words by Annie Fish
(content warning: sexual abuse, mentions of abortion, suicidal ideation)
I just put one foot in front of the other, and the next day is the next day, and you do your best.
—Mick Ronson, 1993.
Listen:
This song was so easy. Being young was easy. A really beautiful day in the park, sitting on the steps of the bandstand. … Middle-class ecstasy. I took a walk to Beckenham High Street to catch a bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts but couldn't get the riff out of my head. Jumped off two stops into the ride and more or less loped back to the house up on Southend Road.
David Bowie wrote that about “Life on Mars?” in 2008. I think about this a lot. “Being young was easy.” What a wild thing to say about yourself as you sit down to write something like “Life on Mars?” He just says that. He just writes that like it was nothing. But from that nothing comes “Life On Mars?”, comes a thousand people’s favorite song, comes something more than any of us. That was just a Tuesday. “Being young was easy,” he says. I always wanted to disagree.
But I’m wrong, maybe. Maybe being young is easy, maybe it always was. I sit here and I think about what “being young” meant and I think “well okay, calm down, I’m only in my mid-30s” first and then I think “well, yeah, because you didn’t worry about it.” Being young is not yet knowing you’re supposed to worry. Maybe that’s what happened, maybe that’s why he got away with it. Nobody told David Jones that you’re supposed to worry about what other people think and so he turned himself into David Bowie and changed everything.
Of course, that’s not even true. Otherwise he’d still have called himself Jones, he wouldn’t have cared about any sort of Monkee business getting in the way. David Bowie cared about what we thought more often than we believed, that’s why we kept talking.
But think about some of his reactions to things— nobody liked mime so he went folk, nobody liked folk so he went metal, nobody even heard the metal so he invented glam (as far as the papers are concerned), everybody loved glam so he went soul, even more people loved that so he moved to Berlin and read books, nobody bought his records that came out of the books so he went global, he listened to people loving him then so he did that again, and nobody liked that so he invented grunge, everybody hated that so he fucked around, and when nobody liked that he turned into a rock and roll legend, and everyone liked that just fine so he left for a little while. And just when we thought he’d never come back, just at the perfect moment when it didn’t quite matter as much, out he came, turning the whole story around.
Of course, that’s barely true. But anyone’s given apocrypha for David Bowie is always going to be more interesting than whatever the heck he actually thought. But one gets the feeling that he knew that, that he understood that this was part of the appeal, part of the trick. People’s histories of him were why he kept getting away with it.
Workspace was a big empty room with a chaise longue; a bargain-price art nouveau screen ('William Morris,' so I told anyone who asked); a huge overflowing freestanding ashtray and a grand piano. Little else. I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. Nice.
“Nice,” he says, like he’s just made a 69 joke. He’s describing one of the greatest songs written in the 20th Century, and he says “nice.”
I’ve told people David Bowie made me who I am and that’s true, even if plenty of other people also say that about themselves. “But no,” I want to scream, “I’m different!” I can’t claim David Bowie. I won’t try to. But I can talk about moments in my life and try to spool things out of them and then maybe I’ll have convinced at least myself that if I ever chose again to say “David Bowie made me who I am” then I’m not lying. David Bowie means more to me than I do to myself.
Which explains a little bit, I guess, of why everything about this feels terrible. If that which made me who I am is no longer a source to draw from (you see how I talk around this), then what am I now? Where am I now? Nowhere, it feels, some days. Some days I convince myself that I’ve forgotten, that it’s… I don’t know, 2010, that’s it’s an okay time to enjoy David Bowie— it’s not quite that archived, it’s all still a little fresh, like the notes of “Bring Me The Disco King” are still ringing out somewhere. Most days that’s impossible. I put on, I don’t know, Lodger, and I don’t hear anything anymore. When was the last time I listened to Pinups? I don’t know. Back when I was young, maybe.
