Illegitimi non Carborundum

If your mind is made up, then don't let yourself get confused with facts about the proposal to bond fifty-five million dollars to construct a downtown police station in Norwich, Connecticut. 

The voters rejected a similar proposal, albeit without having a specific location, for forty million dollars about a decade ago. The discussion at the last City Council meeting precipitated some lively, and borderline illiterate comments on that News Service for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Think for Themselves, Facebook.

The station, finished in the late Seventies while lacking a disco ball, was very much a project of its time-built in the moment and for the moment with little thought given to expanding requirements and future needs and is inadequate according to the people who work there, whom, I assume should know. The Facebook Did My Own Research crowd seem to be unmoved. 

Many of the (mostly anonymous) Facebook experts' comments mention how high their property taxes are while opposing any initiative to make Norwich more attractive (to include downtown police station).  

So many 'not now!' comments. Okay. If not now, then when? 

For decades, the police like other aspects of the municipal workforce were encouraged to improvise and adapt with their present resources whenever budget hearings rolled around. Norwich never has the money for what we need but finds the money for what we want and too often, creates the need after the fact (yes, I'm speaking about the Intermodal Transportation Center among other built projects in search of purposes both in downtown and beyond).

We're talking a lot of money here and we should think about we want and what we'll get for those dollars. In order for the police station to play any significant role in the rebirth of Chelsea and a renaissance across Norwich, let's hear a detailed vision by our elected leaders of what they see our city looking like in a decade, in a score and in a generation. In a perfect world we could all benefit from a dialogue with our elected officials and police station advocates to help us make an informed decision. 

The exigent circumstances that precipitated the original need for a new station have only kept growing for the past decade that we've been 'discussing' this. Closing our eyes to a problem doesn't solve it. 

No one wins unless everyone wins and, in this town, we're still caught up in a zero sum 'for me to look good, you need to look bad' loop that will destroy us all. And then we wonder why we fail....

We can do better, and today (actually this week and I'm not sure why), because I'm feeling revitalized, I refuse to allow us to go down without a fight or at least an intelligent conversation. Illegitimi non carborundum. do NOT let the bastards grind you down.
-bill kenny

Happy Birthday, Kara

Today is my sister, Kara's, birthday. You can be forgiven for not knowing this but only just barely. The world is a much better place because Kara is in it and our family is fortunate that she is our relative even if, as Albert Einstein predicated, everything is relative. Could that mean everything is Einstein? I'm asking that because it would explain the bramble that is so often my hair when I awaken.

Kara and I shared a small overlapping childhood as I was transitioning away as she was becoming her own person. And in a sense, I suspect, she sees herself more often as Jill and Adam's older sister than as the younger sibling of our sister, Evan and brother, Kelly, with whom I spent far more years (but only because their luck wasn't as good as Kara's).

Kara and her husband, Russ, had their own family with RJ, Randy, and Jordan all men in motion and on a mission, in different directions at maximum velocity and then last year Kara suffered the loss of the love of her life and there's a hole in her heart that will never heal.

Kara should actually be our ambassador to the United Nations as she has a genius for talking people into doing things they would otherwise never, ever consider and, while so doing, convincing them that it was all their own idea in the first place and she is just pleased and proud to help them.

She and Jill can probably actually pull off the Tom Sawyer painting the fence trick, but it's Kara who organizes the trip to the hardware store to get the brushes and the drop clothes. And she'll even help you muscle them into the van. Meanwhile, it's Jill who collects the money and, sorry, even though it's a quarter for a chance to paint and you gave her a dollar, she's out of change.

I wasn't around when our mother was a kid, or a teen, or a young woman. I caught up with her as a young mother (and was, technically, the first reason why she was a young mother) but I've always thought Kara most resembles what Mom must have been like when we were too small to really remember.

You cannot help but smile when you are with Kara-I am smiling now as I type this, thinking of her because she is relentlessly cheerful no matter the situation. Her children reflect the values she and Russ instilled in them and have improved the world on their own terms just as their parents, but most especially my sister, taught them to do.

Happy Birthday, Kara!

-bill kenny

The Faces of the Stranger

Crossing the street the other day, I passed two people deep in discussion with one another walking in the opposite direction and heard one of them say to the other, 'and all of them are either midgets or morons.'

I confess to NOT looking around to see if the circus was in town (Congress is back from vacation, so that might be the confusion) as I knew the speaker was offering some pejorative characterizations of people with whom he disagreed and was exercising his vocabulary skills to characterize them.

But reducing the world to two sorts, that's a sweeping statement, when you get down to it. Everyone (else) is a whatever we dislike. Not you and me, mind you-those other folks, whoever they are. What John Kennedy Toole called "A Confederacy of Dunces". And maybe it captures who we are as a species among all the others on this planet.

Heck, for all we know, maybe every life form looks at every other life form as a midget or a moron and behaves accordingly (cats come to mind immediately). All of our lives are alliances of one kind or another, some more fleeting than others. In the primary grades we had a partner for the bus #2 to go home; in high school, we had lab partners, in college, perhaps, study buddies, at work a mentor or someone we regard as one and in our private lives, someone we come home to.

