Insufferable and Inexhaustible

Some things don't age well, like me. Some things get a little closer to succeeding at that. Not sure where this from almost a decade ago falls, but pretty sure gravity does win out. I called it: 

Wordless Screaming

There was an article in the New York Times, the other morning that caused me to smile and grimace simultaneously. I didn't really need to read it (though I did) because I agreed with the headline, had seen the nearly-legendary visual that went with the story, and lived through countless, some might suggest innumerable, close, personal encounters of the worst kind. 

The article, when I was in the Air Force, was what we called a BGO, a blinding glimpse of the obvious. And its premise was/is that PowerPoint has lots of the former and none of the latter. I've endured more than my share of meetings where multi-colored pie charts demonstrate conclusively (and irrefutably) "11" is larger than "5". 

I've always loved the animations some folks use to make these very points--though it's hard to not adore the old stand-by, stacks of various heights so even a cretin can grasp five dollars is much many more than two. There's nothing like the classics. 

Not so amusing has been the amount of my life that's been invested in supporting this kind of puppet show mummery-but since misery loves company I point out that few, if any, of the folks who requisition my help are ever very happy that I show up with a shoebox full of hand puppets while wearing finger puppets (it's hard to get those suckers on, too, after you've got a couple on already on one hand; and I don't have a lot of friends to help). I get invited to less and fewer of these soirees as time passes. Hey, I'm a traditionalist-what can I say?

And it's not fair, in a way to blame the device-when it's we who made it, used it and now overuse it, just like everything else we put our hands to. We will have access to more information, vastly more than we can process or retain, by the end of today then has existed throughout all of civilization. 

Actually, that's crap-I suspect something like that statement is probably true, but like the talking heads on TV, I don't have the time to research or confirm it as a truth, so I'll just proclaim it my truth and because you have no way to compare, measure or analyze, you'll buy in on it. 

Then tomorrow, we can make it into a bullet on a slide and then turn that into a bumper sticker. Soon, we'll have a movement, with a website, tee-shirts and ballcaps and maybe some endorsement deals. Between you and me, considering how full of it as a species we already are, it's amazing we don't have non-stop movements, but that's a discussion for another time. 

Next slide please, "Confusion through Consensus." Yes, it's just a random collection of various parts of speech-what you read it to mean is what your reality actually is and you are more than welcome to it. Subject to your briefing, that concludes my questions.
-bill kenny

Approved by ZZ Top

I have excellent taste in clothes. I hate to brag but I wanted you to know and appreciate that for the achievement of a 67-year-old white guy that it truly is. It's hard work in light of how unkind Nature and Life have been to me in the course of the years in the home-grown looks department so clothing has to be the great equalizer. 

Except, as is true for a whole generation of men across the planet, I have no clue as to what goes with what and why or how. My wife who has a brilliant sense of style and taste, despite being married to me, worries about all the clothes in my house. 

I spent eight years in the United States Air Force and have attempted on many occasions to use that as the excuse masquerading as a reason for why I have no sense of color or style, except I didn't have any before I was in the Air Force, had very little while I was in and got out with no appreciable improvement in any aspect of my lifestyle or personality. 

Left to my own device I will buy shirts and trousers that have nothing in common except their production is a result of the Industrial Revolution arriving in some third world nation someplace. My sense of style in neck-wear when I worked was solid colored ties, mostly black because I think they go with everything, and white socks to complete the look. It's been a number of years, decades, actually (come to think of it) since I've been allowed to shop for myself. And I think we're all better people because of it (at least those of us in the Northeast with whom I most frequently come into contact). 

My wife selected all of my work clothes and laid them out each evening for decades because she really needed to do that. We got better in the latter years of my employment in that she no longer needed to explain to me why she chose a particular tie or why I should use a specific tie clasp for it. 

But not because I understood any of the logic or explanation. I think she finally realized I was listening to her the way a dog listens: "mumble, grumble, stumble MY NAME, mumble, grumble, stumble, something about the couch and stay off it, leaving the seat up and more mumbling." 

At the end of her presentation, there would be a big sigh and she'd head into the living room with the look of a person much put-upon. I'd be left to admire clothing I had but the dimmest recollection of buying, trying to recall what she had told me about how to wear it. 

I can choose my own play clothes (from the clothing she's bought for me). How much trouble can I get into left to my own devices? More than you (or I) might otherwise imagine. 

