Seventy years of tough times, blessed times. Times of war, strife, pain and peace. Beauty, pageantry, propriety, dignity, good character, and  protocol - she had such grace to handle a life that was never really her own but belonged most wholly to her people.  She set a standard for women, their independence at an age when women were expected to simply be pretty and silent. She was that too, pretty in an austere way of propriety that never trailed her with scandal - at least none that I could remember. 
I was but a child and she was The Queen. A real-life, bona fide queen. The model by which all movies, stories, and standards should be writ, in my mind. Her name had household recognition with celebrity laurels even here in America. 
Double rainbows arched o'er the sky as she left us, probably all of her four-legged dear ones coming cross the rainbow bridge to meet her first, followed by Prince Phillip, approaching with his walking stick under arm, the tweed, the gauntlets. Her prince coming to meet her, as always she wanted. God bless and keep them both in your Divine bosom of love. We shall miss all that you represented and all you gave to represent the face, character, mind, body, and soul of England for so many of us.
God bless - Rest in Peace. 
Faintly~

When I was young, many years ago, we were taught “never judge a book by it’s cover,” yet that’s all we seem to do now. We all know that the “look” of a person, place, or thing, -pick a noun, doesn’t define them, so why are we so consumed with being or having “the look?” I’m guilty of it myself, I struggle to find book covers for my writing that will “stand out,” “be seen,” or “draw market shares.”


More than ever before in history, we have become a culture of faces, voices, videos, and images, each of them competing with one another for our attention. I’ve always known that the sighted have a benefit of laziness that the blind do not. The sighted rely upon their vision to interpret probably 80% of their world – there you go fact-checkers – I have not checked this fact.


To me, it seems, as if the global community at large has become a world of three-year old’s all clamoring for attention, saying, “watch me, watch me.” Why is this necessary? I always thought I could become a marketable writer without ever having to put my face on a single book.


So far, that’s been my marketing plan and so far, I’m not on the best seller list. Obviously, my marketing skills need some upgrading. It’s become almost vital in order to compete on a world market to become a talking head – as they used to be called – pardon the Baby Boomer-ism. However, those in my generation – at least for me – I was taught not to be vain, do not draw attention to oneself, do not stand out, in essence – do not become prey.


We Baby-Boomers were taught to excel at a skill set and that would make our name, reputation, and from that we would become known. There were celebrities and royalties, yes, but those were some distant and alien race of people that lived in some far off place, who led manufactured lives for our entertainment. They weren’t like ‘us’ they didn’t have “real jobs” they were just faces on screens.


At first, they were voices, small, static voices, that came from our radios – eventually, their faces appeared on television screens. Even then, the programs were live, people made mistakes, fumbles, performed their own live commercials where laundry wasn’t always cleaner than clean, coffee didn’t cure marital woes, and cigarettes were still smoked by doctors in hospitals. My Mum even had a doctor prescribe smoking menthol cigarettes for her to help aide in clearing her sinus congestion. Oh, those were the days – but I digress.


Faces became famous and with fame, we craved new faces. To be “discovered,” to become the “new face” meant you’d made it into the elite and popular. Cameras and television improved. We were no longer satisfied to listen to our icons of entertainment, we wanted to see them – up close and personal. Fast forward sixty or more years and now tiny children are recording their faces and voices as if the act itself instantly makes this “someone special.”


Does it? Is this the new identity? If so, I’m pondering which one and whether I must get another one. I’m an introvert, to the extreme, and I’ve spent most of my life disappearing to now be foisted into a world where I must be ‘seen’ to be ‘heard?’ Que horror! Ask any of my friends, hardly any of them have a picture of me.


I’m hearing more and more that this is the new trend of marketing and if I want book sales, I’d better get used to the idea of pictures, videos, and podcasts, v-logs, etc. The idea of video-recording my face espousing bits of wisdom (ha!) to others is a terrifying idea – but I can take to a page with confidence. I need no face to write. Just a voice-to-text program and I’m good. I never think about the faces of
Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, Rod Serling, Shirley Jackson, Dean Koontz’, et al, while I’m reading their words. It’s irrelevant to me, I’m seeing their characters, not their authors.


I would love to be a best-selling author whose books sold millions of copies but no one would know me by sight. I always wanted my words to stand for themselves and not have to rely on my face to act as my voice. What does it matter what I look like if you hear a ring of truth, humor, love, or sadness, in my words? I can’t be the only person out here that feels the same and if I am, then it’s going to be very lonely for a long time because the days of modesty, self-respect, and privacy, seems to be things of the past.


Does seeing everyone acting the fool out there make us feel better about being foolish? Perhaps. Does seeing other people rant, rave, be angry, racist, bigoted, hateful, sanctimonious, cruel, make others think it’s okay for them to behave the same way? Maybe so, seems like it. I can still hear my Mum saying, ‘and if all the other kids jumped off a cliff would you do it, because they’re ALL doing it?’ No, we’re not lemmings, we shouldn’t behave like lemmings.


Flip that coin over to the other side, however, and I’ve also seen more generosity, bravery, altruism, care, love, selflessness, and joy – check out any animal/pet video – than ever I could have seen without social media and video clips. Perhaps that is the blessing to combat the dreadful tide of humanity’s worst features which seem to jockey to expose themselves for our vanities entertainment. I hope we as a people will concentrate more on the positive side of exposing ourselves.


I’d like to see more of us, as a people on this planet, being our better selves. Acting in a united power to heal this planet of the damage we’ve caused it. Provide for the lives we’ve created here, preserve the good things we’ve begun so they may continue to perpetuate for the future. Let’s learn from our mistakes, not repeat them for recordings and video hits.


If you have time to record it, you have time to intervene or dial 911. Be involved in your own life before it’s gone. It’s not a movie – there may be a sequel but you don’t get to redo the original. Just a macabre musing, y’all.

Have a good night and write on!
Faintly~