OK so you know how lava lamps just sit there on shelves being groovy and wobbly and completely harmless-looking? The little blobs bobbing up and down like they're dancing to music only they can hear? Yeah. A man drank one. And it nearly killed him, which is somehow both terrifying and the most unhinged thing I've read all week.

The story, reported by MSN, walks through what happens when lava lamp contents end up inside a human body, and I went in expecting a fun little "wow, don't do that" tale and came out genuinely rattled. Because those mesmerizing floating blobs and the liquid they drift around in are absolutely not meant to go inside a person, and the reporting makes that painfully clear.

What follows is brutal. We're talking vomiting, damage to the throat and stomach, and then the slower, scarier stuff, like potential kidney damage. The reporting on this case is thin on specifics, so I can't tell you exactly how his hospital stay went, and I'm not going to make things up. What I can tell you is he needed hospitalization, and the coverage describes the whole thing as nearly killing him. That phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it earned it.

Now, the question you're probably asking: WHY? Why would anyone drink a lava lamp? The source actually gives us one piece of an answer, which is that he reportedly thought it would be harmless. And I get it, kind of? Have you seen one? The silly waxy blobs just bobbing there. I can see how someone could convince themselves it's basically decorative juice. It is not. It is the opposite of a juice.

So here is your extremely obvious and yet apparently necessary public service announcement, delivered with love: lava lamps are for looking at. They are mood lighting. If someone in your house has one, maybe don't store it next to the lemonade, and maybe keep it away from anyone who grabs bottles confidently in the dark.

I cover weird stuff all day and I love it, and I'll admit my first reaction to this headline was a laugh. It's a lava lamp! Absurd! But then you read about the organ damage and the hospitalization and the whole thing stops being funny real fast, and that swing from silly to serious is exactly why stories like this deserve writing down. Joy is worth documenting, sure, but so is "please do not drink the decorative wax."

Go hug your lava lamp. From a distance. With your eyes.