What If There's NO There, There?

I keep a wallet filled with foolscap, absolutely crammed. It works out well, unless you were to rob me, as there's rarely any money in it, though not necessarily because of all the foolscap.

Many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a little too tightly wound. That gasp of incredulity you may have heard from people who've known me for decades is legit. 

The me of Back Then makes the me of Now look comatose; I may have actually slept with my jaw ratcheted closed. I cannot imagine in hindsight why I didn't have a stroke, unless, perhaps, it's because I'm a carrier.

I couldn't let go of my anger. The Air Force, to my relief as their employee, rather than dump me amongst the flora and fauna, decided to send me to the head of the Psychiatric Services Wing at the Rhein Main (Air Base) Clinic, Colonel Doctor Robert G. He was terrific-and very funny (because he thought I was, if I'm being honest) and very willing to try to rescue a wild-eyed junior enlisted Sammy Glick impersonator who kept wading out into the deep end.

He came up with the foolscap. Every time something angered me, I was to write it down on a piece of paper and put the paper in my wallet. But every time it had to be on its own, separate piece of paper. No doubling up, no lists. By the end of the day, I could, and did, have hundreds of slips of paper in my wallet. 

No worries-I had to review ALL these slips each night and put on a different sheet of paper, all those items I was still ANGRY about (I could put those on a single piece of paper), and then I'd put that list on my nightstand. 

The night before I would go to see him at the hospital, I had to review the (six) pieces of paper, transfer anything I was still angry about to yet another piece of paper, and bring that one piece out to our weekly conversation.

Within a month, I had no lists, simply because I'd review all the slips of paper of all the things that made me angry and realized I had no idea what the heck was written on most of them or what the words I could read actually meant or concluded (after reviewing the note and thinking about it, which Dr. G. told me later was the key point) whatever had happened to spin me up wasn't that important after all.

How about this week or real soon (and I mean real soon) we all decide to try that?  Watch the news, read a newspaper, check out a social media website--we are REALLY CRANKED about a lot of stuff. 

I know people who tune in to certain TV programs just to yell at the talking head in the vapor box who is making a fortune by yelling at them. I guess they watch because it feels so good when the show is over (explains the uptick in cigarette sales, I guess). 

Others insist on reading columnists' words out loud and follow every line of the writer's argument with a scowl, or a gesture or a deprecation. And we just keep getting louder and angrier about more things, and more people every day. We don't know how to get off the aggravation escalator-and most of us don't even know we're on one.

Passion is fine and necessary. If our ancestors back in the ooze didn't care if they evolved to have legs that carried them from the pond and helped us grow lungs, every day would be Friday, if you follow my drift. 

It's the grinding though, that is wearing us out; the pitched battles we are waging to benefit who knows who or for what purpose. You wanna feel silly about how we now get along with one another, but you don't want to use the foolscap?

Okay--since we're just weeks away from the 25th Anniversary of the worst day in most of our lives, tell me five things this country was PO'ed about at eight AM on September 11th, 2001. Go ahead, I'll wait. 

Too hard? Gimme three things, then-how hard could that be? No?
You want to take a break from all this head noise and hate to concentrate on the real and important tasks at hand instead? Go ahead, I'll make a note of where we were, and we can get back to it sometime real soon.
-bill kenny

Shame on Us

Not the most cheering of news headlines yesterday at so many levels
I won't bore you with the specifics.

Being a half-full glass kind of guy, I'd point out the Navy is considering doing something it should have done decades, if not a lifetime, ago, recommending MA2 Miller for the Medal of Honor. 

But the grey cloud around that silver lining is the suggestion that the renaming would honor our current Commander-in-Chief, the one who holds those who've served in the military in such low regard he worked as hard as at any time in his life to avoid joining them. 

I think that, should the renaming occur, there could be pickleball courts instead of a flight deck. Surely, that activity wouldn't aggravate the CinC's bone spurs. 

