If you’re four years old and you’re going to pee outside next to a bush because your best friend Pooky (boy) can do it and he says it’s a waste of our valuable time to go inside and use a toilet, DO NOT pee underneath the living room window so your Mom can catch you and scream at you.  Pee over at Pooky’s house where his Mom didn’t care what we did.

If you’re going to steal the next door neighbor’s mail for a summer, let your friends Pooky, Billy and John stand accused all summer long and keep your mouth shut, DO NOT hide the mail in a corner behind one of the big azalea bushes by your front door.  Your dad’s best friend is sure to find your stash, watch you slink away and then rat you out to your Mom.  Hell will ensue.

If you’re going to date a 24 year old DO NOT take him to your High School Senior prom.  That will be the turning point between it’s cool to be dating an older guy to what kind of creep 24 year old dates a 17 year old AND goes to the Prom with her?  ewww.

If you’re going to get stoned at your cool older friend’s artsy store, DO NOT park your easily-identifiable Geo Tracker right out front so your Dad can see it on his way home and stop to check on you.  You will proceed to get completely stoned out of your mind, lose feeling in all appendages and end up getting a “whatever you’re on, it stops NOW” lecture from your Dad later that night.  Actually, you stop smoking weed at that point so maybe it’s not too bad idea – the driving was definitely a bad idea.

If you’re going to get drunk with your best friend, make your sleeping arrangements before midnight.  Otherwise you may end up wasted and realize you both told your respective parents you were spending the night at the other’s house and end up crashing at some girl’s birthday slumber party, explaining to her mother when she tries to refuse entrance that you are wasted and does she want our deaths on her head if she sends us back on the road? Then proceed to wonder why she never did call your mother and tell her what you did.

If you’re going to get drunk at a David Allan Coe concert, listen to your father and DO NOT get a tattoo that night. You will only wake up with a killer hangover and a smudged green outline of some moon and spider on your hip and will pay another $50 to get it fixed – and it will end up twice the size it was originally.  That’s ok – it will end up complementing the other tattoo’s you get down the road.

If you go on a college tour your junior year of high school, how about NOT risking breaking your neck and DO NOT get drunk on liquor smuggled on the trip in shampoo bottles and proceed to scale down the hotel wall out of your room and back up it into a couple guys’ room to simply hang out for a bit, then repeat to get back to your room.  You’ll avoid police and fire trucks being called when someone sees two people on a hotel wall. We’re still not sure how we pulled that off.