A Series of Obsessions...with Series

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

Aside from the Hunger Games stuff. This is also just so weird. A bunch of old men watch a bunch of kids compete in athletic events?

apocalypse: "yes . . . RISE, MY HORSEMAN . . . you now serve apocalypse; the only etern—"

remy (bolting up with a gasp): "MY WIFE"

apocalypse: "what"

remy (scrambling to get up): "WHERE MY LADY AT"

apocalypse: "what are you talking about"

remy: "GONNA MARRY MY WOMAN"

Do I miss some foods I can't eat anymore without getting sick? Sure, but that's not what really bothers me. What bothers me is being excluded from a huge portion of human social life of which food is a crucial component. What bothers me is the stress and social stigma of trying to figure out what I can safely eat. What bothers me is the amount of extra work and cost that is required of me to identify, obtain, and prepare safe foods. What bothers me is people treating my needs like a nuisance, as though I chose to be like this - as though their brief inconvenience to check an ingredients list is unreasonable, when I deal with this every day of my life forever.

I don't miss the food that much. I miss not having to worry about what I eat. I miss freedom. I miss when trying new foods and new restaurants was fun instead of a minefield. I miss not having to plan my entire life around the need for safe foods.

For me today, those circumstances were: Several days of being underslept. Over-stressed. Forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. Already dealing with the harried mental state of day-before-travel stress. A personal panic trigger of missing appointments because I forgot about them.

We all know by now that the IRS will not call you on the phone. The jury duty people also will not call you on the phone, and this was the crucial piece of information that I did not have cold hard confirmation of today. Here is what happened, so that you can be equipped in case these fuckers call you:

Man with an American accent tells me he's from my city's courthouse. He tells me I missed jury duty summons yesterday and that now I'm in Trouble for contempt of court and failure to appear for jury duty. I protested that I hadn't gotten a notification for jury duty, he talked over me and said scary things about getting law enforcement involved unless I went to pay some fines and talk to the judge Right Now Today. He told me that I legally wasn't allowed to hang up the phone or put it on mute. He told me that I was under a "gag order" and I couldn't tell anyone about this except law enforcement or immediate family members. He already knew my address. He had official-sounding case numbers which he made me write down and repeat back to him. He had official addresses of where I needed to go and what I needed to do: Take the cash for my "fines" to a kiosk where I would pay them and receive a "voucher" that i would then take to the courthouse where I would supposedly speak to a judge. He told me again that if I hung up the phone before I got to the courthouse, it would be taken as obstruction or failure to comply or intent to flee and he would notify the police. He told me that if I went to sort it out with the judge, it might be waived and my money would be refunded.

I have not gotten jury duty summons for a WHILE -- since before the pandemic -- and I had been idly thinking recently that maybe I was due for one. So I heard all this and my panic button about Forgetting/Missing An Appointment got hit dead-on.

I panicked, I was upset and frantic, I was not thinking clearly. This is how they fucking get you.

Honestly, thank god he wanted me to take cash to a different location instead of giving him any financial information over the phone. Thank GOD for that, because it gave my nervous system 30 minutes or so to calm down and my higher brain functions to come back online so that I could notice that there were simply too many red flags in one interaction. I did go to my bank, I did withdraw quite a lot of money in cash.

The address he gave me to go to next was for a gas station. When I expressed confusion, the scammer had smooth explanations, and before I'd even parked, he'd texted me some glossy "official" looking infographics on how to use the kiosk and why the """government""" had started doing payments this way (supposedly a COVID measure, and because the funds were 'safer' or something). The kiosk, these infographic images said, was run by a company called BTC Tech, which they claimed was "Bailing Institute & Technologies". You will notice that that does not match the acronym. The infographic was full of grammatical errors, and thank god he had me sit there in my car and read the whole thing out loud "to make sure i understood it" so that I could hear myself vocally trip over every single one of those grammatical errors and think "Wow, this is weird, it wasn't proofread?"

He sent me a QR code for the ""kiosk"" which had a familiar logo on it. He had persistently asked me for my ETA to the next location, and he was pressuring me to get out of the car and go inside to the kiosk, and it was at this point that I started lying and said, "Sure, hang on one second, i have a pebble in my shoe or something I need to fix first" while I was googling "Bitcoin logo" to verify.

