing deliveries, and once on a person. He came into the school and (rightly) told the principal we were "little bitches".
At the end of grade 12, we burned our (public school) uniforms in the street in an overly dramatic celebration of being done high school. But actually, high school was really fine, we went to a great school with very nice teachers, and we were just spoiled brats.
In university we paid our electricity bill with the proceeds from returning the empties from our "bottle room".
Once a "COOL" described me and two of my friends: X just wants to be a cool kid, Y just wants to hang out with them. Eva Lee just wants to make fun of them.
And this was during my phase where I deliberately wore mismatched clothes to make people come to terms with how how "special" I was so I could be defensive and call them on their b.s.
A few years later my friends and I wore so much black and hung out in this one spot in a corner at school that the cools ended up calling us "The Void." SO many fishnet shirts. SO many Hot Topic pants.
Then I got a job at Hot Topic. 10 years later I'm still there. Dirtbag role model.
I feel like there is definitely a column in working at Hot Topic.
And then there was the time where I had had my G2 all summer (for non-Canadians: a G2 is a full license. Before you have that you have a G1 which means you have to drive with a fully licensed driver in the passenger seat and can't go on highways and shit.) It was the end of August and my mom took me into the city for back-to-school clothes shopping and she let me get combat boots. They weren't Docs (we couldn't afford those) but they were REAL combat boots from the army surplus store.
So of course I had to wear my new boots into town to meet my friends. But I hadn't ever driven in anything other than sandals. And combat boots are heavy people, they are much heavier than sandals. And thick, they have very thick soles. So, as I was rounding a turn in the road that is right beside our driveway. – it starts at 240 metres away actually, Google maps can tell you that now. I was rounding this turn and realized I had pealed out of the driveway rather fast and I needed to slow down to make this turn. Only I couldn't feel the difference between the pedals in my new heavy thick boots and I hit the gas instead and ditched the car.
The window burst in on me, along with muddy water and cattails. For a minute I thought I was going to die, drowned in a swampy ditch on the side of the road, mere metres from my home.
But I didn't. I survived but the neighbour whose driveway is 533 metres away from ours (loving google maps. Loving.) called the cops. And then called my parents. My parents were there first but she told them she called the cops so we had to wait. I was really shaken up and my mom was too, because my arm was covered in blood from the shattered window. The cop came and put me in the back of the cop car and interrogated me through the plastic barrier. He had the radio on and it was playing Wonderwall by Oasis and I HATED Oasis. He took some points off my license (that's also a thing) and then he let my Dad hook the car to his truck and pull it home.
My folks were pissed at the neighbour for calling the cops. There was nothing wrong with the car that Dad couldn't take care of and my arm was just minor scratches. The loss of points from my license was something we couldn't fix.
I could not deal with reality and that night and the next day I downed the last 2 Demerol I had leftover from a tragic wisdom tooth experience and just lay on couch.
I didn't want to drive again but my parents made me. I had a job in town cleaning motel rooms and there was no fuckin' way they were going to drive me there and pick me up all the time, that would interfere with their drinking. When I got back form work that first day they had covered my room in cattails and they called me "swamp queen" for a good year or two after that.
TL:DR I think my parents are the actual dirtbags.
In late but I had been hoping for an excuse to share this photo (ca. 1985) with the Toast. I ran across it a while ago and thought it epitomized 1980s dirtbaggery:
<img src="http://i1252.photobucket.com/albums/hh571/roo_heins/TeenageDirtbags_zpsca1b4255.jpg" border="0" alt="Teenage Dirtbags ca. 1985 photo TeenageDirtbags_zpsca1b4255.jpg"/>
I'm on the far right in the (oh god) tie. Later that year someone set my shirt on fire when I snuck out to see Husker Du at a little cafe/bar in Iowa City.
This photo is incredible
Burying the bag separately is what puts this over the top.
I was never really a true dirtbag, I just back-talked a lot of adults, including nearly every male teacher I had from grade 8 onward. Looking back I'm surprised I never got in trouble for it, but maybe if you are confident enough, dudes will let you bust their balls all you want.
The dirtbaggiest experience I've ever had, though, was when I was 16: A guy in my group of friends had died in a car accident, and for the afternoon between the wake and the funeral service, another kid in this friend group had everyone over to his house, where everyone proceeded to get super high in his yard and one of my best friends hooked up with some kid in a dingy spare room in the basement. It was just…gross, and I was so embarrassed to be there that I just sat on the basement steps and ate all the pizza & snacks I could before the stoners could get to them.
