Roughly six months ago, while working on a short story I was writing involving quicksand (the one place left I felt safe to express my fetish, fiction) I had my first experience surfing the net. I launched a search on the topic "quicksand", hoping to find more technical details than I could come up with in libraries. After numerous references to a band, I found:

This site had not only technical details, but an actual account from a woman's real encounter with quicksand. The site offered an incredible plethora of details related to the topic, including a comprehensive list of everywhere quicksand appears in the media.

As I perused this site, the only thing I found more astonishing than the wealth of data on the topic was what I found at the bottom of the page:

...and for those who actually look for quicksand ... and like being in it!!! alt.sex.fetish.wet-and-messy
...and for the true mud and quicksand lover, check out www.messyfun.com

All I could think was, "Okay . . . I may be nuts, but if I am, I've got company."

Very few times in my life have I had an event hit me so hard, that for a moment, I felt as if I were on drugs; this was one of them. I was not alone. I might still be crazy, or at least a little weird, but I was not alone.

Eventually, after following the above links, I stumbled upon a community of people on the internet sharing a common interest, a fetish genre known as WAM (Wet And Messy sex fetish). My participation in this community, coupled with my studies in cultural and physical anthropology, have given rise to what for me is a most satisfying theory as to why I, and the other people in this community, are not only quite sane, but experiencing a phenomena that is nothing less than the inevitable consequence of human evolution.