Call it, "A meditation on fantasy."

It's summer again, so I'm carving out a new routine.

I wake at the same early hour, somewhere before six. I open three windows, grab the newspaper, start the coffee, feed the cat. I usually head out for my run before 7; if I'm resting that day, I dig into the A section.

By mid morning, I'm at the keyboard, reading analysis and commentary on Slate or Grantland, updating newly downloaded podcasts, checking in on Facebook, and considering my errands and chores list.

Sometimes there's time for television, and since my usual cycle of watching only includes the staples I've made time for, summer represents my best chance to catch up on the nonsense I would otherwise skip in lieu of favorites like Community, Friday Night Lights, or Mad Men.

So, I've reacquainted myself with Anthony Bourdain and his No Reservations franchise, something I admitted to loving back in an early blog nearly three years ago. What I loved about the show, then and now, remains Bourdain's episodic commitment to spinning a food-centrist narrative. All the ills plaguing social and cultural landscape of the Western world--one might gather in watching Bourdain's the carefully-constructed arduousness of his trek across the globe--can be solved by reading the fine print on the centuries-old food labels on simplistic, old-world meals.

He eats. He asks. He learns. He even cooks, on occasion. And throughout each venture, you hear him espousing the ways recipes reflect lifestyles, the ways these lifestyles reflect people, and the ways these people make the world. It's a fantastic product, one that catapults Azorians, Icelanders, or Laotians into American living rooms, rendering them tangible, pure, and equally enviable. I admit I occasionally buy into his vision of the world, and identify what I perceive to be a kind of lack within me--an awareness of some cultural or familial legacy I desperately seek to acquire even though it might not exist. I sense a distance between myself and my past.

Is it the narrative creating this? Is Bourdain a glorified commercial, artfully orchestrating some product placement scheme, trying to sell me something I a.) don't need, or b.) can't actually obtain?

In a week, my father and I will embark on a trip that came about from similar ruminations on history, narrative, and tradition. There are things I need to see; places I need to know. So with my summer and his retirement, we have the chance to visit remote areas in Idaho, places he frequented in his life with his father and brothers. We will stay at a rustic family home in a vast, isolated canyon, brought to unnatural life only in the evening and morning by generator power. I will tread the ground where family ashes were returned to the earth. I will learn, like the patriarchs of my family, by the terrain of surrounding hillsides and the eddies of the swirling creek that swells along the property. I will hear the stories of the people who reside there.

Because I can't tell the future, I can't be certain this trip will satisfy all my structured longings. I can say for certain, however, that I've already built a scaffold for the experience in my mind. The deconstruction of these expectations might need to occur before the trip can become organic--before I can allow it become "real"--and by that point, I might already find myself disappointed in the chasm between the life that is and the narrative I so often want it to be.

And that's the thing about Bourdain's narrative. It's easy to spin a yarn about the quality of life when the spool of fabric encompasses an afternoon meal. What I need is proof that something obtainable exists when the episode ends. When the commercial goes to commercial.