The Vacation is Over!

I took a week off to head to the beach and enjoyed it. The weather was great up until yesterday, when I headed home. I wish I could say I did a lot of writing while I was on vacation, but I didn't, unfortunately. I'm waiting to get a release date for my next book from my publisher. I believe it'll be in December. I will confirm that once I have more info.

Next Monday, I'll be back on the grind and back to my day job, but I can look at my photos from this week and remember the beach while it's dark and cold here in Chicago.

Living in the Past

I've been rediscovering a lot of music I liked in my youth when I hear a song one of of the Sirius stations that plays older music. Songs by Stone Temple Pilots, the Cure, Otis Redding have come back into rotation for me after hearing them on Sirius. An article about the group the Violent Femmes came up on my news feed recently and that prompted me to download some of their music. They weren't great singers or even good singers, but I still enjoyed their music back in the 1980s and I still enjoy it now too. It's one thing to look back nostalgically on your life and appreciate the music and memories from that time, but it's another thing to think that what worked back in the 1970s, 80s, etc. will work now. 

I say this because I feel like the recent wars and political situations that are going on now require foreign policy solutions that differ from what we (the US) did in the past, yet a lot of politicians (many who should have retired years ago) keep trying to solve new problems with old solutions. I'm tired of the excuse that "we've always done things this way" as a reason for why we're making foreign policy decisions that may have worked in the 1970s or 80s, but don't work today. It's time for new policies and procedures. Looking back on what was done during the Reagan era or the Bush years (or even back to Nixon, Kennedy, etc.) to try and solve problems in 2023 is ridiculous. The world has changed and modern problems require modern solutions. We can't resolve every conflict around the world and throwing money at these problems isn't helping either when we have problems right here at home that need to be dealt with. Continuing to use the same rhetoric that worked thirty, forty, or fifty years ago isn't helpful. Stop living in the past, folks! 

Reinvention

I watched a documentary last night on Max called Donyale Luna: Supermodel about a black model from the 1960s who had an interesting career, but that few people had ever heard of. I'd never heard of her. Donyale totally transformed herself from a black girl named Peggy from Detroit to an exotic, mixed-race woman whose origins were unknown. Donyale created an entire phony persona for herself. She was part Mexican, she was part Asian, she was from the moon, whatever. Back in the 1960s and 70s (and beyond) you could get away with that kind of thing, I guess. There was no internet. No one would peep you out for not being who you said you were, so Donyale (formerly Peggy) was able to reinvent herself without a lot of scrutiny. The documentary talked to friends and family members who knew Donyale and gushed about how great she was and how the racist modeling industry back then really crushed her. But what they didn't talk about (and what I gathered from the documentary) was that Donyale seemed to have some mental problems. She was briefly hospitalized at Bellevue in New York for a mental breakdown, but it seemed clear to me that this woman needed more mental help beyond that stay. Back in this woman's heydey, she was running with a crowd that did a lot of drugs and I'm sure a lot of her bizarre behavior was just excused or ignored due to the drug use (drug use that ultimately killed her). It's a shame she never seemed to get the mental help she clearly needed. And she ended up leaving her child motherless because she died so young.

The subject of reinvention is interesting to me. The fact that some people just become someone else is fascinating. I used to work with a woman who grew up in public housing, but transformed herself into a different person who shunned all of that and married a man who had a totally different (and more financially stable) upbringing. I think when people are younger, they're more apt to try and present a different side of themselves to others to fit in. Maybe you're ashamed of where you're from or how you grew up, so you give a different narrative to people. You create a diffferent upbringing for yourself to present to others. But doesn't it get exhausting being someone you're not? Keeping the lies straight must take a lot of mental energy. Telling the truth is much easier to recall and recite.