http://www.infiltration.org/drains-first8.html
Ninjalicious, we hardly knew ye. I think I blogged about the death of my fellow Torontonian a while back, and coming across articles like this make me realise what a unique individual he was. He had an unadulterated joy for exploring, even when it was a location as dreary as a drain pipe. (NB: I’ve left the SU tag alone this time, as “subculture” is just too perfect for this entry)
Most people probably have some trouble understanding the appeal of spending the night marching up and down a dark, wet cement tube – at least until they try it for themselves. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect draining offers many of the same mind-expanding benefits as being in a sensory depravation tank. There are many things to sense in a drain, of course, like the wonderful smell, the steady, echoed slap-splash of explorers marching through the water in unison, and the sight of uniform concrete tubes stretching towards infinity in either direction. At one point Persephone asked Sean if he thought the drain was getting smaller, and he replied that either the drain was getting smaller or we were getting bigger. In such an unnatural environment, there was really no way for us to determine which was true, as there was nothing “real” we could look at to restore our natural sense of proportion. With nothing real to correct my mental processes, it was a simple mental trick for me to imagine that gravity had shifted and that we were walking on the ceiling, or marching straight down the pipe towards the centre of the earth.