Shocked

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Admittedly, it took me a good while to "get" Anthony Bourdain. After awhile, though, I came to love his show. I saw him as Randy Newman with a steak knife instead of a piano: brilliantly sarcastic, biting humor, and extensive knowledge of music as well as food. To say I'm shocked to see that he hanged himself in his hotel room in France this morning (6/8) is an understatement. When I was growing up it was "rivalry": you either liked The Addams Family or The Munsters, or Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie. I carried that over to the Travel Channel, where I initially much preferred Andrew Zimmern's sweet, charming, schoolboy mischievousness to Bourdain's acid tongue. In time, though, I did come to enjoy that "acid tongue" and see them as almost complimentary: you needed a badass Bourdain to balance a likable lug such as Zimmern. After Bourdain left the Travel Channel I didn't see much of him, save when the Travel Channel ran No Reservations marathons. The news this morning of his suicide wasn't how I wanted to see him again. Let this please be a lesson: depression is a disease. It's as much a disease as cancer, and just as deadly. It doesn't care how famous a person is (Robin Williams, anyone?), just as cancer doesn't care. By the same token, NOBODY would tell someone with cancer to "just snap out of it," but to go to the doctor and get treatment because many are treatable and curable. As someone who has depression, I'll tell you the exact same thing about that: it is treatable. If you don't feel right, ask for help. It's no "shame" at all, just as it's no shame to go to the emergency room if you break an arm. We need to stop making light of depression. It's taking a future generation, and it's also taking the present one. A sad farewell to Anthony Bourdain, who was just 61. Here's the two Travel Channel chefs together (on Bizarre Foods), with Bourdain's hilarious comment at the end: