Turn It Up to Eleven

It's not necessarily alchemy, but at times it can feel a lot like magic. At its purest, I'll admit, it's simplicity itself: add two or more guitars, some bass, and drums.

Later, rinse, repeat. 
-bill kenny

Feels More than the 30th

Just me or does January 2021 feel like an extension of December 2020? Sort of like having an extra day in February like we did last year, under that new 'have 24 more hours of suck on us' program from the same people who come up with great ideas they never need to live with. 

So here we are, and here we'll stay.  Until we move forward because if we don't in a year's time, we'll have wished we'd started today. So...

Together we stand, divided we fall.
-bill kenny

Now and Zen

I see commercials on television for meditation apps for your smartphone which is kind of funny (to me) since I suspect smartphones are the #1 contributor to the creation of stress in most of our lives. 

But that said, I like the idea of an in-place time-out, a moment of sanctuary from the rush and crush before re-engaging. 

I do a lot of walking and to the disappointment, I suspect, of some of my neighbors, that includes returning home after walks but one of the places I love to go, and it's convenient to my house, no matter the season, is the Lower Falls of the Yantic River usually called Uncas Leap. 

This is from a little more than a week ago, but I hope it does the trick for you in terms of respite and recharge.
-billkenny

They Married for Peace and Were Gone

As we were driving back from the Willimantic Department of Motor Vehicles Tuesday afternoon, my wife, Sigrid, looking out the passenger window at the grey landscape blending seamlessly into a grey horizon where, somewhere overhead, it met an equally grey sky, and offered a word in her native tongue, German, that too perfectly described it, trostlos-hopeless.

This is the toughest time of year for a lot of us, including folks like me who stare out the window in My Situation Room ("Fortress of Ineptitude" finished a close second in the name-the-spare-room contest we had when our daughter, Michelle, moved out) hoping to catch a glimpse of what's next. A number of years ago someone took me on a short helicopter flyover of some of the woodlands and farmlands in this area of Connecticut in the late fall, early winter, and the view from the top seemed to be of another world.

I can recall everywhere we went (and you can see a lot of them from the roadways, but there are many, many more as it turns out), seeing rock walls through the forests and brook beds, intersecting at angles, and wondering how odd that must have seemed to the indigenous peoples here when European settlers first arrived. In comparison, the European landmass was the smallest of the continents, and maybe that's where the assertiveness (if not out and out aggressiveness of its natives) developed as they went out into the big world and marked their territory not only to use but, at times, to use up.

I drive through lands demarcated by ancient stone walls every day as I travel across the Real World, and none of the creatures I pass in my travels or travails regard them as immutable boundaries or barriers. They are there and nothing more. I would imagine for a Mohegan or a Pequot, thinking of the tribes in this region of Connecticut, watching an early settler struggle to subjugate the earth to farm crops, engaged in back-breaking labor to maneuver the giant stones they unearthed while tilling, to serve as property markers was too amusing to not smile.

And it's taken us centuries to learn lessons of harmonious, not rapacious, living within a natural order and I'm not sure we're learning enough and fast enough. Reuse and recycle instead of plunder and leave. We have to work very hard to not spend too much time calculating what has been lost from the lessons left unlearned for too long and too long ago. Broken Arrow.
-bill kenny

#NeverAgain

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 76th anniversary of the Red Army liberating Auschwitz, Poland in the last winter of World War II.

You and I might like to believe that in our world today it is impossible that this fact could ever be forgotten but, looking across the globe, and the country not only is that not so but we encounter deniers who lie to themselves and others by insisting that none of the nightmare that was the Nazi's Final Solution ever even happened.

I almost understand, except because we don't all seem to have time for the truth, the lie gets another chance to spread some more and oozes its way into more lives as we sink a little deeper into the muck of our own perdition. To be clear: Holocaust deniers are not misinformed. They are evil for believing, for persisting, and for insisting that the horrors that happened, didn't occur.