-bill kenny

Slouching Towards Jerusalem

In the Late Sixties/Early Seventies, one of the first jobs I ever had was as a stockboy in a grocery store (a Shop-Rite in South Bound Brook, as I recall). I had my own box cutter and price stamper, as we had to 'throw the truck,' that is, unload a tractor-trailer delivery, route the boxes to the correct aisles, cut open each box, price every item (can, bag, or box), and put them on the store's shelves.  

You, the shopper, would cruise the aisles, scooping up items and putting them in your cart, taking them to the front of the store where you unloaded them onto a conveyor belt at a cashier's station, and the cashier would ring up every item you placed on the belt. 

One of us stock boys would place your purchases in brown paper bags (cans on the bottom, eggs and loaves of bread on top) and put the filled bags in your cart. You'd pay cash for your groceries and leave. Sort of a circle of life, but with Chef Boy Ar Dee and Fluffernutter. 

Fast forward fifty-plus years, and we scan everything.
It's called progress (though some of us call it something else).

Barcodes have been the norm for so long; it could be painful when they're gone, and make no mistake, they are going away. 

QR uber alles? Indeed. At least until whatever comes next. And no worries, something will always come next.
-bill kenny 

Has Anyone Checked for Change in the Couch Cushions at the Otis Library?

I don't have a particular politics, especially when we're talking about my local zip code. When cornered, I will admit to being a Relentless Pragmatist. 

I think if you look at the correspondence between the Founders, the documents they used to create this nation through to The Federalist Papers, they weren't too keen on ivory tower concepts, preferring down-to-earth as they built this Republic. 

I don't think I'm alone in NOT seeing government, at any level, as either the solution to every problem or the obstacle to finding solutions.

I don't pretend to know if it's us or the times in which we live, but we (and I mean all of us across the country and not just here in The Rose City) suffer from selective memory while also lacking the capacity to forgive. 

Not even a year ago, we elected a substantially different City Council and Mayor than we had previously. One of the promises each of those elected had made while a candidate was to do what he/she felt best to advance Norwich economically, politically, emotionally, and socially. That promise is the critical component in making our government work.

I leave to your judgment what has happened, or not happened, beyond our City limits. I have just the right size brain to think locally, and so that's what I do. 

All of us have to believe those whom we elected to the City Council or the Board of Education will do the best they can for all of us, to the best of their ability, always (or at least more of the time than they won't). 

Many of us voted for the very people whom, in recent months, we've had less than kind thoughts and words about for their attempts to master economic (and other) challenges none of us could have possibly imagined. 

Too often we've become so partisan, even in much of what goes on in our State Capitol, that I wonder what's gotten into us. We're spectators, actually consumers, of political campaigns where a candidate decides 'for me to look good, my opponent needs to look bad,' and no issues of substance are ever debated or even mentioned. 

As awful as that is, in terms of tone and tenor of a campaign, it's even worse for us, those who must decide whom we support and choose a direction when so many others are leading us in circles.

This election, we are choosing a Governor, a Congressional representative, and populating a whole new statehouse, upper and lower chamber, as well as literally dozens of other offices and deciding local ballot initiatives. 

Photo by Norwich Bulletin

Here in Norwich, it will be a yes or no vote to bond 55 million dollars for a new police station downtown to replace one that's been inadequate for about the last thirty years. 

This is not the first time around the block on this initiative. Every eight to ten years we try to pass this referendum item, for usually ten million dollars more than the last time, and we never succeed (because 'it costs so much!'). But we all see the need for a new police station. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. 

We just keep kicking the can down the road and hoping (maybe) that the Mayor will have a Powerball scratchoff ticket that pays for it all rather than bite the bullet and do what we know we should do. I fear we won't, and then we'll wonder why the next time the proposal comes up it costs more money. On this issue, for me the choice is simple, especially since I already know what happens when we do nothing. 

-bill kenny          

Stuck in My Head

Welcome to a quick demonstration of how I think, assuming you have any belief I actually think at all. And thank you for the extension of that kindness, or, if you have doubts but remain silent, for that courtesy as well. 