One morning, when I could have still imagined myself as "young," I was walking down Western Avenue. I had a day off, I had probably asked for it. I don’t remember feeling cold. I remember it was sunny. It was a bright winter morning, and it didn’t feel cold. I walked to a comic book store and bought some floppies, probably a new issue of The Wicked and the Divine, maybe something else, too. I felt like I was skipping around town. I didn’t think of myself as particularly young as I skipped down Western Avenue. Nor really was I even thinking of “Life on Mars?” I probably was only kind of thinking about David Bowie that morning. When I think of Western Avenue I usually think of a forgotten, unreleased Zwan song, “Riverview,” because Billy Corgan sings “we’re going down Western Avenue at midnight.” I probably hummed the bass line to that song as I walked in the brisk, sunlit day. My parents called me, I told them my morning plans, to have a little brunch by myself. They said that must be nice. My mom might have asked if I was doing anything the next day. I knew what she was talking about, the next day was going to be David Bowie’s birthday. I said “well, nothing tomorrow, but maybe I’ll have a joint celebration today.” Because it was my birthday on January 7th, 2013.
I kept walking. I got another phone call. It was my girlfriend (maybe you’ve read another story by me recently about “a girlfriend,” well, this isn’t that girlfriend). She said “i got out of work early.” It sounded like she said “I godda whir lee,” because she had a Missouri drawl that made it sound like she couldn’t close her mouth all the way, which she couldn’t. My mother, one cruel visit home, said afterwards “I thought the girl was supposed to be cuter than the boy.” After we broke up, my mother said “she kind of looked like a pig.” I felt like both of these comments went too far, even if it was technically true that my girlfriend couldn’t really close her mouth all the way.
We met a year earlier when I moved into the apartment she lived in after breaking up with my previous partner. One night we got drunk on a jug of wine and watched the Elvis movie Clambake and then half-fucked, then after that night we kept half-fucking until one day when I was upset about our shitty landlord she said “well, I have something that will cheer you up,” and I asked “okay, what” and she said “I love you,” and then I guess we were dating and it was okay for awhile if a little chaotic.
She freaked me out a little bit, but I told myself, “no, it’s cool, she just doesn’t give a fuck.” But there’s a difference between not giving a fuck and not giving a fuck. The week we met she said “I lost my car,” and I asked her what she meant, and she said “well I parked it somewhere so I could get on this boat because I got a job standing on a boat in my bikini, but then I couldn’t remember where I parked my car,” and then she became somehow an exact replica of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and I thought “okay, but how do you just… lose the car.”
As I walked down Western Avenue it was the 7th of January and it was 2013 and it was the beginning of the last two weeks of us actually dating. We’d break up in a huge tumultuous fight about absolutely nothing and I’d stalk off in the rain and go finish the last book of The Wheel of Time and cry at the end and then come back in the rain and we’d finish fighting and breaking up for another hour. But that was late January. Here it was the 7th and it was only occasionally that every time I argued with her about things like “hey, you have to pay the rent, please stop buying so much weed” she’d say “fuck you I don’t owe you anything” and she’d go buy some more, and I’d have to cover both our rents for another week. Or I’d say “can we actually do something about the fact our bathroom sink fills up with black water” she’d say “fuck you why don’t you fucking take care of it” and she’d go buy some more weed, and I’d have to pitch buckets of black water out of the bathroom sink if I ever wanted to brush my teeth. Or I’d say “I really wish you had put something under the dining room table when you stained it black,” she’d say “fuck you you don’t even appreciate that my dad built that for us” and she’d go buy some more weed, and I’d stare at the hardwood floor stained with pitch and think “who’s going to pay for that.” I knew it would be me.
Then she started to get mad at me that I didn’t want to have sex with her anymore and and then every discussion started to turn into something darker and then most nights ended with “fuck you” instead of “I love you,” and that became the rhythm of our lives. Most days, if sex came up, I'd say, "well, frankly it kind of scares me now," and she'd say "why because we had a fucking abortion?" and I'd say "well, yeah, I'm sorry that the whole thing makes me a little nervous now," and she'd say "fuck you, you weren't the one who had an abortion, you don't know what that was like," and I'd just have to agree. Sure, I told myself, I'd called off work and paid for most of it and sat next to her through the worst of the physical pain and was her caretaker through the emotional aftermath, but yes: I had no earthly idea what it felt like. I couldn't argue with that. I always told her "I wish I did, I wish I could, I want to understand," but she'd say "fuck you, that's bullshit," and go buy some more weed, and I'd go back to wondering how exactly we all got here.
