"We Are What We Pretend To Be....

I'm fixated on how we seem to be DEvolving rather than evolving. We're louder, less kind, meaner and actually dumber (in my opinion) than the previous one and we 'r not troubled enough about any of it to change direction. 

I think we're well on our way to being a nation of impatient mind-readers. Don't furrow your brow or make that face (I know 'what face? I wasn't making a face!' Were, too.). 

You may phrase it more elegantly (I would certainly hope so) but, with apologies to Beckett, we're NOT Waiting for Godot but rather hoping the other one shuts up real soon so we can talk.

It's taken me forever to warm to texting on my cell phone. I get hung up on spelling all the words with all the right letters in the proper places with capitalization and punctuation for all. 

Such fastidiousness can make you roadkill with hair on the human highway and more often than I'd like, I've been reminded that he who hesitates is lunch.

I've had follow-up texts as I've been struggling to frame a response to an earlier note. It's hard to count to ten and get a grip on your annoyance while holding a piece of plastic with more computing power than our first three home computers had, put together, while some touch typist is kicking your thumbs.

We're about the same in person-to-person communications, too. Those Sunday morning public affairs programs the major TV networks used to have so the FCC would cut them a break at license renewal time, have evolved into snarkfests where folks who remind me of terriers in need of Ritalin just yap at one another when they're not shredding some 'guest' like an old chew toy.

We're all rushing to get someplace other than here and once we're there, wherever 'there' is, we're off again. My German wife calls it kein ruhe im arsch and she would know as she's married to one (mit ohren).

When you next converse with a real, live person try to listen to the interaction between you, not just to the words but to the silences as well, and you may be surprised at how little of the latter breaks up the stream of the former.

I used to tease acquaintances and associates, disquieted at how rapidly I spoke, that people from my home state of New Jersey couldn't afford a pause to catch our breath or collect our thoughts, because with so many in such a small state, if you stop speaking you won't be heard from again for years. 

So now we talk, type and (for the most part) think in shorthand delivered in staccato, acronym and emoticon all masking, while masquerading as, meaning. Instead of technology and our tools helping language and literature to flower as arts and culture flourish, we've continued to dumb down and throw majesty and meaning over the side.

I came across a quote from Indianapolis' #1 Son, Kurt Vonnegut that makes me smile and think every time I read it. If it does half as much for you, it's worth the inclusion, "...do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college."
-bill kenny (Class of '74)

A Blast (Albeit Mild) from My Past

I wrote this over a decade ago and have thought about it on more than one occasion. At the time I called it, 

Probably Legos or Farts

I have had a rather hectic last few days (I know, 'welcome to the club!') and have ended up in places with thoughts not unfamiliar to me though the circumstances by which I've arrived at them this time often is. 

I caught myself yesterday afternoon thinking back to the most amazing moment I have ever had with our son, Patrick Michael, whose birthday was earlier this month.

He would not have been much more than two at the time. And he sat in his car seat in the back seat of our car, a white, four-door BMW 518 (not available in the USA) at a traffic signal by Der Grosse Friedhof (the Big Cemetery) in Frankfurt am Main near Eschenheimer Landstrasse.

"Weiss du," fragte er, als wir miteinander blickkontakt hat in dem ruckspiegel im auto, "wenn Mom jemand anderes geheiratet, wurde ich einen anderen Vater hab?"
"Do you know," he asked waiting for our eyes to make contact in the car's rear-view mirror, "if Mom had married someone else, I would have a different father?"

Not only did I not know that then, or now, I could not even begin to trace the logic process that produced such a question. 

As I learned not that as long ago as I'd like to think, kids and human curiosity are the two greatest engines for change in the world. And one always accompanies the other, though how I would know that to be true is something I am not prepared to answer at this time.
-bill kenny

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