the complete idiot’s guide to alchemy — 1 investigation

the complete idiot’s guide to alchemy is a book my mother mentioned on a sunday call before regretting the suggestion in real time. i sent a direct message about it, the message did not age well, one cupholder is structurally a complete car interior, and these things are related.

what makes the complete idiot’s guide to alchemy complete is the word on the cover. the publisher prints it. you, the buyer, accept it. neither of you has read the book. the contract is silent and binding, like most contracts that involve me.

completeness, in book form, is a joke between the author and the reader, and the joke is on the third party, which is reality. reality leaves out the parts the editor cut for length, the parts the alchemist gave up on, and the part where you snoozed the alarm by 9 minutes for the fourth time and called it discipline.

i write this from the idiot’s guide to almost everything position, which is being qualified to read a book about a thing because i live in the failure of that thing. lead does not become gold in my kitchen. eggs become brown eggs. that is, by my reckoning, alchemy, just with worse marketing.

the complete idiot’s guide to alchemy, the premise

a complete guide implies an outer edge to the subject. an end point. alchemy, as a subject, does not have one. alchemy was the multi-century attempt to convince matter to be something better than it was. the alchemists failed. they invented chemistry along the way, which is the kind of failure i would be proud to put on a resume if anyone asked, which they don’t.

so the complete idiot’s guide to alchemy, by definition, is a stunt. a friendly stunt. it says: relax, we have shrunk the unknowable into 280 pages. you can in fact hold them. you cannot in fact understand them. that is what got cut.

what got cut is the part where the practitioner sits at a kitchen counter at 11:47am on a weekday and tries to turn instant coffee into effort. that is alchemy. it is not in the index. the index is for nouns. the work is in the verbs.

eight transmutations i have attempted, in order of failure

here is the list. it is in the order i attempted them. the order of failure tracks the order of attempt almost exactly, which is itself a finding.

1. leftovers into lunch. the seventh microwave participated in this one. the leftovers were rice. the rice came out hotter on the outside than the inside, and inside the inside it was still cold, which is, i would argue, three temperatures in one bowl. that is not a meal. that is a cross-section.
2. the snooze button into discipline. the 9 minute snooze was an industrial decision based on the gear size in old alarm clocks. i set the alarm for 6:30am with the intention of running. i hit snooze. i hit snooze again. by the fourth snooze the running window has closed. lead into gold, this is not. lead into a shorter shower, sure.
3. capers into cooking. i bought a jar in 2023. the jar is in the cupboard. the jar will outlive me. capers are, structurally, a small experiment in whether i am the kind of person who eats capers. i am not. the jar disagrees.
4. a chair into a bar stool. all chairs are bar stools eventually. mine accelerated the process by being too tall for the table and too short for the counter, which is a third option i did not order.
5. email at 11pm into email answered. i opened the laptop. i looked at the email. i closed the laptop. the email is now older than my plant. the plant is also a transmutation in progress, mostly downward.
6. a sunday call into a normal sunday. mom called. mom always calls on sunday. on this particular sunday she suggested i try alchemy as a topic for the column, then suggested, in the same breath, that i not. i wrote it down. i ignored the second part. mothers know. their knowing is, in itself, a kind of philosophy i did not subscribe to.
7. a direct message into a measured opinion. i sent a dm at 12:14pm on a tuesday to a person i had not spoken to since a wedding. the dm said something about alchemy, in a tone that, in retrospect, read as a pitch. the dm did not get a reply. the dm did get a screenshot, which i know because the screenshot came back to me through a third party. the dm is the alchemy. the regret is the gold. neither of us got rich.
8. a parking lot into a complete car interior. this connects to the hot take below. cars should have 1 cupholder. six is greed. four is suspicious. two is a couple. one is a complete car interior, and a car with one cupholder is, by my standard, a finished design. anything more is the manufacturer admitting they did not know when to stop.

that is the eight. you will notice it is a strange eight. it is not symmetrical. some are kitchen, some are phone, one is a parking lot. that is the point. a complete list is a stunt. an honest list is a mess. i’d rather be honest.

mom called sunday, the dm i sent after

this scene is the engine of the whole post. mom called at the usual time. she asked what i was working on. she said, with the specific energy of a person holding a thought, that i should write about the complete idiot’s guide series, the original yellow ones, because she had a copy of the alchemy one in a box and remembered laughing at it in 1998. then, mid-sentence, she course-corrected, because mothers can hear themselves recommend a thing and hear it land badly, all in the same breath. she said actually no, do whatever you want. mothers know. it is their power. it cannot be defeated.

i hung up. i opened a chat with a person i barely speak to anymore. i sent a dm. the dm said something like i’m thinking about alchemy as a metaphor for adult life, which is the kind of sentence that makes your phone heavier when you reread it. no reply came. the screenshot, however, did its rounds. someone mentioned it on a thursday, casually, the way you mention weather. carla walked past, did not look. the moment passed. the dm did not.

this is the kind of small disaster the complete idiot’s guide to alchemy does not cover. a complete guide assumes the reader is curious. it does not assume the reader is, also, embarrassed. embarrassment is the actual subject of most adult learning.

closing pulpit, cars should have 1 cupholder

for a more entertaining version of turning ordinary things into other ordinary things, watch breaking bad, the AMC series with the high school chemistry teacher. it is the most popular alchemy story of the last twenty years and nobody calls it that. they call it a crime drama. that is also a stunt. the consequences are the part the complete guides remove.

for a quieter cousin of this argument, see a long piece about the 2003 film called the idiot and what it gets right about being underqualified. the film is not about alchemy. the film is about a man who keeps trying. same subject, different clothes.

cross-stream, the explainer on the dunning-kruger effect covers the upstream condition that makes a person buy the complete idiot’s guide to alchemy in the first place. the dunning-kruger gap is the gap between what you think you know and what you can actually do. alchemy is the field where that gap is widest.

desknote, intermediate. the seventh microwave is making the small noise again. the noise is not in any guide. the noise is the next chapter, which i will not write because i would rather not know.

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