Every time she said this to me, invoking the abortion for little reason than to win a fight, it made me sad— the brief time of her pregnancy had been one of the only genuinely sweet-feeling times in our entire relationship. We both were on the same page about needing to do it, but we both were surprised by the kindness that followed in each other. In the weeks that followed, we both took care of each other, we found a sweetness in mutual sympathy. We had grace for each other, we shared the emotional pain of it. We made up little stories about the kid we were absolutely not having, and laughed at the absurdity of imagining two dirtbags like us having a child. It was a kind winter because we actually for once shared something together. We finally had something in common.
But in November and December in between finding out for real that she was pregnant and the moment we realized we really did both hate each other I remember nice mornings where the snow would softly fall outside and I’d watch it from the window while I drew comics and listened to music and took breaks to read about David Bowie’s album The Buddha of Suburbia. Chris O’Leary’s Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog was still being written, and he’d just started talking about Buddha, my favorite David Bowie record. I learned about St. Etienne for the first time in his blog post about “Dead Against It” and through December as the yelling started again I would look out the window and sing “and did you see the KLF last night” while the snow fell.
On January 3rd it snowed a tiny bit and I saw that he’d posted the entry for “Untitled No. 1” and my entire body filled with something I couldn’t explain. That was my favorite David Bowie song. It might even be my favorite song of all time. I had to stop and think about why. About why that song felt perfect. One of the reasons was because it felt indescribable. I was well on my way to feeling like a musician by that point in my life, and I was getting to the place where I could recognize how people made the sounds on their records. But “Untitled No. 1” was a wonderful exception. I couldn’t explain it, it just floated in my head, around it, through me. It felt like a companion. It felt full of mysteries, it felt unknowable, it felt complete. It felt like something David Bowie had to work through, it felt like something he could have been both proud and afraid of. I felt protected by the song, and I liked that feeling. That’s what David Bowie often made me feel back then: he made me feel safe.
The post had screencaps from Kieslowski’s Three Colors movies and I thought it was a perfect choice, even if I hadn’t seen them (I’d watch Blue two weeks later). He said it sounded like water, and I’d been obsessed with water for years, it was my favorite thing to think about, and here was my favorite writer writing about my favorite song with my favorite thing. I commented on the post:
It’s hard, I guess, for me to talk about it. “Can You Hear Me” was the first to have the distinction. For years after, that went to “Teenage Wildlife.” But as soon as that water-drop-start comes on, and the song washes over me (and you’re right— this song is water), I know it can’t be any other than this.
This is my favorite David Bowie song.
I almost want to say “I don’t know why,” but I do know why (and you expressed most of ‘why’ above). Maybe I at times feel hesitant because it seems so at-odds with ‘fandom.’ Why this and not “Ashes to Ashes?” “Win?” “Sweet Thing?” “Lady Grinning Soul?” Because it is. “Untitled No. 1” is so effortless and inviting that it couldn’t possibly be anything other than my favorite.
I’m typing this as it snows tiny flakes. “Ian Fish, UK Heir” just came on, which again, is fitting. I’ve been waiting for this post since I read “Space Oddity” those years ago, and I feel completely satisfied. A little sad, maybe. A real service to the song.
(The choice to use Kieslowski is strangely harmonious, as well.)
never, never—
Then my girlfriend came in to the room and said “I’m going to the grocery store and I’m gonna need help carrying the groceries so you better fucking come with me,” and I said “yeah, of course,” but she was mad anyways, like she’d already decided I had said no and she already had to fight me on it. I wanted to walk in the little snow flakes anyways. I tried to tell her about the blog post but she told me bluntly she didn’t care.
(It reminded me of this— we went to a comedy night at some bar (I do not remember which) and it really riled me up. I felt electric afterwards, like I had seen a possible future open up. I thought “man… I could do that. I’d probably be good at it,” and out loud I said “you know, I bet I could do that… you could just get up there and tell stories.” My girlfriend said, with only a moment’s hesitation, “that’s fucking retarded.”)