There's always a moment after I don the casual shirt and khakis or jeans when I just don't know if 'the look' works. I can stare into the mirror for an hour and it won't help. She, on the other hand, can, without looking up, get to the heart of the matter and set me on the path of sartorial splendor. 

To this day, in light of all of her talents and abilities, I'm hard-pressed to imagine what she saw in me when we met. She must just like the challenge. Not to mention this iridescent and international emergency orange open-necked shirt that's visible from space. I bought it myself-what do you think?
-bill kenny

Never Too Late for a Happy Childhood

I grew up with Mr. Wizard and hold Bill Nye the Science Guy in high regard (I'd put him in charge of NASA if I were the President. I'd pause so you could imagine the sequence of events necessary for that to happen, but we don't have that kind of time in this continuum), so I'm open to unending possibilities even if they seem to be implausible to others. 

An eye blink or so ago, we truly believed the world was flat, tomatoes were poisonous, and potato had an 'e' in it. We've come so far so fast, and yet still have so many known unknowns. We've spent a lot of time in parts of this country for the past decade and longer on evolution versus intelligent design and while I won't tell you my feelings on the issue, I do get more than a little sick of people who insist on telling me theirs, especially when they use a dogmatic tone of voice they think automatically turns their opinions into facts. Good luck with that, NOT.

This news item causes my brain to make my eyes go back and read the story again. I checked as best I could and believe this to be an actual legitimate news story, or as close as we come to them here in the age of bubble worlds and selective truths: Women who wear revealing clothing cause earthquakes.

"The West Coast has the sunshine, and the girls all get so tanned. I dig a french bikini on Hawaii island, dolls by a palm tree in the sand." Take a look at what's gone on out there since 1965 when California Girls topped the charts. Go ahead! Will someone please get Homeland Security on the horn and tell them to pick up one Mr. Brian Wilson. We have enough trouble right now, we don't need his help.
-bill kenny

A Reprise Without Reprieve

I've offered these words before and hope to live long enough to offer them quite a few more times. 

Kryrie Eleison

I think we in Norwich have had an annual Vietnam Veterans Day since the start of the 21st Century, thanks in no small part to the Norwich Area Veterans Council and a very dedicated band of brothers and sisters, whose shared service in defense of our nation compels them to help the rest of us remember people and events that have gone before.

This year's observance is this afternoon, at one, at Chelsea Parade. The day itself, if not our remembrances of it here, is linked to the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.

I grew up in an era where history was reduced to the memorization of dates and events to be parroted back on test days, but even in today's world of alt-facts and fake news, I'm confident all these years down memory lane that we, as a country, have never really made our peace with that war, the way we fought it, the way it ended, and most especially with how we treated those lucky enough to come home from it.

And again this year to me proof again that the present is often a future we ignored from our past, we have large numbers of young and not-so-young men and women, deployed across the globe, many in southwest Asia, serving our national strategic interests and furthering our foreign policy objectives while I sit in front of my big screen and bitch about the two hundred channels of cable I get.

Some have suggested Vietnam demonstrated the danger of trying to conduct a guns AND butter war, that is, we send people off to fight while back on the home front, very little changes. If that's the theory, then I guess it's true, since while we had sappers trying to clear mines from rice paddies in monsoon season we also had half a million gather in the mud of Yasgur's Farm. And when all the toking and joking was over, the ages of everybody were practically identical, though I think the guys humping it through weeds were younger, but also so much older.

But the Vietnam War as all wars are was less geopolitics and more personal loss and grief across a generation. I was still finding buildings and classrooms as a wide-eyed freshman at Rutgers when I lost forever a Manhattan prep school classmate, Roy O., in Vietnam.

I was grateful so many years later when the American VeteransTraveling Tribute to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stopped at Howard T. Brown Park, giving me a moment to say thank you and farewell to my friend.

From what I know from long-time residents of Norwich, the city lost twelve young men in the Vietnamese War. When I read accounts of that war and its aftermath, I'm angry, bitter and maybe a little guilty at how so many of those who survived were treated, 

Those fortunate enough to come home returned to us often wounded in places that will never, ever heal and were left to their own devices while the rest of us raced to forget what we never knew enough about in the first place.

In years previous on Saturdays passed, we've had skies so deep and blue you could get got lost looking into them with just enough of a breeze that the large flag at the war memorial on Chelsea Parade was fully unfurled (you could hear a light snapping of the cloth). 

