[Bouncingsoul1]

"and looking for non-existent fossils, which I found. I eventually saw petrified sea creatures everywhere and stopped going to work, or answering my phone, paying bills, etc. Things ended predictably, in horrible slow motion." => I think he just interpreted "normal" patterns in stone as fossils

[Alex3917]

To be fair, it's pretty easy to find fossils of sea creatures if you look in road cuts that go through sedimentary rock. It's not some rare phenomenon that only occurs in a few places in the world, it just takes a few minutes of Googling and then looking around on Google Maps.