About to be writ again.

The best thing I ever read about David Bowie is that he was always ahead of the curve when it came to what was cool. He was into androgyny before it was cool, aliens before they were cool, post-apocalypses before that were cool - he was so ahead of the curve, he was into David Bowie before David Bowie was cool. That's how cool David Bowie was.

The best thing I found out at David Bowie Is today was that if Bowie hadn't been a musician, he might've been a novelist instead. Which makes a lot of sense to me: it's another artistic medium which focuses on words and sound that calls for a high level of ongoing focus and discipline. And boy howdy, did Bowie have that. I overheard some people talking about current musicians and musical groups being inventive and creative, and that's important, but good Lord, Bowie worked. Not just how good everything he made was - though it is, thankfully - but how much he made. All the work he did to keep making new things.

If that itself isn't inspiring, I don't know what is.

I got to the museum 45 minutes before the museum opened and stood in line that whole time. Then I stood in line another 20 minutes or so to buy a ticket. Because it's such a popular exhibition, entry times are staggered, and after buying one for the next available time frame, I still had another 45 minutes to wait to go inside. I didn't mind. I spent over two hours in there, so I came out ahead. The only part I wished I'd seen more carefully was the brief part of his early life - not early professional life, but early life in Bromley, his family, public support for the arts in England at the time. But it was right at the front, so everyone crowded in there.

Of note for the exhibition is everyone got headphones. You didn't press a button to hear something at a particular station. The devices played different things - mostly songs and interviews, which is how I found out about the novelist potential - depending on where you stood in the gallery space. A fabulous use of technology I'm sure Bowie would have approved of.

Right next to it was his first breakout success, "Space Oddity," and it still hits me when I think how it's within recent, living memory that we found out what Earth looks like from space. That people I've met, people I know, lived at a time without knowing what color Earth was, or what clouds looked like from space. It hit me hard today, and was the closest in the exhibition I came to tears.

I think the best moments were when I saw someone else mouth along to "Life on Mars?" oblivious to the surroundings, just pushed under the waves of the music, and also, seeing all the parents with young children there. How lucky they are, that they have David Bowie to listen to.

I think my personal highlight was the concert room, where not only did they have his Reality Tour stage costume, they played a handful of concert highlights on loop on a screen with a greater square footage than my entire apartment, counting the bathroom and closet. And yet, that's exactly how David Bowie should be experienced. Someone so huge and grand he can barely be grasped by human minds.

And also, someone who was both great, and did great things. Three of his paintings were there. He did them in Berlin, getting clean and back into music, using a different medium altogether to reignite his creative energies. Someone who kept working.

Unfortunately, I was pretty heavily earwormed, which is worse for getting my wordcount than food poisoning. But I knew that going in. So tomorrow it'll be a day to rest my ears and keep on going.