I Chose Hampture

On more than one occasion, while walking past the basement aquarium in which Hampture resides, I asked myself how my life arrived to this point. It is not a well adjusted man who constructs a fully functional scale model underwater habitat for hamsters, much less makes use of it.

If someday I'm asked about it on an authors panel at one convention or another, I dare not answer honestly that it was a tripartite cocktail of depression, autism and LSD. It's a tightly knit industry and one which expects its representatives to be at least somewhat family friendly, in the bucolic corpo-clean sort of way.

But that is indeed how it happened, and I doubt it could've otherwise. My trauma isn't special, anyone who grows up autistic will tell you a similar sob story of being beaten, tricked, ridiculed and force fed slugs behind the gym. Maybe not that last one, though slugs are a nutritious low calorie snack with a rich, smoky flavor one ought to try before they knock.

I might've had an easier time of school, had I not been the only one convinced of evolution at a fundamentalist private school which taught young Earth creationism from the A.C.E. curriculum. Stubbornly single minded about factual accuracy as my neurotribe tends to be, it was the proverbial meeting of an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

Humiliation and ostracization by staff and fellow students alike only let up when I became receptive to their efforts at social correction, agreeing to meet with a faith based child psychologist who would get to the root of my evolutionist brainwashing.

Something like a G rated version of Winston's interrogation in 1984, I eventually confessed that indeed 2+2=5, Earth is not older than ten thousand years, and received an end of year "most improved" award for my compliance. Turns out, the force was never actually unstoppable!

This left me less trusting of authority, and humans not in my immediate family, than I should've been. But this too is probably a common experience (and supervillain origin story) not worth wringing my hands over.

I've lived a worthwhile life so far not because of such experiences, howevermuch chest thumpers insist that what doesnt kill us makes us stronger (not accounting for the third possibility of becoming crippled).

Rather, I carried on and developed myself according to my ideals anyway, because of how I coped with that trauma. After many years of circling the drain, that familiar downward spiral with death at the bottom, it was no longer in me to swim upstream. I came to a point where, if I didn't do something drastic to alter the trajectory I was on, I would certainly have killed myself.

So, I started a hobby. After all no shortage of well meaning family and friends throughout my life advised me that I needed a hobby. Only to then turn around and say "not that one" upon discovering I was submerging rodents.

It was an engineering challenge, an excuse to care for animal companions, and something to differentiate one day from the next during a period in my life when days had a way of blurring together.

Simply witnessing incremental progress proved therapeutic after spending so long accomplishing nothing at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. That pit can become seductively homey once you resign yourself to the conviction that you belong there.

This is also how I discovered darknet psychedelics, which I soon became a voracious consumer of. Like a horse with a feedbag of cubensis mushrooms around its neck, an explosion of fresh insight and motivation followed, then it was off to the races.

This was by far my most productive writing period. There were week long stretches during which I hammered out one full short story every night. Not my best work, but one can't worry too much about that or they will never write anything for fear of not being perfect from the start.

To be a writer one must write, and prolifically, trusting that quality will come with practice at some point downstream. (Everything written prior to that point may be thrown away. Then you can finally posture as if you were always effortlessly talented.)

This is how I attracted the attention of my first publisher, with whom I put out two tradpubbed anthologies. It's also how I was brought onboard by Honor Code to work on Narcosis, a deep sea horror themed VR game, and how I finessed my way into the Mars Desert Research Program, a mockup Mars base in the Utah Desert where I simulated EVAs by day.

By night I wrote a well received report on sea-space analog principles for Robert Zubrin's Mars Society. During my stay, amid various adult make believe activities, I was interviewed by a journalist to whom I gifted my only copy of Ian Koblick's Living and Working in the Sea. I regret parting with it, given the eye-watering sum it goes for nowadays.

Maybe it was all wasted on me, as I've long been more fascinated by the sea than the heavens. I was space obsessed as any young boy between the ages of 3 and 12. But one quickly runs out of manned missions to obsess over and memorize every detail of. There's a much longer, and lesser known, history of manned undersea activity.

This would lead me to become involved with Dennis Chamberland's Atlantica Expeditions. Chamberland being aptly named, for a man who hopes to establish an undersea land of interconnected chambers. What he managed by the time I joined was the Scott Carpenter Analog Station, a micro habitat fit for two occupants, roughly the size of a delivery van, emplaced in less than thirty feet of water.

The same Floridian lagoon, in fact, which also hosted the Jules Undersea Lodge (formerly La Chalupa) and Marinelab, now in a museum. The month long duration of that mission was the only time in history when three separate undersea habitats were continually manned in close proximity. Conshelf 2 may also qualify, depending what counts as "close".

But fundraising for round two proved more difficult than anticipated. So when years passed without any further subaquatic expeditions, I took matters into my own hands. Using what I learned building heated, humidity controlled positive pressure hamster habitats, I constructed my own solar powered, surface supplied diving helmet.

Inelegant but functional (as with most of my inventions), I built it from a 5 gallon square sided jug into which I inset plexiglass windows. Flat because curved windows distort ones view like lenses in water, and because a diving helmet is under no pressure differential.

It won't surprise you to learn that I immediately used this contraption to trip balls underwater, for up to five hours on one occasion, at the bottom of a Minnesotan lake. Less impressive than it sounds, as limits on the electric compressor meant I could venture no deeper than 35 feet, and mostly hung out around 15 feet.

Helmet diving's quite different from scuba. Posture must remain upright, due to having a buoyant pocket of trapped air on/around the noggin. One may "moon jump" if only slightly weighted. One peers out through big windows into the surrounding water, from within an air-filled sanctuary. Very "Jules Verne". Curious minnows swam right up to the faceplate, undoubtedly more astonished by the encounter than I was.

I saw and felt things that would've been indescribable, if not for my experience as an author. It is the job of authors, after all, to eff the ineffable. The surface undulated overhead like time lapse cloud cover. Shimmering god rays danced between murky shadows, which morphed into whatever I most feared might be lurking in the water with me.

I wrote up this encounter as an article for Psychedelic Frontier, which last I checked is still online. It was one of many such psychedelic expeditions, into subterranean lava tubes and whatnot, by far the most instructive.

It's difficult, after the fact, to give a satisfactory explanation for most of these actions. The closest I've come, (besides "autism and drugs") is to quote Larry Walters, the fella who made news decades back for rigging hundreds of helium balloons to a lawn chair, which then carried him skyward: "A man can't just sit around all day."