It's weird that I'm the big David Bowie fan that I am. Neither of my parents particularly cared for his music; unlike many people my age, I wasn't introduced to David Bowie's music by my parents' old LPs. There was no warm, vinyl crackle from our old record player when I heard "Changes" for the first time, no excited turning up of the car stereo volume when "Suffragette City" came on the classic rock station.
I owe the half-life of relationship I've had to David Bowie to two sources - the VH1 "100 Greatest" countdown series, and the album reviews of George Starostin, whose website (and its accompanying forum, Music Babble) was a frequent haunt of mine in my high school years. Like many, I heard "Space Oddity" as an impressionable teen and had my mind blown. It was spacey, it was cool, it was weird as hell, it was evocative...it was so damn emotionally resonant that I could hardly stand it. That sense of alienation from the world that is, of wonder at the radical otherness "out there" in space, the courage to flee from the empty, vapid commercialism of a world who just wants to know "whose shirts you wear." I get chills every freaking time every time I hear it.
The fact of the matter is that I loved that song (and still do), and David Bowie, because I was weird. I don't mean that I was weird for liking "Space Oddity;" lots of perfectly normal people do. I mean that because I was weird, it resonated with me. While I'm much more balanced in my perspective these days about the place where I grow up and the people who I group with, in high school I could not possibly have fit in less, and I could not possibly have wanted out of my hometown more. In a rather conservative corner of southeast Texas, going to a rather conservative private school, I was the weirdo hippie who felt squeamish about all the things I was told were just the way things were. By virtue of where I was, I got to be the closeted weirdo hippie...I could let my freak flag fly in my musical taste (I may have been the only 15 year old in 2000 to own music by Jefferson Airplane), but other than that, it was short hair, clean-shaven, polo shirts, normal aspirations, and trying to convince myself that I had something in common with my peers other than requiring oxygen to breathe.
It was an empty, vapid, commercial world. I couldn't have possibly cared less about whose shirts anyone wore, but I sure got sucked into plenty of conversations about the matter. I didn't known who Tommy Hilfiger was, but I certainly came to hate him by roughly 9th grade. I cared even less about most of the rest of the inanity that defined life as a teen in a small town. Who was dating who never meant very much to me, especially since pretty much nobody was interested in giving me the time of day, let alone a dinner date at Johnny Carino's followed by heavy petting in the playground equipment over by the pond.
Then there were my ideas about the world. I still can't figure out if a sense of social isolation created them, or if my different worldview resulted in feeling socially isolated. It probably doesn't matter. I mostly knew that a part of me resonated much less with Reaganite love for law and order and country than with...well, I didn't really know what. Maybe that was part of the problem. I grew up in Ron Paul's hometown, so I just came to identify as a libertarian, since that seemed to be the acceptable alternative to being a conservative Republican. It's not entirely untrue, either; I refuse to self-identify as a liberal because I've just got too much of that libertarian bent to me. I don't trust government, I hold the 1st Amendment up as the cornerstone of all liberty and have zero patience for attempts at circumscribing it, I don't like spending with reckless abandon, I have as much interest in fetishizing FDR as I do Reagan....which is to say, none. A left libertarian? Or just my own personal set of idiosyncratic beliefs that people should be free, and that a society that refuses to take care of each other (even the others you don't like or find worthy of care) is damned. Take your pick.
Regardless of the labels, or lack thereof, I didn't fit in. I had friends, and there were precious few people I *didn't* like, especially once I moved out of middle school (and its hellstorm of hormones and mood swings...I was an unpredictable, temperamental, often downright unpleasant young teen). But...barring relationships with a few people, things never felt quite right. I had to be who I was expected to be, and nobody wanted me to crack (baby, crack) and show them I was real. I may as well have been named Lo-Ammi, Not My People. And so I took my company with the likes of David Bowie.
David Bowie presented as a weirdo, and I loved it because I finally found someone who might have gotten me. Was he male or female, straight or gay or bi...hell, was Bowie even human? David Bowie was David Bowie, and even in a career of almost dizzying reinventions, they all felt authentic. Bowie was Bowie. I mean, he was the Nazz with God-given ass, a Starman, a rebel, a thin white duke, Aladdin Sane, a goblin king, a respectable aging musical legend married to a beautiful model...and all of these, and none of them, at the same time. Bowie was Bowie.
It made me wonder just who the hell I was. I knew I was a weirdo; I'd known it since I was little and thought Gonzo was, hands-down, the best muppet of the bunch. I still have a stuffed Gonzo to this day. Somehow, in David Bowie, I found something of a hero - proof that there was life for those of us who just didn't fit into the mold of what we were expected to be. There *is* life on Mars for those of us who struggle on Earth, maybe.
Eventually, I left home - first to head off to college in Seguin (and a semester in West Africa), then to Uruguay for a year of volunteer work, and since then mostly spending my time in Chicago with some shorter stints in Boulder and Iowa. I've been through fewer incarnations than Bowie, but different chapters of my life have brought out different Kevins. And...I am me, and all of these, and none of them, at the same time. And, there is not a thing wrong in the world with that fact. Hippie Kevin coexists with libertarian Kevin who coexists with orthodox Lutheran Kevin who coexists with social justice warrior Kevin who coexists with restless world traveler Kevin who coexists with husband and family man Kevin who coexists with the myriad Kevins who are, who were, or who are not yet. And all of them, and none of them, are me...and it is a strange, beautiful mystery. Who am I? Mainly, I am who God calls me in baptism - God's own. The rest is a kaleidoscopic, beautiful hot mess that makes life worth living.
Firmly into my fourth decade now, the bitterness I had in my twenties toward the people I shared those early years with is gone. I don't have it out for conservative evangelicals anymore (even if I will never be one of those, theologically speaking, ever again). I don't have it out for people whose idea of a big trip is going to Galveston. I don't even have it out for the people who broke my heart or made me feel like I didn't belong. In a way, I'm grateful (and damn proud) to have been a teenage misfit and a weirdo. I am who God made me, and I can be nothing but grateful. And, it's taken me a long time to be able to say this, but thank God for making my classmates and teachers and pastors and fellow churchgoers and family who they are, too. I don't mean that crassly or ironically - I'm grateful for you being you. Full stop.
So, David Bowie - you least likely of evangelists - to you I say thank you, as well. For your music. For your life. For showing a fellow weirdo that there's an incredible universe out there if you just dare to step outside of your capsule. I owe you one.
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