OK so:
1.) I've seen Korn in concert upwards of 4 times.
2.) I found a metal bowl on a boy scout volunteer project, and started smoking pot instead of being a boy scout. The first time I smoked pot it was at lunch right before chemistry class. The guy I bought it from ended up being a sex offender :(
3.) We went to a party in a friend's house in the suburbs, got drunk, and crashed a quincinera across the alley. Free cake!
4.) This one time in college some friends and I went to a party at the U of I. We were next door to a frat house. So of course we went to the frat party. The party consisted of a girl throwing up on the front porch, a different girl dancing with some guy inside (she may have been getting fingered), some random frat guys, and a bunch of pledges. We told people we were from the Gamma chapter of the frat at U Chicago.
We drank a bunch of their beer, got a pledge to do pushups, and then ended up in the kitchen, where we tried to cook a package of turkey bacon we found. Turkey bacon's pretty gross, so we decided to fix it by putting random spices on it. While we were cooking, some of the older guys in the frat pulled us aside and asked us who we were. Apparently they weren't convinced that we were the Gamma chapter of their frat, so they asked us what the handshake was. Thinking fast, my friend said "We can't show you. What if you're not from this frat?" They asked us to leave.
The next morning I left a note on their door that said "We want our goddamn TURKEY BACON- Gamma chapter" and booked it.
5.) I got drunk with my friends at a pro wresting show instead of going to prom
The turkey bacon. Nailed it.
I went to Harry Potter conventions throughout high school, but the one with the most of our group of friends was when I was 16. We decided the cool thing to do would be to sit in the elevators while other people rode them. Like ten of us would spend hours in those elevators just hanging out inside of elevators.
At another Harry Potter convention when I was 19, we decided that the main elevators were too crowded so we took the service elevators for the remainder of the convention. That's also where the ~fandom celebs~ were taking the elevators so the hotel staff didn't give a fuck.
I don't know why my teen dirtbag experience revolve around elevators and Harry Potter but oh well. *flies out on broomstick smoking a cigarette*
What confuses me most is why everyone is talking about this in the past tense. When did everyone but me stop being a dirtbag?
I was a pretty big dirtbag as a child. At the age of eight I pulled my sister's tooth until it snaggled (to be fair I thought it was loose. I was trying to be helpful). In the fifth grade I made up a game called "blind leading the blind" where I got me and my friends to wear blindfolds, spin around, and then led them all over the playground until I had them dizzy enough to push in the ditch.
I was pretty good after that, until tenth grade. Because, God, you don't know me or my life, so, whatever.
In college I made my parents' lives hell by refusing to live on campus. Instead, I lived with a pothead who rarely made rent or utilities, and was such a slob her friend actually BROKE IN to clean her room. We had a drifter named Dennis living on our couch. I was an art major. All in all, my college experience was fantastic and very, very dirtbag.
Twelve years old: Tied a garden hose around my bedframe to hold onto as I climbed out my third-floor window and walked down the wall just because I wanted to try it. I wore a bike helmet though!
Thirteenth birthday sleepover: snuck TWELVE GIRLS past my mother's OPEN BEDROOM out of my house in the middle of the night to meet ONE BOY who never showed up. Apparently I was supposed to get kissed for my first night as a teenager? Didn't work out.
Seventeen years old: 8 shots of whiskey. Had sex in a sagebrush bush at a local music festival. With my boyfriend's best friend. It was great. The scrape marks on my back were epic. The boyfriend was an asshole anyway.
Many, many, many times throughout my teenagerhood: drove out a canyon or suitably unpopulated neighborhood with my friend who spent most of his spare time driving around listening to music to blow up works bombs. What, you may ask, are works bombs?
WELL you take a vitamin water bottle or a bottle with equally strong plastic, fill it about two inches with "The Works" cleaner, then you take a bunch of tinfoil and stuff it in there. You screw the lid on, shake it up, and run like hell. Ten seconds later… BOOOOM.
The funniest part about this is that the practice has continued with other dirtbags as I'm sure it did before we came along, and somehow the police never had heard of it until two years ago, when there were a series of articles in the newspaper about "dangerous explosives" (described exactly as above) being "left in mailboxes and other locations" and they were "concerned about terrorism". Ah yes, toilet cleaner explosives made by teenagers… terrorism indeed.
omg the garden hose one is fucking amazing! Were you okay??
