The Zero at the Bone Thread

[Anonymous]

What's the worst thing you've ever done?

I've destroyed a friend's marriage by sleeping with his wife.

Remember to log out before you post.

[Sean]

Surely anonymity is optional?

The things I feel worst about in my life are the lies and cruelties I've inflicted on the people I love most, usually over fairly minor things, and usually to satisfy one or another deep neurosis of my own - in other words, the times that I've used other people as pawns in my own psychodrama and hurt them in the process.

A big, single event? Maybe this: one time I was driving some guys home from a con, in a car with bald tires and open vodka bottles inside. A guy was trying hard to cut me off from the onramp, so I gunned the thing up to like 70 or 80 to beat him on to the freeway. Well, I just barely made it, using the shoulder, but then traffic was halting for some other reason in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and did some incredible driving to keep the vehicle under control as my car fishtailed and slalomed all over the freeway, bringing traffic to a screeching halt in all but the left lane. Finally I came to a dead stop, inches from the far lane, as a giant semi raced by at at least sixty. Death missed us by inches.

We were all fine, and I turned around and drove off the freeway at the next exit and waited, like I thought you were supposed to, expecting to owe a lot of money to a lot of people and maybe to have criminal penalties and never to drive again. But nobody followed me. We waited there for like fifteen minutes and nobody came. So we said 'hell with it' and left.

I'm pretty sure I caused a big pile-up. Maybe some people got hurt or killed. Or maybe it was basically fine, a few fender-benders, nothing more. But I'll never know either way, because we just took off.

[Anonymous]

The reason that I can never play Zero at the Bone is because the worst thing that *someone I know* has done (would like to stress that this is not me) is prostituted children, including their own, as well as repeatedly raping them and using them for pornography and drug smuggling.

The worst thing that I, personally, have done is believe that this person might not be so bad, after all, and arguing it with someone else.

[C. Edwards]

I think this should be designated the "I've had just enough booze to start feeling sorry for myself" thread. :)

-Chris

[greyorm]

The worst thing I've ever done is almost cheated on my wife early in our marriage. I kissed another girl -- heck, it wasn't even that much of a kiss, not to make excuses, but it was a peck on the lips. I wasn't sorry at the time because we were having serious marital problems anyways. She's long since forgiven me, and we've long since moved past it (took me a good while to even think of it).

The worst thing anyone I know has ever done is steal hundreds of thousands of dollars total from around twenty families (my own included) and flee the country with it, leaving everyone with huge debts and nothing to show for it. This was the administrator of the tech. school I attended and later had a temporary position at.

I tried to warn the State what was happening there a year before they pulled this stunt, but they didn't listen to me. At this point, I'd love to find the son-of-a-bitch and turn him over to the authorities for the suffering he's caused.

[Ben Terry]

There are 2 things I remember doing in particular that I think were horrible.

#1  My dad had a dog, and it was my job to feed it and take care of it.  It was supposed to be a hunting dog, but my dad had quit hunting a few years before, and this dog wasn't such a great hunting dog anyways (Racoon hunting).  My dad kept the dog out back in a cage and he never did anything with it, and I just fed the thing, so I always imagined it to not have that nice of a life.  Nobody wanted to deal with the dog.  So anyways, it was a really cold winter and you had to remember to get straw for the dog house, and it was a pain to get water for the dog because it would freeze so fast.  It was a super cold winter, as in I think I remember it getting -20 a couple times, the coldest winter I remember.  So, as you can guess, I went a few days without feeding the dog, and just didn't really think about it.  I knew the dog needed straw badly.  A few days later my dad asked me if I had taken care of the dog and I said that I hadn't, and he asked me if she had died, and I said I didn't know.  So, I went to check, and sure enough the dog had frozen to death because I was either too lazy or just didn't care enough.  My Dad wasn't particularly upset at me, he just told me to not tell my Mom and to drag the body way out back in the field.  It took me a couple weeks to get around to it because the dog had frozen to the ground so hard it was difficult to break free...