For the last few days, I've been thinking about a marvelous piece of nonsense by Edward Lear that I had to memorize as a child and willingly remember to this day. I know from experience that it will eventually go away, but not right away, unless I try to exorcise it, sort of. So here goes:

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. 

They took some honey, and plenty of money 

Wrapped up in a five-pound note. 

The Owl looked up to the stars above, and sang to a small guitar, 

"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are. 

You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!" 

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl, How charmingly sweet you sing! 

Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried: 

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the bong-tree grows; and there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood, With a ring at the end of his nose.

His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose. 

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?" 

Said the Piggy, "I will." So they took it away,

And were married next day by the Turkey who lives on the hill. 

They dined on mince and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand on the edge of the sand They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon." 

Subject to your briefing, that concludes my questions for now. 
-bill kenny

Relentlessly Cheerful

When I write about national politics, something is going on. Either I have become incredibly insightful, erudite, and educated on electoral dynamics and the psychology of the crowd.

I'll pause until the laughter subsides- in space they can't hear you scream, but in cyberspace I can hear you mock me- or we went from knee deep in the stupid to hip deep in the last decades. I'm thinking it's the latter. And you're hoping that's the worst of it but fearing it isn't.

We are slowly going broke, with the slowly part accelerating on a daily basis. We are so deeply in debt within a generation that all hope of finding our way out will be extinguished forever, and we will be a nation trapped in involuntary servitude to whoever holds our treasury notes (even if they're in a language we don't know how to read).

We have lost the war on drugs. We long ago lost the war on poverty, and from what I've read online, the war on literacy, while going splendidly, means soon we'll have no one who can report on its success, which is just as well, as we no longer have anyone to read about it.

And speaking of war, though we don't talk about it anymore, we were at war in Afghanistan for two decades without once ever explaining to ourselves what victory there would look like. 

Americans of all ages and both sexes in our armed forces there who aren't killed or wounded in combat or murdered by the very people they were told we are there to help came back so beaten and broken by what they'd seen and done they cannot ever be made whole, which is just as well because we can't afford to fix them. Luckily we have lots of street corners they can stand on with squeegees and rags. 

Having finally walked away from that car crash in Southwest Asia, we turned around and repeated all the mistakes we made in Afghanistan and Iraq in the Strait of Hormuz, trading desert sand for salt water devoid of shipments of oil and natural gas that the world needs to run. 

Since I mentioned helping and healing, let's not forget universal affordable health care, which many third-world nations, including the one ninety miles off the Florida coast already have, but we sure don't, and aren't you proud to be an American where you can die waving the flag (!) because you lack the money for a doctor or medicine to make you better.
 
And perhaps it's better that we die now since we've criminally underfunded and fleeced private sector pension plans, and anyone depending on Social Security will soon feel like George Armstrong Custer waitin' for the guys from the fort to get here.

It's the saddest part of Catch-22 where Yossarian tries to help his mortally wounded comrade and ends up dressing the wrong wound as Snowden freezes to death while bleeding out in the skies over Pianosa. We won't even have the luxury of a silk or golden parachute if we don't stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by chatter that doesn't matter. 

We've 77 days and a wake-up to Election Day in November. I'm tired of standing this fire watch by myself while the pyros take turns trying to put a match to everything we worked to build. And argue all you want, but we did build this.
-bill kenny

Over the Rooftop Sails Billy....

I love living in a society where everyone believes we should take turns (probably because, as a now-elderly white heterosexual man, I was born on third base and have spent my life thinking I hit a triple). 

As long as the entitled get to go first. I, too, believe the Lord helps those who help themselves, which is why He/She gave me two hands to grab it all and two pockets to put it away. But there's always someone with a better idea.

I'm wondering how much more we might get done if we began every meeting, from a town hall or city council session to a US Senate hearing, by trying the balloon trick. 

At the very least, we'd have an opportunity to meet someone both like and unlike ourselves. Of course, as Mae West pointed out, the danger with balloons is that it takes only one prick to ruin everything.
-bill kenny