It’s impossible to say anything original about the legacy of Anthony Bourdain. Like all early deaths, he’s been relegated to a symbol. His ethos and for that matter his very image has been much abused in the service of self-help. Because you’re supposed to be on a “journey,” and that’s like travel right? Right?

 And the reason why I’m writing this is to grapple with that ugly disconnect, between the commercial-slash-social media legacy, a sort of Bourdain Inc., embodied in overwrought videos and captioned photos of the man, eyes behind sunglasses, smoking a cig on an Emirati dune or a Manhattan fire escape, which has an at-best tenuous connection to his literary and televisual output. Fandoms have a way of making one ashamed to admit one’s passions. The world is full of Rick and Morty fans who don’t want to say as much.

I can actually pretty distinctly remember the first time I watched No Reservations, in a dorm room in college. The general consensus was that if his job was to travel the world, eating dope shit, getting tipsy, and smoking Luckies, it was more or less ideal for us feckless youths. But actually, I got to know him much earlier, from the very first thing that got him attention in the publishing world, his New Yorker piece that would later become Kitchen Confidential, which I read because I was the worst kind of precocious tween that wanted desperately to understand the world of adults (read the comics first, maybe have a go at the prose). But from the very first paragraph, I realized that I didn’t need to be any different to read this. This was hormonal-boy writing, and I was a hormonal boy.