Every year, there are fewer and fewer survivors of Auschwitz who observe the anniversary of its liberation and in the not-too-distant future there will be no one alive with first-hand recollections. That's why today, in a world of darkness and death driven by deep-seated, irrational hatreds of all kinds, we, each of us, need to be a witness for the truth of the Holocaust and of injustice and murder anywhere and everywhere we find it on this earth.

As a child on the rare occasions when I’d hear grown-ups tell stories about "The War" in which they’d fought they never mentioned the death camps-at least I don’t remember hearing anything. Perhaps their stories focused on a Europe that was an ocean away and even then, there was a reticence and reluctance to revisit a tortured time and a tendency to let the past remain the past. And what did that get us?

I'm the grown-up now and the cautionary tale the Ha-Shoah should have been, does not seem to be a lesson we have even started to learn. There are mindless murders every day in every corner of the globe because of the color of skin, the choice of a God, the shape of an eyelid, always some variation of our fear of The Other.

Here at home. we are NOT much better especially after a Presidential campaign whose vitriol-fueled falsehoods were so ubiquitous, they seemed endless as we denigrated and dehumanized those with whom we disagreed, rendering them abstractions and easier to hate and then hating them deeply and completely.

And then topping that, we had the spectacle of an attempted insurrection just three weeks ago with hours of imagery of angry and armed mobs in sweatshirts many with hateful and hate-filled anti-Semitic/racist/sexist slogans and imagery on sweatshirts and banners, despicable renunciations of everything our country claims to stand for.

Years ago, I came across Paul Chernofsky’s book, “And EveryoneWas Someone.” I think it’s still in print, or should be; you should read it. It's important someone can always bear witness to who we were and how easily all of that hatred happened and how it can happen again. Everyone's shadow is the same color but far too often we choose to forget that.

#NeverAgain.
-bill kenny

Vanilla Twilight

This new year, 2021, which arrived with such hopes and high expectations is already almost a month old or will be by the time we reach next Monday morning. How did that happen and when? Perhaps the good news is, if you've been holding off buying a calendar, you should start to see some great prices on them as the deep discounts kick in. That's an economic stimulus we can all get behind.

If all government is the result of social contracts we make with one another then I'd suggest municipal government works only as hard and as well as we, the people who live in our millions of towns and cities across the country, help make it work.

Everything from picking up trash as you go for a walk around the block, testifying at a public hearing on a zoning change, or offering yourself as a candidate for an office, each a small step by itself, adds up to a larger way forward. And yeah, as I've pointed out before, democracy is a contact sport, so when you decide to get off the bench make sure you're wearing a cup. 

I fear we've spent too many years in this Experiment Called the United States getting too comfortable referring to others as 'them' so that 'we' will have someone (else) to blame. The danger of finger-pointing is that three of the fingers point back at yourself. Perhaps if instead of balling our fingers into fists we offer them as a hand up to someone else in need, together we can make where we live better for all of us. 

If we don't at least try, we'll automatically fail and we've long since passed the point where failure can be allowed to remain an option.
-bill kenny

Aged though Not to Perfection

This is from so long ago our alphabet had two more letters in it than it does now. That's not technically, a lie anymore, but rather, an alternative fact. When I first offered this a previous decade was just beginning and we know how that turned out. I called it:  

Greetings from I. G. Farben

It's not called that anymore-it wasn't even called that when I worked in it decades ago. Then it was called the Creighton W. Abrams Building and was known as the US Army's V Corps Headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, FRG. The FRG, Federal Republic of Germany, was diplo-speak for West Germany; East Germany, the bad guys, were called the DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

It was a massive building and rumor had it that frightening chemical weapons had been developed in the annex behind the main building during the war. Another rumor had it that Frankfurt am Main was nearly totally destroyed during World War II except for the area where I. G. Farben had their massive corporate headquarters which is why Ike set up shop there. 

He and Mamie were gone by the time I got there, as was Checkers and his owner, too, though I once wore a cloth coat to a cat rodeo. I do know there was a great place around the corner to get kiwi and strawberry ice cream, so delicious it practically ate itself while you watched.

