While driving home with my 13-year-old son and his 13- and 14-year-old cousins, I became acutely aware that teenage boys are certifiably insane.
Before we left for home, my overly grateful sister pushed two boxes of doughnuts through my car window. She explained that her boys would get hungry on the way home and hoped this food would see us through till we got to my house.
We were only going two blocks.
OK, it was a little longer than that, but you see the problem. Three hormonally overloaded eating machines with not much in the way of inhibitions were spending the weekend with me. I knew I was in for trouble.
One box of doughnuts was glazed; the other contained those little white doughnuts covered in powdered sugar. The glazed didn't last two minutes. The white doughnuts lasted a bit longer and became a source of amusement for the boys.
My nephew Cameron rubbed the white powdered sugar all over his nose and then, claiming that he was on drugs, moaned and writhed in a pseudo-drug-induced spasm. My son thought that was funny enough to do the same thing, but take it one step further.
He spread the white powdered sugar all over his face, and then, while he was putting it up his nose, he laughed and took a deep breath up his nose. Having sucked in powdered sugar, his respiratory tract protested mightily in the form of hacking and gagging. His eyes were bulging out of his head as he attempted to catch his breath; the only problem was that he inhaled more powdered sugar with each breath. He kept grabbing my arm as he continued in his dance of respiratory distress.
I'm trying to drive during this episode of insanity. Driving was nearly secondary to the laughing I was doing. I don't know what he thought I was going to do to help him.
Then he took my brand-new bottle of Dasani water and shoved it up his nose to clear out the powdered sugar. It cleared out the powdered sugar all right. It also nearly drowned him because he squeezed the bottle and water went up his sinuses. His face was now the color of a sun-ripened tomato due to all the exertion of attempting to catch his breath. He also found his situation to be quite hilarious and was somehow managing to laugh between gasps for air.
By this time I'm glad that he's wearing a seatbelt because I'm quite certain he would have launched himself out of the vehicle otherwise. He's screaming and gyrating while gasping for air. I am barely able to keep my car in my lane of the freeway due to the convulsive laughter I'm experiencing. My son is now covered in water and powdered sugar, which has combined to create a soggy, ghostlike apparition sitting next to me. I'm still laughing, as are his cousins in the back seat.
When things calmed down and my son's breathing had returned to semi-normal, I told him about his father's cousin, who wanted to see what it felt like to snort coke. He wasn't the sharpest of knives, so what he did next didn't surprise anyone. He took two straws and put them up him his nose. He then placed the other ends of the straws in a bottle of Coke and took a rather large snort. Carbonated beverages were never meant to come into contact with tender sinus passages.
He was kissing the floor with his face, screaming in agony in less than three seconds. Did I mention he was about 13 at the time? I rest my case about adolescent males. Insane, all of them.
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