Young sea speed was on a company paid trip to Amsterdam and spent several days wandering around the city, partaking in the local fare, but not the hookers because I'm not bo darville.

I noticed a small ruckus in the street and surrounding buildings and there was furniture on the rail in the street, blocking the train. Shortly after, several people wearing Guy ****es Masks were poking their heads out of the building adjacent to the blocked rail. The regular street police arrived and the Guy ****es people started throwing paint bombs on the cops. Just wild. The yelling and screaming standoff went on for a bit and then several massive police armored personnel carriers pulled up and riot cops got out to another barrage of paint bombs, and then started storming the building. The Guy ****es people ended up on the roof of the building and next thing I knew were jumping from roof to roof to get away from the riot cops. Apparently the Guy ****es people had been squatting in that building and were in the process of being evicted and were none too keen on that proposal. Some street punk looking people were arrested in the crowd for causing mayhem or at least looking the part, and then the cops pushed us all out of the area because the crowd was getting too big and the squatters were getting away via rooftop and they needed to be able to attempt to chase them, I guess.

Anyways, that was absolutely wild and I doubt i will ever witness anything like it again, although I'm sure I could see something similar if I went to an antifa rally or something, but that will never happen.

In before OP's mom.

I lived in Seattle during the BLM riots and CHAZ/CHOP. One of the city councilors lived a block away from my apartment and there were a couple of late night marches to her house with the intent to intimidate her into voting to defund the police (it worked). I did not live near CHOP, but I drove over one day and walked around it and snapped a lot of photos. It probably wasn't all that crazy, but it was definitely the beginning of the end of my life in Seattle.

Not crazy really but it is really surreal to knowingly walk into an ambush. Would not be uncommon to walk through an urban area with lots of activity to then walk back later and it is an absolute ghosttown. The sixth sense developed enough to know that yeah...it's about to be a bad day. But you just kinda like, don't care and just keep drudging into it just waiting for it to kick off. Those moments of extreme unnatural quiet before the chaos were some of the most surreal ever. Tired and worn out and scanning but knowing you won't see it before the first snap or boom and the first American falls.

Craziest would probably be seeing a massive explosion out in the field where I was working on Camp Pendleton. Talking mushroom cloud level. Team lead immediately knew it was unplanned and bad. Grab the trauma bag (I was the team medic on site) and race over but nothing to be done. Four EOD techs lost their lives that day and I thought there were only two at first until we were told that two others were standing directly over the blast. I saw no evidence of their existence at all. The crazy part to me was after the site was taken over by base personnel, my team went right back to work like nothing had happened. Picking over the exact same munitions that had just ended four lives next to us. Still not sure how I feel about that.

And people wonder why I crave a chill and uneventful life. Had enough excitement for a long while I think.

In Okinawa,I watched a Filipino stripper pole-dance to Willie Nelson's Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.

Oh, and once I saw'r a blimp.

Bach party in Austin. Saw a stripper do a handstand, put a sparkler in her hoo-ha, and light it.

Not the craziest or surreal, but one I still laugh at. As someone has already gone down the Acuna and stripper road - in Acuna, one of the strippers was lying on the podium and smoking a cigarette with her hooha and blowing smoke rings (this was after launching a bunch of ping pong balls). Well, the ashes at the end of the cigarette got very long and this guy jumps up from the crowd with an ash try, places it under the cigarette and gives it an ever so gentle flick to knock the ashes off into the ash tray. Was just very unexpected, and given the situation, the guy's mannerisms were ever so gentlemanly.

I was onstage with Sammy Hagar in front of about 20K and some chick in the front row flashed me like I was the rock star.

I was hunting Cape buffalo in Tanzania and we had been tracking a herd of them for a few hours and followed them into some very thick brush. Visibility was very limited and without realizing it we had gotten within a few yards of them and they realized we were there before we realized they were there. They started stampeding in all directions all around us. Trees were snapping all around us, their hooves were thunderous, it felt like the ground was shaking. All I could do was stand there and pray one didn't run me over. Luckily, got out of there ok.

Watched a dude stomped to likely-death in NOLA after Katrina. American History X style.

I was with a co-worker that actually jumped out of the car to stop it. I had been there long enough to know better. Luckly the guy walked away and drove off. We called the police as we stand over a catatonic guy laid in a pool of solidified blood.

Police came and first thing they said was "you need to leave now and do not come back in case they think you will snitch on them"


The entire process ruined me emotionally.

I was delivering pizzas in NOLA when i was a teenager and at one particular delivery, a little kid, maybe 7, pointed his fingers at me like a gun and said "gimme all your money" and presumably his dad right next to him, said "na son, you ain't old enough for all that yet"

That was wild.

I was standing watch on the port side lookout on the USS Comstock. It was maybe just after midnight. It was the early to mid 1990s. We were doing drills off the coast of California close to the Catalina Island. It was a quiet night and calm. Then all at once it was daylight. I could see for miles to the horizon. This lasted for a full 3 second count and then it started to fade and back to darkness. The whole event lasted less than 10 seconds but it seemed like an eternity. None of the watches (port - me, starboard or aft) could see the source of the light. The officer of the deck was flipping out. He was tearing into everyone trying to find the source of the light. There are very strict rules about maintaining darkness on the ship at night. So this was a big deal. All of the watches responded over the comms that it did not come from us.

