Anthony Bourdain

I’m calling it “reverse ideation”. Instead of mentally forming a suicide attempt, I visualize the aftermath, having already done it. I wouldn’t have done it at home, I would’ve done it elsewhere, but I wake up in the morning at home and run it through my mind that I had done it the night before. I was gone. My waking up experience is incidental, hypothetical. Witnessing time and space that continues to happen, but I wouldn’t be here.

Last month, June 8, Strasbourg, France. If Anthony Bourdain were to have done this reverse ideation, he would have woken up and imagined that he had hanged himself the night before. He knew he was there for work and was due to work that day. His award-winning crew was all there nearby, and he knew he was supposed to meet his friend, chef Eric Ripert, who would be co-hosting the episode, for breakfast. Only he wouldn’t show up. He was hanging in the bathroom by a bathrobe sash.

It would be Eric who would be tasked with first noticing his absence and hunting him down. It would be Eric who would find him first, the first to know. The authorities would be called, the crew would be gathered and informed, his family would be contacted and informed. Then it would hit the headline news around the world.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t reverse ideation. That’s more or less how it might have happened.

So many layers that I can’t understand. He was on location in the middle of a shoot, in the middle of a season of “Parts Unknown”. His loyal and talented crew were all there prepared to work, to set up and capture the shots and scenes that had earned the show, and previous incarnations, several Emmy Awards. He had a daughter who was just coming of age with years ahead where she could really use him, might very well need him. He was still making his mark on the world, he still had something to say, much more to discover around the world through the show and much more to show and deliver to his television audience. He was doing a job that he loved and felt blessed to have. And he was supposed to meet Eric Ripert for breakfast. Within all this, he decides it’s the exact right time to get off the train. The ride, for him, was over.

I’m not even a super fan. I consider myself an ordinary fan, like tens of thousands ordinary fans around the world. Whenever I saw one of his books in the library, I read it. Whenever his show came on, I made a point to watch it, even re-runs. Whenever he appeared to me in media, he was prioritized. That’s the hallmark of his ordinary fans.

When I was living in San Francisco, I had a flatmate who was a souz-chef and she lent me Bourdain’s first book “Kitchen Confidential” soon after it came out to give me an idea what her life was like. His writing was incredible; irreverent, funny, insightful, sarcastic, eloquent, personable, scathing. Years later when I got cable TV (so this would be in Taiwan), I recognized his name instantly in the cable TV menu and since then I never missed his shows when they aired. Just this past December when my TV service went down for two months, I mentioned that it disrupted a season of Parts Unknown that was airing on TLC. When he died, season 10 was airing and still is.

It also turned out that he was an alumnus of my high school, Dwight Englewood, albeit some 13 years earlier when it was still called Englewood School for Boys. In his New Jersey episode early on in “No Reservations”, some shots from the school in the opening teaser I recognized as being the cafeteria and hallways of Leggett Hall. Only people who went there would recognize that. He grew up in Leonia, where a girl I had a crush on during high school lived. I hate to say it, and it’s easy to misunderstand this, but our formative years were probably not too much unlike each other. Obvious, distinct differences, but there was likely shared experience growing up towns apart, and a decade apart back then was closer than a decade apart now.

His suicide makes no sense, and in some ways I understand his better and feel more connected to his than others, even though there are aspects that are diametrically opposed. Even principally opposed. He was an active agent in this world, super-connected through his shows with friends literally all over the world. He had friends, family, he touched people in meaningful ways. He would return to places the show had been years and years before, and people would remember him and he them. He had responsibility, he was gifted and active, he had public worth. And apparently still suicidal. Killing himself may be seen as having been both bold and cold.

For me, being suicidal has meant the opposite; disconnect, be worthless to others (not worth keeping in touch, not worth contacting), don’t do anything, have no responsibilities or attachments, affect as few people as possible. And mind you, I have thought of contacting various people through the years, but decided not to because of this principle. If I want to disappear, just disappear. Don’t be something to someone and then mind-fuck them by disappearing.

When I die, I want people to react with indifference, an afterthought. I’ve traditionally overestimated my worth and angled for a soft landing. Truth to tell, I expect the vast majority of people with whom I’ve had the pleasure of acquaintance in my life to never even know. The news would just not cross their front porch. And if it did, it would be ‘Wow, really? How? Wow! Really?! When? Wow! That long ago?! I had no idea’. That’s as soft a landing as it gets for people who were never even off the ground. The hardest landing? Geez, what the hell did they expect?