Oh, lord. Thinking on this has shown me that I am dirtbaggier than I had thought, which is pleasing. This is probably #1 though:
Sophomore year of college, the night before I was supposed to go record a bunch of singing for my group's CD, I got blackout drunk, smoked a shitton of hookah, dropped the coals all over my bf's nice wood floors–it is important to note here that in addition to creating lots of little burns in the floors, I also caught an entire coal on my bare foot in order to prevent this, and was drunk enough that I didn't really feel the pain. I had a scar for yeeeaaaars–hooked up with a girl while bf was passed out. The two of us were only disentangled by the intervention of two male friends of mine, who ran through the room with their jackets over their heads (so as not to see anything), screaming, on their way to the front door. No regrets, honestly. He took me back. I don't care if it makes me a bad person, she was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.
Other highlights include taking taking angry, passive aggressive shots of vodka and chasing them with peach schnapps, out of view from everyone else, because I was ANGRY don't you see; peeing behind a dumpster because I boy I liked asked "who needs to go to the bathroom?" and I said "I do" and it turned out he meant "in the alley" and I refused to back down; smoke ring competitions; starring in a short film about, as far as I can recall, me smoking a cigarette; hanging out on a porch in Allston listening to some lanky plaid thing talk about how his most recent original album was NOT AT ALL influenced by BRMC, it was a TOTAL COINCIDENCE; keeping all my cigarette butts in a Christmas cookie tin so my mom wouldn't smell them in the garbage; my entire life as an expat. (Expat life is, if you are not a government employee or other form of Expat High Roller, inherently dirtbaggy. Mine consisted mostly of hanging around dudes with bad haircuts who don't know what they're doing with their lives, smoking and drinking heavily and hanging out in questionable establishments, and neglecting housekeeping and nutrition and so on as much as humanly possible.)
'hooked up with a girl while bf was passed out'
THIS IS INCREDIBLE. YOU ARE A WARRIOR.
HAHAHA THANK. I feel I should add that when I say "he took me back eventually" I mean that I told him what happened immediately, he broke up with me, I accepted this, and then he called and asked for us to get back together three days later. He did not last long, is what I am saying.
Plus the last thing he said before he passed out was "go have fun with ______," I don't know what he was expecting.
This story gets better and better – you win teenage dirtbag. Of course you expected him to say, "You are a miraculous teenage dirtbag of wonder and joy and the fact that you have more fun when I am passed out than when I am conscious tells me that you are the sun and this other lady is the moon and I am a research centre for photosynthesis."
I'm totally not much of a dirtbag but when I was 13 and the school bus took 3 hours to arrive to take us home, I broke into the cafeteria and stole frozen donuts, which I distributed to all the people on my bus who were way too cool to be my friends. Being just about the only brown person in my whole school, I was easily identified and had to spend the day in 'isolation detention' (which meant I had to spend the day in the sixth form centre full of 16 to 18 year olds. I felt pretty cool).
Also me and my first ever girlfriend made out behind the clay bin in ceramics. Does that count?
I haven't posted yet because I wasn't much of a dirtbag teen (don't worry, my brother picked up my slack), but just realized that I was definitely a dirtbag child sometimes. Like the time in fourth grade when I noticed that the science teacher had left her address labels on the magazines she ordered for her classroom and I thought it would be funny to copy her address into the corner of one of my assignments.
Reading this, I can tell just how boring an non-dirtbaggy I am from the fact that so many of the stories that start: "I was hardly a dirtbag at all! I only did ___" are still things I would NEVER DO.
I've always been too chill for all this. A little light B+E, thats all…
I was never a dirtbag. I was a devout Catholic at my all-girls Catholic high school; I refused to skip for Senior Skip Day because I wanted perfect attendance for all four years; I told my friends that I would pray for them whenever they did something I considered immoral; I almost cried when I got MY FIRST DETENTION EVER for being late to homeroom.
College was a lot like that too, but with much less praying and much more gayness.
I was reading this thinking I wasn't much of a dirtbag until I realized that I have been a kind of lifelong passive dirtbag, which I just decided to refer to as "Time Release Dirtbag." By this I mean that if there was some dirtbag thing I either wanted or didn't want to do, I was perfectly capable from a possibly alarmingly early age of just riding it out and accomplishing my goal even it if took weeks, months, or years. For example, I…I am a Girl Scout Brownie dropout. I started this campaign by systematically losing pieces of the uniform until it was obvious that I wasn't into it and couldn't continue. I could have just told my parents that I didn't enjoy it, but where's the fun in that?
