Everyone, including me, has lost interest in my blog. But I still think it's cool to have one. Cool in a post-cool sort of way. So uncool that it has circled back around and become cool again. Like Jazzercise. But some things are so bad that they never were cool and never become cool, like Labyrinth-era David Bowie.
"Interesting. Tell me more about David Bowie."
I've always been kind of slow to catch on to trends. I never consciously rejected cool stuff. I just always liked really lame stuff. Or, when I caught on to something cool, it was always a little too late. For instance, in sixth grade Adam Shaw had two Mötley Crüe shirts. I don't think he had any other shirts. One shirt read "Kickstart my heart," and the other one said, "He's the one they call Dr. Feelgood." I liked the Dr. Feelgood one because it made me feel good when I looked at it, despite the fact that I was looking at a venomous snake with bat wings wrapped around a knife with what I think was a foul-tempered meerkat on top. One day Adam asked me if I liked Mötley Crüe, and I said, "Yes, I think so." Adam wanted to know what my favorite song was and I said "I really like 'Ice Ice Baby'," and he said, "No, I mean your favorite Mötley Crüe song," and I said, "Wait, Mötley Crüe doesn't sing 'Ice Ice Baby'?" Adam sort of gradually stopped being my friend after that, because Vanilla Ice doesn't have any umlauts.
Later, I found out that that super sophisticated bass line in the Mötley Crüe song "Ice Ice Baby" came from that one Freddie Mercury/David Bowie duet, so in 1996 I bought Bowie's album Heroes because I liked that "Look-at-me-I-am-an-isosceles-triangle" pose David Bowie is striking on the cover. Nineteen ninety-six was a good 10 years after David Bowie stopped being relevant, at least in the musical realm, but I was also almost entirely irrelevant to anything in 1996, so me and David Bowie were a good team.
In my high school there was a creepy picture on the wall in the library of David Bowie holding a book, like he was reading it. And I was like, "David Bowie can read? How does he read with those different colored eyes?" And then I went to the card catalogue and used the Dewey decimal system to find a book about David Bowie and I found out he got into a fight in middle school over a girl and the guy punched him in the eye and it changed color after that. So, between that and listening to Heroes hundreds of times on my Discman while I played "Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" on my Super Nintendo all summer, you can see how David Bowie really spurred a period of serious growth in my life.
Later, I bought all his albums, because I felt like he had a lot to teach me, about cavemen and spacemen and V-2s and scary monsters and Detroit and suffragettes. Once, in college, I made a commitment that I would listen only to David Bowie for two solid weeks. This was when most kids my age didn't realize that androgyny was a thing 35 years before Brandon Flowers knew someone who had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend. I don't know if I would repeat the experiment, as I experienced a loss of appetite and a series of bad hair days that I'm certain resulted at least indirectly from sustained exposure to songs off Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane, but I still think it was a net positive. In the sense that I lived through it. I'm simultaneously impressed and disgusted with myself that I had so much to say about David Bowie.