Despite a forecast suggesting otherwise, I hope the weather will cooperate because a nice day attracts more participants, but the weather will not matter to those who will be there rain or shine, so you should dress accordingly. And on behalf of those Norwich sons, and the other fifty-eight thousand plus casualties, thank you.

I will hope for sunshine because a sunny day provides me the perfect reason to wear my big, very dark sunglasses since, by the time the ceremonies conclude, like many I'm struggling to keep from crying. I have spent too much of my life being too cool to care and cry because I fear if I do, I may never stop.

Praise we great men and women I know but the sacrifices made by those with whom we live and love, make me wonder if we praise and remember the right people. Welcome Home.
-bill kenny

It Never Gets Old

Though, as my youngest brother always points out on my natal anniversary, I have.

Still undecided if today's the day to talk to him about adoption.

Practice makes perfect say I

Probably not. He'd say I'm too old for anyone to want me.
-bill kenny

Another Sure Sign of Spring?

Stephen King, the master of the macabre, once described books as 'uniquely portable magic.' I couldn't agree more and, good news! the curtain goes up on our own magic show tomorrow morning and lasts through Sunday at the Friends of Otis Library Semi-Annual Book Sale.

I have gone to every one of these sales for as long as I can remember not just because I love books and reading them (truth to tell, I've bought far more books than I've yet to read which gives me a warm feeling and technically is known as tsundoku) but also because I'm a fan of basements, and the one under the Otis Library is crammed with reading material of every kind.

As I learned again last Monday when the City Council met with members of the Otis Library Board of Trustees on their budget request, events like the book sales, like the O'Tis a Festival at Christmas, among other outreaches are vital in an era where we have more wants than wallet in keeping the library's lights on and providing services to our community.

If you've been a patron of a previous book sale, consider this a refresher and if you've yet to attend one, this is your introduction and pay attention because there may just be a quiz. Here goes:

There's a sneak preview tomorrow morning from nine to ten which attracts collectors from across New England who pay $10 for the head start it affords them on searching for treasures and great deals ranging from books of every genre, magazines, compact discs, and more. 

No matter how many collectors attend (look for the out of state license plates on the parked cars and despite rumors to the contrary you can always find a place to park) there's still plenty of great stuff when the opening for the general public starts at ten. 

Hours on both Friday and Saturday are from ten until three and from noon until three on Sunday. It's an opportunity to say hello to neighbors you haven't seen perhaps since the book sale last fall (It's why I wear a name tag) while refreshing your home bookshelves, shuffling between the stacks not sure exactly what you're looking for until you find it. I usually have no idea what I'm looking for but still come home delighted, surprised, and with (considerably) more than I'd counted on and I'll bet you will, too.

The Otis Library book sale is also a great reason to check out the transformation that's continuing to happen to previously vacant storefronts as new and young faces open up great new places to shop, eat and mingle. I've long felt downtown looks to the Otis Library the way the fingers on the hand look to the thumb and after too many years of the library being just about all that was in downtown, it's awesome to be spoiled for the choices we have now.      

You can work up quite an appetite browsing for bargains so make it a point to grab a bite at one of the many restaurants you'll pass along the way. There are tables for every taste and plates for every palette, just steps away from the library and one another. And, as I said, you can check out how much more alive downtown is since the last time you looked.

The book sale is our chance to support a champion of downtown development. 

See you there?

-bill kenny

Silence Is Over-Rated

We had an expression when I was in the Air Force ‘nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.”  I’m thinking about that as based on my attempted 3rd-grade class presidency, I nevertheless offer advice to our City Council as they continue their budget deliberations.

And, before you ask, no, I didn’t win that election. And yes, I am aware the greatest thing about unsolicited advice is there’s no obligation to pay attention to it. With that as prologue:   

Norwich is not the only municipality in Connecticut trying to balance wants and wallet, but somehow that’s of small solace as the balancing act continues. Across Connecticut, our state legislators and Governor continue to weigh and measure what services are needed by us, the citizens, and which ones we can continue to afford.

Everything we buy for our families has increased in price and that's as true as well for the goods and services government at all levels. The Norwich City Manager offered his vision of a budget predicated on protecting the lives and property of residents and businesses while also developing a plan for long-term economic sustainability. Now the men and women of the City Council are refining that vision. And if you have ideas that can make their job easier, this is as good a time as any to offer them.

