Sitting alone in an apartment I hate, watching Bourdain take a nostalgic tour his home state of New Jersey, and I think something has struck me.
Bourdain was a man who had been nearly everywhere on the planet a Western dude was allowed to be, and even some places they weren't on a few occasions.
Myself, I spent ten years living abroad in a country where I never gained more than a trivial grasp of the language, hopping planes whenever I could to the main continent to explore, but never as many as I would've liked.
In all that time, I think what I realized, is that a body needs a home.
And I don't mean a place to live. I don't mean shelter. I don't mean "at least you got a roof over your head."
We intuitively know that genuine homelessness is a truly wretched state to be in, even if culturally we seem to react to it in the most absurdly counterintuitive ways. In fact, I'd argue it's this bone-deep fear of ending up the same that is why we judge the homeless so harshly: we want to believe it's their own fault, because it lets us believe it can't happen to us so long as we make the right choices.
But fear is a messy motivator, and I'm not just talking about somewhere to keep out of the cold, though that seems to be what so many of us are forced to settle for.
Home is more than a place to sleep. Home, as the cliche goes, is where the heart is. Home is a place that warms more than your bones. A place you feel safe, a place that inspires you. Somewhere you love, and loves you.
I haven't had a lot of those.
We moved around a lot when I was younger, and even after we settled, I spent basically my entire teenage years trying to escape the house as often as I could. Even ran away once or twice. In my adult years, I bounced around constantly, sleeping as often in couches as beds. The longest I ever lived in one place was in Helsinki, 3000+ miles from where I was born.
Over time I think I tried to dismiss the idea of home. I took Paul Barman's "love people, not places" as my own half-hearted anthem.
It's an intentionally off-putting track, an audio barrage, almost a rebuke or a sermon more than a rap, but it also speaks to a kind of disaffection and overcorrection I have held, and seen a lot in other leftist and queer spaces.
So many of us, in reacting to the nationalism and bigotry we have encountered in our lives, have come to see the idea of loving a place, a community, a home, with suspicion. Even contempt.
To love a place is naivete, provincialism, the mindset of the enemy. We have so often been hurt by our communities that we begin to distrust community itself.
You see it in the way some of the debate about the impending Twitter diaspora has played out, how people have responded mostly with suspicion and dread, even to a place like this that has done so much of what it could to try and build an actual home on the internet, instead of just a place to shitpost and shitfight.
You see it in the way we talk about our homelands, our countries of origin or residence, the places we came from. "I am a man without a country," said Vonnegut, and so much of that sentiment seems to resonate with so many people, not just Americans like him and I.
I talk about this not to make some creepy call for "national socialism", rest your worries. I'm not putting on an American flag jumpsuit any time soon.
But I do think it's worth reflecting on what we're missing, what we have done to our capacity to build community, to build homes, when so many of us have adopted the philosophy of the spiritually homeless either by force or will.
People need homes.
And homes need people. I've come to realize that it is quite the challenge to truly build a home alone. The moments in my life where I have felt that feeling of "homeness" most strongly, are the moments in which I most knew I was not alone.
I felt at home in Tampere, a whole half a world away from my birthplace, even in my rotten little single room apartment, because I had become a part of a loving and wonderful community of expats and students who welcomed me with open arms and made me feel never far from friends.
I felt at home in Berlin, despite being a total stranger to the place, because of how welcoming that city felt to freaks and queers like me.
In the past year, I have felt most at home even in this apartment I hate, when I've been able to share it with the woman I love and our big dumb ball of tortie. Those quiet moments of being together, the little ways my instincts kick in and seek to make the place a better one for the both of us.
Barman is half-right. People are what give a place personality, hope, love. We need community, we are social creatures, and even us introverts need some time with our fellow humans now and then. But I think, as place and community blend in our minds, that is where we find home, and where there is home, there is hope.
There is also something worth fighting for, worth defending, protecting.
If we don't learn to love our places, how will we care when they come to knock them down?