I often take time on Thursday nights to look through “the vault” to see what I was doing 20 years ago and whether or not it’s worth publishing for the world to read (or ridicule).  I certainly don’t expect to gain any insight from this exercise…I usually come away thinking I was not nearly as good a writer as I thought I was at the time, and that I’m lucky to have met my wife later on in life.  In any event, tonight I found the below entry from Saturday, October 3, 1987 rather telling.  Notice how angry injustice made me.  See the passion about property rights.  Feel the frustration with authority figures.  It’s a wonder I don’t work for the ACLU now.
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Today was good.  We played football some.  Then Trey, Kevin, and Mark, and I went to our old treehouse.  Then Trey, Kevin, and I rode our bikes on the track, and we hid from Mark.  Now he’s real mad at me.  Then, we went home.  Mac, Chris, and Ben came over.  Near our back yard, Matt and Brian Shoesmith were raking away leaves and building a dirt track through the Corps of Engineers’ land.  We told them that if the Corps found out they might get in trouble.  They said they didn’t care.  We started riding our bikes on it.  Matt said “get off.”  We said “no.”  Then he went in and got his mom out.  She started telling us a bunch of bullcrap.  She said that Matt and Brian had been working on the track for an hour, even though Matt said they had just started.  When she finished yapping, Kevin said that it wasn’t their property and that we always ride back there and just because they improve it a little bit, they can’t keep us off.  She said that that didn’t matter, all that mattered was that they worked a little bit on it.  When she went back inside, we all rode back on the track.  He called to his mom, and she started coming after us.  We rode off.  Then we talked about how unfair it is for them to keep us off something they don’t even own.  We rode back and shouted, “CHARGE!”  Then his dad came.  He said, “Hey, come here!”  We rode off faster than we had come.  Then we rode in the woods and talked.  We also made a hideout and blocked up the trail that led into the woods so that no one could come in.  We used the mini-bike to haul big logs up the hill to throw over the path.  Then we split up and headed home.

Look here for more childish humor.