If you’ve downloaded and reviewed a copy of the proposed budget attended or followed along via the City’s website any of the Department presentations or the first public hearing (the second one is May 13^th; write it down if you haven’t already), I should say thank you, except (and don’t get me wrong about this) it’s our job as residents to be both informed and involved in how our city works. So, while all of that is a good start, let’s face it, Norwich is a city of good starts. It’s getting things to the finish line where we sometimes seem to have difficulties.

An annual budget and the process of its creation doesn’t define who we are as a city, but it should be one of the tools we use to shape the priorities, circumstances, and conditions we want as a city, to grow and thrive. Speaking and (more importantly) listening to elected officials and to one another, be it via social media comments, letters to newspaper editors, or at public hearings while developing that financial road map is critically important especially now because for too many years too few of us chose to become involved.

If you don’t speak up and advocate for your vision of Norwich you can’t expect anyone else to do it for you. And if you’ve decided to remain silent at this moment when your words are most urgently needed, you deserve what you get. Everything has a price and everything has a cost in what we do, and perhaps, more importantly, what we choose to NOT do. Nothing happens in Norwich unless we make it happen, so make something happen. 

Things You Miss When You Use Their App

From what I've been reading for months, Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in near-mortal combat for supremacy of the American retail landscape. Every time one of them does something, adds a wrinkle or offers an innovation, the other one responds and ups the ante. 

I'm almost tempted to say 'and all the while we, the consumers, come out ahead' but that is demonstrably bullshit as we are pretty much prisoners of multi-gazillion dollar in what were once considered vertical-combinations-in-restraint-of- trade-but-no-longer-because-we-love-monopolies and not just as board games. 

So we all just abwarten und tee trinken and whatever will be (with and without Doris Day) and see who is the last Goliath standing but, between us, Amazon will have to work extra hard to pull off anything close to this kind of shenanigan which seems to happen in random Wal-Marts all the time.

I'm NOT surprised at the news story. But I am surprised none of the three of them made the video for the song. I think they should ask for a recount.
-bill kenny  

School Dazed

There was a bar, Olde Queens Tavern, steps from the Rutgers College campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, that had been a hangout for decades when we wide-eyed wonders arrived in the fall of 1970 (when the drinking age in NJ was 21 and we were not) and we adopted it as our own. 

Maybe it's the fog of war or the haze of alcohol but I don't remember ever seeing people in there who didn't look like me when I went in there. I think we drove the previous crowd out and, in turn, were succeeded by I don't know how many succeeding student-scholars (if wet tee-shirt contests and dropping shots of whiskey into beer glasses is on the syllabus). 

The folks who ran Olde Queens, and probably still do, were always very patient with us, and much more kind than they needed to be (in light of our age and the terrible fake IDs we all had) in moving us out when it was to close up. Some of us, I think, probably didn't go home, or have homes to go to, but leave we did.

Long before Joseph Heller, Closing Time was a state of mind and an attitude check. I'm grateful I don't remember more of some of those nights and the state I was in and I am grateful beyond words for somehow not succumbing as a result of behavior that went well beyond 'youthful indiscretion' without harming myself or anyone else. 

The old man I've been sentenced to become never existed in the fevered fantasies of the young me and I am still amazed how I well I survived that person's excess as if that were, itself, a success. What I do recall makes me shudder and I strive to recall as little as possible for as long as possible.

I hope I live long enough to regard the age in which we now live in the same manner. I have extended and extensive angrily-escalating exchanges with people whom I don't know nor shall ever meet on topics and subjects about which we both have strongly held opinions without nearly as many facts to support them as we think we can muster. 

We hurl invective at total strangers and they give as good as they get, in my case usually a bit extra because through so much practice I am a nearly perfect and egregious ass. We used to joke as kids that 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' but that is, as we all know, an absurdity and a lie. 

Words can and do hurt, wounding in a way unlike any other weapon ever can, without leaving a visible scar. And after the echo of the last of the words has died, all we have to do is go on living with ourselves and the consequences of what we have done to one another. "When the old men do the fighting and the young men all look on. And the young girls eat their mothers meat from tubes of plasticon. Beware of these, my gentle friends, and all the skins you breed. They have a tasty habit - they eat the hands that bleed."

-bill kenny

We're Falling Up

These started out as some thoughts (or what passes for such) from some years back and then things got twisted I guess. Some things like wine improve with age; others, like sweat socks, not so much. I'll leave it for you to decide which is which because you always do.

I used to be a Roman Catholic--actually, that's less than accurate or truthful. It's like saying I used to be an alcoholic. Those two statements have no past tense, or pretense (my attempt at a literary joke); they just are and in this case, I am both.

