10/13

Drinking mercury is usually a bad idea.

That being said, in lieu of writing a book review, I am going to drink a few spoonfuls of mercury I extracted from thermometers.

This is my first time drinking elemental mercury. The symptoms of elemental mercury poisoning apparently include coughing, trouble breathing, nausea, vomiting, and bleeding gums. Inhaling can lead to lung and brain damage, and extreme mercury poisoning leads to death by respiratory failure or various kinds of organ failure. Breathing it in is supposedly the main concern in terms of fatality, seeing as elemental mercury isn’t very water soluble.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but elemental mercury at room temperature looks like a silver liquid. Very shiny. You can tell it’s a metal, and metal usually doesn’t taste very good, so it isn’t particularly appetizing looking.

Mercury being a metal and all, I’d assume it's conductive, but I’ve never thought much about it before. Metals are typically defined by their electrical and thermal transport properties. But I don’t know much about post-transition metals. Maybe mercury isn’t a very good metal. If I managed to get a continuous flow of mercury going, I wonder if I could shock my throat while drinking it by zapping the flow of mercury with a stun gun. A traditional pastime, I'm sure. Maybe I’ll try that once I get more mercury. And a stun gun.

Mercury used to be used for felting animal pelts to be made into hats. To make the felt, the fleece needed to be separated from the hide, and then felted, and apparently treating the pelt with mercury nitrate made both of those things easier. In the process of making the felt, the pelt and fleece were repeatedly exposed to heat, releasing elemental mercury fumes. The mercury nitrate itself is an inorganic mercury compound, and so hatters of the time often experienced both elemental and inorganic mercury poisoning. Hence the so-called “mad-hatter syndrome”. I don’t plan on breathing it in, so maybe I won’t be so mad.

I love logical punctuation, by the way.

Anyway.

I have my mercury, so I figure I’ll drink it now.

It mostly tasted like it looked. Apparently mercury poisoning takes time to set in, so I’ll report back tomorrow regarding that.

While I’m still here in this basement, I may as well ask, did any of you hear anything about the bookstore over northwest of here? I heard it was closing, and it has me worried. I like that bookstore. I used to go there with a friend a lot in high school.

Upon reflection, this is a journal entry, so I guess you can’t answer me. Maybe that was kind of stupid to do.

Anyway, I was asked to do a review of a novel titled Ascorbate, etc. It’s not a very good title, but an old friend of mine wrote it. His publicist contacted one of the editors of the literary column I write for, and the assignment was pitched to me. I turned it down on conflict of interest.

The novel is apparently based on the chemist Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling was one of the greatest chemists of all time. Among other things, he was the first chemist to create a full quantum mechanical description of general chemical bonds. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his anti-nuclear activism. In his later career, he publicly advocated for megadoses of vitamin C as a cure-all. Hence the not-so-good-title of the book. I don’t know where the “etc.” came from. Maybe the rest of Pauling’s life.

For what it’s worth, most medical professionals recommend against megadosing vitamin C. But they also recommend against drinking mercury, so what do I care?

Some number of years ago, this friend got a publication deal with some subsidiary of Macmillan. This is his second novel with a mainstream publisher. When the first one came out, I received a free copy. I don’t remember the title, and I didn’t read it. Then I went out for sushi with him, and I ordered as much tuna as I could afford. That was the last time I talked to him face-to-face.

A stun gun circuit is a little complicated to explain in a journal entry, but basically it charges up some internal capacitors, and then when you press the trigger, it discharges the capacitors into the target. So there’s some impulse of electricity that’s released. Stun guns are typically rated by the amount of charge released in that impulse. Charge is measured in coulombs. 0.5 microcoulombs on a stun gun is considered the start of the painful range, and above about 1 microcoulomb is pretty bad. Or such is the typical marketing claim, in any case.

I remember, in high school, he owned a 0.7 microcoulomb stun gun, and he shocked me with it once. It felt surprisingly good, but I didn’t tell him that, because I wasn’t into mercury yet.

I’m not going to have dinner tonight, because I’m not very hungry, and because I drank mercury. So I think I’m going to just get ready for bed now. I’ll report back in the morning regarding the mercury. Maybe it’ll be worse this time than last time. I hope so, but I suspect not.

Good night,

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