We were doing some biological work on Little Pine Island Bayou in Beamont in 2005. We knew a storm was approaching but wanted to finish. A Game Warden stopped and told us to get the hell out. We got on to SH 105 in Sour Lake.
Four lanes of stalled traffic on a two lane highway. Old people trying to get shade under trees near fences. A dude pulling a horse trailer desperately trying to get water for his horses. People were getting pretty wound up and tension was breaking down along racial lines. It was pretty unnerving. We got to near Conroe and pulled over at a closed convenience store to regroup and pee. Some headlights turned on and it was an elderly couple that were lost, scared, and nearly out of gas. We poured some from our boat tanks and pointed them in the right direction. It took 15 hrs to get from Beaumont to Austin. I think if Katrina hadn't happened a month before people wouldn't have been as spooked. That was a surreal experience.

People went BSC with their over reaction to Rita.

Reminds me a lot of covid hysteria.

Another story comes from a bar/hooorehiuse in Piedras Negras. A group of hunters I was with decided we needed to go to town and have a few drinks and dinner. One of our old bachelors decided he took a liking to one of the waitresses and she proceeded to grind on his thigh for for a while and then he took her to one of of the rooms and did his thing. We left the next day to go home and he left those jeans hanging in the shed. We came back a couple of weeks later and that thigh of his jeans had rotted out. We asked him if he wore a rubber and he proudly proclaimed he did not but washed his junk off in the sink when he was done. He lived to 87 when he finally died of heart failure.

Wife and I were newlyweds and after a year married we had saved enough for a honeymoon. We went to Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina , her choice.

First day we were doing 35mph downhill on a mountain road in our little rental car. Looked in the rear view and saw a concrete truck coming really fast in a cloud of black smoke.

No shoulders, it flew past us with brakes on fire, barely missing us. It took one of those gravel road turnouts designed just for runaway trucks.

We went about ten minutes and came upon a crash scene.
Biker had just passed us and had a head on collision with a big van.
He was laying in our lane, blood everywhere, skull smashed and bust open like a watermelon. Had to drive around the body, my bride was freaking out.

Left the mountains immediately and spent our week in Charleston.

Driving in Galveston after ike and in lake charles after Laura were both surreal. Ike was more so because I lost everything I owned.

I was working derricks over near Spindletop one summer when home from A&M. It had been a really unsettled day weatherwise. We were trying to burn over a tubing anchor that was stuck in the hole. I had come down out of the derrick and we were inspecting the burn shoe to see if we could run it back in the hole or put a new one in the hole.

They guy who owned the rig needed to leave to go to his son's eighth grade graduation, so he told us to run some pipe in the hole and close the blowout preventers and pull 50 or 60 thousand pounds against them, put the valve in the tubing, and go home.

The wind started blowing so hard that the block was 4 feet or so off the center of the floor. You couldn't hear each other as we shouted instructions. Moments later the rig blew over, two guys had felt it rocking and jumped over the side away from the direction it was falling. Two of us were flipped off the rig floor and it was falling our way. I got up off the ground and nearly ran between the rig and mud tank but didn't, which was a good thing as I would have been crushed. I ran around the end of the mud tank, tripped and fell. I looked to my left and saw the derrick and stands of pipe about 30 feet off the ground, right before it hit. Instinctively, I covered my head (like that would do any good, lol) and then it hit the ground about 20 feet from me. The wind was howling so loudly I didn't hear all that iron hit the ground, despite it being so close to me.

I jumped up, as did the other guy, and then I froze. There were large puddles of water here and there, and it occurred to me that the derrick might have fallen on some power lines and if so, stepping into a area holding water could have been bad. Did a quick survey and there were the same number of power lines on either side of the fallen derrick, so off I ran. Not sure why but we ran. Despite having on slicker bottoms and combat boots, I know full well Curtis Dickey would have been staring at my backside! This white boy found another gear.

The sky was a sickly pea green color, then the lightning started, it must have struck 30 to 40 times in a few minutes, way too close for comfort. You could smell the burnt air. It was my second close call, I had basically drowned when I was 6 or so, my father pulled me out of the pond and got me to vomit quite a bit of water. But it wouldn't be my last.

For about two months after the rig event, I would have what I called daymares, more of a flashback seeing the image of the derrick and pipe falling when I thought it was going to land on me. I would suddenly see that image, it would cause me to shudder, then it would go away. This would happen once to three or four times a day for those two months or so and then stopped.

That evening, I ran into my girlfriend (wife now) and told her I had nearly gotten killed because the derrick fell over. She said that sounds bad in in the next breath asked if I was coming over that night, lol.

Afterwards, I kept thinking about how so much happened so quickly, decisions that were made, all in a split second, though everything seemed to move in slow motion.

A couple of years ago my wife and were going to see my folks in Houston. We were on Beltway 8 going south between 290 and I-10 when we came upon a line of police cars driving slowly following a pickup. We were getting close to the 10 East flyover we wanted to take so I was in the second from right lane.

It was a Saturday, so little traffic. The police cars were forming a cocoon around the truck, but traffic was able to pass on the left. The truck was taking the same path as we wanted to go, so I decided I'll just stay on Beltway 8 and take another route.

As I slowly passed on the left, my wife and both looked over at the truck just going up the ramp to see the driver's side window splatter with blood. Dude shot himself.