The jaded, faded imitation of a person I am today looks at his faith as a child and finds it easy to mock the boy on his way to manhood, but also envies him the beliefs he had. When I threw the faith of my fathers into the ocean of doubt, I had nothing to hold onto in its place because I never had the courage of my own convictions and could not develop any trust in those of anyone else other. 

Today is Easter Sunday the most important feast in the Christian liturgical calendar and (pardon my pseudo-theological seminary sermon) precipitant of the article of faith that makes us Christian if that's indeed what we are. Christmas gets the lion's share of press, carols, cards, shouted best wishes at one another, and window dressing. Quite candidly, it takes all the air out of the room in terms of holiday celebrations.  

Christmas gets marketing help from every wholesaler and retailer imaginable and why not? Christmas is a lovely story, wonderfully symbolic and simply beautiful if you don't want to think too much about it.

Take a look at today in the New Testament of your choice and foreboding's afoot in every verse of every version of the events leading to Easter (those, by the way, are the versions and verses of my choice). And in one of the most ironic choices of terms associated with any aspect of Jesus Christ, is Good Friday, which marks His Crucifixion and Death (I went back and made the "h" a capital, not because there's hope for me but out of fear that there is no hope). And as you read the accounts, let's face it, the events of that day are absolutely horrible.

The crowd, the occupying forces, everyone, it seems has abandoned the Son of God who is sentenced to die (I'd say 'murdered' but some might argue the state does not murder) in an extraordinarily horrible manner. And yet.

It is both that death by Crucifixion but more importantly the belief in the Resurrection which followed that so many commemorate today that's the defining event for every Christian, even the ones who seem more like Simon Peter than even they should ever admit in this life.  I want you to remember this. Come on, try to remember.

-bill kenny

Blessed Are the Saints Who Wait

I have never been to the Vatican, nor have I stayed at a well-known motel chain, but I know my way around the Stations of the Cross and the Lives of the Saints. I'm always amazed at the number of people who think Christmas is the origin of Christianity-others consider the beginnings to be Easter Sunday.

If the former is The Promise and the latter The Promise Fulfilled then today, Holy Saturday is the act of faith and hope that defines you as a Christian. The belief in the Resurrection which the New Testament portrays as the promised reward for the faithful servant is never so near and yet oh so far as it is today.

The earliest disciples had nothing to go on, unlike those of us we of the Brave New World Order. They had witnessed a crucifixion-one of the most egregiously horrific forms of a death sentence at its time. Cowering in an upstairs room, huddled together while fearing any sound and every footfall was possibly a signal someone was coming for them, they had no way to see the glory of Easter Sunday. All they could do was believe.

For them to believe as devoutly as they did between the worst day in the history of the world and its greatest day remains for me as a loyal son of Holy Mother Church, but a FARC  for more years than I care to recall, the day which created the Christian religion, today the test and proof of faith.

From childhood on, I struggled against the suffocation that surrender to the traditions and the rites seemed to signify. I took no solace in unquestioning and unswerving belief, preferring what I understood the path of Thomas to be and finding no one who could answer my questions, absenting myself from the body of believers. How odd that this declaration of freedom has never created a sense of being free.

Not that I don't envy those of faith and think about the comfort that comes from that, especially as I did last night (as I have for years on Good Friday) revisiting a news archive to read again about the costs of war and who pays them with the death of Captain Nicholas Rozanski in 2012. He came from Dublin, Ohio, to be lost in the fog of war on the streets of Maimanah, an unremarkable spot on a map of a nation we have carried with us for nearly two decades, unable or unwilling (I don't know which) to lay that burden down.

His death and those of all the fallen and forgotten should be another reminder to those of us who are alive to redouble our efforts to be the best people we know how to be in The Now because The Next, as the New Testament illustrates, can be so lonely and uncertain without a reason to believe. And either you have a reason, or you become one for someone else. When you do, every day is Easter.
-bill kenny

Biblical, But in a Non-Judgmental Way

There is, preached Kohelet in the Book of Ecclesiastes, a season for every purpose it says in the Old Testament, seasons for everything and around the world today within the Christian faith we are within the Paschal Triduum. Monsignor Harding, wherever he is in all of eternity, would be wide-eyed with wonder that, of all that I have been given or taught, and of all that I have lost or had taken from me, that would be a term I would hold onto.

