I really don't know how exactly Anthony Bourdain wrote.

 I really don't know how exactly Anthony Bourdain wrote.   Did he write as an ongoing process, every day, did he write at night, or fresh early in the morning.   Did he avoid alcohol until he was finished, like Hemingway says about himself.   Hemingway put down other writers, "can tell the exact moment in the sentence when Faulkner starts in to the whiskey," can see that Fitzgerald, after some quick fast years of abuse, can't take the drink anymore, gets drunk easily, acts like a fool, the car, the rain, the famous chicken of Lyon, the hotel, calling Zelda...  And yet, while his sober monkish seclusion of his mornings, however he managed, another cold water flat in Paris where he'd get bored with himself and squeeze mandarin orange rind peel oils into the fire, the flames dancing with new colors from the citrus oils, a second wife's wealthy gift of a house in Key West with a writing hut out far enough away in the back, he left record that he might have fudged it just slightly, having a glass of Muscadet in the cafe, treating himself to the views and fresh oysters as he brought his mind back to being Up In Michigan.  

My sense, my immediate reaction to my own question, follows on my experience of what he must have done many times, going through a shift, maybe a double, a long one, and finally, even as you're finally cleaning up, wiping things down, calming, coming down from the adrenaline on top of adrenaline rush, is to pass around the shift drinks--in those days--the beers for the guys in the kitchen, when the quiet laughs can come out finally as sweat is wiped from brow.  The talk comes out.  This would have been his rhythm.  I saw somewhere, in an early video clip, that he would get up, light a cigarette, and write, first thing in the morning.  The fruits of which were varied, broad, and which also got him having a piece published in The New Yorker, the genesis of Kitchen Confidential.  He would have worked on his chops, put a lot of wood splitting in to do so.  Remember, he was in New York City, a native.  He knew the energy, he knew how to talk the talk, he knew the constant struggle, he knew "you gotta get up and face the commute, and all that."  And he did it, and he gleaned, through his curious and nervous bright energies, a lot of stories and forms and little tales and bits of actual dialog.  How people really act, how people, real actual people, talk, what they do, the kind of shit they try to pull.  The egos, the vanities, the supposed pecking orders of worldly appearances.

He lived life at a fast pace.  I imagine he was very disciplined, and obviously he was, to produce all the prose and the narratives of his television shows.  He was, I heard this recently, described as a polymath, a fellow who knew a lot about a broad range of things, take film, take literature, take, well, you name it, politics, history, as if he were a street side John F. Kennedy with a team of speech writers who could pluck out the knowledge of the master himself.

Of course it was all shattered, this whole world we live in, if we try to think of it as a whole, or to find a big enough chunk of it with enough to say things about, enough history, enough character...  And he put it back together for us, reconnecting things, maybe we even ourselves in our little private quick thoughts as we go from one place to another like a school kid in the bus looking out the window, could tune into and understand, having thought them ourselves.  He, Bourdain, was a man for the shattered world.  He got the sense of humor in it, running through it like the grain, the wave pattern, found in nature, in wood, in meat, in metallic things like fine wrought chef's knife, the fiber of everything that exists.   Because, as Einstein tells us, substance is really simply just slowed down waves of energy, so slowed down as to appear to be brought to a solid from, concrete, a standstill, whereas, if we knew better, and could look better down into it, beyond the powers of our intentionally unaided eyes, we would see the vibrations still vibrating, the rainbow in everything, even the rock you might stand on, the tiny rocky parts within slowly dribbling and dancing and ready for the next whatever it is.  Even you.  Like smoke.  He was a man for the vibrating world.  The world of reality that enabled one to fight against the harsh authoritarian regime, the hawkish dogma that itself, of course, fell apart, broken by the very vibrations of reality itself.

All you can hope to do, is be true to that.  Maybe it's in the small underdog Parisian cafe, that's been serving organic and biodynamic small producer wines, along with local organic ingredients.  Maybe it's a local movement.  Preserving old school local cooking, barbecue, street food.  Maybe it's in the politics, how the Turks tried to stamp their authority upon the Armenians by slaughtering them by the family, by the town, by man, woman and child, out in the fields.  He found a home in Berlin nightlife's candor.  He found his people in sushi chefs in old Japan, masters of martial art and stance, of the human being and how that creature is cut out to work, in a stance, so as to be able to move, from one side to the other, efficiently, able, capable of doing many things at once.  

I wonder, I wondered, for awhile, particularly after what happened with Khashogji, who paid for his dissident note against the Saudi crown prince, if a Turkish hit team didn't enter his hotel that fatal night in Alsace...  for the show he rather bravely did, as all his shows were brave, and for the people, and for the energy that runs through the world.  He went to Iraq.  He went to Palestine.  He went to Libya, China, Vietnam, the Congo, where the script can write itself.  He saw things, as they came through his skin.  Hong Kong.  Right?

 He could quote from Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris.  He had a command of the body of work of Italian cinema, Fellini style, Passolini, etc., as his friend Argento facilitated with her direction, how to get to Napoli, Rome, the real Italy, beyond the post card picturesque.  

