Ever since my friend Lucy has gone all green thumb with an amazing garden (and since partnering up with several people in SWMO to create our very own Slow Food chapter), I’ve been getting a little crazy in my own kitchen.

One of my favorite experiments lately involves Raw Milk. Lucy told me how to skim off the cream and whip it into butter, and then so smartly explained that the milk left at the bottom is buttermilk. Duh, right? So that will be used for the fried green tomatoes that will sadly finish off the last of the veggies left from summer.

I have to say, I’ve had a lot of fun baking bread, making butter, and simmering fresh vegetables into soup stocks and tomato sauce over the past few weeks. It’s kind of nice to be able to make so much from scratch and feel like I’m escaping the preservatives and hormones that are in most of our food. Thanks for all of the inspiration, Lucy!

As January 16 rolls closer and closer, my excitement for the movie My Bloody Valentine 3-D continues to grow. Sure, I like my share of horror movies, but honestly, the biggest reason that I’m excited about this movie is because my friend Zach might not only have his arm show up as the TV news camera man, but because he also officially has his very own IMDB page thanks to this movie, another horror movie, a zombie movie, and some random show for young Hasidic Jews. So I’m going to see it to support Zach.

But naturally, my desire to post what I like to pretend are witty messages to Zach on Facebook led me to randomly roam around IMDB to see what our mutual friend Sydney was up to these days. When we lived in New Bern, NC, the normal group of us had headed out to Captain Ratty’s one night, and we couldn’t help but notice the loud man who was wearing flip flops, spandex pants, a t-shirt, two pairs of glasses and a fanny pack.

Over the course of the next couple of years, we all got to know Sydney pretty well. He would introduce himself as Sydney Jackson Bartholomew Jr. He was a production designer in Hollywood, and he had worked on the Farrelly Brothers movies. The dog car from Dumb and Dumber? Yeah, he designed it. That Emmy he won for Pee Wee’s Playhouse? He was using it as a doorstop in his house. He was only in New Bern for a short amount of time, trying to win a lawsuit against the hospital after his mom died. And though his stories were absolutely crazy and seemingly unbelievable, if you met the guy, you’d literally be blown away by the things he was saying.

Sydney was by far one of the most talented people any of us had ever met. He was so creative that he was, well, crazy. He was eccentric to the point that he sometimes wouldn’t leave his room for months at a time. We saw him get thrown out of bars. I saw him “joking” about throwing somebody off of a roof. He got beat up with a lead pipe one time. He would purposely yell things about Zach, saying he’d “never work with a Jew” just to see how Zach would take it. On his way to Los Angeles once, my friend Chris called him, and he was eating dinner with the mayor of Memphis. He was weird. He was wonderful. And he helped me understand like  noone else could some of the things I had experienced with my father. He truly was an incredible guy.

Before he left New Bern to go work on The Heartbreak Kid, Sydney handed me a screenplay he had written and asked me to turn it into a novel for him. He said he figured novels could sell easier than screenplays, which I laughed about at the time. Who reads anymore? But he made me promise, and I did.

Sadly, Sydney died at the age of 52 in June of 2008, and somehow, none of us knew, yet none of us were really surprised, either. That’s why I’m thinking it’s time I fulfill my promise. Seriously, guys, make me do this for Sydney. Kick my butt, please. Just make sure I get it done. I’d appreciate it.