I know a lot of Christians who see the birth of Christ, Christmas, as the defining moment of their faith, and I guess if you work retail that's an attractive argument. As a child growing up in Holy Mother Church in the late Fifties and Sixties, I knew (and had plenty of nuns, Sister of Charity type, if I were to forget) for Catholics it was the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.

I can still remember Sister Thomas Anne faintly smiling as she ticked off the three events on the fingers of her right hand: pinkie, ring finger and middle finger (how ironic is that? (I'm lying, third-grader students had no concept of the significance of the middle finger, not even Bobby D' who was a pretty fast crowd all by himself)). 

She paused as she would note the similarity to the Holy Trinity, three persons in the One God. When I watched her do this same explanation, with the pregnant pause in the same place, complete with the slow smile of accidental recognition of her triad point for the next five years, there was still a sign, but, I must confess, the wonder was gone.

And yet, I suspect she, too, is smiling today. It is Good Friday, a day of such momentous import to so many disparate elements of our historical, philosophic and cultural identity where, no matter your belief, or disbelief, you can take solace from the perfect sacrifice of the Son of God who became the Son of Man and laid down His life. 

Even if you have hurts which can never heal, you can, if only for today, have hope, knowing there is a tomorrow.

-bill kenny

Why Zevon Wrote It

There are so many wonderful Warren Zevon songs-perhaps too many (kidding! of course. That was the root beer talking). One of my favorites, and it has been since first hearing, is "Lawyers, Guns, and Money." 

It's jaunty with just a touch of dramatic foreshadowing, usually served with a green salad, and feeds eight. But nutritional palaver aside, I think I figured why he wrote it. 

This guy right here.

Turns out, you can put a price on a broken heart and Miles G. is the appraiser.
-bill kenny

Springing into Spring Fever

Without trying to steal a march on any words that will undoubtedly be offered by a leader of a church of your choice in the next day for either Passover and the Paschal Season (or both), I’ve got a case of secular spring fever right now and hope you’ll consider joining me in the spring days ahead to make awesome happen.

Seems like a stretch? It shouldn't really, Look around you. Everything that was dark and dead a month ago is showing signs of rebirth. Every aspect of our lives here on earth is measured by. and in, both evolutionary and revolutionary change. Why not us, and why not now?

Why not decide, in addition to being a brother, a sister, a son or daughter, father or mother, employer or employee, resident and neighbor, our new jobs will also be (in whatever way you have within your means) to make awesome happen. Would this be a cool planet or what? It would definitely be a cooler city, that's for sure. And before you quibble, consider this: we can't muck it up too much more than it already is. Seriously.

I'm not talking grand gestures. Baby steps. Start by smiling at someone you pass on the sidewalk. I do it all the time (I like to show off my teeth). It takes less than two seconds and not only do you brighten someone else's day, more often than not they'll share the smile you gave them with someone else and so it goes.

Don't be daunted because you're alone. That's how we enter this world and how we'll leave it. It's what we do, or choose to NOT do, with the space and the time between those two events that mark our passage on this planet and if you're living for the reflection of approval in the eyes of others, you've already got one foot in the grave.

'I am only one, but still, I am one. I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something; And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.'  

Yeah, the words of Edward Everett Hale are certainly a mouthful, but what a mouthful!

We might want to stagger the schedule for making awesome happen so that everyone can actually savor the sensation and appreciate the majestic magnificence of what it is we are doing and what is becoming of the world we have inherited. That's part of our problem sometimes as a species, I fear, the moderation switch has been broken clean off and our appetites for destruction are so seldom sated.

Maybe like you, I'm unhappily surprised to discover I 'know' more people online than I do in real life (by a factor of ten or more times) so it's easy to lose sight that people power is more reliable and abundant than any other form of energy we have or are likely to ever have. In this season of new beginnings, we can make awesome happen. Today and every day.

-bill kenny

Funny How Time Slips Away

I just found another something I wrote almost a decade ago that I had not only completely forgotten about but had you told me I'd written it I'd have not believed you (because the spelling and grammar were both better than decent). 

It was about my receiving (getting? receiving sounds like it was a gift and it wasn't) a new work desk and filling it up with the stuff that had been in the old desk. I smiled because starting about this time last year, I incrementally emptied the new/old desk into cardboard boxes to bring home a bit at a time and put in the basement as I readied my great escape from the (actively) employed. I put parentheses around actively because for a number of years that was a hot topic of discussion, even to my face. 

