Archy, Bowie and me

So I’m in the office and it’s past 11 p.m. and most of the lights have been turned off. I can hear the occasional chair-creak and keyboard-tap from elsewhere on this floor but I have a hard time determining where the sounds are coming from: it’s a big office and I have been remiss in developing my latent powers of echolocation.

For all I know I am two rows away from witnessing an Archy & Mehitabel type of situation, with cockroaches or other similarly diminutive creatures expressing the hell out of their tiny souls by their late-night typing away on Apple products ostensibly designed for humans, hurling their small selves on letter after letter, assembling essays painstakingly, piecemeal. Tomorrow my colleagues in publication will chance upon these critter-crafted musings, furrow their brows at them for a moment, and delete them, depriving the world of yet another chance to communicate itself to itself.

These are the kinds of thoughts one has when one has not slept much in the past 48 hours and is trying to wrestle articles into a state of semi-readability.

Tonight, on top of my thoughts about the opportunities for self-expression inherent in unattended office equipment, I am thinking about David Bowie. My girlfriend M. is slated to play keyboards for a hand-picked band at a Bowie tribute in July; she’s been learning such songs as Changes, Space Oddity, and Let’s Dance. She’s less familiar with the ‘80s stuff than with the earlier, universally-acknowledged-classic stuff. In a phone conversation between articles, I admit to my unwavering and possibly misguided affection for the ‘80s material (up to and including Never Let Me Down, vilified as Bowie’s most wretched album, and even the Tin Machine side project, which as a youngster I used to play on the car stereo until my mother told me to stop. As always, Mom’s judgment was sounder than my own).

Archy and Mehitabel: The story of a typewriting cockroach and the cat of his affections

That the ‘80s, less-acclaimed Bowie is more bound up in the events and emotions of my life is an accident of time and circumstance I would not alter even if I could. Ziggy Stardust may be a more mind-blowing and world-changing incarnation than the Goblin King of a baby-snatching kingdom, but the Labyrinth soundtrack still stirs me in ways that will always be a little too elusive — or perhaps embarrassing — for words. (Oh, the uncritical eye and ear of youth.) Rebel Rebel is without doubt the better song, but Shining Star is what soundtracked a too-early, fumbling first date, years and years ago.

Tomorrow, only minutes away, M. and I have an anniversary. All of our lives involve many ways and reasons to mark time, but some are more meaningful than others. The hours one stretches to meet a minimum of documented work time are one thing; the moments adding up to years spent with a loved one are quite another.

Like our music, our loves are both chosen and not chosen. There are happy coincidences, chance encounters, endings and beginnings: collision and confusion and recognition, and everything after.

This is not to imply that everything is an accident of time and circumstance, though one can certainly make an argument for the idea. It is just perhaps a fumbling towards the notion that such things as music, and stories, and love, are only made possible by listening.

The clicking of a keyboard from elsewhere in the office goes on. The guard wanders in, and wanders out. An hour from now I will hail a cab home, but at this moment that cab is miles away.

The world is always telling us things, whether in the form of free verse written by reincarnated insects or otherwise. Sometimes it takes the stillness and semi-dark of an office after hours to remind one of what messages one might be missing.