Bourdain Taught Me

In most episodes of any of Anthony Bourdain’s shows, “Tony” is thrown around with the combination of ease and admiration that lingers behind nicknames, “Anthony” often too formal for friends and fans alike. The way in which old friends and new acquaintances felt such familiarity, an intimacy, intrigue, and friendship that the viewer was privy to, amidst such an unknown, is significant and noticeable. A guide, companion, and comfort to so many for just as many different reasons, Bourdain’s inimitable presence remains a year after his passing. 

I watched roughly six hours of Parts Unknown reruns on the plane to Switzerland, my first trip out of the United States. The following hour was spent talking to the Iranian businessman seated next to me, discussing the protests of his home country, his eventual move to New York, and the unrest of our current America. Unfeigned curiosity, politics, and conversation over airplane Merlot felt keenly Bourdainian, only one example of his influence over the way in which I aim to understand the world, food, and travel, with an openness to what I’m eating and who I’m eating it with, and with a candor and receptiveness that transcends their origin.

Bourdain was more inviting than explanatory; he seemed to say not just that there is good food and good people in these places, but that one day, you too may be a welcomed traveler if you so desire, that none of this is exclusive should you put forth the empathy, willingness, and adventurousness to engage, learn, listen, try.  

With this philosophy in mind, that first international trip was colored by Bourdain’s dare, in so many words, to enter the back alley sandwich counter, enlist limited and broken French to order the cook’s recommendation, and sit on the curb to eat it, a strategy that has and will continue to underline my perspective. Inhale deeply, walk if you can, order what you know you should, ask if you’re not sure. Move, and do so with intellect and integrity. Do this in your city, your country, and everywhere else you can. We are a mix of where we come from and where we’re going, what we have seen and have yet to see, what we cook and what is cooked for us, and we’d be best to expand each of these with intention. Anthony Bourdain taught me that.

Feel it now, for all of the times we did not.

I’m twenty-two years old. They’re beginning to run together in the same way that headlines about Afghanistan deployments and suicide car bombings did, with an omnipresence, a rotating fixture in the news cycle, announced with predictability and frequency.

“Did you hear about that shooting” has come to exist as a fleeting and detached utterance, the phrase hanging in the air over an exchange of headlines, of information, of sadness and silence, a lull in the conversation as we all look down at our phones and read the numbers, about the AR-15, stare into space for a moment, and then we move on. We talk about the weather, and the baseball game, and whatever else, steeped in the familiar exchange of a narrative that follows a troubled kid who killed.

I suppose it has been gradual, that the normality in massacre and fear has drifted in slowly, becoming more potent with every presidential condolence and grieving community. I can recall particular events, albeit with disturbingly hazy detail but concrete melancholy, the moment my social studies teacher announced the murder of 27 kindergarteners, the cigarette I smoked after 25 were murdered while worshiping in a church, the street I was driving down when 12 were murdered in a movie theater, the culpability I felt in staring at the ocean, trying to absorb the weight in my existence and their existence, that my life carries on, the mundanities of my day compiling in the midst of such carnage and destruction and devastation.

It doesn’t seem as though there is anything else to be said. It all feels stale against the inconceivable sorrow left in a community that has a tendency to feel far from our own. The condolences sound trite, politician’s mention of reform rings hollow, all said with a muted disregard for the awareness of the parents making funeral arrangements for their children, the seniors who didn’t get to graduate, the futures they never got to have, the love they never got to know.

It is not unfitting for me to feel fortunate, privileged, that I have not heard gun shots in my high school hallways or across my university lecture hall. I feel it an act of luck, not knowing anyone who has been wounded at a concert venue or an elementary school.

I—we—are living in a time when it feels lucky to not have been shot.

The weight of such a phenomenon is not lost on me, the notion that while I was drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book, 17 were killed in Parkland, or that while I was sleeping, 49 were gunned down in Orlando, or that while I was out with my friends, 58 were killed in Las Vegas, doing just the same as I, living.

And while it is not lost, while each death feels no less poignant, no less important or heartbreaking, it seems as though the pungency with which each is received has been stifled, numbed in what I believe must be a nation-wide act of self-defense.

It has to be. To suggest any other explanation for the maintained absence of change, other than the sheer inability for our human brains to comprehend such a level of grief, of pain and loss, that we turn to disassociation instead of a plan of action, is the only conclusion that feels remotely comprehendible and understandable. 

