Processing Pain: The Legacy of Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain’s Death | Parts Unknown | Eric Ripert | Apollo Fields Photojournalism
Watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown with Eric Ripert offers insight into the turmoil behind Bourdain’s infamous irreverence. Around every corner of conversation Bourdain’s slinging some cryptic or grotesque piece of humor, landing upon Ripert’s matter-of-fact ears like juvenile jabs from a close friend. It is entertaining albeit haunting, to hear the words “death” and “I want to die” come from Bourdain’s mouth. Perhaps the saddest part though, is that the callous, cynical persona that we all fell in love with was slowly consuming the host of Parts Unknown right in front of our laughing eyes.
Hindsight is 20-20 of course, and now watching the show is an exercise of recognizing his blunt, unforgiving humor as the red flags of a man publicly processing his inner demons. Bourdain’s trip to Buenos Aires in one episode is particularly poignant as it cuts in and out of a therapy session where he explores and laments his character. Bourdain says that he wanted nothing more than to look out the window and think, “life is good,” but couldn’t see past what he considered an unfixable, untreatable “character trait.” The reality is that he was processing his pain the way he was accustomed to—using lewd jokes as bridges for cross-cultural conversations—it’s just a shame that we didn’t see these devices as explorations of his mental “parts unknown,” rather than hilarious quips.
Yet that’s exactly what our mental machinations are to each other: “parts unknown.” Bourdain knew he would find no sympathizers with his woes because, let’s face it, he had a job we all could only dream of. But I’m beginning to believe that our feelings, the things us millennial are infamous for, are perhaps the only knowable truths in our lives. Yes they are subjective, but no set of objective circumstances can make them invalid. Bourdain felt suicidal despite the objective reality of a world full of open doors. He told us his truth in his way and we loved him for it. His opinion on life is valid. If his unfortunate demise is to teach us anything it is to further explore and explain our own mental “parts unknown.”
I see a problem today is that avoiding our introspection is easier than ever. We dive into any form of social media and relate to each other or fictional characters with similar problems but never really engage with our “parts unknown.” We recognize social media as a problem in the same breath that we launch an hour long conversation about Stranger Things or Black Mirror. I do believe that we all want to be stronger, but few us of have the will power to shut down our apps and sit in uncomfortable silence. Just the other day, when I was asking a friend what he thought about a current painful event in my life he recommended watching The Good Place and American Vandal on Hulu and Netflix respectively. I called him out and couldn’t help but think that we are treating our “parts unknown” with a healthy dose of social media. But I don’t want to distract the pain away, I want to engage it.
And I think that’s exactly what Bourdain was doing. Let me be clear, the irony of me opining about social media consumption while learning a life lesson from social media is not lost on me—it is a reflection on a particularly honest man. Bourdain’s death is a representation of what can happen when we conflate our mental machinations, our feelings, our “parts unknown” with consumable pieces of entertainment. If we don’t learn to resist the urge to hide our feelings in our favorite characters and friend’s Instagram stories, I fear that we all increase our likelihood of realizing the same fate. In a nod to Mr. Bourdain and to all of the pain in the world, be strong and speak on it. Not just on social media, but to your friends and family, and more importantly, to yourself.
Photo credit: The Hollywood Reporter
Nihilism: The Teenager's Escape from Reality
3.27.18 - 5004 Cody Street ~ 9:10 AM MT
I’m starting to write at 9 today, which is a step in the right direction. Once I spend a few minutes or hours sucking at the teat of mindless information it’s difficult for my mind to focus and get back on track. When I first wake up my mind may be groggy but it’s the most clear that it will be all day.
Yesterday I helped a friend, let’s call him Mark, paint a room and we talked about everything from nostalgic video games (Link’s Awakening for Gameboy) to what animal we’d want to be reincarnated as (some type of bird). He talked about that he doesn’t have much time to do anything and the time that he does have he enjoys being by himself and gaming, proclaiming that he has “no responsibilities to anyone but himself.” At the time it seemed very appealing, carrying an air of total freedom, but I can’t help but think that it’s ironically one of the reasons he’s depressed. He often uses it as a rationalization for sleeping in until noon and he never applies himself.
I remember when I used to sleep in that late and I’d feel crummy. It was tough to feel good about myself when I wasn’t leaving the stamp of my uniqueness on anything on any given day. Floating through life is fine and all, but at some point I thought, “this is how you wake up middle aged never really doing anything.” Pleasure and leisure can only get you so far but fulfillment lies in a putting in a concerted effort at something that you don’t mind doing over and over again, improving upon it every time. When you sleep through the morning and coast through the afternoon, the only thing you get in exchange is whatever you’re dreaming about.
Heather helps me by pulling my productivity towards her end of the spectrum because that’s her default. It’s also why we’re good together: because we bring each other towards a happy equilibrium. Too much of anything is detrimental, just take either Mark or Heather by themselves—unhappy and caught in a cyclical pattern of what they know and what they feel comfortable doing. I could definitely use some work getting pulled to the side of productivity but I tend to think I hover more around the center than either of them.
Mark also lets his cynicism paralyze his action in the form of anti-capitalistic nihilism. He’s not wrong—it’s just too much for a human mind to carry with it, especially if you’re going to exist within the capitalistic structure and enjoy some of the luxuries it provides. Perhaps I’m too cut and dry or I’ve bought into the system as well, but when you hold beliefs as strong as him I think that you have to either separate entirely, removing yourself from participation in the system as much as possible; or you come to grips with the futility of overthrowing it, accept the benefits it awards you, and you try to combat it in the most productive way that you can as an unique individual. I don’t think he believes in some widespread Marxist revolution to overthrow the owners of the means of production (I used to) but I don’t see any value in nihilism. It’s like a teenagers way out of the existential crisis of capitalism.
