Teenage kicks ...
Wish I could find some funnies in this one but no joy. Usual apologies for length.

When I was a little girl I was a fat, innocent, speccy little bugger who adored her parents and didn't pull the legs off spiders. A nice kid, in other words. We lived in a council house on a council estate but my mum had delusions of grandeur and would not talk to let alone mix with the other mums, so automatically our family (mum, dad, me, cat) were assumed to be fair targets for a hate campaign. It didn't help that my dad could never turn the other cheek and thought that anything these twunts could do, he could do better - next thing you know it's all out fucking warfare.
Such jollities included the neighbor next door trying to poison our cat, the kids next door trying to chase it into a main road, and my dad and the neighbor coming to blows on the front lawn after years of winding each other up by "parking in my spot", drilling holes in the wall before nine o clock on the morning on a weekend, playing their radios and tvs louder than the other guy (got so bad that mum and I had to wear ear defenders in our own house - no word of a lie), and calling the police round for every slightest neighborhood annoyance. They were worse than children.
Said blows being rained down on each other as me and the bloke's daughter (me aged seven and her about five) stood on our doorsteps in our jarmies one summer evening crying in fear and my mum and her mum shouting abuse at each other from the sidelines whilst the rest of the street looked on. Sigh.

Anyhoo -- you can imagine that because my mum and dad didn't talk to the rest of the street, the only side our fellow residents got was the neighbors'. Which made me public enemy number one with the kids.
The thing was - I mighta been fat, four eyed and a girl, but I lamped 'em like I came from a family of Navy boxers (which I do), so I never got much real aggravation from the kids my same age, because we were always kicking the shit out of each other, and laughing about it. I thought it was how life was to be honest.
However, one household had an older kid of sixteen or so (when I was nine) and he took it upon himself to absolutely persecute the fuck out of me. He encouraged the younger kids to back him up, and before you could say "bullied big style" I was, well, bullied big style.
His favourite stunts included:
- finding half an old grapefruit in the bin and running me down, catching me, stealing my glasses off my face and squashing it into my eyes. It hurt like a bastard.
- tying me into a stolen pram (one of the old style big wheeled ones) and pushing it out into the main road that bordered our estate at rush hour. The pram got clipped and jolted round by some silly old bat who probably shouldn't have been driving. I don't know who was more terrified - her or me.
- force feeding me poisonous berries. I had to have my stomach pumped at the local hospital.
- getting two older girls to pretend to help me when he tripped me up and I cut my knees, but what they really did was not put antiseptic cream on my cuts but put bathroom cream cleaner on them instead. And then show me the bottle and laugh.
And a host of other unpleasant past times. He was at least inventive, the evil fucktard.

This list could go on, but it would be piss boring and have no point but here's an interesting (to me at least) epilogue. Well, two epilogues really.

One day I was ditty bopping along on my bike, minding my own business, when the local kids call me over with sneaky looks. I go (like a twat - but the younger ones, as explained above, were at least half friendly - when we weren't smacking the crap out of each other).
On the hill near my house, they've constructed a scary looking bike ramp in the road, fashioned out of bits of scavenged wood. They're looking for some dumb bunny to try it out first.
They dare me. I - like a tool - can't lose face, so I agree.
So I get back on my bike, ride a fair distance away, and start pedalling like a little dervish towards said ramp.
Now - I mighta been a plucky (or indeed stupid, which often amounts to the same thing) little shit, but at that age I knew exactly fuck all about physics and its effects on bike ramps. I didn't know that the idea is to give the handlbars abit of a pull up before you hit, to facilitate your smooth transition from road to wood. As a result, I hit the thing going flat out with my little chubby legs pumping - and promptly fly over the handlebars as my front wheel stops dead on the edge of the wood. The force of this is so intense that the milk bottle lenses of my glasses actually fly out of the frames - the frames amazingly still on my face - and twinkle their way through the air to then land, totally fucked, on the road. I pitch forward and clear the ramp, and land with a face shredding thump on the tarmac.
Silence from the on lookers.
Silence from me - I'm totally winded.
When I finally recover, blood pissing down my face and my nose all but shattered (amazingly flesh wounds were all I received I managed to figure later), my first thought is "Why the fuck can't I see anything ?"
I was extremely short sighted even then - nowadays that pathological myopia means I am blind in one eye and have no central vision in the other due to the extraordinary shape of my the back of my eye and the strain that puts on your retina (which just splits or bleeds out and causes blindness). Then I couldn't see anything but light and dark about four inches away from my face without the glasses.
I'm probably five hundred yards away from my house, but have no hope of getting home without further injury. That scares me completely and I burst into panicky tears.
The assembled kids laugh and run off and I am standing there in the road bleeding and having a full scale panic attack.
Some boy comes over and takes my arm.
He has the lenses from my glasses, and gives them to me. He wipes my snotty phiz on his sleeve and says, "Don't worry, I'll get you home."
He then picks up my bike with the other hand and leads me home, rings the doorbell, and hands me and croggled bike over to my mum, explaining what happened and that my glasses need fixing.
She thanks him and takes this bleeding snot fountain that looks vaguely like her ten year old chick indoors.

And who was this knight ? You can probably guess. The very teenage thug who'd had made my life absolute hell for the previous years.

Next day he was back to his old vindictive self. Normality was restored.

The second epilogue is that some years later, said thug was imprisoned for attacking a nightclub bouncer (he wouldn't let thug in). By driving at him and crushing him against the nightclub's exterior wall with his car.

As the song says, "People are strange." And you don't even have to be a stranger.
(womanwhocanonlylivewithdogs, Wed 13 May 2009, 19:33, 2 replies)

Oh my cunting Christ.
Have a click, not because I like it, but in sympathy.
(all my scars face forward possesses 2.5% of a hyperalloy combat chassis, Wed 13 May 2009, 23:39, closed)

Thankyou
I look back on the whole period and realise that I got off lightly - in terms of how it affected me later. Which to be honest isn't much at all really - eventually I figured the best way to avoid him was to stay home. Luckily none of this stuff followed me to school. So no lasting harm done.

Don't you think it's weird - usually, if this sort of shit happens in the adult world, the perpetrator can be arrested or given a court order for harassment or stalking or down right violence. I say usually because as we all know it can still happen when we grow up too. But such arseholes can be prosecuted in the end.
When it happens to children by other children the advice is just to get on with it or tell a teacher, who has basically no power to do anything really because "it's just children."
I'm not claiming to know the solution (though I wonder if more little shits shouldn't come to the attention of some authority that could actually DO something) but -- how fucked up is that ?
(womanwhocanonlylivewithdogs, Thu 14 May 2009, 14:14, closed)