Write

err, right - I mean, rite, dig?

Being a writer has some advantages. Sometimes you find yourself in polite society, and your talking out about retirement plans or something, when all of a sudden, you're talking off on a tangent about the smog monster, that's hovering over the basin absorbing people's hemoglobin - and that leads you go off about the blood-curdling human sacrificial rites of the Mayans, and describing in gory detail, their method of slicing open a victim's chest with an obsidian knife, and taking their gory, blood-slick and still beating heart out of their body and holding it up for their strange and psychopathically named gods.

Whereupon, you then realize, most people don't really talk about these kinds of things, and people around the copy machine are looking at you with dazed, and dropped-jaw looks. You know from experience, in mere seconds, they are forever going to regard you as a deranged weirdo who may be a practitioner of Satanic (at best) or Cannibalistic (which - as
we all know, can get really really fucked up.) rituals when you're not at work, and should by no means be trusted ever again.

Which is exactly the right moment to mention something along the lines of, "The reason I mention this is that I'm doing some research for a piece I'm working on. I'm a writer." It's kind of like a "get out of jail free" card. Nobody will question whatever crazy fucked up crap
you're into, as long as you preface it with "It research for a book I'm working on."

Even if you're not a writer, it's a handy trick. Try it sometime.