And I am twenty-two and young and was once fifteen and young and so were all the kids that were murdered on Valentine’s Day, as they stood in an age of wonder and feeling and discovery and possibility, and that is gone. Find yourself in each, and then in their parents, and then in their teachers, their neighbors, their friends. Pay attention, close and real attention, to the suffering of today and last week, and last year, and two years ago, and five years ago, and two months from now, and three years from now and I wonder if we will look back and see this era as a time of strengthening our tendency toward apathy or of an increase in empathy.

Maybe this time will be different. We have more than headlines, more than just school portraits identifying the victims, as students snapchatted videos of their SWAT team escort out of barricaded doorways, the bodies of their classmates strewn across the hallway, the blood of their peers smeared on the floor, the sound of their feet walking over broken glass while they tried to stifle their sobs, exiting the building with raised hands and a newfound trauma unimaginable to most, yet raw and tangible and present to many who have now experienced lockdowns and gun shots and gun shots and gun shots, who have now experienced this grief and loss and pain and horror and pain and pain and pain.

It’s overwhelming and heavy and should feel like both; blood and bodies and guns and kids and schools and screams. Resist looking away from what is happening. Realize what is happening, what it looks like, imagine what it feels like. It is heavy and horrible and should feel deeply like both. Stare at what is becoming normal and know that it is anything but.

In Defense of the Addict

There’s this moment in a documentary about Amy Winehouse. She’s just won a Grammy, surrounded by family and friends on a stage in London. She celebrates, hugs and smiles, and leans into the ear of her childhood friend to mutter, “Jules, this is so boring without drugs.”

Her pain is clear. It is poignant and raw and real. And even more so when she overdosed at 27.  

She’s not a fallen star or turned into a shooting star or whatever other floaty euphemism people would like to use to describe her body giving out over heroin and liquor. In that moment, in that and all the other moments of intoxication and public breakdowns, she is no longer her talent and brilliance and everything else that makes up a person. She is another human in need and in pain.  

But that isn’t pretty or fun or entertaining, so we turn into a story, one that becomes digestible and casual and twistedly admired. There’s this fantasy we buy into, the good dying young, living too hard, the beautiful tortured souls lost in a world for which they are not made. The far less romantic truth tells of an addict and of their demise. 

It’s an uncomfortable image, someone dying assumingly by their own will, conceivably over something they did, they control. We see it more closely on street corners, in the eyes stumbling out of a bar or the arms holding a cardboard sign, and it’s easy to turn away, for not all our legs are held down by the grip of invisible hands. Taking the artist in anguish or the homeless drunk at face value seem to be the easiest for us to hold, to take as acceptable without considering the existence of another problem. It stands as impersonal as we make it. And our dysfunctional acceptance becomes an inadvertent praise.

The glamorized idolization of the Cobains and Hoffmans and Ledgers may really not be different than ignoring the bum on the curb. Or your neighbor or cousin or friend or teacher or guy at the party or girl next to you at the grocery store. We separate one from the other, qualifying experience and struggle through status and stigma.

People laughed at her. They said she was a mess and took pictures and turned her crisis into a headline instead of something like hope or help. And she was a mess and was lost, her and all the other addicts, though mess does not substantiate abandonment or scrutiny. Mess means human, and people need other people. But not like that. 

In defense of the addict, I implore you: Do not look away. Do not throw aside your own addictions, rendering them distant and detached because they don’t come in a syringe or a bottle. Note what they feel like, and do not disassociate the bonding humanity accompanying them.

Do not forget that there is nothing inspiring or edgy or productive about an artist dying from addiction, in the same way that there isn’t when the kid from your high school or that friend of a friend does. All the other addicts, famous or not, hurting publicly or privately, do not warrant the subtle distance we give them, unconsciously protecting ourselves from the societally constructed grime laying on their hands. Be aware of the words used to describe the next poet or songwriter or actor who’s overdose sparks a minute of discussion followed by a memorial painted in a soft white light by broken hearts claiming genius and perfection out of a person who may have been, but who also fell victim to the cracks and left them broken.  

Perhaps it isn’t up to us to save, but rather to pay attention.

She is not forever young. She is forever gone because of something that could have been helped.

She Showed Up Broken

Her gaze reaches beyond New York, over the mountains and rivers, beyond forests and valleys. Her eyes watch over the picketers and the soup kitchens and the football games. They fall over skyscrapers and subway cars and rush hour traffic, people trying to get where they’re going. Mostly people just trying.

