I almost created a religion.

When I was 21-years-old I almost created a religion.

It’s 2006, and I’m a student at Morehead State University. I’m home on summer break.

On one inspired night during this summer, myself and two of my friends decided that we would get together at my parents’ house and watch a movie. We were not unique in the fact that we had a pack of four or five that hung out with great regularity. One of the places we frequented was a movie store owned by our friend Zach’s parents; the kind of place that has now died off. It was tremendous: we had access to movies and video games (all levels of quality and obscurity) any time we wanted. 

Zach decided that this would be a great night for us to watch the movie Congo, which as I’m sure you know was a “blockbuster” film in the mid-90s that united Laura Linney on screen (at last) with Tim Curry and a host of men in really ridiculous gorilla suits. I had never seen this movie, but I knew that when I was a kid they had promoted the shit out of it. Just the trailer for the film made pre-teen me get hyped up and ready to spend my parent’s money.

I could sit here and summarize this movie’s absurdity, but I could never top what Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas did on the How Did this Get Made? podcast. They nailed it. This is a bad movie. It’s very bad. There are tons and tons of scenes that make little to no sense, but the thing that I would like to focus on is one scene in particular that was pointed out by Paul on the podcast.

Near the middle of the film, this happens:

This got a huge laugh in the room, at the time. Zach intentionally had withheld from us the fact that this movie fucking sucks, so the surprise factor was really doing some heavy lifting. I had no idea it was so bad! The only memories I had were of the promotional materials, which clearly trick children and are most likely designed to do as much.

When that snake slithered down that branch, I (in an extremely asinine, high-pitched voice) yelled ‘SNAKE TIME!’ only to have my hyping of the scene cut short by the solider immediately chopping the snake in half with a machete. We lost our minds, laughing, because the timing was something that we just couldn’t have foreseen. I know this is all extremely strange, but stay with me.

‘SNAKE TIME’ quickly became a phrase that would infect our group of friends more or less immediately. It soon evolved into ‘SNAKE TIME, Y’ALL!’ and we applied it to situations where it obviously had nothing to do with snakes or really any change in what time it was, chronologically or figuratively.

When I returned to school (two hours away) I kept saying it and told the moment with some friends, and quickly this became something that a separate, unconnected group of friends started to laugh about together. ‘SNAKE TIME!’ was like a virus.

After really sitting down and thinking about it, this is where I think things started to get bizarre. You read that correctly. It gets dumber and more bizarre.

I lived in the basement of a student center during college. I served as a resident janitor there for a while and “cleaned” the building in exchange for free rent. In that building was an office, and in that office there was an enormous dry-erase master calendar. You know the type. A friend of mine, Thomas Stevens, decided that he would take that calendar and write several fictional birthdays and holidays on it. He did this to be funny, I guess. I didn’t know that he had done this, and I found out about it by walking by and seeing that someone had penned ‘SNAKE TIME’ in all caps on the date of January 29th, 2007.

As bored college kids, we decided that the best thing for us to do would be to watch Congo on January 29th and do our best to recreate what had happened that night during the previous summer. 

So we did. We got together with friends (roughly eight of us if I remember correctly), watched the movie, had some snake-related snacks (no actual items containing real snakes to my knowledge), I yelled ‘SNAKE TIME!’ at the same spot in the movie and we had a great time. That was that.

What I did NOT know was that Snake Time 2008 had inspired some underclassmen who had heard the story and found the entire idea so compelling that they had decided to hold the event again, without my knowledge. I had graduated by this point.

[Fast forward to 2011 for the purposes of this story.]

I’m sitting in my apartment in Louisville and it’s a cold, January night. Megan (my wife) was away on a trip and I was killing time on my computer, likely accomplishing nothing.

The phone rings. I see that it’s Luke Day, one of my college roommates from my senior year. It’s about 6:45PM. The conversation unfolded very close to this:

Luke: Hey, what are you doing?
Me: Not much. Sitting at home. Why?
Luke: Snake Time is tonight. We should go.
Me: THEY ARE STILL DOING SNAKE TIME?!
Luke: Yes, and it starts at 9. We should go.
Me: Man, I don’t know. Let me think about it.
Luke: Alright man. I’m going.

