Immediate Gratification!

I'll keep this short today (I heard that cheer) since brevity is the soul of wit.

Go to Google Search, type "zerg rush," and then hit "enter." You're welcome. 

Yeah, I know; we could be using all this computer power to cure world hunger or create peace in our time, but the gratification with this is more immediate. Trust me.
billl kenny

Stay Strong

I'm having trouble staying out of my own way this week for reasons I can't quite sort out, try as I might. When I was a young man and occasionally lost my driving wheel, I just shrugged and put my shoulder into it and counted on the next day to bring me something better. 

I turned seventy-four last month and know from looking at the mug in the mirror that the tomorrows are more finite than they were five years ago or even five months ago. 

These are hard days for all of us. Spite can be an effective motivator, trust me.

Illegitimi non carborundum. 
-bill kenny

The Way We Were (Not)

One of the things I always liked about Howard Johnson's as a kid growing up was the choice of ice creams for dessert after dinners with Gramma and Grampy. At the time, this was the Sixties (GASP!); there were (I think) twenty-eight flavors. I'd always pick chocolate, but it was nice to know there were so many others. 

Of course, Hojo's as they were then are not now, nor is the world in which they existed close to the one in which I grew up. Progress is what progress does-the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Thanks to the convergence of technologies we have means of gathering and sharing information we didn't have when I was a kid (we had computers but no one 'normal' ever saw them as they were huge machines the size of rooms, fed by punchcards) all gathering up news and notes we desire and delivering all of it to our desktop or the screen on our smart phone or device.

Remember when we referred to this jumble of wires and ether as The Internet (both with caps)? We were Such Hosers, eh? Now we have news aggregators that are so transparent and seamless we have no idea where the item that just showed up in our news stream actually began. 

Add to that the growing number of readers and netizens who cannot distinguish between opinion and fact (the demarcation is stunningly simple unless you're sadly stupid), and we, as a nation or a neighborhood, descend into discord and disintegrate.

We were Athens-we are becoming Sparta. And don't mistake me, we are each entitled to our own opinions, but we are never allowed to have our own facts, be they on anthropogenic climate change, creationism, or gay rights. 

I suspect you and I have very different views on just these three items, not to mention the deeper and more fundamental issues such as the designated runner starting on second base when a baseball game goes to extra innings.

We can agree to disagree, which is how our parents functioned, or we can hurl invective at each other like the morons we elected to represent us in Dodge City (and they do a fine job, as they seem to be as imbecilic as we are-at least your guy is, mine is a genius (see what I mean?)).

How we view the world has a lot to do with the window and prism (filter) we choose. You pick Fox, and I take CNN. You tune to MSNBC, and I like the Cartoon Network.  For me, it's perspective, and for you it's propaganda. Tomato, tomato; potato, Dan Quayle.

Someday we'll have a meeting of the minds, as Isaac Asimov once feared, but it will be in the middle of nowhere, beyond the city limits of common sense or decency. And the first thing we'll do is argue about how we got there and, more importantly, who is to blame. After we round up everyone who knows more than we do. Leaving just us, as horrible a fate as either of us can imagine.    
-bill kenny

The Wisdom of Higgins

I was stunned when visiting my brother Adam's blog to realize that today marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of my father. I had forgotten completely the very event I'd have thought I'd go to my grave remembering. Color me surprised.

I know I'm not the only son with a complicated and complex relationship with their dad (I can think of two other sons right off the top of my head in the same boat, but I'll also concede it's a large ocean), but until earlier today, I've tiptoed around this date and our relationship.

Truth to tell, for the first time since his passing, I wasn't in his shadow. That's not a good thing, or a bad thing; it is what it is. It took me all these years to realize, Higgins, from Ted Lasso, captured it perfectly:

"I try to love my dad for who he is and forgive him for who he isn't."
-bill kenny  

But While Everything Is Blooming

I've been a little preoccupied recently (the competition for post-occupation is brutal), but I had an opportunity last weekend to decompress and reassess. I've been working on some things that were important for other people but didn't have much value for me.

I think we all live like that sometimes. 

We give our time to total strangers and then discover we need to shift scheduling priorities, but those to whom we gave the gift of our time now see it as an entitlement, and they have hard feelings when something they've grown accustomed to is rationed or curtailed. What were once vices are now habits, and what began as voluntary is seen as mandatory.

