May 5th – 1:00 PM

What am I doing?

That’s the third time I’ve asked myself that question – third bump I’ve hit, third time my heart’s nearly stopped dead at the thought of spilling this stupid canister out the back of this Home Depot rental truck.

“We can’t put that in a car”, he says.

Everything was going perfect – give him a Visa card, tell him I don’t mind the $500 deposit, I survive the blue-collar terrorist-check staredown, and control the conversation. He didn’t ask why I wanted it. He didn’t ask. I don’t have to tell him.

I don’t have to tell him that I need ten liters of liquid nitrogen because I’m making ice cream.

Because if he ever knew that was the real reason I walked into a professional welding gas supply company, pulled right up like I knew what I was doing, and asked for liquid nitrogen – supercooled, life-threatening, maddeningly dangerous gas, he’d laugh at me until I shriveled up and died.

And he probably wouldn’t give me the liquid nitrogen, either.

Liquid Nitrogen?

Yeah, nitrogen. Cooled down to -320 degrees fahrenheit, it becomes a liquid, and subsequently the stuff of scientific legend. You can do anything with liquid nitrogen. It shatters flowers like glass. It beads up and skids along the floor endlessly like little hovercrafts. It makes huge clouds of Ridley Scott fog. It scares people if you drop it near their feet. If you have a lot of it, you can shatter Jason Patrick into a thousand pieces (but that’s been done before).

It even makes ice cream. In five minutes of pouring and stirring, some milk, eggs, sugar, and salt becomes a gallon and a half of ice cream. Ice cream in three-hundred seconds.

And once you’ve seen it done, you have to do it yourself. Nobody can stop you, nobody will ever convince you that it’s dumb, dangerous, or petty.

You just get the liquid nitrogen and all the ingredients and you don’t tell anyone why, especially not the guy at the company that sells you the nitrogen. You don’t tell him. You just let him load the dewar – that’s what they call the canister – on a little hand truck, and bring it outside.

But then he carts it outside, sees the car, smirks, and pops the policy pill. Can’t put it in a car.

“If ya get into an accident”, he says, “It’ll spill all over you, and -”

And he doesn’t finish his sentence because life gets kind of random in a closed vehicle with ten liters of spilled supercooled gas all over you, bleeding into your lungs and skin and expanding to about 7,000 liters of gas in a 3,000 liter cabin.

You could go all sorts of directions with an “and” when you’re suffocating and frozen and parts are blue and falling off like a leperous smurf and -

He just doesn’t go there. He just stops at “and”. And then he turns the little hand truck around and the liquid nitrogen – my liquid nitrogen – was gone.

Well. Time to go to Plan B.

B is For Bad Idea

Need a truck. Where do I get a truck?

“One hour,” I tell him, real slick-like.

I’m filling out forms and talking tie-downs at the Home Depot. Someone’s trying to fix a diamond-carbide-tipped whatchamacalit and I realize I’m really bad at this “doing things that involve things” thing. I don’t even know how to use these stupid ratchet tie-downs they give me, but they trust that beautiful gold Visa card and dangle a key ring in front of me.

The truck is orange, slapped with blatant Home Depot logos on every available square inch, and there’s no way to hide what I am – a guy without his own truck, without any legitimate reason to have liquid nitrogen, and no idea what he’s doing.

Screw it, I already paid the money. Let’s go get my nitrogen.

Half an hour later, I’m back at the gas company and my dewar is tied down in the back of my rental truck. Nobody says a word about the truck. They just hand off the gas and get far away from me. I ratchet, tie, and twist, and eventually, I think I have it.

I tense the dewar, push it, try to see if it’ll fall over when I’m driving, and spill minus-three-hundred-degree liquid nitrogen all over the back of the truck, the road, other cars – I see the truck cracking in half, I see windshields shattering, cars skidding on newly-iced pavement, somehow ripping a hole in the space-time continuum, wondering what the repair bill on that would look like…

No More And Then

Alright, so the short story is, I made it home, and whipped up a tasty batch of ice cream for my friends at this year’s Cinco De Mayo party. You want to see the video? It’s fun and instructional, too!

There’s also photos from the party, here.