BDBD / ADBD

I'm in bed with my banjaxed back and a feeling in my body with which I am very familiar. It's terror. I have a lifelong anxiety disorder and panic attacks, so I am used to this, used to it enough that I can feel it and observe it at the same time. Right now it feels as if squirrels are running around in my torso, taking stops to bite on my stomach. Note that I picked a cute animal. I don't want to make this worse than it is.  It's almost embarrassing to admit, but I am deeply disturbed that Boris Johnson is in intensive care and might die. I don't like Boris Johnson but I don't wish death on him, but that's not really the point. It's bigger than that. There are other people I know of in hospital right now, other famous people or relatives of friends of mine, and I don't want them to die either, I don't want anybody to die of this, but it's not freaking me out in precisely the same way. It's the thought that the Prime Minister, regardless of who he is, might die from an epidemic of a disease I'd never even heard of a few months ago, a disease derived from bats, which is shaking up my sense of reality, a sense of reality that has been shaken and shaken and shaken over the past four years. I'm realising that I keep placing my sense of stability in places that aren't stable at all, such as the assumption I hadn't even realised that I had made, that the Prime Minister won't die in the middle of a crisis from the thing that the crisis is made of.  I blame David Bowie. I have started dividing my life into the years BDBD and ADBD - Before David Bowie Died and After David Bowie Died. Didn't everything feel just a bit more normal until January 2016? Before Brexit, before Trump, before Covid? It's like Bowie was a conduit of weirdness, a lightning rod that attracted all the strange and unpredictable in the universe, and then after he died there wasn't anywhere for it all to go, so now all the insanity is free floating everywhere and fucking everything up. David Bowie was born in 1947, which means he had being doing the diligent job of holding shit together for us since World War Two. Robert Johnson, who died in 1938, had probably been channeling the universe's craziness before that (I think we can agree that there was nobody in charge during the war years); maybe Mark Twain before him, before him Coleridge, and so on. We need someone seriously strange to be born pronto so that they can suck it all in and, ideally, make great art from it, while the rest of us settle back down to a life more reassuringly boring.  Thank you for your weirdness, David Bowie. I'm sorry you couldn't live forever.