Like many of you, I’m thinking about why Anthony Bourdain’s suicide has hit me. Celebrity deaths—even the deaths of celebrities I love or admire—don’t usually affect me much. But Bourdain has and I think I know why. Part of it is that suicides have affected my life. Four of my friends have committed suicide over the years and a couple of others have tried. It brings all of that up.
But it’s also that his way of being in the world resonated with me. I’m not a foodie. I’m not a big traveller. But I’m a hopeless engager because I feel that by engaging people in those things I love again and again will somehow prevent that most noble of sufferings, loneliness.
Like Bourdain, I’m constantly curious, outgoing, full of energy, generally friendly, but also often cured in my own darkness. I loved watching Bourdain’s Parts Unknown not just because of the places and the people. Those were great…the Palestinian women racing cars, the Mexican journalists living in danger, the old trains in Myanmar, and the absurd (non)fishing dive in Italy. But it was much more his struggle to be good in the world. He was a big lost boy, a guy on vacation fucking himself up with booze but doing well and right to make us more compassionate and knowledgable, a guy ceaselessly pushing himself in a way that serves, embracing his follies and foibles but always, under the surface, a man wrestling mightily with his own shadows. These are things I know all too well and it gave me heart to see a man who, like Henry Rollins (another of man of my heart), spoke to me because he knew me.
I’ll miss you Anthony. You did us good.
And I’ll nod to Henry Rollins too.
Peter Walks for Democracy 