This is a small David Bowie thing meant to be another David Bowie thing in the rapidly expanding star-cloud of David Bowie things.

Early on in college I babysat in Brooklyn. My first day babysitting a six-year-old named Gabe, we were sitting and coloring. I was probably thinking something about how pure and child-like coloring was, and how it was just a ton like improv, a thing I was learning and just as quickly becoming insufferable about at the time.

After a long time of us both being quiet, Gabe asked, “Who’s your favorite singer?”

“Elvis Costello,” I said, doing the most important thing you can do day one of a new babysitting job: establishing hipster cred. “Who’s yours?”

“DAVID BOWIE!” Gabe said.

Outcooled by a 6 year old. Truly this was Brooklyn.

Gabe hopped off the stool and returned to the kitchen counter seconds later where we were coloring with a big floppy black CD binder. In it were all the 70’s Bowie albums.

Gabe told me, “This is mine.”

I said, and meant, that this possession of his was awesome. We put on Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

As it played and we kept coloring, I thought, Oh, of course a six year old would like David Bowie. It’s so theatrical and visual, even just on record. At a time in your life when your imagination is as overpowered as it’s ever going to be, Bowie’s music would be like this audio accelerant.

Sometimes when I’m listening to music and doing a certain kind of task, this space opens up in my brain between the two things. It feels like a physical space, a room or something. Sometimes it’s an imaginary place, sometimes it’s a hallway in my high school. It’s weird and I don’t know why it happens. It happened that day because of course it did. And listening through the ears of a six-year-old, that space seemed wider than it ever had before.

That’s where David Bowie lives. He lives in a space in your head that is sometimes memory and sometimes completely made-up, a space that opens up between his music and you drawing, between him expressing himself and you expressing yourself. He doesn’t stop inside your head. He continues directly through you.