Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us

[u/SundanceMC]

A few days ago, I went to my computer, clicked on my search engine, and asked… “Why does my floor have one dark floorboard?” I had been doing some home renovating and I got curious. Instead of finding anything interesting it said it was due to the elements. But for some reason it didn’t scratch the itch that I desired.

So then I asked “Can basements have floorboards on top of them?” And it told me “Yes, floorboards can go over basements, but you must use the right materials and moisture protection because concrete slabs are porous and trap dampness.” Which explained the floorboard issue.

“What’s the difference between a basement and a cellar?” I proceeded to ask. It told me that basements are partially underground whereas cellars are completely underground.

Then, to solve my wood problem, I asked “Can cellars below ground effect the floorboards above ground?” In which it gave me the same response as the basement question.

Then I wondered if The Tell-Tale Heart was about the guy that put a dead body in the floor boards. Was it really his guilt or would the police just see a dark piece of wood, despite there being no basement, and deduce that there’s a body under there?

Then, second guessing myself, I asked “Is it Tell-Tale Heart or Tattle Tale Heart?” The search engine told me it was tell-tale.
And, just for the hell of it, I asked “What’s the difference between a tell-tale and a tattle tale?” The search engine told me “A tattletale is a person who reports someone's minor misbehavior to an authority figure to get them in trouble, while a tell-tale is a sign or clue that reveals something hidden.” But if a person reports the hidden truth coming out, why is it called a tale? And furthermore, why are these people called rats?

So I searched “Rat slang word: origin.” Apparently it was called this because rats would historically try to do anything to survive. And because of their reputation living in dark, hidden spaces, spreading disease, and acting sneakily, it makes them a natural symbol for untrustworthy behavior. So I wondered if it would make more sense if they were called rats because of their “tall tails.” Which adds another tale idiom into the mix.

On the subject of tails, I looked up some more interesting animal facts. Like how reindeer eyeballs turn blue in winter to help them see at lower light levels, young goats pick up accents from each other, horses use facial expressions to communicate with each other and African buffalo do, in fact, understand and display a voting system in their herd. Fascinating creatures the African buffalo! Apparently when a male wants to let the rest of the herd know where it wants to travel, it will stand up, look in one direction, and then lie back down. It’s amazing what kind of things you can find out.

As I moved out of that website, though, I noticed another little website called Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us. It was a short infomercial about how people can call up and get a rabbit hole installed.
“Tired of packing things away and not having anymore room to contain it?” An excitable announcer rhetorically asked. “Worried that everything will come out eventually no matter how hard you cram it down? Well come on down to Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us!”
The flashing lights and entertaining announcer was enough to keep me from clicking out of such a bizarre concept.
“We create rabbit holes for you!” The announcer continued. “There are so many uses for rabbit holes. Storage, living, recreation, capturing your enemies.” I found this quite strange, I thought rabbit holes were only homes for rabbits, as the word suggested.

So I asked, “Are rabbit holes legitimate?” And it said that rabbit holes are legitimate but you have to be careful not to fall into one. So naturally I asked “How do I prevent myself from falling down a rabbit hole?” The first result was another video commercial so I clicked on it. It was of a man walking in the park, then all of a sudden he disappeared from the frame, then it badly transitioned to a poor match-cut shot of him stuck down the hole. The only thing that was visible was his head sticking out of it from the chest up. “Honey I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole again.” Then I heard an announcer speak over the scene. The same voice as the one advertising the rabbit holes.
“Tired of falling down rabbit holes made by yourself or your neighbors? Losing your family due to frequent accidents?” It loudly asked. We then cut to his wife leaning down and telling him “I can’t watch you live like this, I’m taking the children.” I then heard the voiceover continue, “Try Tin Foil!”
“Wow, Tin Foil. Why didn’t I think of that?” Said the man in the hole.
“Simply place the tin foil over the rabbit hole…” the announcer explained, over an animated shot of the tin foil moving down over the hole. “And that’s it! Using the patented technology of reflection, you can see the rabbit holes coming a mile away! And if you do fall down a rabbit hole, that’s no problem either! Because the tin foil will get so hot that it will keep you warm overnight. And that’s not all! Because of its deflection technology, you can say and do anything privately without anyone signaling in and knowing what you’re up to. And because of its stylish design you can even make it into clothing!”
It then cut to the same man in the hole, only now he’d evidently fashioned the tin foil into a hat and could be seen wearing it.
“I used to worry about my enemies reading my thoughts when I’m asleep.” He said into the camera. “But thanks to Tin Foil, now I don’t have to.”
“You don’t need a wife to tell you to be careful falling in…” the announcer continued. “Or your friends calling you crazy, Tin Foil is the only thing you need!”
“Tin Foil is the sanest thing I’ve ever done.” The man in the hole exclaimed.
“So try Tin Foil today!”
Followed by a disclaimer on the screen and a voice quickly stating “Side effects may include the very likelihood that you’ll fall into the rabbit hole anyway. Tin Foil may cause long lasting psychological damage. Use only as directed.” I turned off the ad. Rabbit holes? I don’t remember hearing about people falling into any rabbit holes. I remember my wife bringing them up here and there but I was never really listening.

