Hipstercrite Life, Pop Culture

Teenage Wasteland

People under the age of 20 scare the living hell out of me.

Teenagers have zero understanding of how life works. Unless they grew up in a Little Orphan Annie-type setting. Then they understand the way life works more than I’ll ever want to know. Because most teenagers are inexperienced with the ways of the world, they are prone to doing terrible and illogical things such as shooting animals, driving drunk, taking dumps in public spaces, and wearing pajama bottoms for pants.

When I think about the potential ways that I am to expire, death by teenager is one of my greatest fears. Teenagers act without knowledge of ramifications. They will shoot you point blank with a smile and then go eat a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. THEY WILL EAT YOUR FIRSTBORN AND THEN USE THEIR RIB CAGES AS TOOTHPICKS.

If you don’t agree with me, take a look at this story that happened on Friday night.

A friend and I were out and about on the hipster-centric east side of Austin. After the bars closed, we retired to my car which was parked in front of an apartment/artist workspace near the popular bars on east 6th street. As my friend and I sat in my car talking, we watched four underage children climbed the roof of the workspace and begin throwing back what looked like something that was fished out of a dumpster from a back alley in South Central. When they weren’t drinking, they were throwing glass into the street. Like many bored and ill-raised children, they began scanning what was in their peripheral view to play with and their eyes landed on my car. They suddenly became very concerned with whether or not my friend and I were making out. When they realized that we weren’t making out, they decided it was in everyone’s interest to coach us into making out. They then decided to collectively pull down their pants.

Fortunately for us, like squirrels with ADD, the foursome promptly forgot about us and either a.) passed out on the roof b.) made out with each other c.) fell down. My friend and I anxiously watched as the four tried to descend from the one story roof onto a ladder that none of them could seem to find. As we waited with bated breath as one after another barely made it down the ladder, what we anticipated finally occurred in the last girl who caught the ladder with her face. On the way down she also managed to punch one of the kids and lose her wig.

After they gathered themselves from this minor setback, they promptly remembered that we were sitting in the car and ran over to interact. At this point we finally got a good look at what we were dealing with. The first word that comes to mind is “vacancy” when recalling the eyes of our four hecklers.
And “death”.
Vacancy and death.

Maybe it was their age or the fact that they drank enough to motorize a fleet of Hummers, but there was a piece missing from their souls. They told us that their names were Forrest, Thomas, Pez, and something that sounds like Iris and that two of them lived in the workspace that they had just climbed down from. They were very concerned with whether we were happy or not and punctuated their point by screaming, “BE HAPPY!” over and over. They then decided that they wanted to share their giant tub of Jell-o and ran inside to pull out a bag full of two-feet long straws that we could use through our window. We thought we bought some time to leave when we told them that we didn’t like red Jell-o and that they should run back inside to get the green Jell-o they also made. Unfortunately for us, the bowl of green Jell-o must have been sitting right next to the door and before we could blink, Forrest was standing outside my driver’s side window like a dutiful dog with a sparkling bowl of liquefied gelatin. When we refused to interact with them, Forrest got angry and began running his mouth over my window. He sprinted back towards the apartment and turned around to shout one last “FUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!” towards my car and then went inside of the building. My friend and I hoped that this would be the last time we had to deal with Forrest and the children from Hell. It was not. Forrest then opened the door and shot a gun towards the ground.
A gun.
An underage kid with a Jell-o fetish, anger management issues, and a body full of what could have been plutonium…and a gun.

After the gun made it’s debut into the story, we decided it was time to leave.

The adventure of the evening overshadowed the potential danger we felt at the time, but into the next day I couldn’t help but feel that that was kind of fucked up. Maybe I was sheltered as a child, but is this normal behavior? What is so wrong with today’s youth that this was an idea of an evening well spent?

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23 Comments

  • Reply rae March 7, 2011 at 6:45 pm

    I grew up in South Jersey, where all of the above would have happened except for the gun.

    God bless Texas.