The same with the legends of French gastronomy, friendly types anyway, and through his obvious appreciate and respect, through the enlightened attitude he had toward the beauty of what he came across, the poetry, the art of it, the very appropriateness of all elements the chef has brought together, in a professional manner, sure, he got it.  (Perhaps why the airport hamburger of Johnny Rockets or whatever it was depressed him so deeply.)

He coped with the distractions of the road.

A fine machine, such as his, needs to rest sometimes.  I see his depressive moments as times calling him to slow himself down, to return to a gentle womb of reintegration, day dreams, dreams in general, the gift of shutting down the mind to just not think, to not be overwhelmed by all the details, the details we're all supposed to, as adults, keep on top of.  He seemed to do well with Bhutan, the Buddhist nation of a different sort of GNP.

Remember, he was one of the first American males to be able to go public, in a humorous convivial way, about the brain's attraction to the birds of Thailand, the clever illusions of ladyboys, the shemales, dressed and looking very much like females, in a way that brought some acceptance and some laughter, a joking chagrin about how he needed to get back and reassert his American Manhood by drinking beer and cooking out a summer barbecue of burgers and franks and football to turn his mind away from what it had seen and couldn't easily unsee in its own lustful tastiness.  Yet another part of the culture, of the deeper waves of deeper reality that come through all of us.  Responsible for making wine.  Responsible for getting us laid.   Responsible for birth, for life, for death.

He was honest with us.  He regretted out loud for us, being such a spoiled little prick with a bad attitude that he tossed away many opportunities, quit Vassar, didn't apply himself.  Didn't take advantage of the God given good thing set before him, falling into the realm of addictive pleasures and mind alteration.  Yet, scarred, he came back from that.  He was honest.  Hey, we all have this genie within us...  See, it's like he was speaking in our heads, and we were speaking in his, and we all said, "Holy Shit, This is a match!"  This hasn't happened since Vonnegut, or Kerouac, or Hemingway.  (He was a Burroughs fan, far more than a Kerouac prose stylist.  He never relied at all on Hemingway, in my recollection, which might be sort of odd, given Moveable Feast, but then again not.  As a man of his own, he knew there was no overlap, there was no desire to replicate, except if it was something weird that none of us would have gotten without his guidance.  Morocco.  All those expat cats.)

Boston, that was funny.  Staten Island, a classic piece of stylistic autobiography.  A podcast from Bemelman's Bar drinking gin martinis.  

I know at night, given a sort of anti circadian rhythm given to me by thirty plus years being jerked around by the restaurant shifts, day, night, day, night, then later, all at night, the standing on the feet for so long, well, you end up submitting to it, and your whole body and your entire brain say, hey, now, we need rest.  I don't care how efficient it is, such that light is now "creeping up between the shutters and you heard the sparrows in the gutters," and the "sawdust trampled feet that press to early coffee stands," but you're missing all that, sorry, T.S. Eliot and Preludes, you need your rest, and if it can't be real sleep, at least meditate, as in corpse or lotus pose, don't think, just breath.  The night schedule is not good for you.  It's the cycle of migration, as in what the Monarch does, or the whale, I suppose, but a more inward one undermined by logic, but by the spirit, I suppose.  And thus it was for me, so enriching, even if it meant I'd be away to five in the morning, or worse, to be ready and capable and indeed meeting so many wonderful varied and great people from all around the world, when I tended bar in Washington, DC, at the coolest little wine bar you could ever imagine.   A real Jesus Buddha life, now that I look back on it, I mean, if only the impossible were not even more impossible than that.  It the price you have to pay, a different kind of library of experience, more tailored to my own mind's workings.  

And you can't all record that.  You can't have customers come in, and then you tell them, hey, I'm clicking on the record button, because I really value this conversation, and I enjoy you, and I really think you are cool, I mean, way beyond my own poor powers to add or detract.  You can't do that.  You should be able to, on the one hand, and New Yorkers are probably strong enough to not give a shit if you put them on some form of record, but of course it has to be some particular peculiar maybe circumstance, i.e., you, customer, have come alone here, and if you wish to share anything, well, that's totally cool, and by the way "here are tonight's specials.  The soup du jour is a celeriac soup, garnished with duck confit.  In addition to the salmon tartar on the menu, there's an old school Lepic dish, tuna carpaccio, with ginger.  A salad, fresh anchovies with hearts of palm over arugula with a lemon vinaigrette.  Black Cod with leeks a la nage, stuffed leg of guinea hen with red cabbage and wild rice and balsamic port reduction, and a braised beef Paleron, with sweet potato puree and asparagus."  Something like that, the ballgame of every day.  Gehrig's the first baseman, batting third.

There will never be another, of course, goes without say, Anthony Bourdain.  All of us people, restaurant or not, have to nod at that statement, and think inwardly, prompted, by themselves.  He did a lot.  Man, he did a lot.  He was a gift to me, and my own understanding of the world.  And rather than be selfish, oh, yes, I think there's something of that soul to be emulated.  Not copied.  Just bowed to.  Whatever. 

There's a Quequeg in every bar, a Melville too, maybe.  There's people just cavorting and having fun, and that's the way you live life.  

And then there is the Bourdain level.