1) Boost your belligerence by watching this video portrait of a prisoner who tried to escape on a rope ladder made of dental floss.

2) An audio portrait in a similar spirit, Brooklyn Archipelago.

(This American Life is a national treasure.)

3) Years ago I read some mountain biker’s story about a time when he tried to hop his bike through the crotch of a tree and did not make it, and destroyed his bike, busted his face and broke his collar bone. He concluded his story with something along the lines of, “I have learned nothing from this, and will continue to bomb through the woods at breakneck speed risking my life attempting insane feats.”

4) A final offering: my favorite story from early childhood, Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Did Not Come to Grief”. Between a way-too-early exposure to that story, and an equally way-too-early exposure to Beatles Revolver (mamas, don’t let your toddlers groove to “Tomorrow Never Knows”) all hopes for a normal adulthood were killed in the cradle.