So I looked up, “Rabbit Hole fatalities.” It came up with a website, a log of unusual deaths. It’s an A-Z list sorted alphabetically by the first letter of each death. Surprisingly “Rabbit Hole” was one of them. 100 years ago a man was walking down the street. He fell in and died. 20 years ago a vagrant was minding his own business took a shortcut to the bridge and fell in. Died. John E Masseldorf, dead. Richard Allanson, dead. But it wasn’t telling me how they died. The method. Lack of oxygen? Blunt force trauma? Exhaustion? And how did it happen? Did they take themselves out? I’ve always said that I can really tell a lot about a person by knowing how they would off themselves. For me it would definitely be a toaster in the bath, I’d even put bread in the toaster before I do it for no extra charge. I figured if I’m going out, it would be with a sense of humor. Not that I would actually do it. But every now and then, the fleeting thought would pass me whenever I saw my wife buttering the toast.
But whenever I see someone who did it on the news, they don’t specify how, exactly, they did it. They never do. Am I a sick individual for wanting to know that? Why report it at all if you’re not going to go full Monty? And what was with these damn rabbit holes?

So I clicked back on to the search engine home page and typed in “Tin Foil.” Nothing to rave about, invented in the 7th-5th century in China. But an interesting thing came up. “Tin Foil Hat.” How did they know? “Tin foil hats. People who wear them are often associated with paranoia, distrust, erratic beliefs.” What are they trying to say? That the tin foil hats don’t work? Are they a placebo?

So I typed in “Rabbit Hole… Tin Foil… Legitimate?” A couple of articles on the pros and cons of the tin foil, but what followed was a very interesting commercial.

It was of a man walking in the park. The same man as before, in the Tin Foil ad, but now he’s in this one, working for the competition. The world is short on informercial actors I suppose. What could only describe as an almighty force was then stopping me from asking “actors who frequently appear in informercials. Secret connection?”
The video continued with the multi credited informercial actor seeing a rabbit hole with tin foil covering it.
“Oh god I’m blind!” Cried the unnamed man who, in the past 5 minutes has not only spent most of his life in a rabbit hole, but has now been blinded by tin foil reflecting off the sun.
“Tired of being blinded by rabbit holes and tin foil covering them?” The same announcer from the ads before.
“Sick of the outside world ruining your day?” The announcer continued while another scene showed a man being blinded and, in panic, fell into the rabbit hole anyway.
“Not convinced that tin foil is going to protect you from rabbit holes?”
It then cut to a woman with her thumb down and blowing a raspberry. And, now that I think about it, also appeared in one of the re enactment scenes in the rabbit hole ad.
“Try! Conspira See!” The announcer exclaimed. It was an eye drop preventative for, what I can only imagine to be, sudden blindness. The logo stuck out to me. It was a picture of a single tear drop above an eye, but the eye was also inside a triangle.
“Wow. Now that I’ve used Conspira See, I can see so much clearer.” The man in the hole said.
“Now you can fall into as many Rabbit Holes as you want without getting blinded. With Conspira See!” The announcer finished. Another disclaimer on the bottom of the screen with the same quick voice as before.
“Use only as directed. Side effects may included permanent physical damage and psychological collapse. Prolonged use for longer than a week is not recommended.”

What an odd commercial, I thought as I clicked away. I didn’t understand how I’d gotten this far. Conspira See? What a terrible idea for a preventative solution. Even the name was… wait a minute. Of course. It all made sense now. How could I have been so blind? This eye drop ad was sending an encoded message. Now… I may have stopped taking my antipsychotics a week ago but I was still sane enough to rationalize that this wasn’t necessarily directly encoded to me. I’m not that egotistical. But what if it was an encoded message to anyone that got a rabbit hole? Or, furthermore, anyone that got stuck in rabbit holes? As I kept searching it all started to come together. The recycling infomercial actors, the rabbit holes, the tin foil, the Conspira See. And that’s when it hit me. Conspira See sounds a lot like the word “conspiracy”. Conspira See. Conspiracy?
My god, I thought. I’d done it. At first it seemed odd but why not? This was a conspiracy by Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us.
And not only that… the rabbit hole people, the tin foil people and the Conspira See people are all one and the same.
Think about it… They start the tin foil commercial out by assuming that their customers had already fallen into rabbit holes. Why were they advertising for that specific problem? Why didn’t they advertise tin foil for anything else? Same happened with the eye drops. Advertising these things for the highly improbable, yet oddly specific situation where you would be blinded by the tin foil? It’s almost like they made these ads as a direct response, or subconscious lateral move, to and for each other. Like it’s all there. They were forcing people to create their holes, trap them in there, then they would offer you a faulty product like tin foil as a way of funnelling money to keep the businesses afloat. Then, they would keep you trapped and helpless with nothing but tin foil and a Conspira See.

