Bourdain’s Field Notes
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
—Hassan-i Sabbah
When I was an angry young man, disillusioned with the world, disenchanted with my generation, disappointed by the “counterculture,” and looking for role models, William S. Burroughs’ paranoia and loathing, his antisocial appetites, his caustic, violently surreal wit, and his taste for controlled substances seemed to perfectly mirror my own aspirations.
I wanted to write. I wanted to be apart from everything I grew up with. In short, I wanted to be elsewhere. And the Tangier, the “interzone” that Burroughs described—where he’d found himself exiled, strung out, writing the pages that eventually became Naked Lunch—sounded to my naive young mind like an exotic paradise.