I’m not sure exactly what she’s looking at, who she’s looking for. Whether she’s glaring in distain, or studying with sorrow. Maybe both. I think there’s a lot of both. She has stood in as many moments of glory and pride as agony. And still standing, yes, but the copper has turned green and is starting to chip and give in under the thankless responsibility of playing host for the millions standing on American soil.

One of the millions, armed with power and delusion, said that now we are starting to stand for pride, for safety, and for justice. Standing for greatness. And some cheered and some cried, some sang prayers of gratitude while others muttered prayers of fear. And she stood, lost in the notion that greatness had been missing, for she had seen it all and is proof that greatness was and is still very much intact. 

But suits did not listen, and people remained in their countries and in their homes, on couches and on floors. And some in airports, and some in holding rooms. And they looked to her. They waited for her. They stood silent, not by the absence of thought, but in the presence of shock. Bags in their arms, suitcases at their feet, children on their backs, a stinging silence in the air.

She first arrived in America in October of 1886. A gift of friendship and freedom, the intention was for her to inspire and invite. She showed up broken, disassembled and in boxes on a ship. She was rebuilt here. Her life was rebuilt and started over here. A broken chain rests at her feet. Her left hand holds a tablet stating the date of American independence, her right holding a torch, a symbol of enlightenment and freedom. Enlightenment and freedom. This is what she says we stand for.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” she said. She said it then and says it now. I think she knows that walls don’t win wars. She remains in spite of the wars and stands without the walls, planted in a harbor of her own. The water reminds her of all who have arrived through it, and she wonders what makes now different from then, for this nation does not exist without its immigrants, she says. She says more with her presence than could ever be said with words. When pleas and shouts and protests fall short, her flame does not burn out, but continues to glow with the warmth of home, burning the same for those who are in their granite counter top kitchens and wood floor living rooms, and for those with planks and nails and hammers aching in their hands, asking when.

She still stands just as proud, just as strong, but now with tears hidden under a cold Manhattan rain. Her knuckles turn white as her grip tightens around the torch held high above her head. Still she stands, unwavering, unchanging, as a warning in waiting. A warning to those who dare to betray her tradition, one not of exclusivity, but of permission and belonging. A proposal by Lady Liberty, to stand firmly through the waves, through missiles and through walls, with the knowledge of who we are and who she is. A request by Lady Liberty, to “send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

It Doesn't Snow in California

“Character building” is a common phrase among Midwestern parents, most often as a response to their children’s complaints about the weather. The excuse for being forced to go to school during the snowstorm, why the driveway needs to be shoveled before the sun comes up, the consolation for the black-ice induced bruise: “It’s character building.”

Illinois is 2,000 miles away. I am in California. It’s raining. School is cancelled. Does this get called character building? High school me, stomping through sidewalks left unplowed on the route to school, says no. The inconvenience of weather is perhaps an underrated force of humility, available to ground any sense of ego inflated through months of sunshiny days.

A fireplace becomes warmer when it’s melting ice off of thick boots, heating toes from under two layers of socks. Words on a page are somehow more inviting when the streetlamps are dimmed by a fresh layer of snow. A specific feeling of community found in being snowed in, stuck at a friend’s house with the power out. A notion of togetherness unable to be recreated, bound by the collective and anxious hope of school being cancelled, enveloped in snow day rituals and prayers. These are the makings of my home, pieces of my childhood.  

I look back on what has made up my youth, on what has contributed to the person I am becoming, on what I get to change and what is so ingrained that it’s permanent. In the absence of weather, in the absence of home, what is it now that builds my character?

While it’s true that looking too closely prevents one from seeing and understanding the whole picture, there’s still something to be said for the details. Hot chocolate evenings, getting away with too many marshmallows. Or the first time driving alone, newly licensed without having learned the art of navigating winter-inhabited streets.

Remembering that the warm mugs of cocoa were in celebration of university acceptance letters, and that the icy drive was to pick up a friend after a breakup, result in a kind of personal essay on their own. To consider the moments where empathy and honesty were found and learned is powerful. To reflect on the instances that brought a sense of mourning or belonging is the place that presents the slow start of change, of growth.

I’ve started looking for the origins of where my character has been built, to not forget that the details make up the whole picture.