Four days after reading about “Untitled No. 1” it was my birthday and the sun had come out and melted the snow and the weather felt nice on my face and I got a phone call. It was my girlfriend saying “I got out of work early.” I was disappointed, then embarrassed for feeling that way. I wanted to have a birthday brunch by myself. I had scheduled a birthday dinner for myself and friends at another restaurant later that night, she was supposed to be there, I was happy to have the morning to myself. She said “what are you doing,” and I said “I’m about to eat lunch” and she got mad at me and said “you can’t eat lunch by yourself on your birthday I have to be there what the fuck,” and I said well okay I’ll meet you at work, even though it was way out of the way from where I was walking. We walked together in the nice air and she told me about how much she hated her job and I didn’t talk about anything.
We got to the restaurant I wanted to eat at and she kept flipping the menu back and forth. “There’s nothing I can eat here, it’s all vegetarian stuff,” she said, which didn’t really make any sense to me. I recommended the buffalo chicken wrap because that’s what she usually got at other restaurants, but she said “but it isn’t even real chicken,” and got a sandwich that didn’t have any fake meat on it and she complained loudly the whole meal about how she wished there was some fuckin’ chicken on it. It was the second time in a month we’d had an extremely unpleasant meal out together. A couple of weeks earlier we’d gone out to a restaurant in Chinatown and fought the entire way down. Earlier that morning I had read about Laura Jane Grace coming out and it excited me, though I couldn’t have even told myself why at that point. I brought it up at dinner and my girlfriend said “you’re only telling this to me because now you’re gonna say you want to be a girl so you won’t have to have sex with me anymore.” And I thought, in that moment, “this is the first time you’ve been right about anything you’ve ever thought about me.”
We walked home and by that time it was evening, an early winter’s dark. The air got bitter. At home she went to light a bowl and offered me some. I declined and checked my computer. I looked at the comments on the “Untitled No. 1” post to see if anyone had replied to my own comment. I looked at twitter. Someone said David Bowie’s website was down. I looked at it and it said it was closed for maintenance. I noticed the message was written in a different font than the site had been using for the last few years. I took a screencap of the page, and posted it on tumblr with the caption “feels like something’s gonna happen this year.” I added the tag “#tellinglies” because I knew it was silly to think anything. I started singing the hook of the song “Telling Lies,” just stretching out the words “telling lies” out loud until my girlfriend said “what are you doing?”
I said “just singing” and she said “I’m gonna lie down, come lie in bed with me,” and I said “okay but I have to get ready for dinner soon” and she said “where is dinner again” and I told her and she said “another fuckin’ vegan place? Why are you Mr. Vegan all the sudden?” And I said “I don’t know, man, it’s just my birthday, I like those places” and she said “come to fuckin’ bed” and so I followed her in.
I laid down next to her as she finished sucking her bowl and she rolled over and put her hand on my crotch. I said “oh, uh, hey” and she said “it’s your birthday” in a drunken sing-song voice and I said “hey, I have to get ready, let’s, uh, do it after dinner.” And her eyes lit up with something wild and scary as she said “no.” Then she smiled as she climbed up on top of me, taking her shirt off. She leaned close to my face. “It’s your birthday,” she said. “That means you have to have sex with me.” Something in her voice terrified me and I wanted to get it over with because I knew I had friends coming to the dinner and I didn’t want to be late for their sake and I just didn’t want to fight even though I really didn’t want to have sex with her. She could see all this behind my eyes and she knew what I was thinking and she said “you better not be afraid of fucking me because I got pregnant,” and I said “i mean that does feel like an okay reason to be afraid of sex” and she said “it’s not, you gotta fuck me right now, it’s your fuckin birthday and you never fuckin’ have sex with me and I’m fuckin’ horny.” So I took off my shirt and tried not to look scared whenever I looked in her eyes and I unbuttoned my pants and took them off from under her and then she started grinding on me and then even though it wasn’t what I wanted, even though I had said no, even though I was visibly scared of her, we had sex. She was high as a kite, and the sex hurt. I looked up at her face. Her eyes stared unblinking at me. I didn’t see anything behind them. Her mouth was open, her lips bared in a weird rictus. I looked at her teeth. The thing I remember most is the tiny squares of white enamel on her two front teeth. I don’t remember any sound. I don’t remember how it ended, either. There’s a jump cut in my memory to me hurriedly getting my clothes back on while she faced the wall away from me. I said “hey, we’ve got to get ready to go,” and she said “I have a headache.” And I said “oh, are you not coming” and she said “my head really hurts” and I knew it was because she had smoked a lot of weed and had no water for probably an entire day and she had just tried to exert herself on top of me. I said “well, you rest then. It’s okay.” And I started to walk out of the bedroom and hesitated before adding, “...I love you.”