ETA: Aaaaaaaand this morning I remembered exactly why I dragged it out so long. We usually met in the basement of a large church, and that basement had very nice smooth floors that a handful of us would spend as much time as we could (before things officially started) running and sliding in our sock feet from one end to the other. We basically took over the entire middle third of the room running and sliding and crashing into each other and whatever was against the opposite wall until an adult came down there and made us stop.
Obviously, if I'd kept going with losing parts of the uniform the socks would have been the last to go.
I am still capable of this behavior today. I am probably doing it right now and don't even realize it.
Obviously, if I'd kept going with losing parts of the uniform the socks would have been the last to go.
ahahahahahahahaperfect
Those were excellent sliding socks.
'I am still capable of this behavior today. I am probably doing it right now and don't even realize it.' I am kind of picturing you wearing like the latter half of judge robes or being a swim instructor who has turned up to work naked but still has their whistle.
Ahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa don't give me ideas. Truthfully, I'd be more likely to show up in cutoffs, a baseball t-shirt, and the remaining item from whatever uniform I was methodically discarding.
cutoffs, baseball t-shirt, Brownie socks
cutoffs, baseball t-shirt, latter half of judge robes
cutoffs, baseball t-shirt, whistle
cutoffs, baseball t-shirt, marching band uniform hat
Okay now I'm picturing you in cutoffs, baseball t-shirt, bridal garter, white high heels, and veil.
I was in a speed metal band through high school. When my parents were out of town, I threw a house party including them & other friends that involved:
-Our bassist drawing pentagrams all over the back stairs.
-Our vocalist and his girlfriend sneaking into my parents' bedroom and throwing up on the floor.
-Myself passing out in the kitchen, inspiring some friends to mop the kitchen floor with my hair.
-The band consequently being forbidden from using our garage for practice, which really put a damper on Burning Creation's nascent thrash domination, let me tell you.
Another day, one friend was mugged by roving dropouts at lunch, and another was chased by guys he had a crust-punk-scene feud with after school. I was paranoid but unarmed and tiny, so I picked up a half-brick I found on the street, tucked it into a beanie, and walked around with my makeshift sap just DARING some dropout Nazi-punk shitstain to come at me. The next day I scrounged up an oversized pocket-knife and brought it to school with me for a week until a kid two grades behind me told me I was being a jackass.
All the damn boy dirtbags in my school would brag about climbing the water tower at night, so when I went to stay with my best friend/hero/star-crossed dirtbag love of my life one town over, we snuck out to try climbing that one. Which turned out to have an alarm. I still have the pants I ripped getting back over that fence, like the drifty morose has-been all teen dirtbags become.
oh also some female friends of mine in college had a pissing contest for distance somehow? I wasn't there because Male Gaze but I think they deserve a dirtbag award for that. And for the time they took mescaline and danced around wearing only fur coats. (I wasn't there for that either but I respect it)
(14) Teenage drinking began in a skate park we'd broken into (it was closed for the summer). A 2 litre bottle full of water was kicked up a curved ramp and hit me in the head. I didn't want to cry in front of my cool new (dirtbag) friends so I grabbed the nearest drink to me and chugged, beginning a beautiful relationship with alcohol that would last 7 years.
(15) Not being bothered to puke in a toilet, decided that puking out of a rooflight (on to a roof) was a respectable alternative.
(16) Drinking in "abandoned" house – and kissing a brother and sister within 2 minutes of each other.
(17) After running away from dirtbag dudes who were pissing in the street, ended up eating a suspicious substance under a bridge. The substance had no effect, since it was meant to be smoked.
(also 17? maybe?) Only place out of bounds at this one house party was their parents' bed, but I was tired and ornery so I curled up and hid my entire body under a big pillow. Wasn't found for 45 minutes.
Oh dirtbag years… how I don't miss you…
'(16) Drinking in "abandoned" house – and kissing a brother and sister within 2 minutes of each other. ' Pure dirtbag. Amazing.
I didn't believe in myself as a dirtbag, but this is bringing back memories!
In school I was very, very good, but university was a bit different. In my Study Abroad year, I lived in a flat and used to do shopping on a Sunday afternoon with my Geordie flatmate. We'd buy this disgusting bright blue liquer called Mickey Finn's and a carton of orange juice and mix them into pea-green 'cocktails'. We'd spend the afternoon drinking those and then go to evening church half-cocked. We also used to buy plenty of hangover food in advance during our grocery trips, because we were teenage drunks, but organised teenage drunks.