  • Reply Nicole March 7, 2011 at 6:49 pm

    Teenagers are terrifying. That is not hyperbole. I seriously feel that way. They have no common sense, no concept of consequences and they are trying to impress their friends. Which usually means doing something dumb. All ingredients in a recipe for horror! Your story went from funny to pathetic to tragic to OMG, A GUN?!?! I mean, WTF.

  • Reply girluntitled March 7, 2011 at 7:06 pm

    WHERE WERE THEIR PARENTS?!?!?!

    …inside making the jell-o?

  • Reply Demy March 7, 2011 at 7:10 pm

    Jesus!! You're kidding, aren't you? What type of psychos were these teens?? I mean, come on, it's nothing to do with age. I'm 16 and I cannot accept that there are normal teenagers who act like that. A gun? Seriously, a gun??? What the hell?? We are civilized people, dude. Even teenagers are civilized people, I know this, because I'm a teenager, and YOU should remember how was your 13-19… There was no way that this thing would have happened back then, but it's not happening today either, not in Greece at least. Well, you know what? I'm sure that crap like video games and TV made the whole damage… It's…socking. You freaked me out, I cannot imagine how you felt and I'm cetain that it was not the best evening of your life, but please don't put every teenager in the same pot. There are different people, with different characters and respect in them. And I know I'm one of them… Ok?

  • Reply That Chelsea Girl™ March 7, 2011 at 7:50 pm

    Wow, that sounds like quite the adventure. Sure glad none of the bullets ricocheted. Take care.

  • Reply Mademoiselle Hautemess March 7, 2011 at 8:42 pm

    Teenagers are in my Top 5 reasons that I don't want to have children. When they aren't shooting vodka thru their eyeballs or stuffing themselves with vodka soaked tampons, they are bullying each other, filming themselves have sex, and striving to star on MTV's Teen Mom.

    I distinctly remember being a teenager and how narcissistic and hubristic I was. I now pray every day that I am never as smart as I assumed I was when I was 17.

  • Reply birkley3030 March 7, 2011 at 8:49 pm

    Are you sure this wasn't a troupe of performance artists? The whole thing sounds fucked-up squared.

  • Reply theTsaritsa March 7, 2011 at 9:36 pm

    Not a fan of teenagers, or guns. That's really crazy that it went from Jell-o to that.

  • Reply Trina March 7, 2011 at 9:57 pm

    i am with you on teenagers terrifying the crap out of me. my brother is almost 20, so he's chilled out a bit, but man… the teens are years i wish to forget. how he didn't end up killing us is beyond me. don't get me wrong, he's a good kid, straight A student and wicked talented on the computer… but his anger issues were something else.

    if you told this story to mi Abuela, she would've told you that all those kids needed were parents to smack the crap out of them and i kinda think it's true. as a parent, i've witnessed TOO MANY parents who let their kids run around willy-nilly. i don't condone spanking, but i am not afraid to raise my voice and ask my son what the hell he was thinking & take time to explain the proper procedure for schtuffs.

    i don't like the mentality of 'kids will be kids'. yeah, they'll be screwed up, malicious teenagers if you don't give them the proper discipline at a very young age. gosh parents!

    i hope my son doesn't end up pulling his pants down, offer jello to strangers and shoot at people when he's 17. this just proves to me that i'm not yelling for nothing.

  • Reply Teenysparkles March 7, 2011 at 11:16 pm

    crap. you just made me scared. each generation of kids are braver and better equipped than the last gen …all the better to excorcise their hormonal rage!

  • Reply Big Mark 243 March 7, 2011 at 11:21 pm

    Rae is frontin' on South Jersey… that crap is called 'Tueday night' there (and sadly, it is a regular feature in the Motor)

    This could have been a scene from a Phillip K. Dick novel. Glad you managed to get through safely. It is okay to be less hip and more safe… next time or whenever you 'danger meter' goes off, to GET TO SAFETY.

    Nothing is less cool than being dead… irony in that, I know but you feel me…

  • Reply MG March 8, 2011 at 2:16 am

    OMFG. Seriously. I'm terrified of having children because I don't want them to be friends with assholes like this. Or worse, that I would have to interact with their obviously brain dead parents. What the fuck is the world coming to?

