Dear Bourdain,

I don’t know how. But you ended up alone, sitting in a hotel room, unsure of if tomorrow would be worth living.

I empathize. I know exactly how heavy that boulder is. So oppressive, Sisyphus would pass you on the mountain face, grunting in respect and empathy, and feeling a bit more grateful that even if her boulder will undoubtedly roll off the other side, at least she’s still planting her feet into the march, digging with her heels and stiffening her back.

At least there is something to be said about work. Some, if not pride, then discipline; if not routine, then deliberate action; lifting and rolling the boulder along.

Instead of just being succumbed to its weight; not enough to break the rope, but enough to wonder about putting it down.

Maybe it’ll be freeing; ease the burden. An eternity is simply an infinite blink away.

Running through a Bridge in Sapporo

Baka! As if you could hold it alone on your own mortal spine; you’re not Atlas. Don’t you see everyone around you also pulls your weight along? That you don’t survive this world alone.

And if you decide to cut the rope, don’t you know how many people stumble? That they depended on you to hold them higher, closer, together. Tony, didn’t you see that so many of us were watching you, maybe not knowing you, but using you to pull our own boulders along?

[Anime aside; this is when Karen finds Leleouch about to use refrain. S2. She smacks the shit out of him letting him know Zero isn’t just his anymore. Similar concept here, less mech battles.]

There is no heaven, there is no god. We simply exist in this field/plane, unaware of anything that might suffer elsewhere; dumb luck and nothing else that gets us right here, in the miracle of everything and nothing all at once.

And at the very end of it, we die alone, stepping into the final mystery by ourselves.

It’s a dark and scary reality, but hey at least we live in an age that we can enjoy ice cream! That’s pretty miraculous if you ask me. All those other human and pre-human shmucks don’t even know!

If you’re really in to it, you can even make your own ice cream! My coworker did it, fennel came out great, so did tamarind. Huckleberry. It was delicious! He shared with the whole office floor, a minor break in a normal work week. Just a hobby, between the 9-5 grind, something he did with his kids.

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Or you can Facebook livestream your shooting of a small community Mosque in New Zealand.

This is our Brave New World.

In the midst of everything, a utopian/dystopian present, we’re still facing the same exact end as every other living thing on the planet. We live, we eat, we die.

In between that, at least for the modern homo sapien sapien, you can do literally whatever the fuck you want. It’s goddamn terrifying. For you. For me. For all of us.

What I’m really trying to say is: Thank you for being here. Thank you for being. I’mma hug you. And compliment your hair, or your tattoos, or your breakfast choices, or that picture you drew and hung on the walls of the Graham. I’mma share delicious foods and have outrageous adventures. I’mma write letters to you that you’ll never read, stored on some small piece of the internet.

I’mma love all of y’all.

If I can keep doing that, maybe I’ll actually ease some burdens. Maybe we’ll all live a little lighter. That would be just fine.

Well. Not Tony. He found it too heavy. Now it weighs on us all a little more. But we’ll shoulder on regardless.

Love,

Winston