And in each of those situations, we create egoisme a deux, which is how we make our way, forming and breaking bonds every day until a moment the clown car comes to a screeching halt in front of someone we thought we really knew and then how surprised we are as we step out of the back seat to see the look in their eyes and realize we are, sadly, a little too tall to be the former.

-bill kenny

Forget Sheep

Do you have trouble sleeping? I do, at least I have trouble falling back to sleep after I've been awakened. I fell across a trick from Google Health Coach that has me use the word "STAIR" to think of as many words that start with each letter as I can.

After I've exhausted my vocabulary with words beginning with the first "S" I move on to the "T" and so on. To my knowledge I've yet to ever get past the "A" before I've nodded back off (perhaps I just know really boring words?)  

As kids, who among us hasn't tried counting sheep. I mean why would our mothers lie, right? 

But I've come up with something perhaps more state of the art and very definitely more amazing. Enjoy.
-bill kenny

Thinking About Bob

The last friend I was to make as an adult in this life passed away twelve years ago today. I still have the hole in my heart our often-aimless conversations used to fill.  There's a lot of space there now. 

At the time of his passing, I offered words I'm sharing again here. I called them:

The Death of Someone Is Like Reading a Book

We exchanged notes electronically more often than we spoke on the phone, probably about every ten days for the last ten-plus years. 

I met him about eighteen years ago when he was becoming the 'military beat' reporter for The Day newspaper, a daily based in New London, Connecticut, a town across the river from this country's oldest submarine base.

I had nothing to do with submarines and almost as little to do with the training of the contents of them, and yet he always checked in or listened to an idea for a story I was struggling to pitch and more often than not made something out of what we both knew had started as less than nothing.

He was an extraordinarily fair person who not only believed there were two sides to every story but who strove to make sure he had shared ALL sides of every story. He always succeeded. From the first time I met him, I felt like I'd known him my whole life and that we would always know one another.

In a way, we did.

He and I had exchanged notes about a week and a half ago on yet another matter of grave national import; those were the tangents I sent us off on and always did, which was capped by some down-home wisdom as a man who was both a contemporary and a confessor always managed to bring our discussions back to family and futures, home and hearth.

I'm sitting here now typing these words, struggling to remember his, saddened to tears that there will be no more words to ever remember, as my friend Bob died yesterday morning in his home, at the age of 57.

I'm a better human-a husband, a father, a citizen, what-have-you, for having known him. There are no words I can offer to his children and his wife that will ease the hurt they will feel every day of the rest of their lives. I stole this thought and offer it as all that I have or ever will be able to offer: "Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves a memory no one can steal."
-bill kenny

A Dark Anniversary

The feces flinging has already started two and half years in advance to the demolition derby that is the American Presidential election cycle. I've seen, and so have you, the hyperbolic accusations and assertions from both sides as well as their Agents of Endarkenment.

We've both read so often we don't actually 'see' it anymore, comparisons of (name a politiclan) to Adolf Hitler, without a doubt the most abhorrent human being of all time. On this date, eighty-two years ago, a very small number of his military leadership cadre in the most militarized nation on earth, attempted to end Hitler's regime and life as well as Europe's wide-awake nightmare reign of terror. They failed and millions more perished before the mad dog was run to ground. 

Why mention a failure? Because when, not if, you next hear the So-and-So is Hitler comparison, start with this (if you feel better, I've never been able to watch it to the end and it's only a quarter of an hour) and then go back to your pals in the media plutocracy from whatever part of the polit-spectrum they are based and tell them to shut the fudge up (or use peanut brittle if you feel that strongly about it). 

No one they name will ever be Hitler so stop doing that stupidity.

When I was a child, before the age of reason and maybe my memory, we used to have elections based on contrasting visions of our country and how to achieve those differing goals. We had the means-we compared the ways. Now it's a filth fest as we argue about outsourcing vulture capitalism and working on appealing to our core wedge groups.

The best way to choose The Next Leader of the Free World is to evaluate which one best displays those traits between now and the next campaign. Tell the talking heads to go soak themselves and do something too many of us haven't done for a long time and think. 

Here's something to help you decide the unterschied zwischen der Scheiße und der Schuhcreme. Keep it handy and use it often. And perhaps but only perhaps, we can learn again to speak to and not at one another.
-bill kenny

You May Have Wondered ...

...Or perhaps not. 

Today World Cup 2026 concludes as the defending champion, Argentina, and Spain meet in MetLife stadium (assuming the skies over the New Jersey Meadowlands have cleared some more from the smoke). A month's worth of magic moments (and misery, too) and I authored not so much as a prepositional phrase about any of it. 

As someone who is known for pulling over and watching eight-year-olds play PAL Soccer in fall leagues all across the region, I'm not happy that, for the moment, football (to give it its real name) is coming to an end (I don't count MLS and rarely watch it, sorry, not sorry).

I've watched as much football as two eyes and one brain can handle and maybe a little more. I don't really have words, or the right ones, to describe the World Cup, even as we we were one of the three nations hosting it. 

Luckily for me (but more for you), I found someone's words to borrow, Jonathan Wilson, on this World Cup and the world in which we live. Enjoy.
-bill kenny