My argument against nihilism is also the same one why I don’t harbor negative feelings towards people most of the time—because they don’t provide anything useful to me. When you do things in life that have no positive purpose you are essentially keeping your needle close to neutral, perhaps even tilting towards the negative side of things, and I believe life is more than that. You don’t have to achieve greatness, you don’t have to get a PHD or discover something new; all you have to do is try to leave the unique imprint of yourself somewhere everyday (with exception to intentionally hurting others), and try to err on the side of positivity.
Diversifying Your Set of Skills
2.23.18
I don’t know if the fort will ever come down at this point, it’s getting cozier by the day. Aside from that, I’ve been running around the past couple days, attending interviews, sending out resumes and trying to stay disciplined to a minimum amount of words per day.
My newly found ambition all stemmed from a conversation I had with Heather the first day I
decided to start this glorified journal.
For the past few months, I have been chasing full-time jobs like a drug addict chasing a high and each time I have gotten excited, thinking, “I’m going to get this one,” the job is pulled a little further, just out of reach. Heather has helped me see that this focus on one full-time job is too singular and because of that, the other things I devote my time to, i.e. writing, local politics, seem even more laborious. Rather than focusing on getting part-time work in all three fields I care about, I’ve been putting all my eggs in one basket, dividing my mind into a competition of my interests rather than developing each of them individually.
Diversifying your career path is a skill that comes easy to Heather as she has been doing it since she was a teenager. For her, it made a lot of sense to develop photography alongside her equestrian training because she couldn’t see herself risking her body day-in- and-day-out for an entire career. Thus, she came across photography, which is now the main source of income—but she kindly reminds me that it wasn’t always this way
At the beginning of Heather’s photography career, she was willing to work for free or for peanuts and accepted jobs that others in the industry did not want to take. It was difficult because she still needed to make a living wage, but she was willing to do what she had to do to in order to gain experience. Jim Carrey has a quote something along the lines of, “you can fail at something you don’t like, so why not try and fail at something you do like?” It would’ve been easier for Heather to stay as an equestrian, but she thought about her life 20 years from then and had deduced that while it may’ve been easier in the short term, it would’ve been crippling in the long run to rely on one source of income. Ironically, failure for Heather meant limiting herself to one full-time position.
Now as I chase several jobs in each of my respective fields I feel more whole, engaging in conversations that cover an array of my interests rather than constraining myself to one. As I commit further to the development of my writing, political, and hospitality careers I also envision it all under one unifying umbrella in the future that Heather had the foresight to see at a much younger age. Framing my future in the context of an attaining elusive single goal has been a paralyzing approach of mine for years, but thanks to Heather, I may just be breaking free. Instead of looking at what I need, I’ve begun to look at how I can develop my interests in the diversification of my time, personality, and ideally, the stability of my financial future.
Time is Empty
2.23.18 - 5004 Cody ~ 7:25 PM MT
Sitting down to write twice in one day, wow! Maybe Pressfield is making an impression on me. As I joke, it’s kind of true. His distinction of a professional and an amateur is incisively honest and accurate. As an amateur writer, I dedicate small portions of my day (sometimes no time of the day!) to doing something I say I want to do for a living. Pressfield also defends us writers as he says the most difficult thing to do is to just sit down and write.
He explains that the amateur: takes things personally; expects epochs the size of Homer’s Odyssey to drop into their mind and ooze out of your fingertips in some perfect, opportune arrival of immense inspiration; and clings too much to the judgment of his/her work. The professional for Pressfield: learns to separate themselves from their work, creating a thick skin, seating their criticisms in a space separate from their ego; has a regimen where they sit down everyday, rain or shine, inspiration or no inspiration and writes. This is so that when a moment of real inspiration hits, the writer has been at it, honing their technique, to now where they can lay it down as it comes. The amateur waits on inspiration to strike, the professional writes through it.
It is very hard for me to keep at it, given my history of complacency and litany of instantaneous gratification and distraction that lay around every corner. It is nearly impossible for me to stay focused when I have a phone that flickers every two seconds and a computer that grants me access to any piece of entertainment I can think of (all for free to boot). Living in the 21st century enables most of us in the western world to live at a level of luxury never before seen my humans—we can essentially get anything delivered to our doorstep with the click of a button. We live like kings!
Yet we feel like serfs. We feel like nothing is truly satisfying and we bury our discomfort deeper into the meaningless abyss of consumption. We turn our attention to products and entertainment rather than inwards because the passive approach is easier. In a country that is run by convenience there is nothing convenient about engaging with the unhappiness that lurks in your mind while you wait in the drive-thru line at McDonalds or skip the intro to continue your binge session on Netflix. When the inconvenience of the complexity of our minds comes to the forefront we find a way to conveniently drown it out. There is no time for self-reflection in a time of instantaneous satisfaction. We feel like serfs even though we have the world at our fingertips.
Even now I have an itch to go out, an itch to watch porn, an itch to throw a movie on and cook popcorn. Pressfield would call these urges ‘resistance,’ and I suppose that it is. The progress of technology has subverted our attention spans, decreasing the value of a moment down to a swipe of the screen. Time itself changes meaning over time; when I was a kid the phrase was “time is money,” and perhaps that’s still true, but I would now say, “time is empty.”
Time has been reduced to the passing of it—I still don’t get how people can be bored. When I say that time is empty I mean that we’d rather fill it up with the consumption of meaningless information than sit and watch the seconds pass like we’re back in grade school watching the clock, waiting for the bell to ring. **UPDATE** just got back from watching meaningless videos for like an hour. Time travel is possible everyone, and I’m not talking getting black out drunk, I’m talking turning your mind off to passively spend time.