  • Reply Madison Rae March 8, 2011 at 3:43 am

    I am a teenager, and I am afraid of my peers. I live in small-town Suburbia Minnesota, and even then almost all of the teen population is still obnoxiously ignorant to common human decency, manners, and none of the people around me seem to have any awareness of the consequences for any of their behavior. I don't know if the majority of them would go to those extremes, but they're still ridiculously oblivious when it comes to respect for themselves, others or the world around them.

    😐 I really hope the generation after me isn't like mine. I plan, at least, to raise my children better than this/the above behavior.

  • Reply Anonymous March 8, 2011 at 4:16 am

    Thanks for the reality check–sometimes I forget Austin's a big city. So glad y'all made it out of that situation safely! Well written account, too.
    –Stella

  • Reply Maude March 8, 2011 at 9:22 am

    i know what you mean! i have a teenage sister and she scares me… sometimes i read her diary to make sure she isnt turning into the monsters you described!

  • Reply StrangeBird March 8, 2011 at 9:39 am

    Wow – that's a crazy story! I'm glad no one got hurt. I know it's just like an 'old person' to say such a thing – but I really don't remember kids being like that when I was younger…

  • Reply Anonymous March 8, 2011 at 5:09 pm

    OK – I had to laugh. This is how I feel about anyone under 30. I mean really Lauren, why did you guys stick around? Why didn't you drive somewhere else? Why didn't you call the cops?

  • Reply Brooke Farmer March 8, 2011 at 6:40 pm

    I hung out with kids like this when I was a teenager. They are terrifying. I was terrifying. When I was 17 I watched as one friend almost shot his brother by mistake after we had all been drinking (among other things). The bullet he didn't mean to send flying through the air landed inches from his brother's abdomen, putting singed hole in the bed beside him.

    How did we celebrate the fact that my dear friend Jason did not just die a traumatic death in front of us all at the hand of his brother?

    We drank more and did some coke.

    I have no idea how I survived those years.

  • Reply laurenne March 8, 2011 at 9:05 pm

    I HATE teenagers! Seriously. They think they can do whatever. And I guess they can because that's how they learn. My friends shot and killed a pregnant lady when we were in junior high.
    And they're in jail for 90 years. They were 13.

    Hopefully, though, it taught everyone in our town NOT to do that. And their kids. And lots of others. I hope! So, maybe that one death saved lots of other people.
    Who knows what is supposed to happen in life?
    Scary either way though. Glad you're okay!
    LOVE!
    L

  • Reply HD March 9, 2011 at 5:25 am

    Hmm. The more I think of this, the more I think it would make a cool subsection of a screenplay on teenagers being Satanic spawns or something along those lines. Still hard to believe this happened.

    BTW, shout out to Mademosielle,
    "Teenagers are in my Top 5 reasons that I don't want to have children. When they aren't shooting vodka thru their eyeballs or stuffing themselves with vodka soaked tampons, they are bullying each other, filming themselves have sex, and strGHTiving to star on MTV's Teen Mom."
    THIS RIGHT HERE!
    mY type of humor.

  • Reply Anodyne Press March 12, 2011 at 6:05 am

    Hmm. So. Does anyone know, do vodka-soaked tampons work? I'm pretty curious about that one. Not curious enough to try it, nor would I have been when I was a teenager, but I did a LOT of other stuff when I was a teenager, some of which makes that scenario seem almost charming. And it didn't even involve drugs and alcohol. (Straight-edged scary is always scarier than drugged-up scary.)

    Just for future reference– cars are gas-pedal enabled. Seriously.

  • Reply kimmie coco puff March 12, 2011 at 5:17 pm

    How incredibly Hopeless todays youth is. You always have the most interesting stories.

  • Reply Guise Faux March 13, 2011 at 7:42 am

    Sounds like my own misspent youth in the '70s, which was only slightly more sane than the "Kids" depicted in Larry Clark's 1995 movie. On the plus side, some of us grow up to approximate what passes for normal.

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