when you're feeling anxious

Firstly, call me if you can, I will read to you.

Try and get somewhere a bit more quiet if you can, all the extra noise isn't helping xx

If you can't call me, give this a read, and keep reading until you don't need to anymore.

First Page of Anthony Bourdain Book "The Nasty Bits" xx ( I might just start adding more then there will be a whole book here x)

"i went seal hunting yesterday. At eight a.m., swaddled in caribou, I climbed into a canoe and headed out onto the freezing waters of the Hudson Bay with my Inuit guides and a camera crew. By three p.m., I was sitting cross-legged on a plastic-covered kitchen floor listening to Charlie, my host, his family, and a few tribal elders giggling with joy as they sliced and tore into a seal carcass, the raw meat, blubber, and brains of our just-killed catch. Grandma squealed with delight as Charlie cracked open the seal's skull, revealing its brains—quickly digging into the goo with her fingers. Junior sliced dutifully at a kidney. Mom generously slit open one of the eyeballs (the best part) and showed me how to suck out the interior as if working on an oversize Concord grape. From all sides, happy family members were busily dissecting the seal from different angles, each pausing intermittently to gobble a particularly tasty morsel. Soon, everyone's faces and hands were smeared with blood. The room was filled with smiles and good cheer in spite of the Night of the Living Dead overtones and the blood (lots of it) running across the plastic. A Bonanza rerun played silently on the TV set in the normal-looking family room adjacent as Mom cut off a piece of snout and whisker, instructing me to hold it by the thick, strawlike follicles and then suck and gnaw on the tiny kernel of pink buried in the leatherlike flesh. After a thorough sampling of raw seal brain, liver, kidney, rib section, and blubber, an elder crawled across the floor and retrieved a platter of frozen blackberries. She generously rolled a fistful of them around in the wet interior of the carcass, glazing them with blood and fat, before offering them to me. They were delicious.

Words fail me. Again and again. Or maybe it's me that fails the English language. My depiction of the day's rather extraordinary events is workmanlike enough, I guess . . . but, typically, I fall short. How to describe the feeling of closeness and intimacy in that otherwise ordinary-looking kitchen? The way the fifteen-year-old daughter and her eighty-five-year-old grandmother faced each other, nearly nose to nose, and began "throat singing," first warming up with simultaneous grunts and rapid breathing patterns, then singing, the tones and words coming from somewhere independent of their mouths, from somewhere . . . else? The sheer, unselfconscious glee (and pride) with which they tore apart that seal—how do I make that beautiful? The sight of Charlie, blood spread all across his face, dripping off his chin . . . Grandma, her legs splayed, rocking a crescent-shaped chopper across blubber, peeling off strips of black seal meat. . . How do I make them as sympathetic, as beautiful, in words as they were in reality?"

"Without the seal, we would not be here," said Charlie. "We would not be alive." A true enough statement, but not an explanation. You'd have to have felt the cold up there, have seen it, hundreds and hundreds of miles without a single tree. You'd have to have gone out with Charlie, as I had, out onto that freezing bay, a body of water nearly the size of an ocean, watched him walk across a thin, tilting layer of ice to drag the seal back to the canoe. Heard, as we did, the resigned calls from other hunters over Charlie's radio, stuck out in a blizzard for the night, realizing they would have no shelter and no fire. You'd have to have been in that room. A photograph wouldn't do it. I know. I take them in my travels, look at them later—and they're inevitably, woefully flat, a poor substitute for the smell of a place, the feeling of being there. Videotape? It's another language altogether. You've turned what was experienced in Greek into Latin, edited places and people into something else, and however beautiful or dramatic or funny, it's also . . . different. Maybe only music has the power to bring a place or a person back, so close to you that you can smell them in the air. And I can't play guitar.

Fragments. Pieces of the strange ride, the larger, dysfunctional but wondrous thing my life has become. It's been like this for the last five years. Always in motion, nine, then ten, then eleven months out of the twelve. Maybe three or four nights a month spent in my own bed—the rest in planes, cars, trains, dogsleds, sailboats, helicopters, hotels, longhouses, tents, lodges, jungle floors. I've become some kind of traveling salesman or paid wanderer, both blessed and doomed to travel this world until I can't anymore. Funny what happens when your dreams come true.

My pal A. A. Gill once suggested that the older he gets, and the more he travels, the less he knows. And I know what he means now. Seeing the planet as I'm seeing it, you are constantly reminded of what you don't know—how much more there is to see and learn, how damn big and mysterious this world is. It's both frustrating and addicting, which only makes it harder when you visit, say, China for the first time, and realize how much more of it there is—and how little time you have to see it. It's added a frantic quality to my already absurd life, and an element of both desperation and resignation.

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks—on your body or on your heart—are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt. When I look back on the last five years since I wrote the obnoxious, over-testosteroned memoir that transported me out of the kitchen and into a never-ending tunnel of pressurized cabins and airport lounges, it's a rush of fragments, all jostling for attention. Some good, some bad, some pleasurable—and some excruciating to remember. Much, I suspect, like the pieces in this collection.

I've done a lot of writing for magazines and newspapers in the last few years, and it's the better morsels (I hope) from that work that follow. A lot of it is hopelessly dated, or obviously written for a British or Australian publication, and I've added some accompanying notes at the end by way of explanation (or apology). I've been writing this stuff for much the same reasons behind my frenetic traveling: Because I can. Because there's so little time. Because there's been so much to see and remember. Because I always think for sure the next book or the next show will tank, and I better make some fucking money while I can.

It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and what's happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there—with your eyes open— and lived to see it.