It’s gonna hurt. That’s why the doctor slaps your brand-new ass: friendly warning. Call it professional courtesy. It can be ameliorated. Alleviated. Abnegated. You can throw all sorts of vocabulary words at hurt, and hurt will kiss your forehead, congratulate you for being so clever, and then not move a muscle. There are pills you can take. Specialized footwear is available for those who choose to run. Churches are open during the day, and bars at night. The symptoms can be managed, but take care with the treatments.
Lock yourself inside; hurt is not a respecter of doors. Go see everywhere there is to see; you’ll wind up in Samarra. Play your music too loud. (Doesn’t matter.) Sit real quiet and don’t bother no one. (Doesn’t matter.) Dance, fucker, dance as fast as you can. Try not to notice who’s feeding the jukebox dime after dime.
Where’d it come from, anyway? Probably your childhood. Good a thing to blame as anyone. Childhoods are nothing but trouble. We should get rid of those. Maybe your family did it. Having a family hurts. Not having one hurts, too.
Real late one night, somewhere on Earth, a man said to the Lord, “I was not informed it would be quite this painful.”
And the Lord said, “Now you know.”
The man had several hours until dawn to decide what to do with that information.
Tragically beautiful, my friend.
Right on
Once we’ve figured it out, it is too late. We’re hooked.
Bourdain’s friend, the late author Jim Harrison, who also battled depression, said this about the death of David Foster Wallace (from Tom Bissell):
Harrison brought up Jonathan Franzen’s much discussed New Yorker piece about Wallace, in which Franzen revealed that he could never get Wallace interested in his passion of bird watching. “This is interesting,” Harrison said. “Of the 12 or 13 suicides I’ve known, none of them had any interest in nature. In other words, they had no interest in what Rimbaud called ‘the other.’ The otherness, say, of nature.” They could not make, Harrison said, “that jump out of themselves.”
We were silent for a while. “You know,” Harrison said finally, “he loved his dogs for that last year, but he should’ve been having dogs for 30 years. Every day of the year, the first thing I do after breakfast is take the dogs for a walk. They absolutely depend on it. But it’s also what’s best for me.”
truth. beautifully written, too.
You said it brother.
That was beautiful and perfect. Those last three sentences will stick with me forever…
The world needed this today. You’re amazing.
So much real.
I keep coming back to this page to re-read this post. Haunting, beautiful, horrible. Perfect.
This one hurts. A lot. What went into the decision? I’m sad that he was that sad.
drifted off to this last night. musica de la raza (91.3 KBCS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYVria-yWg4