Being young and growing up feels both miserable and electrifying. Versions of pain and joy spark for the first time. Visions of a future, a life beyond a hometown, are molded through a tumultuous mixture of doubt and inspiration. Born and bred in an environment that cultivated creativity as much as it stifled individualism, in only the way that the suburbs can, presents a somewhat muddled initial outlook onto the rest of the world. Though perhaps appropriate. Gray shows itself more than black and white.  It is here that fragments of myself are found. The niceties and notables, times where trust was built or broken, the slow grasp of empathy infiltrating a tightly wound sense of self-involvement.

It is as intriguing as intimidating, watching myself change while intentionally finding the pieces of what I will become. Recalling moments that offered wisdom and explained feeling make me feel both closer and farther away to where I’ve come from.

Now that I’ve moved away, started somewhere new, the continued quest for identity is renewed. I’ve found that I identify more with where I come from than I thought. I take pride in the hellish winters, feel bonded to those from the Midwest, lamenting together over Chicago Februarys like a badge of honor.

There are no longer parkas and sleds. Scarves and mittens have been tucked away in closets. I didn’t pack them. It doesn’t snow in California.

La La Land

“It’s kind of crazy because, like, my name is Emma, her name is Emma, and we even kind of look alike, so it’s just like, I don’t know, I feel like I’m just going to meet Emma Watson someday, you know?”

“Yes. Completely. It almost sounds like- okay I don’t know how to explain this, but it’s like when I’m at Whole Foods, and it’s like I just know what blend of juice I’m supposed to buy, you know? Like, it’s like the universe or something is just telling me that this is where I’m supposed to be, and this is what I need to do, like in this moment.”

“Exactly, yes, that’s so what I’m saying.”

Each paused to sip their lattes, glancing around, taking inventory of all those seated at the coffee shop. Their eyes scanned like a Doppler radar to the sea, letting no important person go unnoticed, no one unaccounted for, a mental filing through anyone worth their noting. Having overheard from my table behind theirs, I glanced up from my laptop, now curious and intrigued by the possibility of some sixth sense these two had apparently developed.  

“So I was thinking, and he should just quit his job and move to LA. Honestly, it saved my life,” Pseudo Watson advised, the topic having suddenly shifted from grocery store epiphanies to relationship quandaries. 

“Maybe you’re right. It’s like when people get religion and try to convince everyone else to do it too.”

“Yes. Los Angeles is my religion.”

“Wow. You should tweet that, seriously. People should hear that. Have you ever thought of writing a book?” said the other, clearly still floating in revelation from her divine juice-buying experience.

“You know, you are not the first person to tell me that. I’m working on this script right now, kind of an indie sort of thing, and really feel like I just have this voice inside of me that’s recently just really been exposed through all the other projects I’m in the middle of, but after that, yeah, I mean, a book seems like a real possibility,” she replied, said with a forced and cool sort of apathy, like she had the power of a secret hidden behind a façade of indifference. “Have you been working on anything lately?”

“Oh, I’ve been going on a bunch of auditions,” Holy Green Juice uneasily stated, a panic and reluctance still present beneath a forced confidence and assurance. “And, um, I don’t know, nothing was the right thing. I could kind of just feel the toxic energy in the room, and it was like not really the greatest… But it’s so fine because this is just like a great time of self-discovery and to just like reconnect with myself, you know?”

“That’s amazing. You’re so positive, it’s, like, inspirational,” Pseudo Watson said, a slight glimmer in her eye and smirk on her face, poorly disguising the satisfaction in possessing whatever level of victory she felt she’d earned within this unspoken rivalry.

“You know, it’s like you just take it day by day and do the best you can to make it through, and- wait, Oh my God, I love your shirt. Is it like vintage or something?” It was a black t-shirt, soft and worn in all the right places, with capitalized bold white writing on the front: They worship everything and value nothing. 

A Christmas Miracle

Twinkling lights hung with care, a balsam fir standing tall in the corner, and if it wasn’t Topanga, snow would certainly be flurrying just beyond the window.  Quiet chatter floated over the crackling of a fireplace as an acoustic rendition of “Silver Bells” lulled below.

“Trump is the best thing to happen to this country,” is the phrase that broke through the Christmas cheer, prompting my eyes to slowly rise from the computer screen on my lap and search for the source from which such a statement came.

Couldn’t have been Iced White Mocha in the corner sorting flashcards, too busy balancing a hangover and impending chemistry test to care about politics. Double Shot Cappuccino at the other table also an unlikely candidate, too wrapped up in The New Yorker while sulking about the café’s lack of house-made almond milk.

The search came to a sudden halt as a different voice responded, “Oh absolutely. All this bullshit about Obama and living in a post-racial society has gone on long enough.”

