I swear Shuffle shuffled up this--this, my most beloved song* by this man on my mind today (and a lot of days)--for me tonight while I was walking beneath the engorged stars and across from my night-gilded city and beside the lake that gradated from alien green by the shore to ink way out there.
It was so god damn beautiful.
*I realize that, because I first truly engaged with this song when it played over the credits of the end of the CBS Sports broadcast of the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, my love of it probably is and should be suspect. But, hell, I don't know, I'd heard it before, and I'm sure very recently before that on WKLH, but I remember this moment because it stopped me across the room, my bedroom in the apartment on Bartlett. It was around the time I was starting to think about moving to Chicago, yes, and while that doesn't have anything to do with why CBS Sports was playing it as it scrolled all the names of the technicians and camera people and coffee people and translators and ski wranglers and what-have-you who'd worked long hours for weeks in a foreign country (which itself is not a an achievement that necessarily deserves an accolade such as "hero"), I find it wonderful and strange that I think back to that moment that this song first (or finally) wove a spell over me at the very moment that I'm gaping at the skyline of the place that was merely a flicker of a possibility in the back of my mind while I was busy being spellbound by Bowie in the front. Or, rather, struck still by the decision of a Bowie-loving television network producer.
I've loved this song since 1998.
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