Faint memories of childhood

So, the CDC is finally waking up after a few decades of slumber on "the choking game," or one of the many other aliases by which it's known. I hate to tell them, but it's been popular a lot longer than 10 years. I know this because I used to play it. And if we knew about it in Brazoria County, trust me: We weren't the first ones to get fads.

I'll never forget the first night I did it. I, a kid of I guess 12 or 13 at the time, was spending the night with two friends, and they apparently were old pros at it. I watched them do it to each other several times, but I was too terrified to do it myself. Finally, I succumbed. And wow.

They did it in the second way described in the article. We were never as hardcore as to throttle each other or wrap telephone cords around our necks, for goodness sake. We didn't even call it choking, as we didn't consider it as such. I don't know that we called it anything. Basically, the "victim" would bend over, take about five or six deep breaths and the hold the final breath, as the other person tightly gripped their stomach, like a frozen Heimlich maneuver, and lifted them off the ground. When the "victim" finally released his breath, you knew he was out.

I'll admit: It was pretty euphoric. No, there was nothing sexual about it. But the hallucinations and dreams experienced when one was out were pretty vivid, sometimes scary, not that I could describe a single one of them almost 20 years later, of course. And when we woke up, after what was probably only about 30 seconds to a minute but felt like hours, there would be a bizarre tingling sensation left in the head.

Adults knew we did this. Not my parents, of course, but some other adults heard us talking about it. Hell, I even remember one Boy Scout camping trip in which we were doing it in one of the leader's vans while two leaders were in the van with us. We kind of got an idea that there might be a bit more danger than we thought to it when one kid, at one of my slumber parties, started to have a seizure after we put him under. Finally, one teacher heard us talking about it and told us what we were really doing to our brains in depriving them of oxygen, even though we were pretty much over it by then anyway.

Point being: This is nothing new, nothing underground and nothing restricted to a fringe group of kids. The kids I refer to earlier who did it with me pretty much all were honor students by the time we got to high school.

That being said, some of the comments below the article are pretty appalling (and kudos to the author for calling them out). The attitude that it's just Darwinism, that the kids who die from doing this are just stupid and getting what they deserve is ridiculous. By that logic, a kid who doesn't know how electricity works and dies after sticking a fork in an outlet also got what he deserved.

Oh, and anyone who takes any of the above paragraphs -- particularly numbers two, five and six -- out of context for prurient purposes? God'll get ya for that, Walter.