Lately as I gaze out at the shrunken reddish sun trying to insinuate itself through the smoke, I find myself thinking of this song. When Bowie wrote it slightly less than 50 years ago, it was science fiction. But today if news came across the wires that Earth would uninhabitable in five years, would anyone be that surprised? The recent UN climate report wasn’t too far off, but there are no riots in the streets. Cops are not kissing the feet of priests, and no one is vomiting.

Or at least that’s not happening here… though maybe it is in the big cities. From this vantage point it seems more like a quiet, slow-motion apocalypse. There will be plenty of time, at least, to assemble the proper playlist.