At this point I am living a touch over two hours away from Morehead, KY, where this event is taking place. For me to leave Louisville and make it on time to Snake Time, I would have to make a decision in the next ten minutes, if not sooner. I quickly decided that I was going to attend whatever Snake Time had become, because this was just too much to pass up. You can imagine how bizarre this was for me: thoughts swirling around in my mind, wondering how in the hell something so trivial and stupid could have become an event that still existed after I had left the equation.

I arrive in Morehead in record time. As I pull into the back parking lot of the student center I look up and see that the top floor (the whole floor one huge room where all the events were held) is OBVIOUSLY in party mode. From the street I can see that there are intense strobe lights thrashing and thumping beats that could also be heard easily from 100 yards away, which is roughly how far away I was. I’m becoming restless with anticipation. My friend Luke almost immediately pulls in behind me, and after some quick pleasantries we are going inside, in no way prepared for what we’re about to see.

I get inside the ground floor of the building and it is standing room only in the lobby area outside the stairwell that leads to the top floor. It is PACKED. This is the type of crowd that you barely are only able to shimmy through. More astonishing to me is the fact that I have never seen most of these faces in my life. Anyone who has left college and visited in the two to three year period post-graduation can tell you that you immediately feel out of place and old when you visit the places you frequented. This was the case. There was a very light dusting of people that were like babies when I had left Morehead, and past that this was a sardined group of strangers.

Some of the familiars from my time there had caught wind that I was coming, so for once in my life I was a VIP. I was rushed through the crowd and led to the upstairs area, where the organizers of the event had stationed stoic pairs of dudes to create an official, serious vibe and the floor was riddled with rubber snakes, as if a farce version of Raiders of the Lost Ark was about to be filmed. I’m not kidding — rubber snakes.

They explain to me that they have something special planned for me. I am obviously really wide-eyed and slack jawed, just attempting process this sensory overload, and I agree to follow their instructions as they let all these buzzing people into the main auditorium and begin a ceremony. The ceremony did not disappoint.

The music slowly faded out and the lights came up on the stage. Up the center aisle strode Matt Stevenson (nickname: Sticky Stevenson) in a robe and carrying what appeared to be a knit sleeve of some kind. Positioning himself center stage in front of the whispering crowd, Sticky slides a DVD case out from the knit sleeve and presents it to the crowd like Rafiki presented Simba for the first time. It’s Congo on DVD. Of course it is.

The crowd cheered. THEY CHEERED.

I’m just non-stop doing that coping laughter of disbelief. It’s something past surreal. After the presentation of the Congo DVD, I am brought on stage as an honored guest and dubbed (what I am dubbed as I am not sure) with a rubber king cobra. As homoerotic as this sounds I found a way to stay faithful to my wife.

Now the lights go down. The crowd is still buzzing. Believe it or not, we actually watch the first forty six minutes of this film. I can tell you with some certainty: even as a joke, this is a hard film to sit through without becoming restless. I had begun to deduct what would happen next. As the infamous scene showed on the screen, the lights began to flash and 25 boys, ages 18 to 22, began to jump around the room and scream ‘SNAKE TIME!’ at the top of their lungs. Streamers were thrown. Chairs were flipped. New Year’s Eve party poppers were set off. It was pandemonium for about twenty seconds, and then it stopped, as did the movie.

Sticky appeared on the stage one more time and thanked everyone for attending, and just like that, one of the most bizarre nights of my life had come to an end.

I would spend the next few days reeling from what had happened. The sheer enthusiasm that they’d shown in executing this ridiculous idea had left me completely baffled and amazed. I told countless people the story to almost universal disbelief. The following year the event was held at the same place and a band I’m in actually played afterwards.

Tracing the timeline back to the beginning, I still have a hard time believing that one impromptu viewing of Congo in 2006 would grow into a campus event without me even knowing about it. If I tried to act like there was a moral to this story, I would go ahead just assume that I deserved to be kicked in the face by some bikers. There is no moral and honestly there is no profound purpose for Snake Time to exist… but it does.

I can’t claim to know what the future holds for Snake Time. At the very least, what we have seen from Snake Time thus far suggests that it could slither in any direction at any time. Let’s hope next January 29th it sheds its skin and surprises us again.