A thing I think about sometimes: when I was a kid you could go to a flea market and be like, “Hi, I’m ten, do you have ninja weapons” and some carnie would say, “Do you have twenty dollars” and you’d say “yup,” and then you’d walk away with a bag of shuriken and maybe nunchaku?

And your parents would be like, “Whatever, just don’t ninja attack anybody,” and then you’d go home and get on your bike and ride five miles to some abandoned lot where you’d break bottles with ninja weapons and you’d be gone for seven hours and your parents gave zero fucks?

What I’m saying is, the unmitigated freedom of kids in the 1980s was equal parts mega awesome and horrifyingly negligent.