On the death of Anthony Bourdain ...

On the death of Anthony Bourdain, or how an exquisite light can cast an abominable shadow.

Can we quit saying, The struggle is real?

When we speak of trivial stumbles, of pulling push-doors, of missing a button, when a salon-crafted coffee misses a mark, can we not use a vapid phrase, like The struggle is real.

When we repeat, the Struggle is real, to say it in banal ways, we demean the struggle that many carry in our minds, our hearts, in our guts and soul. When we neglect the brutal reality of the struggle, how it has gravity, mass, talon and teeth, how it hunts us endlessly, we begin to fade from sight. We begin to lose our light.

The struggle is real, its a fucking deathgrip, and the endurance to keep above it is a measured in life and death. This thing is a darkness that bleeds from our own hearts. This thing wears our bodies, uses our eyes. It speaks through our teeth and it hates us when we laugh. It drags at our faces when we walk with pride. It collects our moments like bones, to throw at us when we become happy, relaxed, or complacent.

The struggle is real and it keeps stealing the lives of our mentors, destroying the minds of our teachers. The struggle is burying our thinkers beneath the Earth, the same they once carried on their shoulders. The struggle is killing the ones who take the time to search, to look and feel, to taste and translate the experience to us, to insert exceptional moments into our unexceptional days.

When Bourdain was a child, his parents left him in the car, a comfortable backseat in Bordeaux, and they dined on food from the great kitchens of the world. It touched Bourdain in ways that took his heart to the realm of myth, stirred his young soul to wonder and passion. His exclusion perhaps became his intense interest in it, and he began to seek the things that were not easily available, began to mine deeper the things that were not on the surface.

Let's talk about what its it's like when you contain the darkness of all of your worst nights.

Let's talk about how it feels like when you tear, like a deep-rooted tumor, all good from the core of your being, despite the sun, despite a bowl of hot soup before you, despite the day, despite your friends, despite it all. Fuck it all. In spite of it all. Fuck it all and go.

When you’ve been locked in the room where every wall is a mirror, the endless echoes of the terrible truth of yourself, the atrocious display of your ugliness, when you have been kicked by the ghosts of yr fears as you sweat in the middle of a linoleum floor, then maybe you know.

When you have shifted through sweat and regret through sleeplessness, mulling things said, things not said, months ago/maybe years, and the room will not relent her mirrored haunt.

When you quit answering the phone, when you quit laughing, when you quit crying, when you quit trying, because you are insulated in a rapture of lightlessness, that is when you know.

DFW. Kurt. Chester. Chris. Kate. Tony.

The struggle is real, people. The struggle is real people. This whole fucking thing is real, and it's a monster. It is killing our inspirations, our hopes, the lights that cut the fog, and it is murdering our friends when we were dancing unaware.