Anthony Bourdain

I’ve never paid much attention to him, but he seems to have been quite a character. Here’s a foreword he wrote to a book in defense of a guileless restaurant reviewer in flyover country.

[Update a while later]

Dealing with suicide.

It’s always been such an alien concept to me.

[Update a few minutes later]

After a suicide, think of the survivors. and Ben Shapiro asks “How do we stop suicides?”

When I was a kid, one of my classmates’ father shot himself, and she discovered the body. I wondered just how terrible that would be.

4 thoughts on “Anthony Bourdain”

  1. I can relate to some of the dark, obsessive and regretful feelings expressed in one of the links. On the other hand, thankfully, I could never bring myself to stab my own finger free-hand with a blood-draw lancet in the blood type lesson in science class, let alone cross the barrier of this much higher level of self-inflicted violence.

    Self preservation is a powerfully valuable human as well as animal instinct. We focus on the combination of both physical and emotional pain that drives a person to contemplate ending their life, but to actually carry this out, there must be something else happening. One could engage in all manner of drama in the STNG Holodeck, but for a person to come to physical harm, a large number of “safeties and interlocks” had to be overridden on the personal authority of Captain Picard.

    What overrides the safeties and interlocks of a person’s self-preservation instinct? People are known to endure great physical or mental torment with those interlocks functioning, so what overrides them? Something else must be going on.

  2. I always liked Bourdain’s persona, which was in some ways similar to mine, but I stopped watching him around ten years ago, because I stopped having television (other than Netflix on disk). There’s no cable where I live and, until a couple of years ago, no land-line Internet. HughesNet is too expensive and too metered for streaming. By the time we finally got DSL, I’d lost the habit. I binge-watch shows when they’re over and done with.

    I do sort of understand the impulse to suicide, on the same level I understand the impulse to murder. I’ve probably considered both as radical solutions to personal problems, from time to time. But I’m a good bit older than Bourdain was, and am still alive and still haven’t strangled any of the deserving many. One of the perks of living on is seeing people I wanted to do in manage to die on their own.

    1. On a “samizdat” Web site a commenter claimed evidence supporting that Mr. Bourdain’s death could have been an accident.

      The man was known for seeking the pleasures of the senses by the various licit and illicit means, and they say there is a way to get a buzz by pressure on the neck in conjunction with, ahem, other stimulation.

      So maybe he left this life on his own terms, seeking satisfaction in something dangerous but not willfully seeking to end his life. So dudes, stay safe.

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