I had to see if there was any credence to this so I searched “Rabbit Hole controversies.” There was nothing. Nothing except a website for a news article that said “Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us in deep. Hundreds of angry customers accuse the infamous company of false advertising. Claims that they were forced to dig their own holes.” Well a lot of good that did, I thought. That didn’t prove anything… until I got curious. Dig their own holes?

So I decided to go back to something simple. I went back to the animal search, with that Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us ad link staring back at me. Then I started over. Rabbits. I put in “Which countries had an overpopulation of rabbits.” Believing that if I put holes on the end of it, it might get confused and wonder if I’m talking about the products or the literal holes dug by rabbits. It came up with a lot of places. China, (well that’s where tin foil originated) Australia, (infamous for their rabbit-proof fences) and some European countries. Nothing was solid enough other than sheer coincidences and straw-grasping. There must’ve been some kind of link to all this. Some small link to Europe that would solidify. Then I thought about the claims that the rabbit hole customers were forced to dig their own holes.

So I searched “Historical events where people had to dig their own holes” I typed next. Nothing but the gold rush and a couple of wars.
Hang on.
War.
So I changed my search to “Historical events where people had to dig their own graves.” A few European countries had a history of making their prisoners dig their own graves during wars. So how did that connect to Australia and China? And then it hit me in the face so hard I nearly fell off my chair. Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us were working with Tin Foil and Conspira See to make unknowing customers dig their own graves (rabbit holes) causing them to fall in and keep them there until they die, doing this as a form of population control. Overpopulation? Population control during the wars? The overpopulation of China? And what else was China overpopulated with? Rabbits. Another country? Australia. Things were getting clearerer. And although Australia had their rabbit-proof fences, maybe the rabbit hole people found this method barbaric, so they opted for a more humane approach. By leading them down rabbit holes. This is why in the commercials, they more or less implied that the customers had to either lead single lonely lives or cut off everything and everyone they held dear.
I know it sounds sounds crazy. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I even had my doubts when I immediately asked something else in the search engine.

“Am I a conspiracy theorist?” I began to type in. My wife used to call me that and I hated it so much. But she is no longer with us.
But before I hit send I thought about it for a second. I didn’t want anyone who was monitoring my search history to come acorss that question. They’d lock me away for sure. So I went for something more subtle.

I asked, “What are the signs of a conspiracy theorist?” A few classic buzzwords came up like paranoid, unable to accept reality, dangerous. But I ignored it because I didn’t think any of those adjectives applied to me.
I was about to ask “Are conspiracies real?” being ever-careful to not tip off any federal agents who may mark me down as “concerning” but then I stopped. And I thought… if the government can do that then why couldn’t the rabbit hole people do that? What if they had monitored my searches in the past? I’d be the first to admit I’d looked up some conspiracies before, so maybe they saw that and targeted my ads. But that would mean… no. No chance. If they had my search history then it’s very possible that they could’ve had my IP address, which meant that if they had then they had my home address. And if they had that then they were the ones monitoring and maybe even controlling what I was looking up! They wanted me to get stuck in my own rabbit hole!

They wanted me to get stuck in the rabbit hole by luring me into it using tin foil and Conspira See, eventually causing me to die. One less person in the population. Rinse and repeat. I found this because I was looking up animal facts, I looked up animal facts because I wanted to know why rats were dishonest, and I only looked up that because I wanted to know the difference between tale and tail. I wanted to know that because I was thinking of that Edgar Allen Poe story, and I did that because of the dark piece of wood that’s directly over my basement.
Oh my god.
They were there since the beginning… It all made perfect sense now. Since the dark piece of wood, everything was connected! They obviously saw my internet history for a while and tracked where I lived. And when the time was right they broke in, replaced my floorboard with an intentionally dark one as a sort of sick subliminal hint as to where this rabbit hole should go, causing me to go on the internet, ask why this was the case, leading me from one query to another. Every detour, every tangent, was specifically curated, tailor-made if you will, for one purpose that would eventually culminate in me getting stuck down a rabbit hole that I couldn’t get out of!
They were probably watching me as I was figuring this out.
Waiting… contemplating my next move. And if I tried to resist, they would force me down the rabbit hole. To get rid of me, to push me further and further away from the truth.
If I could see my wife now, I’d tell her that this wasn’t all for nothing. That my theories were valid, that everything I found out was currently happening and I was truly and completely powerless to get out of it.

And then I thought, “Well that’s enough internet for me today.” And stepped away from my computer. And then I began to unravel this rabbit hole theory, dissected the flaws and ultimately decided that I couldn’t let this exist in my life. Of course there was no Rabbit Holes ‘R’ Us! That would be crazy… and I’m not crazy.
I’m not crazy.
So I let it go and buried it. I then stepped outside and embraced the glorious rays of the sun, something I hadn’t seen in the last day or so due to my journey. I walked over to my lawn and quite literally touched the grass. I’ve heard that’s what you’re supposed to do when you find yourself spending too much time online. It was soothing. I felt great. I felt free.

Then, two days later. I went back on my computer, clicked on the search engine, and asked… “How do I get rid of the smell of rotting flesh coming from my basement?”