At dinner my friends asked me where she was and I mimed a bong rip as I said “she’s got a headache” and I pretended I didn’t notice the look that the two of them shared, knowing something I couldn’t express but not knowing how to talk to me about it.
I walked home in the melted snow and even though it had got real cold over the course of dinner, I walked slow. I didn’t want to get home. I was afraid she would find something I had done wrong in the interim, even if she had passed out in bed. I kept thinking of her face as she moved on top of me. I couldn’t get those eyes out of my head, I couldn’t forget her open mouth, moving silently, taking up the entirety of my vision. I stamped down the thought, I stamped down the feeling, I stamped down the phrase “you have to.” I thought about what it meant, how I knew I didn't have to, and what that meant, and I thought about how now I’d be forced to live a new kind of life with that inside it. I stamped it all down. I crawled into bed slowly and silently. I kept trying not to think about it. I was back in bed and two hours earlier I was in the bed and she was on top of me and I didn’t want to and she made me do it anyways, because she knew I was afraid of her. I stamped that thought down too. I thought of the snow. I thought “well, I can think about this forever, or I could just die.” I thought about it. It felt okay to think about. I took the blanket off. I wanted to be cold. My girlfriend shuffled in bed and I froze. She started snoring. I took that as some symbol of calm. I finished bottling the rest of it all up, and let myself sleep.
The next day I woke up early. I don’t know why. It was before 8AM. I carefully got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I looked at the sink and saw a little bit of black water in it and decided I didn’t want to deal with it, so I went to the kitchen. I filled the kettle with clean water. I put the kettle on the stove and lit it. I whispered hello to the cat, and gave her some food. I went into the dining room and looked at the light. It was beautiful. Sunny and raw and it felt warm and wonderful. I listened to it; the sounds of the radiator banging to life, the fish chewing on rocks and spitting them out. I went to feed the fish. I heard the water bubbling in the kettle. I made some coffee. I sat down at the black-stained dining room table. I opened up my laptop and opened up Google Reader. It was early enough that not many people had posted anything yet. I scrolled through, not really meaning to read anything. Then I saw that The Quietus had posted something and my heart stopped.
“LISTEN: New David Bowie!!”
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t think. I felt my cheeks burning with what my muscles were doing to it. I realized I was grinning like a fool. My face felt wet. I was crying, too. Not sobbing, just tears, pent up after years of thinking “well, good thing “Bring Me The Disco King” was great” and thinking that there’d never be anything else ever again and I was going to have to just live with that. I was almost ready to shift David Bowie into the past tense, even if it felt like tearing a limb off to do so. I needed that feeling of “he’s out there, going on walks, carrying his laptop bag, wearing his little hat, and maybe he's working, too.” I needed to feel that he was out there thinking, like a symbol that I’d be okay as long as he was. By 2013 I was almost ready to give up on it. He wasn’t coming back. I’d never be in conversation with a new song of his again.
But now that was wrong. Suddenly, I’d been wrong to think all that. I had lived one life and now I had no choice but to live another but it was something I wanted, something that felt right, something I had wished for for so long but had just about nearly given up on. There was something new coming in the world and I had to hang around to hear it. Sometimes you need a new piece of news that reminds you that there is more than just one part of yourself. I could have spent the rest of my life hammering the events of that birthday into my soul. I could have made a new self out of it and died feeling sorry for myself.
