Voters in this city rejected three incumbent City Council members just one month after they voted to implement a harsh anti-trans bathroom ban, replacing one with the city's first out gay council member.
Law says you can’t pee in the bathroom? That’s ok. Pee in their mouths instead!
Ah, but then the media would run amok with stories like “Trans perverts are peeing everywhere! What you can do to protect your kids!”
Why do so many afraid people think kids need protecting? You know what my dad did when I was a kid? Nothing. He was passed out drunk on the living room floor after watching football at 2pm on a sunday.
You know what I was doing? Roaming the city. We lived in a bad neighborhood too. Our street was known as a drug and prostitute meetup spot. I can remember going to the playground at 5 years old, which had a basketball court, and a big grass field. I found something shiny in the grass. I picked it up not knowing what it was. Suddenly I hear “Hey yo! What’re doin?” I turn around, and about 15 gang members, who were just a moment ago playing basketball had now turned their attention to me. I was holding something of theirs. I didn’t know it, but I just picked up a brass knuckles.
I wasn’t scared. I was too stupid to be scared. I just happily said “I found this thing!” and he said “No, you got MY thing!”. To which I said “Oh, it’s yours? Ok. You should put it over here. Are these bags yours? Here, I’ll show you.”
So now still holding the brass knuckles, and now grabbing a duffle bag, I walk onto the basketball court they were using. Just on the other side of it, is a bunch of pine trees in the grass. I used the sawed off tree branches as hooks to hang the bag, and then slid the brass knuckles into a side pocket.
I said “See? Now you can keep an eye on it, so someone doesn’t mistakenly walk off with something, not knowing it’s yours.”
And this one of them walked over to the bag and said “You wanna see something?” and he reaches into the bag, pulls out a gun and starts shooting down past the trees onto the railroad tracks.
And so I said “Wait, hold on a second, don’t fire that for a little bit. I have an idea.”
And I reached into the trash, pulled out 4 beer cans that someone threw away, jumped the fence, put them on the tracks, came back, jumped back over the fence, and now pointed at the 4 beer cans I placed on the track, about a foot apart from each other. They were about 200 feet away. I said “Think you can hit those?” Sure enough he did. 4 shots, 4 hits.
So we played basketball together until the cops came, and they all ran. I didn’t run. I didn’t understand what was going on.
Cop comes up to me thinking I was hurt or something. They got reports of gunshots. I said “Well yeah. I put those beer cans on the track to see if Devon could hit them. And he did. Want me to set them up again for you, to see if you can hit them?”
Cop was quite confused, said no, and then insisted he take me home. Which was literally across the street. When the cop woke my dad up, he thought I got arrested, and yelled at the cop for arresting a 5 year old. Cop could tell he was still drunk, and just gave me over to my dad, who passed back out after the cop left. I just went upstairs and played Sega Genesis.
To this day, my dad refuses to believe that I was too dumb to realize I was in danger multiple times, and did illegal things. But that’s what I did. Nobody taught me how dangerous guns were. Nobody taught me what gang members did. I just saw a bunch of new friends, and that’s how they acted for the 45 minutes or so we interacted. Never saw them again.
And now, being 41 years old, I see these people today saying “Oh, the world is too scary to let them out of my sight! We must protect the bathrooms from people with different genitalia! Oh everything is scary!”
Meanwhile I’m a little 5 year old white boy walking up to gun carrying gang members, like “Hey guys! Let’s play!”
So they can fuck off with this bullshit of kids not being able to handle themselves. Just like when I was a kid and ran after a bear with a stick, and the bear runs off. Sometimes in life, you just gotta stop being a little bitch, and stop being afraid. Even the things that DO want to kill you aren’t going to fuck with you if you know you’re not going to get fucked with.
In conclusion, I don’t care what genitals you have. Go pee in the toilet. Fuck everybody else.
Sounds like you and me grew up in very similar environments. I was all over the place until I got my first computer with internet, I didn’t leave my room much after that.
The gangsters I grew up around were dumb white hillbillies with guns.
What the other commenter said about survivor bias is true though. Nearly everyone I grew up with is dead now but me and my brother. The only real difference I can think of is that my mom came looking for us if we were gone too long. If we didn’t get back when we said, my mom was on a warpath stopping at every place we frequented and screaming bloody murder. We were only brave enough to hide from her when we were drunk or high and we knew the consequences for that would be a lot bigger than hanging out somewhere later than we were supposed to.
That woman had such bad anxiety, I don’t know how she survived us kids. I really don’t.
We survived because she protected us though.
One night my brother and I snuck off to a party in the next town over. My mom showed up and dragged us both away and beat the hell out of us. A few hours after she did, some rival hooligans fired shots at the boys from our neighborhood, killed one of them and wounded another.
I might be alive to make this comment because my mom came looking for us that night. Christmas Eve, 2000.
