Kooks

David Bowie's "Hunky Dory" 1971

David Bowie does not belong to me.  In fact, I never even had the chance to meet him.  Still, upon hearing of his death, seemingly out of the blue and completely unexpectedly, the other night I had a visceral reaction.  I felt as though I had been kicked in the gut and yet strangely numb at the same time.   How can someone who's technically a stranger have such a deep and everlasting impact on my life?  How does one describe or even truly understand an icon of this magnitude?  What is it about David Bowie that speaks so directly to my soul?
     There are those moments in my life when things just clicked.  Moments when all time and space came together in one swirling tornado of feeling and being.  Moments when I was 100% certain that everything would be alright.  One of those moments came from listening to my 1st David Bowie album.  Sure, his music decorated the soundtrack of my youth with his radio hits being the confetti on the cake of my childhood.  Songs like "Let's Dance" and "China Girl" were prolific and, of course, I knew them by heart but I had not yet connected the dots of the mind-blowingly genius timeline of his life.  So, the day I bought a copy of "Hunky Dory" more than a decade after its release and brought it home my life would be forever altered.  The cover alone was enough to make me question everything I had ever heard or seen about gender and sexuality.  I knew I was gay, I knew society deemed this as wrong and I knew that I loved to dress up and look different than the people that walked the streets in my school and hometown.   When I put on this record and heard those gorgeous melodies and poetic verses I realized that I was not the only one who didn't feel like a cookie-cutter mall employee.  I wasn't the only kook out there!
     "Discovering" Bowie is like finding the holy grail of the underground.  It's like tapping into a consciousness that up until that moment I had thought was a solitary and private way of thinking.  Hearing "Hunky Dory" in all it's timeless glory was like opening a giant box full of glittering treasure and sailing away on a magic carpet of color and emotion.  The dull grey existence that I was faced with in upstate NY in the 1980's was suddenly transformed to a flashing rainbow like I had fallen down the rabbit hole and landed in Oz (my blog so I can mix up as many metaphors as I like!).
     In my teenage Moonage Daydream David Bowie was my father.  In many ways I actually learned way more about who and how I wanted to be from Bowie than I did from my actual dad.  My dad was like a roadmap of how I didn't want to be whilst Bowie was a blueprint of a magical life that I could be my own architect of.  He was beyond gender and sexuality and was more like a glorious alien being that could be or become anything he fancied.  Of course, Bowie belongs to the stratosphere.  He belongs to the cosmos and to the universe and, therefore, he is many, many different things to millions of people.  That is part of his absolute wizardry - the godlike chameleon that speaks a different language to each person that listens.
     So far in my life this has been the biggest loss of public persona.  When Elvis died I saw my father cry for the 1st time and it broke my heart.  When John Lennon died I saw my Mom weep for his untimely loss.  I understood at a young age how these larger than life figures can unite and bond people and societies together.  Perhaps that is the ultimate goal of art to break down all barriers and unite people in the process?! All of that being said David Bowie was my personal hero and, luckily, I will have his music to guide and comfort me until my time is up too.