Instead, I looked around me. I decided I had to take in the room. I had to commit the room to memory. Only the room, no context. Just the room. I had to memorize every detail. I watched motes of dust fall through a beam of light and land on the table. I listened again to the fish sucking on rocks, to the crunch of the cat chewing kibble. I smelled the coffee I’d just poured myself. I let it all in, I wrote it down behind my eyes. Then I actually wrote it down:
"Do you remember where you were?
Sure. 8:15AM, Chicago, at the foot of a long table. The cat crunches her meal. The fish chews on rocks. The sun is triumphant against the winter. The radiators hammer, the kettle begins to whistle. The room is bathed in a soft yellow. I seem small somehow, against the sun. It makes the room clearer. The soft hum of electricity. Things sharpen. I rub the sleep from my eyes.
And then, all those years of jokes and days wondering and thinking and wishing and finally becoming resigned to the fact that something that somehow felt so incomplete… just like that, a new day. I had joked about it last night. I purposefully stamped out any sort of expectation. I called myself silly.
I can’t help but talk about today’s news in anything less than intense emotional hyperbole, because this is very important to me, and I’m feeling a little vulnerable, and I can’t remember the last time that a bit of news meant to much to me. I always joke about how I’ve forgotten how to cry, but having spent the morning with this long-forgotten wonderful moisture returned, I can tell you it feels good. It feels right.
As long as there’s me, indeed.
So what about the song? I won’t lie— the first bars had me nervous. But then I realized that one of the endless imaginings I’d held was more or less true. This song is a pretty clear line that extends right back to Reality, namely something like “The Loneliest Guy.”
But, like parts of Reality (and like some swaths of his extensive catalogue), it takes time for it to sink in: this song is just as idiosyncratic as the rest of his ouvre. You can start with the stuttering, nervous drums. Even as they begin to crescendo and gallop at the half-way mark, they’ve still got a tentative quality to them. And that’s before you talk about the most important part of one of these songs.
Oh, that voice.
I always wondered, in my weakest moments, what it would sound like. And it’s harrowing, a little bit. Maybe it’s a choice, but you can absolutely hear the ten years that’ve passed. There’s strain, and sadness. The song drips with reflection on age.
So the line that extends backwards really goes to …hours instead of Reality. An odd dissonant choice in a lifetime full of them. But already it’s an improvement on that album. After all, a line like “walking the dead” is stunning. It’s a much clearer and haunting image than anything from 1999.
A man lost in time … just walking the dead.
I don’t know. We’ll see what happens, won’t we? But just the very fact that it is 2013 and there will be a new David Bowie album is something that I never thought I would be able to say. I am amazed and awed and ridiculously excited just to be allowed to wonder what it will be like, and, as the reductive saying goes— I can’t wait.
I feel like there is gold in my veins."
I looked at that text, I thought it was okay. What else could I have possibly said? There was nothing left to do but walk into a future I thought would never come.
So I pressed play, and I lived.
And so did David Bowie. For three years, filled with endless possibility. Every day I woke with a new spring in my step, thinking about David, having conversations about David because he was in conversation with the world again. In 2013 my life improved. 2014 was some weird peak, I could in hindsight argue, pinned in its exact center by the “Sue” single and its low-key life-changing b-side, the original version of “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore.” 2015 things were getting strained, I was hitting some form of rut, but then there was a teaser for the “Blackstar” video and there were rumors of what the album would sound like and then it was announced and I remember seeing the press photos of him in that shirt with the star on the collar and thinking “oh my God, David Bowie looks so fucking cool.” And it reminded me of being 15, and looking at pictures of him and not knowing what exactly it was but loving it, but needing it.
My new girlfriend put together a surprise birthday party for me and it was the best night of my life, a world away from the birthday I had in 2013. The next day Blackstar came out and I listened to it on record and cherished the turning of the sides and thought, “wow, he can truly do anything now.” I listened to it on a bus and chuckled at its cheek and thought “wow, what is he going to do next.” I sat in bed the next night, listening to the record, bathed in the christmas lights I’d haphazardly tacked to my wall. A poster of David, in the “somnambulist” costume from 1976 that he’d just reused for the “Lazarus” video, stared off into space across from me. I didn’t have to work the next day, so I was up in bed. Sitting, staring, refreshing all my feeds. It was no different than any other night.
