10:35 p.m.

[ David Bowie & Orson Welles ]

I'm listening to the David Bowie: Live by Request concert. It's floating in to me from the next room and making me really nostalgic for a time long past. A time when I'd be getting up the next day to go to my job at the now-defunct video store and maybe have a semi-interesting date aftwerwards. The dates weren't always semi-interesting. Some of them were like watching Oswald on Nick. Jr. Slow, boring and mostly colorless. I hate that show. Everything looks really blah because the colors are almost nonexistant. The action is really sloooooooooooooow and the songs are so tedious they all sound like dirges, even the upbeat ones. I may have covered this here before. My loathing for Oswald the not-interesting octopus is legendary within my clan. I hate his friend Henry the Anal-retentive penguin even more. I seriously don't know why anybody hangs out with that uptight little fucker, unless they're intrigued by the way his practically ziplock sealed ass squeaks when he walks.

Anyway, it was the job I loved. It didn't pay worth shit but it was a good time.

Ahem...

Back to David Bowie. He did Ziggy Stardust a little while ago and I rejoiced. That's one of my all-time favorite songs. He's phenomenal live too. I saw him in 1990 at Merriwether Post Pavilion (Sound & Vision Tour). Adrian Belew, with whom he had a hit song at the time, Pretty Pink Rose, was awesome too and the entire show was fantastic. It was my first concert and I will never forget it. I hope that there's a place in the mind for stored memories. If anything should ever happen that makes my memory function even less than it does now and such a safe place of the mind exists that can be locked and safeguarded, then I want to hold the memory of that concert there. I want to tuck that memory in with the memories of my wedding in Las Vegas and the births of my babies and the day I got engaged to Larry, so that they can be safe and mine forever, only to be opened occasionally as reminders of how good life can sometimes be.

I think I have almost everything he's ever done, except for his current CD. I won the Sound & Vision box set in a contest in 1990 (two of them actually), and still love them. I used to have posters of him on the ceiling over my bed when I was sixteen, along side the Duran Duran and Culture Club posters I was absolutely sure I couldn't live without.

Anyway, he sounds as wonderful as he ever did and I must say, he looks awesome. Only a little older, considering the abuse he's put his body through. I used to say he was pale and tragically beautiful. He still is. Only now there's less tragedy in his form and more life in his face. It's quite amazing, actually.

If it's possible to overdose on nostalgia, I'm doing it right now. I miss the 70s and 80s so much. Hippie love and synthno pop. Two more things to be locked away in the spirit safebox.

I was also thinking about Orson Welles today. He was so beautiful and so brilliant, so incredibly talented. I have always wondered what happened to make him gain all of that weight. He destroyed himself with it. There had to have been a motivator, a trigger somewhere in his life to make him just say, "Fuck it, I don't care," and give up. What could be so horrible? He made one of the most popular films of all time and is among the most respected film makers in history. He pioneered cinematography as an art form, by not just shooting another movie, but by making the audience experience his vision. He was among the first to use slow motion (the breaking crystal ball scene), he shot scenes from a platform sunken into the floor to give his audience an alternate view. He was adored both by critics and by audiences and was much sought after by women. And all of this by the age of twenty-four. How freaking mind-blowing is that? To have one's place in history well established and not even be thirty years old yet...

He was physically beautiful as well, and intelligent, personable. Charming.

Something to everyone, it seems.

So what happened?

Why destroy himself, especially in the slow, awful way he did? His friends by all accounts tried to stop him. They talked to him, pointed out the affects of his consumption of food and the multiple glasses of sweetened iced tea he threw down at every meal. Yet he didn't stop. He gained weight. Lots of it. And it killed him. And he knew it would.

I don't understand. I never will.