Thread by @JoekillianPW

Saw "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" today.

Morgan Neville has made some of my favorite documentaries of the last ten years. So I wasn't surprised it was great. I was surprised at some of the ways in which it was great.

I have an uncomfortably intimate relationship with suicide. Heroes of mine have killed themselves. Good friends, too. My mother's suicide upended my life in ways from which I'm still recovering, years later.

So anything dealing with suicide is a toss of the dice for me.

Is it going to ruin my day? My week?

Am I going to find something in it with which I connect in a way that is strangely comforting?

You never know until you roll those bones.

What I found in this film was as close a true representation as I've seen of someone who is a whole, complicated and intelligent person who chooses to do something irrational that hurts others because...people sometimes do that.

Over the years I've heard many people say, "I just don't know how people kill themselves. I don't know how they get there, how they make that decision."

To that I can only say: "I envy you."

I know how they get there. I've lingered in that particular doorway.

It isn't that you know you're going to hurt all the people who love and need you, that you'll be leaving a giant crater in all of their lives and decide you don't care.

It's that you feel, you really believe, things will likely be better for everyone without you in the picture.

There are a lot of ways to get there -- even for people who are talented, successful, beloved.

A key to understanding it in Bourdain, which I think the film explores brilliantly, is that from early childhood he knew he wasn't like other people. He didn't want what they wanted. He didn't understand why certain things, in which he had no interest, made them happy.

In his late teens and early 20s, he found kitchens. The hours: crazy and crushing. The people: misfit toys. The lifestyle: consuming. It alienated him from "normal people" - and he loved it.

I get that.

At around the same time, I fell in love with newspapers and newsrooms.

There are people for whom a job is a means to the rest of life -- a paycheck, some security, the foundation on which you can build the more important things.

And then there are those of us for whom what we are doing *is* how we are doing, always.

It's not always healthy or enviable. It's not to be romanticized. But, like the weather or substance addiction, it is also not in your head. It is a reality.

You can deal with it well or you can deal with it poorly.

How happy you're ever likely to be depends on that choice.

Seeing how much writing and creating were Bourdain's life, the way he struggled to center other things but could never achieve the balance he thought he should want...it was very sad, but powerfully relatable.

I've known people who can turn anything into heroin.

Work. Love. Sex. Reading. Writing. Travel. Running. Fighting. Meditation.

This film really shows you that side of Bourdain.

There is a scene, after he discovered Jiu Jitsu in his 50s, when a friend says he wouldn't stop talking about it. It was insufferable.

It gave me spasms of involuntary laughter because I could certainly relate.

I was that guy with boxing. With motorcycles. With books and records. With girls.

Some of this you can work on in therapy. Find tools to help. Some of it you can medicate. Some of it's just character. And character is destiny.

Which is not to say that some people are destined always to set themselves on fire.

But there are those who are that way inclined.

But the end - the mess, the depression, what he'd have called "the nasty bits" - those aren't his story and his legacy. That's just how it ended.

The things he left behind -- a daughter, a family and far-flung network of loving friends, an awful lot of good writing, good interviews, good television -- those are his legacy. And they're appropriately celebrated.

Can't recommend this film highly enough, if you can go in knowing that.

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