Until it was more different than every other night could be, I guess.
I was up for the news. I saw the post, thought it was a hoax, wrote that— much like my cheeky “feels like something’s gonna happen this year” from 2013, I wrote something to the effect of “well someone’s about to be hiring a new web security team.” Then Duncan proved me wrong, and that was that. I stayed up until past dawn, at first trying to find a song to listen to, losing my fucking shit at “Quicksand,” then giving up. Eventually I found “Ian Fish, UK Heir”— another song from Buddha of Suburbia, which probably just has to be my favorite David Bowie album by emotional import alone (I mean… where do you think “Annie Fish” comes from?) and listened to that on repeat. I stayed awake, watching the internet, watching as people, one by one, awoke to this news. I waited until I saw that Chris O’Leary had seen it— “no words,” he tweeted. Then I could let myself asleep.
Before I did, I wrote this:
“1.11.16
I am preparing for dawn. It’s Monday. David Bowie has gone. Four words, so abstract. I barely understand them. I haven’t slept. It’s 5AM. I don’t work today. Is that coincidence? I’m listening to “Ian Fish, UK Hair.” It’s freezing in Chicago. I’m cold, too. My head hurts. I’ve been gritting and grinding my teeth. I’m making coffee. “But he was an alien!” The final twist, a last game, a final wink— he was human after all. People are going to wake up and David Bowie will be gone. Is the water boiling? The sound is the same as “Ian Fish.” There it is. I didn’t wake up to it. I was there. Watching the world realize, bit by bit. I thought it wasn’t real— hoax.
And then— no.
This is what this morning looks like. Empty. And it is, in a way. But in another it’s so full! Full of memory and song and dance. Everyone celebrating a life that moved theirs. Low Side B. Young Americans. Hell, even Blackstar. And thus Blackstar threatens to be unlistenable now. Like the joke REM pulled with Collapse Into Now, but… final.
The thing about saying “this is a world without David Bowie” is that it’s not true. David Bowie will always be here. David Bowie is eternal, immortal, forever. It’s David Jones we lost. David Jones the kid from Bromley. The London Boy. The family man. The New Yorker. The young due. Jones.
Bowie is still around. IN that way, it’s what makes “ian Fish, UK Heir” a perfect song for the morning (and the mourning). Bits of a theme filter in— a scrap of melody. Fluttering by, on the breeze. That’s how “david Bowie’ will always exist. Always nearby, on the wind. If David Bowie “IS” anything, it has always been a force of nature. Shit, if you wanna go there (and frankly I could use a laugh), David Bowie IS the 5th Element.
And of course, this morning, the lyrics to “I can’t give everything away” bounce back in to my head. What did you mean, David? It fells like you gave so so much. But that’s it, isn’t? There was still more. Still so much we’ll never know— and still wouldn’t even if you lived to be 100 years old.
(Meme aside: happy to see that gif of animated Bowies through the years making its way through everywhere)
The fact is that it is almost impossible to recount the moments in my life where Bowie was life changing. And that’s true for almost everyone in the whole world. Jesus. What a life.
Think of that life. Think of the days David Bowie spent among us. Look at the dawn starting to break outside. That, out there, is a world that has to come to terms with everything Davdid Bowie accomplished. Yes, we’ll greive (like me, right now), but then what? Who knows? Maybe we’ll do something wonderful.”
Look at that hope. “Something wonderful.” I didn’t know what 2016 was going to be, you can’t blame me, I can’t blame myself. I went to a bar the next evening and it turned into a wake before my eyes and suddenly a man was up on a table without a shirt waving a bottle of wine everywhere shouting along to “Under Pressure” and I got wine in my hair. People kept texting me about it and I kept texting back hearts. People came up to talk to me about it and I made my way through it, saying “yeah, I uh, yeah.” I tried to listen and couldn’t. I put on Lodger at work and turned it off. I didn’t listen to anything. I tried to listen to Blackstar that week and couldn’t, because that question from the first time was there, that ultimate excitement: “wow, what is he going to do next?” I just wanted to know what he was going to do next.
