“A case of reinvention through preservation.” Sullivan’s friend leaves the celebrity world to go back to his roots to work in canning:

These days when you say someone becomes “obsessed” with something it usually means they spent four hours reading about it on the Internet last night, but it seems accurate to say that Kevin became obsessed with preserves. It gradually became not the only thing he talked about, but the thing you could tell he was always thinking about. He started making cross-country trips to track down fruits that supposedly “put up” well. He tried to preserve things he’d never seen preserved, stuff that would have made his grandmother have to lie down and fan herself. He sent me a picture of a Buddha’s hand citron one time. It was an unearthly yellow and looked like a squid. If one of the ghosts in Pac-Man had been bright yellow and was preserved in a specimen jar, where it got all distended over time, it would have looked like this thing. “Found this last night at the Altadena farmer’s market,” he wrote. “My first thought was, I wanna get that, I wanna preserve it.”