Introducing... The Cosmic Bubble

Okay, so.. I've fixed one part of the timestamp problem with this site. Except now apparently they have AM switched with PM. I wrote this at 1:51 PM today, not AM. Weird. (grumble)

So my life has been, in general, quite strange. In fact, though I've been through some bad times (obviously), I think the weird times far outnumber the bad ones. Below is a little anecdote that's so weird that when I think about it, I really question my sanity... except this was, indeed, real. And no drugs were involved. I was eight.

My parents sent me to this camp for smart kids the summer before I turned nine. It was really cool. It was in this converted high school, and we made rockets and played these really weird, Apple II-quality pseudo-educational computer games where you had these little characters that had to solve puzzles and make decisions. I made new friends, only one of whose names I remember (Ben Kowalski?) and generally had a good time.

This wasn't strange at all. What was strange was "The Cosmic Bubble."

The entire camp was apparently sponsored by the whole DARE/Just Say No! campaign of the late eighties. McGruff the Crime Dog made sporadic appearances. His presence during the Cosmic Bubble episode was sort of the icing on the cake.

They gathered us together one day and told us we were going to experience "The Cosmic Bubble!" I was a strange child, world-weary and cynical, having, just six months earlier, had a recurring nightmare that scarred me for years. I was used to idealistic People In Charge being continually disappointed by our generation's apparent inability to get along with each other at that time. In second grade they called us to an assembly in which they made us all sign the "Declaration of Interdependence" which I guess they thought would have enough of an impact on us to make us realize we were all one and/or make us stop our inane, pointless battles. No dice. We were beating on each other during the assembly.

I thought "The Cosmic Bubble" would be something like that. I was very wrong.

No, instead, they led us all to a series of corridors in the school where the lights had all been turned out, save for intermittent strobe lighting. The corridors were lined, somehow, with plastic sheeting along the floors, walls, and ceilings. We were, essentially, walking through a vast network of plastic tubing, similar to the scene in E.T. where they're walking between (I think) the van they're using to transport E.T. and the NASA building. I can't describe it any better than that.

Worse, they had somehow installed some sort of fan system that caused the plastic tubing to periodically expand and contract, as if it were breathing.

So.. picture this, if you will. You're eight years old, you're in a bunch of darkened hallways, lit by the eerie, staccato glow of strobe lights, and the walls, floors, and ceilings are breathing.

Oh, and to top it all off, while you're having this near-hallucinatory experience, McGruff the Crime Dog is wandering around, muttering vague warnings about drugs.

This whole experience left enough of a mark on me that, nine years later, during a fever hallucination, I saw McGruff coming for me. He was apparently quite incensed that I had been stealing vodka from my parents' liquor cabinet.

If my "Cosmic Bubble" experience was at all typical, it's kind of unsurprising so many of us have gone on to experiment with drugs.