"In a perfect world, individuals would be free to take all the heroin they wanted – and stuff their faces with trans fats as much as they like – until it becomes a problem for their neighbors. Which it clearly has."Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw (via fortuneandglory)
"I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able – if called upon to do so – to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world."Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw (via fortuneandglory)
(Source: amazon.com)
"Sweating through your shirt, resisting the urge to double over in pain, you begin to understand. Pain - followed by relief. Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbess. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. … At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed … Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad. Pleasure was good. Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused."
I have never really been able to explain why it is I subject myself to foods that cause physical pain. I’m talking burn-my-nostrils, make-me-cry pain. Why?
When I was eleven years old, I had my first extra sloppy, extra spicy chicken wing from a local pizza joint - mild by my current standards, but excruciatingly painful to a child who grew up in a salt and pepper only household. A friend of my older brother - Steven was his name, five years older yet never treating me like an inferior or annoyance as so many of my brother’s other friends did as I tried so desperately to butt my way into the teenage world - brought them over on a Friday night after a football game and asked if I was interested in having some. “They’re damn hot,” he warned me, and I did not hesitate to prove my worth, to show him that I was just as much of a hardass as the rest of them, scrawniness be damned. Those wings burnt - and I panted my way through eating a half dozen, sauce dripping from my fingers, my chin - but they burnt so good. I was hooked.
Soon, my teenage love affair with jalapeno, serrano, and habanero peppers took off. Exploring atomic and suicide sauces with mandatory waivers became a priority. Middle school lunch competitions to see who could bring in and eat the spiciest sauce without blinking or taking a drink became a weekly occurrence.
Nowadays, my more subdued adult self still has an addiction to adding ingredients which cause burning sensations and when asked, I have never really been able to explain it to friends and family. Reading Bourdain’s Medium Raw tonight, I think he did a damn fine job of explaining why it is those of us who love spicy foods enjoy it so much.
(via fortuneandglory)
"If I were a reasonable man, a smart man, I would have retreated to my hotel long ago. But I am a flawed vessel. I carry within me, as so many do, the seeds of my own destruction. A Rumsfeldian delusional belief in my own infallibility."Anthony Bourdain, The Layover (Montreal)
(Source: fortuneandglory)
"Everything was different now. Everything. I’d not only survived - I’d enjoyed. This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents’ shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life - the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation - would all stem from this moment."Anthony Bourdain on eating his first oyster as a child - from his memoir Kitchen Confidential. (via fortuneandglory)
"I don’t have a reputation to protect. I came from nowhere. Whatever success I’ve had is from being frank and not giving a shit. I’m incapable of doing otherwise. It’s not an integrity thing - I’m just constitutionally and emotionally and neurologically incapable of keeping my mouth shut."Anthony Bourdain (via fortuneandglory)
(Source: tvguide.com)