Where I relate to him and feel connected to him is that no one has mentioned depression or suggested he was depressed. Yes, there are simpletons who assume he was depressed because that’s the easy way out of understanding something they’re too dim to fathom. When no one in a position to know, including his mother, says he was depressed, the idiots can only comfort themselves by attributing his suicide to depression. Kate Spade was depressed, Chris Cornell and Shinee’s Jonghyun battled with depression. These were established. Robin Williams is a little more complicated. He was subject to depression, but was battling all sorts of demons.

I don’t think Anthony Bourdain was depressed, unless someone who would know comes out and definitively says so. He was morbid, had a dark sense of humor and probably had a close relationship with mortality that pervaded his existence. It shows in his shows, he jokes about death often, making fun of his own demise and conjuring it in humorous imagery and appropriate snark. There was even a previous episode featuring Eric Ripert (Swiss Alps, I think), who was plotting to murder Bourdain and trying to figure out how to get away with it. I saw it after he died and it was still hilarious. Ripert is Buddhist which made the premise even more ridiculous, but it shows how Bourdain’s gestalt permeated the show.

I’m not depressed. I even tried to convince myself I am not long ago to befit my suicidal angst (not), but it didn’t last long and was a total failure. That attempt was pretty ridiculous and ranged farcical (the skit in my head was hilarious). So if it wasn’t depression, was Bourdain’s suicide a little more like my theoretical forays into suicidal ideation? Based on some amorphous principle, rather than solely on emotions. An understanding of not wanting to be here anymore, not needing to be here anymore despite daughter coming of age. Perhaps an understanding of the vanity and fleeting nature of life. I mean true understanding. It’s not a giving up. I love what I’m doing, I get feedback that I’m doing good, but nothing’s permanent and I trust my daughter will land on her feet. I’m ready for what’s next.

I’m not gonna pin any of that on Bourdain. That’s what I’m hoping to see in myself, minus the loving what I’m doing and good feedback, and of course the daughter. In my view of the world, the daughter would preclude suicide. Of course I don’t need to explain my reasons, the fact that I don’t have one is the explanation enough. The fact that Bourdain had a daughter is testament to her worth and value to him enough, suicide notwithstanding. Sometimes some people just want to die. They just don’t want to be here anymore.

Maybe that’s what Anthony Bourdain found in all his travels and all the people he met and spoke with, all the views and perspectives of this vast world that he uniquely internalized. He could present them to us in his shows in diluted, edited form, but he experienced those people first-hand. Was it too much? Maybe. Did it lead to a better understanding that few people, if any, could have without walking the path he walked? Likely.

All this in a world where issues are no longer discussed, where there’s more often than not partisan digging in, digging in ideological trenches, digging in heels. People don’t want to hear the other side, much less understand or experience it, and they’re proud of that fact. All this in a world of emerging generational warfare where Bourdain had no choice but to be a partisan representative. However much he could empathize with both sides and tried to present them fairly, he was getting on in age. He was old guard. Whatever it was, it warranted pulling the emergency brake on the train because it was time to get off.

I wake up in the morning and in reverse ideation, I committed suicide the night before. I don’t know exactly where my body is, but I hope it will simply return to nature without ever being discovered. In the reverse ideation, nothing in my apartment changes for the entire day except the external light from the window until it fades to darkness in the evening. It lightens up the next morning and changes through the day until it fades to darkness once again. This goes on for days. Then weeks. Months? Between weeks and months, there’s a jiggle of the door knob that someone finds unlocked. Until then, no one noticed anything amiss. Mission accomplished.

After Anthony Bourdain died, TLC Asia posted a few of his early No Reservations episodes. It was pretty raw back then and there was still a sense of trying to appeal to an audience. The camera people were still finding their feet, but it was the beginning of what would become more than camera work. Later on, and fully established in Parts Unknown, it was no less than cinematography. It was no less remarkable than Bourdain’s writing. The camera work on other shows is pretty utilitarian, union maybe, and just gets the job done. Zero Point Zero Productions camera work is pretty much art.