Yeah, good times. Anyway, at the time I called it: 

Sayonara Kid, Have a Nice Day

I cleaned out my work desk yesterday for the delivery of a new one. I know what you’re thinking, ‘how empty is this guy’s life that he’s writing about getting a new desk?’ You’re the one reading about it so you tell me. Et tu, Brute?

The desk was in the office I first worked in when I arrived from Germany in the fall of 1991 when I wasn’t sure of where I lived (let me clarify: I knew it was Norwich; I just didn’t know the name for the city). 

I told people I lived in Norwalk because I'd heard of that place, an answer that got some stares and glares when in response to ‘how long does it take you to get here?’ I’d answer ‘about twenty minutes.’ That answer always got me the rejoinder, that 'well, take it easy-w don't have the autobahn around here.' (like anyone could mistake two lanes of I-95 North and South for the A3 nach Koln.)

At the time, I couldn’t understand the looks of incredulity as people offered me that advice. I’ve since become inured to them. Point in fact for about two weeks, I couldn’t find the house I lived in at night, because I got lost. I kept that to myself since I didn't think that had anything to do with how fast I was going.

The desk was, aside from me, the oldest thing in the office and as the years went by, it filled with the detritus of the decade-long daily grind. Actually, I just remembered that wasn't true-the computer on the desk was the oldest thing (third oldest to be honest) and was a 286 something or other with, wait for it, Windows 1.0. No lie.

In the various drawers, I found foolscap with notes and names of people from a decade and a half ago with cryptic additional information that may have once had value but is now long lost and gone. Clearing out a bottom drawer I surprised myself with two framed photos of my children from ‘back in the day’ when they were very much children in primary grades at school and these were the portraits that were done on Picture Day.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed those kids until I saw them again and smiled because I’d put the portraits away for safe-keeping, so safe I’d lost sight of them. I took them home so my wife could preserve them as I can't even do that right.

Digging through another drawer, in theory, to clear it out, but actually to dump its contents into a container while the old desk goes away and the new desk is moved in. Then the contents of the container will be emptied into the new desk drawer for the remainder of this century or longer and we go round and round and round in the circle game. 

On a small piece of paper, neatly cut out from the return corner of an envelope, I found the address of my Mom’s brother, Uncle Jim, whom we buried years ago. It stung to realize I’ve been so self-absorbed that staring at it might have been my first time thinking about him since his passing.

New things are nice, in moderation. I have a new office and with it came some new responsibilities and I appreciate greatly the concern the people I work for have for me in going out and getting ergonomically spiffy (I don't think that's the actual term, but it could be) furnishings to perhaps encourage me to continue to work for them. 

Like so many across this country, in light of crash and burns in a number of retirement plan investments, I'm now signed up for WUD, so no worries. And I have no life (free will decision, mine) so having a new and empty desk drawer to put the memories in, is only necessary if you make some. 

Otherwise, I'll be keeping my pencil case there.

-bill kenny         

Through the City's Melted Furnace

Someone told me years ago that the older you get the faster the days seem to go by. As I close in on the successful completion of my sixty-seventh orbit around the sun I am reminded of the truth of that observation more with each passing day. 

I am sometimes surprised to be confronted by a calendar telling me something is happening that I promised myself I would never forget but I have. I hope we're all like that and wish we weren't, most especially the latter part. 

The bombing at the Boston Marathon, an integral part of that city's Patriots' Day celebration was six years ago. Martin Richard would be just about ready for, if not already in, high school. But his song ended almost at the same moment it began. 

When I first wrote this I called it:     

The Telling Never Changes the Tale

I wrote this years ago because there was nothing else to write that day but the words of the next paragraphs. And here we are another year on, and no sense still makes no sense and good and decent people still have holes in their hearts where their loved ones used to be.

Today is Patriots' Day in Massachusetts and also the traditional running of the Boston Marathon. That order of precedence, if you will, was altered and changed for forever because of circumstances officially recalled in this news account on the one year anniversary of a day that we all now recall.

In 2013 at the Boston Marathon, Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev those evil, ungrateful bastards whom we took in and who repaid that kindness with killing innocents, broke hearts, destroyed lives and shattered our national illusion of insularity and insulation from the other horrors of the rest of the world and altered forever anyone's memories and imaginings of the Boston Marathon.

