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

No Sleep Until the World Series

Major League Baseball's All-Star Game was earlier this week, and it was at least more interesting than the annual (in recent years) National Football League's Pro Bowl (All-Star Flag football) game.  

I'm a Yankees fan (actually a New York baseball fan to include the NY Mets who are having a difficult season to put it mildly) and because my dad was a New York (baseball) Giants fan before they moved to the West Coast with the Brooklyn Dodgers in May of 1957, also a San Francisco Giants fan. 

Mom was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan so in the middle fifties I grew up in a household with two broken-hearted baseball fans as parents. Los Angeles Dodgers are ludicrously in the lead of the National League West Division (I would say 'they should be because they have the biggest payroll in the MLB,' but both the Yankees and Mets aren't too many dollars behind them and don't have the position in the standings they do). 

All professional sports are a conundrum in a way. We, the fans, see the teams as ours, and root passionately for anyone wearing the colors, until they don't (Red Sox fans loved Wade Boggs until he signed with the Yankees and then not so much), 

But the people who own the teams, almost exclusively billionaire white guys, see them as their property to relocate as they see fit and can turn an additional dollar (just in case you thought Horace Stoneham and Walter O'Malley yearned to enjoy the sea breezes of the Pacific Ocean).

I'm a grumpy traditionalist who loathes the designated hitter, the designated runner, the put-a-guy-at second-to-start-the-tenth-inning-if-the-game-goes to extra innings (unless my team wins as a result). The game that was good enough for my father and his father before him (I'm guessing) is more than good enough for me. 

With the exception of umpiring; that can certainly be improved. There's a bit too much personal bias to my taste, so maybe, but only maybe, robot umpires are a step in the right direction for baseball. Play ball!
-bill kenny. 

Time Has Come Today

The days have been getting shorter since the Summer Solstice last month and will continue to do so. both in terms of dawnings and duskings (duskings? Sure, why not) until we reach late December. But since the only constant is change, we may be about to change from falling back this autumn as we've done for decades.    

US Congress takes next step to make daylight saving time permanent. I used the clock resetting stuff every fall to remind myself to swap out the batteries in the smoke alarms, but now that I have the new ones with the ten-year batteries, I'm ambivalent about permanent Daylight Saving Time.

I'll be willing to bet a year or two of stumbling around in the dark, going to school or work in the morning and/or coming home from work and school in cave darkness might cool our ardor for this innovation. Of course, it could do wonders for flashlight sales.
-bill kenny