When I was a kid, adults had to constantly remind me not to, well, act stupid.

“Don’t run with that pencil in your hand,” they’d say. “You wanna fall and put your eye out?”

Well, no I didn’t.

Or, they’d say, “Get down out of that tree right this minute! You wanna fall and break your neck?”

Actually, that wasn’t part of my plan.

Now that I’m an adult ordering from the senior menu, I find that someone is still reminding me, well, not to act stupid.

Just last week, I read in The Indianapolis Star that I should not drink alcohol and drive a boat. That would be about as stupid as drinking alcohol and running with a pencil in my hand or drinking alcohol and climbing to the top branch of an 80-year-old oak tree.

I will be in a 60-horsepower boat the third week of July. It’s a fishing trip that will find me in Canada and Minnesota waters.

I have heard what drinking and driving a boat will do on Crane Lake, Minn. The locals say that a couple of adult men were in the booze on a foggy night a couple of years ago and had a 200-horsepower boat cranked wide open when the driver rammed an island.

The boat stopped, and the passenger kept going. He is no longer with us.

I won’t mention names, but I know four guys who got liquored-up and drag raced on a lake at 2 a.m.; a disaster waiting to happen.

It happened. One boat sideswiped the other and both boats flipped. All four survived, unlike their fishing tackle.

They, too, were adults.

So I understand why some of us need to be treated like children when we’re adults, constantly reminded that when we drink and drive, it’s like running faster than Forrest Gump with a sharp stick in our hand.

Let’s take another look at those drunken boater arrest statistics that The Star printed last week. In a five-year period (2004-08), Indiana Department of Natural Resources conservation officers cited 511 boaters for boating under the influence.

So here we go. In a time when money is scarce, look at how funds that are sorely needed for outdoor recreation are being used — to pay overtime to officers to make adults get down out of the top of an oak tree.

I mean, take a look at why there are 100 DNR boats with 200 officers patrolling the state’s public waters on weekends.

They have to constantly remind people to wear flotation vests; to tell adults to put life jackets on their small children.

Can I get a duh?

In three days, some friends and I will leave on a four-day motorcycle trip that will take us through Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina.

None of us will have to be told to not ride and drink alcohol. We read the statistics on riding and drinking.

Drinking riders represent 40 percent of all motorcycle fatalities. In 10 percent of all motorcycle accidents, the rider had been drinking.

Our trip will include the “Tail of the dragon.” It’s a biker’s dream mountain stretch of road in Tennessee and North Carolina — 318 curves in 11 miles.

I rode it three years ago. At one end there is what’s known as the “tree of shame,” from which hundreds of pieces from crashed motorcycles hang from limbs and lean against the tree trunk.

I’ve heard riders say that they needed a little shot of booze to race their “crotch rockets” through the turns.

They airlifted three riders out the day I was there.