RULE 36

You are not immortal.

Contrary to what you might expect, there is very little risk that you will die of boredom. You could, however, very easily die of stupidity. Right now you are going through the most dangerous period of your life, at least until menopause or midlife crisis, when you might be tempted to move to Arizona and take up hang gliding. All the forty-year-olds I know find it amazing that they managed to survive the dumb things they did as teenagers, from streaking to tequila shots, when they were under the impression that they were invulnerable.

The biggest threats you face are euphemistically called “risky behaviors,” most of which involve drugs, drinking, sex, and cars. You’ve heard the cliché “None of us is as smart as all of us,” but when it comes to driving, nobody is as dumb, reckless, and irresponsible as all of you; the IQs and common sense of teenagers decline in direct proportion to the number of them riding in car. This is the precise moment when it is important that you have chosen the right friends, or at least the right people to hang around with.

If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young, and leaving a beautiful corpse are romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

They don’t look glamorous, or even tragic; they are usually blue-gray and cold and are often quite messy. Whoever came up with the phrase “going out in a blaze of glory” never visited a burn unit, or saw what was zipped into a body bag after a fiery car crash. There is little romance in being identified by your dental records.

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Don’t assume that everybody gets it.

In a rural town in Wisconsin last year, a group of teenagers—two of them sixteen years old—sat around a park drinking beer, then jumped into a car, sped out onto the highway, and ended up killing five people, including themselves and an elderly couple heading home from a doctor’s appointment.150 The death of five people in a car accident was appalling enough, but the aftermath was what shocked the community.

The friends of the dead teenagers memorialized the tragedy by going to the crash scene and … drinking, even leaving cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer as a makeshift memorial. “See ya later Mike!” read one can, signed, “Tom.” Written on another empty beer can: “This ones for you.” [sic]

Nearby, somebody had written on a cardboard sign: “Live hard. Party Hard. Party to the death.”

“And never mind, I guess, who you take with you,” commented Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Mike Nichols.151

The sixteen-year-old driver who lost control of the car had a blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit, even for someone legally able to drink. The accident left behind five separate grieving families—fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, cousins.

There were five funerals. There were no parties.

This is one of the reasons your parents may seem so hung up and stressed out; they know that their biggest job is just to get you through all this, and you don’t always make it easy. Ironically, one of the consequences of the bubble-wrapping of children over the last few decades has been a revolt against the safe-but-dull regime; a generation that has been protected from dodgeball seems increasingly attracted to X-treme sports and edge-of-the-envelope risk taking. Maybe a life spent in bubble wrap has reinforced the impression that you are exempt from bruises. You aren’t.

When you get behind the wheel of a car, assume that every other driver is an idiot, moments away from committing an act of vehicular madness. You are sharing the road with drivers who apply makeup, pick their teeth or their nose, fiddle with their cell phones and/or laptops, eye up scantily clad joggers, and reach for moving objects like their girlfriends, which happened to be the cause of my most spectacular accident when I was seventeen. You need to behave accordingly.

If you are a teenager, expect that you will be held absolutely responsible for any accident. You need to avoid the temptation to blame any other factor, person, condition, or driver for any scrapes, collisions, or crashes. If you are not willing to do that, your parents have the right (and obligation) to pull your driving privileges, take away the car, and cancel the insurance. They don’t want to visit you in the morgue.