#2  I was in 3rd grade and I was reasonably popular with the kids in my class.  I was also very interested in Sci-Fi and making these simple fantasy trap games and coming up with the military ranks of the member of the Galactic Defense Force and so on.  I knew this other kid who was a farm kid and he was mercilessly picked on all of the time.  Kids would refuse to eat at the same table with him, and would say all of this cruel false stuff about him.  I thought it was mean and ridiculous, so I started to hang out with him at recess, and we would play around with the same kind of stuff I was so interested in, and I'm sure he was happy to have a friend.  It didn't take long for me to end up in the same classification as this kid, just for hanging out with him.  I would get fucked with and pushed around by people who were OK with me weeks before (as befits this archtypical geek story I have going on here).  So I remember one kid pushing me and I cried because I was frustrated, but he was all apologetic because he thought he had hurt physically and thought he would get in trouble.  Somehow this reputation spreads all of the way through all the elementary grades, so 6th graders are all up on it as well.  That was all near the end of 3rd grade.  During the summer he drove his bike all of the way over to my house a few times so we could hang out, and he lived a long ways away.  I tried to get him in on comic books, but his mom wouldn't let him have any of the cool ones because she was religious in that sort of way.  I would get depressed over the way things had gone with kids at school, which my parents recognized, so they tried to give good advice on what to do.  As I started 4th grade, things were much the same as the end of 3rd grade, and my Dad told me "It is unfortunate, but the way it works, is, you can't bring him up, he can only bring you down"  So, when the next week started, in gym class he came up to me and I tried not to talk to him, then I told his older sister to tell him I wasn't his friend any more.   I never spoke a word to him again.

Those would be the 2 biggest things I regret ever having done.  Everything else has been OK.

[Andy Kitkowski]

I've never heard the expression "Zero at the Bone".  What does it come from?

The worst thing I've done is cheat on a girlfriend. A lot.  Then, after we had broken up but were still friends, I had this compulsion to confess to her, and should have realized at the time that that was the last thing she wanted to hear from me.  Not as horrible as the above, but I lost sleep entirely for three days over the whole thing.

Aside from that, the worst thing that I have ever done was to restrain myself from beating the shit out of the cockey-as-fuck mayor of Azuma village, Gunma prefecture, when we got in a shouting match and I had an excuse to do so some 4 years ago. I still sometimes regret not being the one to knock some sense into that bigot.

[Mike Holmes]

I once played in a game of Elfs.

Mike

[Christopher Weeks]

My worst things all revolve around victimizing people for shitty reasons.

As a young'n I was, in general, very resistant to peer pressure.  But there was this one time in the fifth grade when I beat someone physically (a year younger, but physically similar) in an attempt to gain the respect of the really messed up neighbor kids.  He wasn't hospitalized or anything but I felt dirty as soon as the insanity that had seized me wore off.  It's the only thing I really clearly regret having done.

The other people that I've harmed were strangers and there was typically at least a vestige of justification even if my reaction was way out of proportion to their "crime."

I guess I'm not much of a bad guy, but it sure seems now like I had a fucked up mindset at different times of my life.

Chris

[joshua neff]

Worst thing I've ever done?

I once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Also, I got sarcastic & smartass on a thread in the Forge Birthday forum. But I ain't saying which one.

[Andy Kitkowski]

Oh, I forgot to add:

I once fudged my D&D characters Attribute rolls so that I could have two attributes over 15.

Dirty, shameful, shameful day.

[greyorm]

ANDY!?!?!
YOU SICK BASTARD!!

I...I...the world...*sob*...my heart!

Sick, sick bastard. You've crushed my belief in the general decency of humanity with...with your horrible crime!!

[Bob McNamee]

I helped Mike do what he did.

[Paganini]

I once played in a game of Elfs.

Mike

Pfui. I once *ran* a game of Elfs.

[GreatWolf]

I stacked the deck in Candyland.

That's such a pathetic evil thing.

(But isn't evil, ultimately, pathetic?)

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf