Monday, December 04, 2006

FREAK YOURSELF OUT! Volume 1 - The Bathroom Nebula

I come crawling to you now out the back end of a very nice weekend.  I did a bunch of clothes shopping (with surprising success), ate good food and did a little home cookin’, and had some great times with Zach.  Tomorrow I think I’ll be having a good day again, but today I’m just sort of under the weather and I stayed home to gather my strength.  Zach took the opportunity to be very high-maintenance, tearing the place apart and refusing to eat when appropriate, or to nap, or PLEASE little man take it easy for a few… anyway he’s been forced into a nap now and my head is only barely spinning, which of course puts me in mind to return again to a brand new game that I think is best called, “FREAK YOURSELF OUT!” Today’s installment is called, Floating in Space in the Middle of Your Bathroom.  It’s easy and it’s fun.  Come on, I’ll walk you through it!

I did this as one of a variety of recreational perception experiments I undertook in college.  This one is distinguished not only in that it is suitable for publication, but also in that it was particularly compelling on a sensory level. But you should judge for yourselves.

You need a smallish, tidy, totally light-tight room, and about two dozen (at least!) of those long flexible tubes with the glow goo in ’em.  Not the big thick chunky ones – the long flexible ones, 15 to 18 inches long, are what you want.  You know the ones I mean, you see kids and ravers use them as necklaces or bracelets.  They usually glow green but you can probably find other colors if you look around.  Multi-color sounds cool.  Back in my day we only had green, and we thought it worked just fine.  Then again, we had to walk 3 miles through snowdrifts just to use the Xbox.  Those were hard times. 

Okay, you’ve got your freakout supplies.  From here on, move fast – the glow goo loses intensity every second, so you don’t want to dawdle.  It might help to keep the tubes in a freezer for as long as possible.  I don’t know.  Just don’t waste time.  Freakout waits for no man. 

Go to your tidy little room with some wide dark tape and clean out the room as much as possible – all the clothes, all the stuff on the walls, the shower curtain, the tubes of unguents and bottles of poo (sham or authentic) – give yourself a nice clean canvas.  Use the tape to block all possible outside light sources; use heavy paper to tape over the windows if there are any.  Once you’ve taped over everything else, get your glowtubes and then close the door and tape around the edges of the doorway.  Test it with the lights off a few times – let your eyes get used to the utter blackness and then see if any glimmer of light seeps through at all. Cover every chink. It’s the key to ensuring a convincing and thorough freakout – and that’s why we’re here, people.  Try to keep focused. 

Now, in your light-sealed room, turn on a bright light, stand one good arms-reach away from the lightswitch, and cut the ends off the gootubes.  Hold the tubes by the uncut end and twirl them around in all directions so they spill their contents everywhere.  Do a couple at a time.  Really spatter the place with glowing goo – ceiling, floor, all the walls.  Try not to get it in your eyes, and maybe I should have warned you earlier that it might stain your clothes, but whatever.  A good freakout demands sacrifice.  If you don’t have a flawless yearling or an ephah of new barley, the least you can give up is a t-shirt.  The freak gods demand it. 

The important thing is, stand still.  Do not touch the walls; do not smear the floor.  Try not to move at all – except to turn off the light.  And thus the freakout begins:

The goo will have emerged from the tubes in drops of varying size, generally forming circular spots on every surface of the room.  The dots will be sufficiently similar in shape that your mind, in the absence of competing cues, will try to perceive them as effectively identical.  They’ll be of different sizes, though, and the quick-fading goo will show up with more intensity in fresher spatters, so different spots will be larger or smaller, and will shine with different degrees of brightness. And in response to all that, your mind will interpolate distances and obscurities to account for the unexplained variations. 

What I’m saying is, you’ll think you’re seeing a bunch of identical dots at widely varying distances, occasionally hidden by translucent clouds.  The walls and ceiling and floor will seem to disappear in a sea of stars.  Your heart wants to shoot into your throat but you’re comfortably standing, motionless, floating in deep space as if it were your own damn bathroom or something. So long as you don’t move, the illusion is quite amazing.

Of course, once you move even a little, the parallax receptors built into your stereoscopic skull will kick in and even a miniscule violation of the rules of perception will shatter the illusion.  Plus, it doesn’t last long.  As soon as the goo hits open air it starts fading.  You need to move fast, as I mentioned before – cut, spatter, kill the lights and float through space for a minute or two.  I have no idea if it’s hideously toxic, carcinogenic, a gold-plated invitation to death. This might be the most foolhardy suggestion anyone ever gives you.  But I can only tell you, in response: something this cool is totally worth it.

Now go into the wide, wide world and freak yourself out.  If you’ve got any other ideas how to do so, I warmly invite you to share them.  It’s been a while since I got a good new freakout to enjoy.