I've gotten a little too old to continue to live for the reflection of approval in other people's eyes-I've discovered that for some time, maybe a few weeks or even months, I'd lost track of that hard-acquired fact. In the last couple of days, the sometimes petulant reaction of those who have no legitimate claim to my time and talents when I've placed myself first has reminded me that self-abnegation is not a virtue others applaud, but, rather, abuse.

We all work our way through valleys that sometimes feel like chasms. This one has been a little deeper and a little wider than I'm used to, but I put that down to having close to a full lifetime's experiences now, unlike when I was a child. 

I'm putting away the things of childhood, and what's left in its place has the attractiveness and the danger of the new and untried. That's a path I haven't walked in a long time. I'm thinking it's high time I went.
-bill kenny   

Better Late than Never

I'm a bit late to the party, but best wishes nevertheless. Sunday was Bob Dylan's 85th birthday.  I almost cannot believe this, even though I'm typing it. For Dylan to be 85, I would have to be...let me do the math on this for just a second, okay? Take away the five and carry the one plus....YIPES! One of us is really old, and I suspect it ain't the kid from Hibbings, Minnesota. And don't get me started on you, okay?

I guess you had to be there in one place, a generation lost in space as McLean sang, to really appreciate how bad pop music was until Dylan and The Beatles, coming at it from different perspectives and different backgrounds, reinvented it and allowed all of us to own it. It was a long, long time ago.

US pop music before Dylan had Pete Seeger, The Weavers, and Folkies and Okies for the most part. Woody Guthrie was idolized, but the guy at CBS (the largest label in the world at that time) was Mitch Miller (and we watched his TV show and oh boy...) while Guthrie lay dying. We also had the Brill Building contingent and a ton of heart throbbers and throbbettes and all the June/Moon/Croon lyrics you could eat with a-- well, you can probably guess what utensil you could eat 'em with.

I was too young to catch the guy who, as Elston Gunn, was the piano player for Bobby Vee and most of the hokey folkie incarnations--I picked up on him first through other folks doing his material and being seduced by his command of the language through Blonde on Blonde before finally stumbling across John Wesley Harding even as the auslanders were unveiling Rubber Soul. I realized the language was so powerful because the ideas it reflected were the foundation of the Next New World.

All of that was eons ago, and the face I shave in the mirror now could barely clear that sink a lifetime ago. Like Leo Kottke, I spoke with Dylan (and Leo as well and knew who they both were when I did; and my feet are still smiling), and was close to tongue-tied (my wife knows how rarely that happens) since all I wanted to tell him was how much his music meant to me even while realizing that he didn't make music for how it made me feel; he made music for how it made him feel. We were along for the ride.

So, as Loudon Wainwright, III, one of those dubbed a New Dylan in the Seventies before we realized there was nothing wrong with the old one, once offered, (a belated) Happy Birthday. I hope we'll always find new and better reasons to celebrate you as you have so often celebrated each of us.

-bill kenny

Arrivals and Departures

I'm always delighted by small children and infants, though I am often annoyed at parents who don't keep better control of them in social environments. I was shopping yesterday, and hadn't realized it was 'bring your mewling child to the store with you' day because I was up to my butt in very unhappy, very young people.

When that happens, I go with the flow and get cranky myself. Don't get me wrong-I'm not angry with the children. A newborn didn't decide to get in the car and drive to the store. Mommy did. Or maybe daddy, but based on what I saw yesterday, more than likely not, though mommy probably wishes she knew where daddy was.

I don't know when we became a country of the very young and the very old, but having been the former and now being the latter, let me tell you that all the other age groups, and food groups for that matter, had best start pulling their own weight.

We spend way too much money on diapers and Depends in these parts. We built this nation for our children-that's the deal every generation worked with the one that followed, except now we sold our children and their children out for offshore bank accounts and left them with no skills, no jobs, and no hope.

We're so busy blaming the New World Order and the changing times that we have no time to look in the mirror and look at ourselves. When Gandhi talked about being the change you want to see in the world, he wasn't talking about the change under the couch cushions in the living room. He was talking about all of us to each of us, for everyone.

If being polite means being less than honest, maybe we should ask one another if that's too high a price to pay for comity. We owe each other the unvarnished truth to build the world we all want to live in. Hurt feelings are a luxury we most certainly can afford if they get us to where we need to be.
-bill kenny