Bowie

Words cannot express the loss I feel knowing I no longer live in a world with David Bowie.  He was, after the Beatles, my second musical obsession.  My dear friend Russell made me a tape in my eighth grade year that I wore out, & I date my high school experiences with purchasing & absorbing his records.  Some of my Bowie vinyl has skips on songs made by me desperately lifting the needle to listen to one song or another just one more time.  I'm almost certain that if you could tear apart my brain or my DNA or whatever, a considerable percentage of me would be found to be made of David Bowie.

Oh I could go on & on like this, but I don't think I could really express the impact he's had on me.  So I'll tell you a story about this morning instead.

My wife woke me at 5am.  It's no secret she's a big Bowie fan - she even has an Aladdin Sane tattoo.  As soon as her friends heard the news, they began to text condolences to her, even in the wee hours of the day, & weirdly, she asked me, shaking me out of sleep, "Have you heard that David Bowie died?  Is it true?"

Not entirely certain that my wife believed I had a newswire pumping current events into my brain as I slept, I went to my phone, noted the time, & typed "David Bowie dead" in Google.  Many, many hits.  It was confirmed.

She seemed to be beginning her day but I needed sleep, so we didn't say anything more about it.  Sweetly, she didn't want me to wake up, find out, & worry that she didn't know.  My own reaction was muted by the darkness, my sleepy state, the strangeness of it all.  I managed to get back to sleep with a little difficulty.  & then I began to dream.

There needs to be a caveat here that I don't believe in dream analysis or anything like that.  If dreams have things to tell you, they'll be pretty obvious.  I've known people who believe dreams are filled with universal symbols, etc., & I regard them in the same way I regard anything which requires supernatural means to be true, & that is with skepticism.

In my dream, an acquaintance here in Lexington had died.  I won't say who, but he's nothing like Bowie, except they're both musicians.  Plus, he's not really dead!  He was just dead in my dream.  For some reason, his memorial was being held at my home.  This wasn't the home I currently live in - it was a house that had a thin U-shape, with the front door at the end of the U, & something like a back door close to it, at the other end.  The bottom of the U was the back of the house, & it opened into a sort of backyard; the area in-between the stalks of the U was negligible - the U was long & thin.

A deejay at WRFL was there at the memorial, & I asked him how this acquaintance had died.  He didn't tell me - he didn't want to tell me, as if it were a secret - but he did tell me that the deceased had wanted us all to share what little money he had, & that amounted to five bucks apiece.  He put my share into my hand, & as I counted it out, I noticed I only had three dollars.  When I tired to tell him it wasn't five dollars, he began walking to the back-door area of the house, & I found people & objects in my way, so I couldn't follow him.

Instead, I went to the front door, to let guests in.  When I went outside, I was in an urban neighborhood - my front door opened into the street, like a brownstone's would.  It was all terribly familiar, although I have never lived in any place like that.  It was a warm, sunny day, & I took a stroll around the neighborhood.  It seemed like people from all walks of life lived there - there was a ranting person at the bus stop, a family walking down the street, folks getting in buses & taxi cabs, horns honking, street construction - you know the scene.  It seemed like a wonderful, vibrant place to live.

Suddenly remembering the memorial, I made my way with some difficulty to my home, & when I opened the door, the house was full of as many different people as outside: some older people had set up a card table in the foyer, & were playing cards; close to the back, someone had turned on the radio & a mix of young & old people were dancing; a nearby shelf was an impromptu bar, & plastic cups were being filled by a line of chatting guests; I even saw the actor who played Lester Freamon on The Wire, Clarke Peters, on an old wall phone, in a friendly conversation.  I was filled with a sense that this was the right way to celebrate someone's life, as well as a little anxiety that it was happening in my house.

The dream ended there.  I woke around 8pm with a sadness in the pit of my stomach, like somehow as long as I slept David Bowie would still be alive.

Do I think the dream was my brain processing the news of his death?  I don't know.

Of course I never met Bowie.  I never tried to communicate with him, ever.  It's one of the strangest aspects of recorded music that we can feel that we know, really know, people who are ultimately strangers.  & he can never really go away, not as long as something he recorded - he who made so many amazing recordings - is just a mouse click away.

All that's left to say is, goodbye, & thank you.