When you find something disturbing in a deep, unspeakable way, people often say that you "have a big problem" with it, especially if you're a child. We know what is meant even though the words are all wrong. For one thing, to call it a problem both trivializes the mix of fear, disgust, and horror that envelops you like a fog and also locates the difficulty in a part of your brain which has evolved to its present state in the relatively recent past, i.e. the last, oh, two million years or so, and not where it belongs, which is in the darkest twists of the reptilian brain. Furthermore, it is wrong to say that you "have" a problem with it, as "have" suggests your ownership of some mere opinion, some snappy assessment you've made while drinking iced tea on a sun-dappled veranda. No, the "problem" you "have" (more like the problem has you) is a feeling that wells up like glugging oil or magma in a subterranean channel of your most primitive consciousness, a feeling over which you have no control and whose origin may be located but never fully explained. I was gripped with such a feeling about quicksand when I was a kid. Naturally I never encountered quicksand for real, my feeling was centered on depictions of quicksand on TV and in movies. Most of the time it was played for laughs, but I could never laugh; laughing requires the ability to breathe, for starters.

I couldn't be in the room when someone got trapped in quicksand and began to be pulled under. Another character would throw the victim a rope, but I would have already left the room or would be peeking from around a corner. It made me feel so unnerved and uncomfortable that to go on living one more minute in my body and in my head seemed at that moment a total impossibility. There was something about that abstraction of a churning maw, a faceless malevolence. I always imagined that the thrashing victim was already beginning to disintegrate below the waist, or whatever part of him was already under the surface. To me it wasn't a matter of mere asphyxiation, but rather that quicksand threatened to turn you into more of itself, you'd become quicksand as you dissipated into the roiling sediment. This makes no sense and obviously has nothing to do with how quicksand actually works, but that was my primal fear: the fear of merging with my surroundings, of bodily decomposition in an abstracted, almost molecular sense; the fear of personal annihilation by dissolving into nothingness. Foreground becoming background.

A few years ago I learned that this very idea is a sexual fetish for some people, a source of throbbing excitement, and that makes perfect sense. These people rather wonderfully cover themselves in shaving cream and pretend they're dissolving, usually against their will. I've always sensed that whatever gives one person the willies is turning someone else on at that exact same moment somewhere else on the planet. It's some kind of natural law, all expressions of elemental disgust are balanced by equally murky erotic fixations, and any asymmetries that develop in this precarious equilibrium, any surplus or remainder on either side, will result in some kind of grotesque manifestation on a global scale, like a sudden widespread taste for circus peanuts or an unexplained epidemic of toenail fungus.