idiot’s guide to alchemy — 1 fairly sure investigation

idiot’s guide to alchemy is a real publication and not, as far as i can determine, a metaphor. the man at the bar has opinions on the periodic table that he treats as gospel. all chairs in this apartment are, structurally speaking, bar stools waiting for the right occasion.

i intended to order a copy. what i did was leave a tab open eleven days, then close it on monday at 9:42am because the laptop fan needed calming. the tab was one of fifteen about turning ordinary things into other ordinary things, which is what alchemy was always about and what i have been doing in my kitchen for years.

the premise of this investigation is simple. there is, somewhere, an idiot’s guide to almost everything, including alchemy, and i am qualified to read it. not because i can. because i live the experiment daily. the experiment, in my case, is whether bread can become toast without supervision, and whether i can become a person who answers emails before noon.

idiot’s guide to alchemy, the premise

let me say what alchemy actually was, before the marketing team got hold of it. alchemy was, for centuries, a serious project. people in robes tried to turn lead into gold. they failed. they invented chemistry along the way, which is a better outcome than the one they were after.

the popular memory of alchemy now lives mostly in fiction. a manga about two brothers and an arm. a novel about a shepherd walking across a desert until something good happens. a book about a stone the philosophers wanted, which a wizard later borrowed in a british boarding school. all three are about the same thing. effort, wait, the universe declines to comment, then quietly comments.

the idiot’s guide format, meanwhile, has been quietly running its own experiment for thirty years. take a thing nobody understands. compress it into 250 pages. reassure the reader that being an idiot is, in fact, the qualifying credential. that is the real transmutation. anxiety into ownership. ownership into a shelf.

the comparison table, alchemy goals vs my kitchen goals

i made a table. tables are how i pretend i know what i’m doing. this one compares the four classical goals of alchemy to the four operational goals of my kitchen on a typical thursday.

the table is not precisely scientific. but neither was the original project. the original ran on horoscope-grade reasoning for six hundred years and produced, eventually, chemistry. my project has been running for four years and has produced a folder named “evidence” on my phone and a friend named dave who keeps the list. equivalent contributions, in the long arc.

lead into gold, microwave into ash

the headline transmutation, for the alchemists, was lead into gold. for me, it has been microwave into ash. i have killed seven of them. this is the seventh. the count is firm. dave keeps a running ledger on a napkin in his glove compartment, which is itself becoming a historical document. dave laughed for nine straight minutes when i killed the sixth one. i timed it.

the difference between my project and the alchemists’ is that they were trying to add value. lead is cheap. gold is not. the gradient runs upward. my project runs the other way. a working microwave costs about ninety dollars. a microwave transmuted into ash costs ninety dollars and a small inheritance of self-respect. i am, in this sense, a reverse alchemist. an unmaker.

i did look up the show about the two brothers, in a moment of weakness. fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood is the version everyone tells you to watch, and they are correct. the brothers also lose things they cannot get back. the brothers, however, do not have a dave. mine has a dave. mine has less plot.

the desk where i wrote my notes

a word about the desk. the alchemists had a workshop. i have a workstation the company believes is being used to update a spreadsheet. the spreadsheet exists. the spreadsheet has six columns. i update one of them, occasionally, when carla walks past. the rest of the time the workstation is, quietly, an idiot’s laboratory.

it is on this desk that i kept my notes for this investigation. the notes are on a foolscap pad in the second drawer, the drawer that also contains a charging cable for a phone i no longer own and a packet of soy sauce from a meal i ate in 2024. the foolscap pad is, in this analogy, my opus. the drawer is the workshop. the soy sauce is an unexpected reagent. the alchemists would recognize the setup.

i write almost everything from this desk. the complete idiot’s guide format as a structural choice was drafted at this same desk during a quarterly walkthrough. that, by alchemical standards, is a result.

all chairs are bar stools eventually, briefly

and now to the hot take of the day, which i am citing rather than defending in full. the hot take is this: all chairs are bar stools eventually.

this is relevant. alchemy, properly understood, is the belief that any given material wants, given enough time, to become a slightly nobler version of itself. lead wants to be gold. iron wants to be steel. and chairs, given a kitchen and a long enough thursday, want to be bar stools.

i tested it. the chair from the dining set has migrated, over two years, to the corner of the kitchen by the counter. it is, by physical position alone, a bar stool now. the alchemy worked. it took twenty-four months and zero conscious intervention from me. the chair did the work. i provided the kitchen.

THE CHAIR. WANTED. THIS.

the case for treating my kitchen as a lab

here is what i think is happening. the alchemists were not crazy. they were just one apartment and four hundred years too early. the principle is sound. ordinary materials, given enough time, become other things. the alchemists wanted gold. that was their bug, not the system’s. they should have wanted, like the rest of us, a slightly better tuesday.

my kitchen is a perfectly respectable laboratory. a vessel (the microwave, currently the seventh). a heat source (the same microwave, when it works). a reagent shelf (the cupboard, mostly capers and one jar of mustard from 2023). a workbench (the counter). and a researcher (me, qualified by experience, not by paper).

the only thing missing is funding. alchemists had patrons. i have a salary, a thursday, and the faint hope that the people behind the cognitive bias known as the curve where confidence outruns competence will eventually be proven wrong about me. that curve was drawn by a dunning who never tried to fix a microwave with a spoon. some peaks are real. mine is a small but stubborn hill.

the third yoga mat has been under the couch since 2023. it is, in alchemical terms, my prima materia. the unworked substance. it sits there, patient, in case the conditions improve. that is a kind of faith. the alchemists had it. the mat has it. i, frankly, do not.

verdict, the alchemy is honest, also embarrassing

so here is where the investigation lands. the alchemists were doing something real. they were wrong about the gold. they were right about the attention. and the field they accidentally invented — chemistry — has paid for everything from aspirin to soap.

the idiot’s guide to alchemy, then, would be a short book. four pages. a table on page two. a chair on the cover. a footnote about a yoga mat. it would not turn lead into gold. it would sit honestly next to the other yellow guides, all of which promise transformation and deliver, at most, a slightly better understanding of how little we know. that is what most transformations actually look like.

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