Bourdain

For what it's worth, my pebble on the cairn.

I didn’t know him any more than the countless others gathered around the TV on Sunday nights to watch him digest (both figuratively and literally) some culture unknown to us. Even and especially those cultures we didn’t know we didn’t know about, those that existed all this time just up the road or down the subway from us in secret symbiosis. Over the past couple years, I’ve been driven to travel more, see more, consume more, experience more of the world around me, even as it keeps changing in my mind’s mouth as I struggle, pleasurably to get it all down and lick the bowl clean. I’ve arrived at it late, but not too late. So for me Anthony Bourdain serves as not patron saint but rather as the most recently ordained saint in the pantheon of urban exploration, still more human than legend and therefor accessible for those like me, just now discovering discovery in a new way – for we who consult Roadside America and google “America’s Strangest Festivals” as often or in lieu of Fodor’s and other more traditional travel resources. We took notes from him on what to see, what to listen to and where to steer clear of, what parts of which animals you can simmer in a stew and which other parts will send you running for “the thunder bucket.” I didn’t know him personally, but he meant something personal to me, an opening through which to could crawl and begin to map out hidden worlds, and I am saddened that he’s gone off explore those parts unknown where we, the audience, can’t join from the comfy couches of our air conditioned homes. Irony intended. Did that contribute somehow to his departure, the weight of all our faceless, hungry eyeballs and the despair of a once master chef who’s been reduced to performing a single trick ad absurdum: tossing any and all ingredients at hand into the endless maw of some marginally-conscious child who knows only the word “more!” I suspect it was otherwise, but still I’ll take it as a reminder of the human cost along the path from field to fork to film. And, perhaps, as a reminder that the living room couch is great for entertainment and for research - the first stop en route to the first jumping off point, but not to be mistaken for the journey itself.