Who were your BAD influences?

I was thinking back to all the TV I watched growing up in the 80's/90's and I realized what a lousy role model Kevin Arnold of the Wonder Years was. That show romanticized his inabilty to act on his emotions and I partially blame him for my own "wonder years". I wish I had someone else at the time to help me navigate through adolescence.

Thankfully I didn't have a real-life bad role-model like an alcoholic uncle or anything. How about you? How far down the rabbit hole did you go? Was there a point when you realized the harm this person was causing? What do you think of them now?

 

me, I am my own demon

 

You know, I have to agree with this. My own naivete and desire for life experiences. I went through bad things in life, knew bad people who did bad things but really I was smart enough to not recognize them or their behaviors as things to model my personal life after. If anything I would have to say seeing that made me perhaps a bit wiser in life. Of course there were moments I did stupid things knowing they were stupid because I simply felt I had to experience them at least once for myself.

 

God bless the Porn Faeries

 

I usually am the bad influence


Ha, no, seriously. I've been thinking about this since you posted it, and MOST of the people who might have been considered bad influences had some good effects on me. Like the girl I considered my best friend in elementary/first part of junior high. She was always pretty wild, and her parents let us do anything so long as we weren't in any real physical danger (and naturally, we didn't tell them about those things.) I remember doing ridiculous things just to impress her, like walking the beams at the very top of her barn, running through the woods at midnight to see if her cute neighbor was still awake, smoking grass to see if we'd get high (no, like, literal GRASS, plucked from her lawn.) She pushed me out of my comfort zone, made me toy with the idea of being a bad girl, and brought me out of my shell, and I'm actually pretty grateful to her. I mean, looking back, it was all really just silly stuff that kids think is ULTRA SERIOUS, but at the time, it was...you know. ULTRA SERIOUS.

 

Usually me, I came from a interesting family, once we all moved out of the house, our "do what we want" attitudes developed like we deserved something back from the world.... I always didn't care enough my public "image" to stop myself from doing something, as I've gotten older, I've given myself 15 seconds to think.

 

I'd love to romanticize my own history and say I was the bad influence, but that really isn't true. When left to my own devices I typically just read quietly or fall asleep during movies. My sorta brother Eryk was a nightmare by comparison. He introduced me into the wide and colorful world of using prescription drugs for entertainment purposes. After the world didn't stop spinning on New Years 2000, he kidnapped me from a safe party and took me to a less safe party across town. Some time and beer and weed later, we took a walking tour of places he had had sex at. I don't think that was 100% the purpose of the walk, we just happened to cross the right/wrong neighborhoods.

 

I'm a cross between the bad influence and an easy subject. If something sounds like fun, it takes very little effort to convince me to try it, regardless of stupidity. I'm happy to share my adventures with others.

 

My bestfriend since I was 17. She is 13 years older, but has taught me the bad and the good.

Just had dinner with her on Friday night, she is still a free spirit at 66 years old.

 

I think that I was mostly the good influence.
The kids 2 streets over with the collection of Playboys stashed in the shed.....well maybe they were the bad ones.
But not so bad. I mean a 13 year old boy isn't really harmed by looking at a picture of a naked woman. And back then Playboy was the only game in town so to speak. None of these internets.

 

My bad influence was a guy 3 years older than me and my brother, and besides the small stuff we usually did (breaking old windows with BB guns, as an example), he talked us and a couple of more friends into skipping school one day, walking to the lake and breaking into a lakefront property to use their water-slide.
We also ended up breaking into their small boat-house where they kept supplies, like soft drinks and snacks.
The guy across the way saw us, yelled out and pulled a shotgun on us. Needless to say, we ran. He also had called the cops, so we lit out across country when we saw the car, and spent the day crossing creeks and muddy terrain, trying to get back home.
We came out on a small county road and saw a big butane truck parked in someone's driveway. The sign on the side of the truck had the next county over's name on it, so in our retarded minds, we had walked all the way to the next county.
One of us worked up the courage to ask someone if we could drink from their water hose, and from them, we learned we were still near home. (sigh)

We finally made it back home just as the buses were bringing kids home, so we just blended in.

Gradually, we hung around him less and less, till we lost track of him for a few years.

In 1998 we heard on the news he and another man had murdered a man on the behest of a woman, whom we also knew, and he's currently spending 35 years in prison.
Their story ended up on one of those Dateline NBC-type shows, where I learned the whole sordid mess, or however much they could find out.

So, I was lucky to get shed of him when I did, and to realize, then, what I did was hurting others and was wrong.

The only good thing I came away from that relationship, was he turned me on to dousing my ketchup with ground black pepper for my French Fries. I loves me some peppered ketchup.

 

I don't really think of anything being a particularly bad influence. I'm young enough now that I had internet when I was a teenager, so there was the porn thing. But I don't think that's inherently a bad influence; it seems somewhat normal curiosity and whatnot that happens during the teen years.

If anything, the lack of bad influences and other things was and has become the bad influence. I wanted to go more into detail, but unexpectedly I find myself oddly apprehensive about doing so. But I do want to say that those things lacking are the main part of the 'right reason' I can easily see my mind using to justify doing 'the wrong thing for the right reason'

I think there is more to this that I originally realized. I think it might also tie in to something else I've been thinking about lately. Which would explain why I didn't feel like going into more detail.

 

Bad influences? My family. There's never been more perfect examples of how NOT to be, in the universe. I never followed the lead of TV shows either.

Don't go blaming porn, be reasonable people.

Peppered ketchup is good, even better when you mix in the mustard too

 

My 2-years-older cousin who introduced me to the occult. We spent summers together and were completely on our own at night in a building adjacent to where the rest of the family slept. We kept trying to raise the dead.

My best friend from Jr. high school. Though I'm grateful for her sharing her beauty routine, applying makeup skillfully and not excessively, she introduced me to smoking pot. I remember us sitting in my bedroom, attempting to roll a joint the first time--they were sausage-shaped and fell apart. Same chick was older than me by six months and was having sex, so I of course, had to hunt down some guy to rid me of my virginity at age 15 1/2.

My parents, absolutely. Most everything right that I do I saw them do first as well as the inverse.

Even by age 21 I was corruptible. My Vietnam vet/construction worker 1st husband turned the air blue with his swearing. Now I do.
Other than my 17th year, I've not been a big drinker. Being married to an alcoholic (same guy as above) really dissuaded me from developing a taste for more than drink or two in a sitting. He hated pot-smoking hippies tho' so I'll blame him too for me being a confirmed 'head.

 

The group of asshats I hung out with in High School. They were a bunch of ignorant, racist, future alcoholics from 2nd generation dysfunctional families who were determined to carry on the tradition. Its amazing I made it out with a clean police record, a little bit of sanity and most of my liver function.

 

I was definitely my own worst influence, along with my immediate group of friends.

Though in Junior High I used to hang out with a kid who had his own cigarette rolling machine.

 

...I didn't have any.

Probably explains why I turned out the way I did. When you're a scared goody-goody when you hit initial entry training in the military, you've got problems. My exwife introduced me to drinking, drugs are the debbil and I've always been a big fan of law and order. I had the most boring childhood.

I fold my socks. I like paying taxes. I go to the gym for fun. I enjoy making spreadsheets. I give my girlfriends survival kits. I took being a Boy Scout seriously. The handful of times I've fucked up in life? I've probably never stopped punishing myself in some form. Heh, wow, I'm a lonely bastard.