When I was twenty, I drank wayyyy too much at a house party, mostly from a communal vessel by means of metre-long party straws, then threw up in the sink for an hour or so. It was all documented.
My friends from home lived downstairs last Summer and they used to come up to my flat all the time with a giant bucket of tequila punch. A bucket, yes. Mostly tequila.
I am currently 23 years old and planning to hold a bonfire in my back garden on which we will burn some old beds, because we can't be bothered to take them to the dump. I'm so excited about this. At my last party, I ran out of cups really early on and just swigged from the bottle (in front of my mother) shamelessly for most of the night.
I am a dirtbag.
I was a (very) minor dirtbag, but mostly because I have an older cousin (D) that is a walking cautionary tale.
Age 5- He and his brother would steal beer bottles out of the fridge, shake them up on the walk to school, and then when they got there, stick nails in the caps so they could spray beer all over the other kindergartners in the playground
Age 10-ish- Took the BB gun onto the roof to take potshots at the Catholic school kids that walked by their house since they had to be in school earlier than the public school kids.
Age 12- stole his step dad's car and drove it around town until he crashed into someone's yard because a bunch of cops were chasing him
Age 13-18- Found a bowling ball, and with his brother and the one cousin that could drive, took it to the top of the biggest hill in town. Rolled it down one side and then everyone jumped in the car to follow it down the hill. When it got to the bottom, it hit the curb so fast it went flying back at them, over the car, making a huge hole in some guy's lawn. Then they took it back to the top of the hill and rolled it down the other side, which ended in the busiest street in town. Turns out bowling ball insides aren't as interesting as you think.
Again with the older cousin and his brother, went into the woods on Thanksgiving with a BB gun, got the brother to shoot at some guy's giant glass picture window, (got a hit, dead center! brother later joined the army) at which point the guy came tearing out after them (cop house! yay!) and everyone ran. D and brother made it to the traditional family Thanksgiving place, and when asked where the older cousin was, figure out he's not there. Older cousin was stupid enough to do this adventure wearing his letterman's jacket and be slow, so he got caught. Police turn up to Thanksgiving dinner, etc etc etc.
When he joined the army with his brother, they put him in military intelligence.
I really didn't like this one guy, but we both liked Harry Potter. So on his 11th birthday I slipped a perfectly forged admission letter to Hogwarts under his front door.
Senior year of high school I drank so much Malibu and Pineapple Juice I disappeared from pool party to vomit in the yard and pass out in the back of a friends car.
Sophomore year of college, I helped a friend start cooking her birthday dinner at a fancy place she was house-sitting. I decided to make pot brownies for dessert but left the oil heating on the stove with a wooden spoon in the pot while I accompanied her outside so she could have a cigarette. We came back inside to find the to black smoke billowing up thorough the kitchen because the spoon caught fire. We cleaned as best we could and took the food to a friends house for her birthday dinner. She had to spend several weekends going back to scrub, clean and re-paint the kitchen without my help.
My childhood dirtbaggery still haunts me to this day:
My family went to Disney World when my brother, sister, and I were finally old enough to ride all the rides. It was a big deal for a lower-middle-class family to afford, and we were all having a blast. My mom usually hates rides, but there was one she really, really wanted to try: Splash Mountain. She was always a fan of flumes, and a flume on steroids probably scared the shit out of her, but it's DISNEY. She had to do it and couldn't wait.
Of course, we're there during April vacation, and the line for Splash Mountain is about two hours long. Halfway through, the three of us start crabbing like little assholes about being hungry, so my mom says she'll go get us some food while my dad waits with us. The line moves, and we move with it. We get closer and closer to the ride, but my mom is nowhere to be found. I don't remember what happened next, but I have a feeling the three of us ganged up on my dad and bullied him into saying "fuck it, let's ride" without my mom when we got to the front.
We totally forgot about her and rode the *shit* out of Splash Mountain, screaming in the photo and getting soaked to the bone. We ran off after, slappin' high fives with each other and laughing about HOWMUCHFUN we just had…and then we see her. My mom is standing at the exit to the ride, angrier than I've ever seen her. She's white-knuckling four overpriced hot dogs in her fists. She holds them up for us, as if to offer them, and then makes sure we watch as she slams them into the trash can behind her.
My dad probably didn't get laid for several months after that one, and the three of us kids still walk around with the image of her standing at the foot of the ride with ketchup oozing between her fingers…and the kind of infinite guilt that only an Irish-Catholic mother can inflict.
Fucking dirtbags, all around.