The crowd is a renegade whirlpool. Arms, legs, hair and sweat fuse, blur, spin ferociously and disappear into black. Half a second later the slippery mass is there again, reignited by a sudden explosion of blinding pink light. Thick plumes of gritty yellow smoke fill the air. Brilliant white fog pours from the stage. The music, stuck firmly in some infinite loop of cracked-out Motown samples and ass-shaking Top-40 fare, drives this bizarre scene, pushing the crowd from frenzied to psychotic, from human to human-shaped bags of pulsating electric gel.

This is the Festival. Bottles in hand, red cups in tow, lewd self-indulgence on the mind, we sweep through campus for a single day of relentless 21st century hedonism. Classes be damned, inhibitions be forgotten — we have more important things to worry about. The Festival, after all, is the crux of our collegiate social integration, a daylong test of everything we’ve learned up to this point; how to get down, how to stay low, how to fix a blown-out laptop speaker by striking it savagely with the palm of one’s hand. We’re training for life. We’re shooting for excellence.

And where better to do it than here, in this place, on this day. Erupting from the concrete confines of our peaceful academic landscape, the Festival is a strange blending of things familiar and unexpected. Campus shuttles become raucous mobile dance parties; public restrooms transform into aqua-tiled dens of illicit behavior; roads are recast as sluggish pedestrian highways, clogged deep with rubber-legged revelers determined to traverse any distance with the greatest of style and swagger.

It’s an isolated awakening, a vivid yet temporary rendering of the everything-be-damned excitement and pure, unbridled desire to live that is youth. The Festival sets us loose, shoots us up with adrenaline and shoves us squarely in the direction of triumphant exhilaration. It’s us at our best, us without boundaries. It’s us as nature never quite intended: savage, inspired, blind to authority and drunk with freedom. The only thing that matters is what we want to matter. Everything else can wait.

Of course, this spirit is fleeting. It burns out the moment we falter, the instant we break down and let the quietest inkling of fatigue creep slowly past our desire to keep going. To maintain this spirit would be a tremendous physical achievement, but to recapture it would be unnatural, a fabrication.

So with a collective sigh the Festival dies down and gradually we become ourselves again, our vision restored though still gently obscured by a distinct haze that reminds us we’ve just experienced something quite out of the ordinary. For the next several days we’ll stumble across subtle indications of what happened — discarded bottles, hastily scrawled graffiti, an overturned trashcan suggesting some brief rebellion against some perceived injustice.

In another year it’ll happen again. Until then we sink willingly into the bounded convention of ordinary life, our eyes fixed forward, our minds freshly endowed with the memory of the Festival.