And I can still not say out loud what exact thing he did next.
I have yet to say it out loud. Only in the last year have I even really referred to him in past tense. That’s how much I haven’t even let myself process it. But that’s half a lie, of course I’ve processed it, I process it every day. I process it in the wound I feel, that act of God taking away the living conduit to the records and the life that meant more to me than myself. I remember the horror of 2016 for everyone compounding with the horror growing in myself that “listening to David Bowie” didn’t feel the same anymore. Like there was always something about the conversation between the work and his present day that was the important part for me.
Then time kept happening, and the way people talked about him (or didn’t anymore) started to change, and I started to watch it ossify, to stiffen into some unbreakable shape that wasn’t quite right. There wasn’t going to be another discovery to shake the foundation of “David Bowie” anymore, it was always going to be David Bowie. A thing you know. A thing you can know. A limited subject of which there is a finite amount. That’s what kills me. Moonage Daydream came and went and didn’t really make a huge blip culturally because it didn’t really matter anymore— it was a movie hell bent on telling the same story that had already been decided. That David Bowie meant more than a series of obvious images didn’t matter— it doesn’t matter— he’s something for the history books now.
And you can argue maybe he’d get a rise out of that— the man sure loved his history books.
But for me, I was trapped. Trapped in a world with less joy in it, while the greater world eased into the new sharp comforts of fascism, and then slipped into the plague years that will almost certainly never actually end. The joke is easy, the world stopped working once David Bowie stopped his conversation with it, and it’s hilarious how much evidence there is, every single day, to support it.
In October 2016 I was involved in a samhain séance and through trance I entered a dream-state. Within that state I took an elevator down into a place where I could tell the spirits were closer. I got out of the elevator and looked around. Three directions showed me empty sand dunes, the last was a path surrounded by cherry trees. I walked through the trees and found a library and sat in a gnarled chair and then a half-spectral Bowie approached me. He knew I was looking for him. I knew it was him, that it was not a dream, that I had passed through the veil and I had managed to find his exact spirit in a library, and now I had to tell him something. I tried to tell him everything I wanted to, but I couldn’t get it out, I stammered like a fan, and he shook his head, exasperated with my mumbling. Instead I looked at him for a second and just thanked him. He nodded, and I wept in the dream, and woke with tears in my eyes. I should have just wiped the tears with gratitude and left it at that. But I never let the loss go, and now it’s too late.
Now the entire world is only loss, loss more incalculable than “David Bowie” could ever be. I found myself in even worse positions than the one on January 7th, 2013. I’ve written about them at length, and won’t do it again here. But after my life went bad (and then everyone else’s did too), one thing I thought about is how easy a time circumstance had in wrecking me. How it seemed I had no shields left, that after experiencing even more and worse and an emotional rather than a physical abuse, there was nothing preventing my little head from breaking.
There was no Next Day for me after 2016, just as there hasn’t been every year since. There stopped being even “a next day.” It’s just been the same day, over and over, and that little voice in my head (it was never my own) that says “take another step” just got quieter and quieter. What do I mean by that, am I implying that the voice that tells me to “live god damn it” is voiced in this emotional production by David Bowie? I don’t know, maybe. Yes, obviously.
The man’s work and the man’s life meant more to me than myself. If one takes that sentence as an absolute truth, one can make a quick equation on what then is left of me. I wake up every morning a little more empty, not only because the mess of memories knotted in my head went irreversibly bad. But also just because I know that I will never again experience not only the joy, but the absolute relief of seeing the words “LISTEN: New David Bowie!!” light up on my screen. The freedom I felt in the news. The knowledge of something new, freeing me from the rot that’s become my memory, freeing me of the horrors of "what's happening." The possibility is over, that life is over, and it will never be again.
Instead it’s just me, my little heart, and all my memories left to rot in a hollowed out tree. Tomorrow will be the same. And the next day, and the next, and another day.