This came from late twenties flannel-clad guy, legs outstretched and slouching on the couch to my left. Noticing the sudden increase of heads cocked in his direction daring him to go on, he lowered his voice, though continuing the conversation.

Still, this was not the Trump supporter’s voice from earlier. Who’s he talking to? Trump Voice interjects with a jolly chuckle, “Change the world, my ass. I think I found some change on the streets, still looking for that hope he talks about.”

Trying to be discrete, I look back at my laptop and sneak a glance up to identify the - Santa? Trump Voice is Santa? White beard, round belly, distant sound of jingle bells… But Santa wouldn’t support Trump. Santa supports women and champions equality.

“Obama was signing bills and making calls on Christmas Eve. What is he doing signing shit on Christmas Eve? What kind of an example is that, doesn’t he have a family?”

What’s he doing on Christmas Eve? Ending wars. Providing health care. Lowering the unemployment rate. Fighting climate change, perhaps? What did Trump Voice Claus do on Christmas Eve?

Flannel shirt chimed in, “And Pence, that’ll help him out. Have you heard about what he says you can do with the gays? He says we can get rid of them with some kind of therapy or something.”

A tangible tension-filled cringe ran through the café. What he can do with the gays? Conversion therapy. Right. The electroshock therapy designed to turn teenagers straight. Lets add that to the agenda.

Silence stood in the air, waiting for Santa’s response, sure to be either a moment of redemption or a tinsel-covered downfall.

“There are some people that just can’t wrap their minds around the fact that maybe a psychopath is going to president, and maybe it’ll be great.

Well, then. Looks like we’ll be needing more than just a Christmas miracle this year.

It All Comes Down to Tequila

“Well I’m not going if you’re not going.”

“I told you, if Ryan’s going, I’m not going. I’m just not. And I’m sorry if you can’t understand and respect that, but it’s really not my problem if you don’t go.”

“I get that, but I also don’t understand why you can’t just be my friend for like a second and suck it up and go. I’m not sitting in a car with Dylan and Josh for five hours by myself and you know how much I want to go on this trip.”

Silence sat in the air. Each thumbed through their phones. Five minutes passed. One snapped her head to the side, “Are you really not going to say anything right now?”

The other slowly moved her eyes forward, stubbornly glared at her latte, then towards the window, and eventually locked in on the wall across from their table. Through gritted teeth, she quietly muttered, “I want you to know that this is only because you saved me the other night. That’s it. I don’t want to go. I will go.”

“That’s all you had to say. Thank you.”

Strangers surrounding them wearily glanced up from their work and slowed their conversations, glancing around with the particular discomfort that follows unintentionally witnessing such a skirmish.

Tension loomed in spite of the apparent resolution. Both silently returned to their open books and laptops in an attempt to refocus, frantically questioning the stability and future of such a friendship.

Quiet… Quiet… Quiet… And then, “Do you think Ryan would get us liquor for the weekend?”

“Oh my God, I’m so sure he would, texting him right now!”

And with that, order was restored. The two scooped up their things, plopped sunglasses on their faces, and strolled out of the coffee shop, excitement and anticipation on their lips. Ryan responded as they made their way across the room, committing to at least a bottle of tequila. The door closed behind them. Everyone else applauded.

The Chip in My Front Tooth

There’s a chip in my front left tooth. It’s been there for ten years, the result of my brother’s sporadic running headbutt into my mouth while I sat and watched tv.

This is the same brother who totaled the car the night he got his license, the same brother who smoked pot behind our house assuming that the pasta our mother was cooking in the kitchen would counteract the smell of smoke wafting through the window.

His recklessness has never been met with rationale.

I’ve had the chip filled a few times, first after it happened and then a few years later. Both have fallen out while eating an apple, I think. It doesn’t really bother me and no one ever seems to notice until I point it out, so getting it filled again hasn’t seemed necessary. It reminds me of him and of growing up together.

And so as I sit in my dorm room in California, my parents in Illinois, and my brother in a house with ten others in South Africa volunteering at an elementary school, I think of my chipped tooth and how it got there. I think of my brother and his red hair and his impulsive disposition, and how such an attitude has led him into as much unsuspecting joy as it has issues with authority.

He’s maintained a charismatic innocence, one that has now carried him across the world to care for others in the way only an eighteen-year-old craving the chance to make a difference can do. And one that can get you out of chipping your sister’s tooth.