I'm an idiot, did you know?

Sam is fifteen now and a full-fledged teenage boy with everything that goes with it.  He thinks he knows eeeeeeeverything and that 99.9 percent of the rest of humanity are total idiots who don't know what they are doing.  Teenagers are annoying.  I hope with all my heart and soul that this is a phase and he is right now at the rock bottom of it and on his way back up to his old careful, sweet self because frankly I'm tired of being the idiot mean mom who is ruining his life.  What do I do that is so mean?  I'll give you an example.

The other weekend he told me he had plans to go ice fishing with his friend.  Okay, whatever.  That friend lives right on a lake so I had envisioned them walking out a couple dozen yards and drilling a hole and fishing. No problem. The days leading up to said fishing trip Sam leaked out some more details of his plan.  They were going to have to snowmobile out to where they wanted to fish.  It was just going to be the two of them.  Sam was going to borrow his grandpa's ridiculously overpowered snowmobile that goes over a hundred miles an hour.  I had to put the kibosh on the plans because it was a recipe for disaster.  The ingredients:

1) stupidly overpowered motorized vehicles
2) wanting to use these machines and drive them too fast over a body of frozen water where neither one of them knows about currents and the subsequent varying thickness of ice.
3) No adult supervision except maybe the friend's mom's boyfriend-of-the-month who I've never met which I suspect was just something Sam made up to make me feel better about the whole thing, but had the exact opposite effect.
4) The tendency of teen boys to try to out-macho each other which in this case would, of course, manifest itself in a high speed race.
5) When I expressed my concerns to Sam, he assured me that he knows absolutely EVERYTHING about ice and snowmobiling on ice, even though he's only ever done it once.  And he thinks I'm an idiot for thinking that ice can vary in thickness.  (Insert sarcastic tone here) "It's all four feet thick, Mom. There's nothing dangerous about it."  I told him a story that still haunts me about a family (mom, dad, baby) driving on the ice roads on Rainy Lake about ten years ago.  Their car went over a patch of thin ice and went through.  The car sunk in about 20 feet of water.  The baby was strapped into her carseat.  The dad dove down over and over until he was almost dead trying to get their baby out, but he couldn't.  Sam's response:  "That's too bad, but that guy was an idiot.  You don't strap a baby into a carseat on ice.  Everyone knows that; and cars don't sink, [idiot], they have tires filled with air." I love him dearly, but sometimes when he talks I just want to punch him in the face.  And then I feel bad for wanting to punch him in the face.

Ugh.

So there was no snowmobile trip.  Now I'm the mean bitch that is keeping him from having any fun in his life.  I miss the safety conscious little boy who built a tree-house on the ground because he thought a rickety dwelling built in a tree by a nine-year-old wasn't a very good idea.  I miss the boy who used to do the limbo like this:

And surfed like this:

and had the humor and self-deprecation to make fun of himself and his safety conscious ways by riding around on his scooter like this purely for the entertainment of his mother:

I'm convinced that is unfounded confidence in his abilities and the ridiculous assumptions he makes about things he knows nothing about are going to get him maimed or killed, and I'm still his mother, right?  It's still my job to raise him and protect him, right?  Yes.  Unfortunately in his eyes I'm just a fun-ruining worry wart who is dragging him down.

Ugh.

Oh, and this is the year he gets his driver's license.  Is there any way I can put him into a drug-induced coma to protect him from himself for the next five or six years?