Both brothers will be long faded from memory before what they did is forgotten, but better remembered, and hopefully always remembered, is what they failed to do. Just ask Jeff Baumann, who gets stronger every day and whom I fervently hope gets angry and powerful enough some day to kick the ass of Dzorkhar all the way to Boston Harbor and then hold him under until the bubbles stop.

I understand being an angry old man will get me nothing but an even more premature grave and I should take my cue from those who not only survived but triumphed over the tragedy of that day. Perhaps I shall, starting tomorrow.

No More Hurting People

I have the good fortune to have as a Facebook friend, a Fenway habitue  and Grammy-nominee, who spent a lot of years on the Jersey Shore and has now followed the advice of Horace Greeley and gone west, Linda Chorney, who repurposed and molded her sorrow to create a beautiful celebration of a life taken terribly, suddenly and far too soon into a song perfectly suited for today and all those who are enjoying it.

-bill kenny

Revisiting Faith of Our Fathers

As a child, today was always a big deal Sunday in my house. And I have to be honest, I was almost a teen before I even fully grasped why--Palm Sunday was up there near, though not quite at, Christmas Mass and Easter, and when my first name still had a 'y' on the end of it, I never really followed the reasoning as to why. Ecce Homo indeed.

Palm Sunday has always seemed to me to be some variation of the deceptive handshake. The New Testament has accounts of the triumphal entry of the Son of God into Jerusalem, being welcomed as part of the inevitability of a week that had Him crucified on Friday (a more excruciating way to die at the time was unknown) and resurrected on Sunday.

I never impressed any of the nuns at St. Peter's School (now called Saint Peter the Apostle Elementary School I guess to distinguish him from the St. Peter who played shortstop for the Newark Bears in the middle seventies) with my scholastic aptitude or ability to interpret scriptures (I was almost married  before I caught understood the import of 'for I know not any man' and Joseph not having Mary stoned and why) and yet I still experience a dryness in my mouth of dread and foreboding as the events of the Passion Week unfold.

I couldn't stop reading about it as a child but I couldn't look away. When Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber cashed in with Jesus Christ Superstar, if nothing else, they linked the inquisition of Christ forever in my mind with a jaunty little music hall number I can hear even as I type this. Another reason I'm very confident in my destination of the next life.

Today is a day for many to visit the church of their choice. Sidewalks are crowded as families make their way to retrieve fronds of blessed palm (my mom's mother had a piece that never left its location, behind a framed black and white photo on the wall in the apartment in Elechester. Only now do I realize I have no idea of whom the picture was, nor any idea who I might ask). 

The blessed palm that doesn't end up scotch-taped to auto rear-view mirrors or suspended by a thumbtack alongside the front door will be collected after all the Masses today, at least in the Catholic Church of my youth, and then burned to become the ashes used on our foreheads for Ash Wednesday.

Intro ibo ad alteri Dei. I think I still know the words and know that I always shall. I once had the faith to believe in their meaning but I lost that, or perhaps threw it over the side to help speed me on my way, but then I lost my way. 

And now, I have the charts and maps spread out on the floor, but it's starless and bible black and I can't find my way home.

-bill kenny

Hold Tight! We're in for Nasty Weather

I love every aspect of the convergence of technologies that has produced what we tend to call The Internet (always with a capital T though I've no idea why) and while I lived for over four decades without it, (we hunted dinosaurs for food and used actual instruments to make music), I have only dim memories of life back in the day. 

One of the great things about connectivity, aside from unending cat memes (and the word 'memes,' come to think of it), pictures of pugs and 'don't try this at home' videos, are news stories from the farthest reaches of the planet that display on your monitor or smart-phone and help you feel a part of a much larger world around you. 

So yesterday when I saw this headline: Flintstone House Legal Drama: Both Sides Gear Up for Fight I almost ruined my computer mouse emphatically clicking on the link to get the story that much faster. I mean, who wouldn't? What's the matter, Barney? Is Pebbles in trouble? Turns out, not exactly a Betty and Wilma situation but more a Florence and Hillsborough embroglio. 

Truth to tell, based on the video in the link and the description outlined in the story I quite like the idea of 15-foot tall dinosaurs in the backyard of the house, though I'm not as keen on the idea of giant 'shrooms (but that may have something to do with unhappy experiences with peyote buttons in an earlier phase of my life). Of course, I don't live anywhere near the house, either, which may have something to do with my feelings about it.  

Geography aside, am I truly and not so secretly hoping Fred, himself, will testify for the property owner? Perhaps. Though I hope she also calls Mr. Slate as an expert witness. 
-bill kenny