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“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.… Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.”

Part of the reason lies in the challenge, another in how deep dives change the chemistry in the brain, creating nitrogen narcosis or a “rapture of the deep” that freedivers describe in lyrical terms.

From 40 metres to 60 metres you get nitrogen narcosis and from 80 metres and deeper you get oxygen poisoning.

I called an emergency vet, convinced he was going to lapse into narcosis.

It’s time to forage for consumer goods, but it’s also nontime, no time at all, a faint narcosis that removes you from the bindings of daily existence.