I wasn’t even clear if the bathroom law went into place
Law says you can’t pee in the bathroom? That’s ok. Pee in their mouths instead!
Ah, but then the media would run amok with stories like “Trans perverts are peeing everywhere! What you can do to protect your kids!”
Why do so many afraid people think kids need protecting? You know what my dad did when I was a kid? Nothing. He was passed out drunk on the living room floor after watching football at 2pm on a sunday.
You know what I was doing? Roaming the city. We lived in a bad neighborhood too. Our street was known as a drug and prostitute meetup spot. I can remember going to the playground at 5 years old, which had a basketball court, and a big grass field. I found something shiny in the grass. I picked it up not knowing what it was. Suddenly I hear “Hey yo! What’re doin?” I turn around, and about 15 gang members, who were just a moment ago playing basketball had now turned their attention to me. I was holding something of theirs. I didn’t know it, but I just picked up a brass knuckles.
I wasn’t scared. I was too stupid to be scared. I just happily said “I found this thing!” and he said “No, you got MY thing!”. To which I said “Oh, it’s yours? Ok. You should put it over here. Are these bags yours? Here, I’ll show you.”
So now still holding the brass knuckles, and now grabbing a duffle bag, I walk onto the basketball court they were using. Just on the other side of it, is a bunch of pine trees in the grass. I used the sawed off tree branches as hooks to hang the bag, and then slid the brass knuckles into a side pocket.
I said “See? Now you can keep an eye on it, so someone doesn’t mistakenly walk off with something, not knowing it’s yours.”
And this one of them walked over to the bag and said “You wanna see something?” and he reaches into the bag, pulls out a gun and starts shooting down past the trees onto the railroad tracks.
And so I said “Wait, hold on a second, don’t fire that for a little bit. I have an idea.”
And I reached into the trash, pulled out 4 beer cans that someone threw away, jumped the fence, put them on the tracks, came back, jumped back over the fence, and now pointed at the 4 beer cans I placed on the track, about a foot apart from each other. They were about 200 feet away. I said “Think you can hit those?” Sure enough he did. 4 shots, 4 hits.
So we played basketball together until the cops came, and they all ran. I didn’t run. I didn’t understand what was going on.
Cop comes up to me thinking I was hurt or something. They got reports of gunshots. I said “Well yeah. I put those beer cans on the track to see if Devon could hit them. And he did. Want me to set them up again for you, to see if you can hit them?”
Cop was quite confused, said no, and then insisted he take me home. Which was literally across the street. When the cop woke my dad up, he thought I got arrested, and yelled at the cop for arresting a 5 year old. Cop could tell he was still drunk, and just gave me over to my dad, who passed back out after the cop left. I just went upstairs and played Sega Genesis.
To this day, my dad refuses to believe that I was too dumb to realize I was in danger multiple times, and did illegal things. But that’s what I did. Nobody taught me how dangerous guns were. Nobody taught me what gang members did. I just saw a bunch of new friends, and that’s how they acted for the 45 minutes or so we interacted. Never saw them again.
And now, being 41 years old, I see these people today saying “Oh, the world is too scary to let them out of my sight! We must protect the bathrooms from people with different genitalia! Oh everything is scary!”
Meanwhile I’m a little 5 year old white boy walking up to gun carrying gang members, like “Hey guys! Let’s play!”
So they can fuck off with this bullshit of kids not being able to handle themselves. Just like when I was a kid and ran after a bear with a stick, and the bear runs off. Sometimes in life, you just gotta stop being a little bitch, and stop being afraid. Even the things that DO want to kill you aren’t going to fuck with you if you know you’re not going to get fucked with.
In conclusion, I don’t care what genitals you have. Go pee in the toilet. Fuck everybody else.
Great stories. Tiny bit of surviver bias.
Sounds like you and me grew up in very similar environments. I was all over the place until I got my first computer with internet, I didn’t leave my room much after that.
The gangsters I grew up around were dumb white hillbillies with guns.
What the other commenter said about survivor bias is true though. Nearly everyone I grew up with is dead now but me and my brother. The only real difference I can think of is that my mom came looking for us if we were gone too long. If we didn’t get back when we said, my mom was on a warpath stopping at every place we frequented and screaming bloody murder. We were only brave enough to hide from her when we were drunk or high and we knew the consequences for that would be a lot bigger than hanging out somewhere later than we were supposed to.
That woman had such bad anxiety, I don’t know how she survived us kids. I really don’t.
We survived because she protected us though.
One night my brother and I snuck off to a party in the next town over. My mom showed up and dragged us both away and beat the hell out of us. A few hours after she did, some rival hooligans fired shots at the boys from our neighborhood, killed one of them and wounded another.
I might be alive to make this comment because my mom came looking for us that night. Christmas Eve, 2000.