Adapted from the original, image oriented version by Aaron Luther (see what the images add after reading it this way)

My Stupid Childhood

I grew up in Bakersfield, California. Bakersfield is a desert that has been force-irrigated into something slightly less than a desert. It is, like most of California, brown. The lawns are brown, the buildings are brown, and the people are brown. It is occasionally also beige.

This occurs after the hot winds have kicked up to spread a thin layer of carcinogenic dust - made that way because of the huge amounts of toxins spread on the almond, cotton and fruit groves located around the place on all sides. Insect death-camps surround Bakersfield, and sometimes the crop-duster-dust crawls into an incestuous relationship with the dust-dust resulting in a dry, hacking cough among the human population, similar to the sound of a dog choking on a chicken bone.

It was summer. And, in the summer, one of the fun things we kids did was challenge each other to stand as long as possible in bare feet on the asphalt. Any asphalt would do. The street in front of your house, a parking lot, the school blacktops. Because in summer, the sun would rise to its zenith and rain fire down upon us, heating any bare surfaces to the boiling and/or blistering point, depending on what you set down to test it.

And those were long summers. Long summers we struggled to fill with something fun because there was nothing to do. There were no video arcades - the only video games were in bars. There was one mall, but no one hung out in malls. There were swimming pools, and those were great. There were bikes, and those were fine. But after a while everything becomes boring and you want something new. My brother's new thing was a skateboard. My new thing was a pair of skates.

Back then, skateboards looked like skateboards. But they were, in fact, death machines. The wheels were made of red clay. The trucks worked, sort of. The boards were about 18 inches long and as wide as your foot. No one wore helmets or pads or anything remotely resembling safety gear. Safety gear was for sissies! You were supposed to get scabs and have gravel ground into your flesh and end up with broken skulls and things. That's what being a kid meant. Breaking things. Roller skates were also nothing like today's inline versions. The wheels didn't even have the benefit of being made of hard clay – they were hard metal. Why this was considered a good idea defies logic.

My neighborhood was constructed so that the rows of tract houses sat on embankments above the street. Perhaps this was meant to suggest that the street was a canal in this desert city and our cars like Venetian gondolas, taking us to wondrous and magical places like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. Whatever the reason, it meant that the driveways were all curving inclines, making going around and around in circles on your childhood vehicle of choice that much more ... exciting.

At the foot of each driveway was a mailbox, placed high enough so the mailmen (there were no mailwomen) could slip your mail in easily without actually exiting their little Jeeps. Then they'd scoot to the next house, the sound of that motor and the opening and closing of mailbox doors an announcement (to children like me whose only thrills were visits by the street sweeper, the ice cream truck, and the mailman to brighten our otherwise dull-as-a-cardboard-box-of-hammers days) that there was something to go do. Whee.

I was pretty small for a long time growing up and always had trouble reaching, and then seeing in, the mailbox. I would have to reach my hand inside and feel around, determining whether there was anything in there only after touching the warm paper envelopes instead of the hot, wavy metal. Things like that always frustrated me. I couldn't get myself glasses of water because the cabinets and faucets were so far away. Then suddenly I discovered I could reach them. It would seem to happen in one day. I couldn't do something, then I could.

So it happened that I was roller-skating up and down my winding driveway when I stopped at the bottom and looked over, discovering that my head was at the exact same height as the mailbox. And even more remarkably, it seemed to me that my head was the exact same size as the mailbox.

I will pause here to remark on the stupidity of children. Children aren't curious. They aren't ignorant, either. They're just stupid. They do stupid things, and when they aren't caught, they do them again to see if they were as stupid as they seemed the first time.

With my head inside the mailbox, I noticed that I could hear myself breathing exceptionally loudly. And if I then spoke, my voice reverberated back at me like an echo. A very loud, very tinny echo. And in fact I had discovered – having inserted my huge melon-shaped noggin in the mailbox - that my head was, just as I had observed, a perfect fit.

What I hadn't noticed was that once inserted, all I had to do was twist my neck slightly and my head could get stuck inside the mailbox. Further, I had elected to attempt this experiment while wearing roller-skates, which did an amazing job of eliminating traction on the inclined driveway. What, then, could be a better test of human endurance than for me to start screaming inside the mailbox?

The answer is, of course, nothing.

So there I was on that hot summer day, my head inside a mailbox. My feet were skittering around as if I was standing on ice, and my hands grasping the outsides of my tiny cell as I screamed incoherently from fear and frustration regarding my predicament. Then, as easily as I had inserted my head, it popped back out. I mean, it's only logical that if I could stick my head entirely inside the mailbox so easily, I should be able to pull it back out the same way. But, going back to that stupid-kid theory, I had decided that freaking out was the better way to go.

Then, as I stood there, breathing hard, sweat-soaked, shaking, red-faced and probably bleeding from the neck, I heard laughter from behind me. Turning, I saw two teenage girls standing across the foot-blistering street, looking at me and laughing. I imagine they'd been standing there for some time, watching the stupid kid with his head in the mailbox trying to keep his roller-skated feet from scrambling around at all angles while screaming gibberish that erupted from out of the mailbox like Grand Canyon echoes.

Gathering what was left of my dignity – which pretty much amounted to me pretending it had never actually happened – I pivoted on my skates, climbed up the driveway, entered the garage and stayed there for ten years.