This forum probably isn't the prime spot for a few words about Anthony Bourdain, but this is where my friends reside...
As we age, death of people around us hits harder. Maybe that's partially a function of realizing our own impending mortality, but for me the feeling on this one is similar to Zoe DiBlasio's passing last year. With Zoe we were online friends, and with Bourdain the closest I've come to meeting him is a TV segment he did on a late friend of mine, a pizza guru outside Chicago.
But the connection between the two is that I've lost another who thinks like me. Damn it, in this world that number is shrinking. Yes, Anthony Bourdain was about food but he was more about having an explorer's lust for faraway places, with the cuisine being a happy by-product. I've focused on Italy in my travels because I dig the place and it's my ancestral homeland besides, but I've had similarly tactile, visceral experiences in France and Switzerland as well, and truth be told even up in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Being somewhere else is fun...
Bourdain also had a keen, sardonic eye for the absurd, and I can tell you--and Zoe would attest--is that if one hasn't repeatedly found the theater of the absurd in Italy, all I can say is that you haven't looked hard enough.
My first trip to Italy eight years ago, through a buddy back here we set up a day in Chianti with a transplanted New Yorker named Eugene Martinez, who had spent the last 25 years understanding, enveloping and explaining Florence & its environs to tourists who 'got it'. We were willing subjects, and we spent a magical autumn day in Greve-in-Chianti at Montagliari Winery--cooking, eating, drinking & talking about everything and nothing, the doors of the kitchen wide open to the fall Tuscan breeze and the fading afternoon sun.
After we returned, we stayed in touch through EMail and social media. A couple years later, after another failed attempt of mine to schedule a return trip, he messaged 'come back soon--life is short.' You probably know the rest. Six months later he died in his sleep of a heart attack.
Through Zoe, through Bourdain, and through my friend Eugene, they are telling me now, almost imploring me: Get out there, get out of your comfort zone. Travel and see what the rest of the world has to offer.