Allegories are alluring because they promise to light up inchoate objects, trace unimagined connections, and resolve ambiguities and paradoxes of human—and more‐than‐human and abiotic—life. At the same time, allegories reveal their own failure to cohere, disintegrating in the excessive polysemia of their heterogeneous fragments. Meth cooking similarly throws into relief the unstable composition of a life. Meth cooking is an aporia: it leads the way out of workaday failures while lapsing back into them.