Didn't really need to verify because when I went inside, the only "kiosk" looking thing was an ATM looking thing that had "BITCOIN" written on it in very loud letters. Which brings us to one of two admittedly hilarious interactions, wherein i was standing there in front of the fucking bitcoin machine with my eyes narrowed going, "This is for Bitcoin" several times while he said "No no no no it's not, it's not bitcoin, it's BTC tech" and I kept saying "Well but it says Bitcoin on it in big letters." "No no, it's just a multi-currency system, it's for the courthouse, you have to get the voucher." "Ok but it's fucking BITCOIN, this feels like a scam, I don't think the government uses BITCOIN."

I walked out. I went back to my car. I told him that I wasn't comfortable, and that I needed to call the courthouse to verify with them what the charges were, or I needed to go in person to the courthouse to check what was up. He told me if I hung up, I'd be arrested, and if I stepped foot on government property, I'd be arrested.

It was at this point that I utilized a weapon which in many cases is very dangerous and unethical to use but hey, it's perfect for situations like this: White Lady* Tears. This is exactly the situation they're MEANT for -- buying yourself time to think when a man is strongarming you into meek obedience and fear. (* I am nonbinary but he didn't need to know that.)

Anyway I pretended to cry and told him i felt nauseous and that i was going to be sick and i was just uwu so fwightened and upset and uwu uwu uwu sob sob i felt like he was getting mad at me and it was so scawy oh woe oh no -- while this happened he texted me an arrest warrant that had one of my old roommates' names on it instead of mine, but that EPIC FUMBLE didn't even matter because the whole time I am frantically googling on my phone "jury duty scam" and finding a Reddit page from a guy who posted about the exact same thing happening to him.

I hung up. I called the courthouse, got patched through to the jury pool department, and as soon as the guy picked up, I said, "Hi, my name is Alex, I just got a call saying that I missed jury duty--" and before I could even finish the sentence, the guy said, "That was a scam, we will NEVER call you." I said thank god thank god oh fuck thank god, which brings me to the second hilarious moment of this escapade, where the jury duty guy cheerfully said, "But if you have a couple thousand dollars on you, you can come over and give them to me if you want!" which did make me burst out laughing. Thank you, jury duty guy, for that much-needed moment of levity. I hope you're having a good day.

You are not immune to social engineering. I am 36 years old, highly intelligent, educated, and VERY tech-savvy, and those fuckers STILL caught me at just the right moment and with just the right hook that it triggered panic and desperation and shame and guilt and overrode my critical thinking skills for a solid 30 minutes. If it happened to me, it could happen to you. BE FUCKING VIGILANT. THE IRS WILL NEVER CALL YOU, AND JURY DUTY WILL NEVER CALL YOU.

In hindsight, I'm actually glad that it played out the way it did. For one thing, as a life lesson, that was a pretty cheap one -- all that it cost me was about an hour of my life (including the time it took to go back to the bank and deposit the money I'd withdrawn, gossip extensively to the bank teller about what happened, and get home) and some grey hairs.

For another thing, that fucker spent all that time on the phone with me and didn't get my money. I snatched his smug asshole victory right out of his mouth at the last second and wasted his time -- time that he otherwise ould have spent scamming someone who might not have gotten over their panic in time.

I actually wish that I'd kept him on the phone longer, tbh. If I'd been less rattled, I bet I could have strung him along for another hour or two. Better he spend it with me than with someone else.

However, that's only after you've (that's "you" as in the reader, not OP) already received notice in the mail, and confirmed that you received the notice by returning the required questionnaire. They DO NOT call jurors without that confirmation. If you missed the jury duty notice, they'll probably just mail it to you again. So at least in my town, you will not receive a "you missed jury duty" phone call completely without any kind of warning. You would be made very much aware of the entire process and appearance requirements ahead of time.

And you will definitely not ever receive a call from any court or government agency I've ever heard of instructing you to deposit money in a Bitcoin kiosk and claiming that you will face increased penalties if you hang up the phone to confirm by calling back. All of that is 100% a scam.

From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea:

Wolverine joins his friend in prayer

no no friend chapter