Diary of a Mad Scientist

Having a high Internet presence makes for some fun ‘accidents’ in reconnecting with the many people I know around the country. I’ve had tons of AWESOME ‘hi from your long lost friend’ sorts of emails, just because they’ve run into my book page by accident.

so here’s a few:

1… Last month I was ecstatically reading a new cookbook called ‘Wild Fermentation’ by Sandor Katz, which is all about fermented foods like sauerkraut, miso, sourdough, tamari, beer, wine, and other goodness , which brought back some memories. About 8 years ago I was standing around a kitchen in Asheville with Kerb and Jason, getting giddy and drunk on homebrewed sake that Jason had brewed 30 gallons of. I was surreptitiously making eyes at Jason, whom I’d just discovered, trying not to be rude to Kerb in the process. Cooking turned out to be a safe topic. We’d all just met and figured out that the three of us all made bread and beer and other cultured and fermented things, and Jason said, man, it’s so rare to see that many fermentation experts in one room- we should do a cookbook!

Our cookbook never happened, though my biodiesel cookbook happened instead. And the next few years in our scene in Asheville saw lots more sake, sourdough, malted grain syrup, amazake, yogurt, goat cheese, tempeh, wine, kimchee, and hundreds of gallons of homebrew beer.

I recently saw Jason when I was doing the Tour De Ex-Boyfriends in the Northwest this fall- visiting people from my very distant past- and we got to talking about the fermented foods fetishes. And the cookbook idea came up in conversation. We should do a cookbook… yeah, I did one- on cooking up fuel… funny thing.

I continued on to Portland. Portland is heavenly for it has a cookbook store. There at the cookbook store… was something new, Wild Fermentations. Someone had done “our” cookbook finally. I grabbed it off the shelf, took a look at the table of contents, and hauled it home without reading more.

Finally got around to reading it- it was actually ‘a read’, not just a dry listing of recipes, but a story- and recognized some names. It turned out to be written by someone I’ve met, from the Tennessee queer intentional community Short Mountain Sanctuary. I remembered then that at all the eco- street theater* events I went to in the mountain South 7 or 8 years ago (*throwing rotten tomatoes at Klansmen at a KKK rally, anyone? fun for the whole family!), we’d always run into the Faeries from Short Mountain, who’d be late to the event, riotously funny, and armed with giant jars of sauerkraut to share with us.

I spent a couple of weeks raving about the book to anyone who would listen, and was planning to write a fan letter to the author. One night in the midst of this, I was sitting around in Tom’s kitchen with the book on the table next to my laptop, and a huge jar of gorgeous red cabbage/beet kimchee* (*kimchee is sorta like kraut but spicy) culturing away on the counter next to me. I checked email, and there was an order for my own biodiesel book. And it happened to be from the author of the Fermentation book I’d been raving about…

2. It got me thinking about another friend with whom I’d gone to visit one of the rural Tennessee queer intentional communities for a party sometime around Y2K. She lived in Georgia and I was thinking about Georgia cause I’m headed there for a class… I haven’t been in touch with her since then but there were some great memories of cooking up a storm at the awesome Faerie party.

well, yesterday I opened up email for a moment and there was one of those ‘hi from your long lost friend’ kind of emails- and it happened to be from that same lady from Georgia. She’d found me because of stumbling onto the book link online, though it wasn’t at all related to my upcoming Georgia class.

3. It’s not always sweetness and light.

One day last spring, I checked the book orders emails, and got someone’s name stuck in my head a bit. I headed out for the Mercey Hot Springs biofuels weekend, and walked around all weekend with a little black cloud brewing over me- because of this name that kept running through my head. No, it’s not him, I thought, the first name’s wrong, it must be common enough somewhere, why would he be interested in biodiesel, I just imagined seeing that name.

I got home and started filling orders- and the book was indeed going to a name I recognized. I got on Google. Started looking up NYS Department of Corrections. Had trouble finding anything current. Found a transcript of a court appeal hearing. Could he be working for the Department of Corrections as part of parole? Finally did a reverse lookup on the address- yes, prison.

The guy who’d ordered my book was the killer of a friend of mine in NY. The manslaughter trial happened several years after the killing. One of the charges was something like ‘aggravated manslaughter with depraved indifference to human life’, which very much describes the defendant’s attitude around the time. I"d moved out West by then, and I flew back to sit in the courtroom and support my friend’s family during the trial, and it was one of the most intense, conflicting, enraging things to experience- again. And now, with the book order coming in, I went through it- again. I was at the Foothills job at the time, with no one around to talk to about it. I got on the email to Dana Linscott and Graydon and a few other people whom I barely know, and bawled my eyes out in 2-dimensional email.

needless to say I canceled the sale.

Mark