I was working in a video production facility that everyone liked, as an abstraction, but in terms of manning and funding, no one was too crazy about us. It's not that we weren't nice people or didn't deliver great products-we just cost lots of money. Armored vehicles were going for tens of millions of dollars, this was during the Cold War, remember, (a Gift Store?) and we were squared off against Ivan and his toadies (our toadies were, of course, our friends and allies) and whoever blinked first laughed last. Or something. I forget. It was a long time ago. Anyway, we had LOTS of tanks. Video cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars and we had trouble getting money from the guys with all the tanks to buy us even one.

I thought about that yesterday when a fluorescent bulb in the fixture overhead "burned out". I remembered Ron Hicks, one of our engineers, and his running buddy, George Whose Last Name I Have Forgotten. George was from Samoa and was the most easy-going person I've ever seen, even when provoked by Ron Hicks. Ron was crazy-brilliant but crazy. He and his wife had two very young boys, Brenden and LB. And if you guessed that LB was short for Little Brother, then, perhaps you met and know Ron because that's what the youngest one's name was and that's what the initials stood for.

Ron, as the chief engineer, saw his job as repairing the video field production equipment we took on our travels while accomplishing our jobs and broke. He skipped over almost all of that and cut directly to 'broke'. And he was right. We did inordinate amounts of damage to production equipment as it got run over by any number of tracked vehicles moving at high speeds across unforgiving terrain.

When dropped from helicopters, it did not bounce, it splattered. Rain cases were not, as hoped, waterproof shock-mounted protection and so it went, one disappointment after another. And Ron and George repaired everything, even if we didn't come back with all the parts we started out with. There was a day we compensated by returning with part of a German motion picture camera, a very expensive motion picture camera, that was, alas, utterly worthless to us and anyone else. Ron and George did more with less more often than any two people since Adam & Eve.

But I thought of Ron because of the "burned out" light. Ron used to explain to the most junior of the field cameraman the differences in methods of illumination, a topic not really touched on in the Television Production Handbook by Herbert Zettl, the video equivalent of the Sacred Text of every major, and most of the minor, religions. Something not covered in Zettl? The little ones would lean forward and listen closely, and Uncle Ron didn't disappoint.

Incandescent light, he'd explain as if this were merely a review because (yawn) all of us knew this already (or so his tone of voice would suggest), illuminates by driving darkness out of a defined space. He noted that late at night when you turned the nightstand light on, it always seemed even brighter than during the day because at late night it was much darker. Heads would slowly nod and the sound of young fish flopping on the dock, hooks still in mouths, would begin to be heard.

Fluorescent light, he pointed out, worked in the exact opposite way--it absorbed darkness and left only light. There would an occasional askance look-Ron would continue unperturbed because he was already to his clincher. How many of you, he'd ask, have ever removed a "burned out" (air quotes every time) fluorescent?

All hands went up. And did you notice, he'd ask, how there was what looked like black very close to where the metal gap met the glass fixture on both ends? Again, all heads nodded furiously. That, he explained, is because the florescent is full and can hold no more darkness and the leftovers are seeping out.

He'd allow that to linger for the briefest of moments before adding he could understand how some might be tempted to doubt him but, submitted for their approval, he'd add, have you ever thrown a "burned out" fluorescent light into a metal dumpster? Of course, all of us had done this countless times. 

The next time you do it, he said, open the little door on the side of the dumpster and take a look in there--it's as black as a coal mine. Why? Because (of course!) throwing the glass fluorescent into the metal dumpster broke the glass, releasing all the stored up darkness the bulb had been sucking out of rooms for years, scattering it around the dumpster.

I do not recall Ron ever finding the time, or the opportunity, to correct the information he'd shared with the best and brightest videographers the US Army could send to Western Europe as we avoided, but documented nevertheless for all posterity, the deadly embrace of the Russian Bear.
-bill kenny

Ev'rybody's talking about Ministers, Sinisters, Banisters, and Canisters ...

We have a hole in the ozone layer that we seem to think hand-wringing will fix, eventually, unless it doesn't in which case, oh well. We're poisoning our potable water and basically treating the earth and its resources as if we had a second planet someplace we can get head off to when things here get too dicey, like later this afternoon in some areas.  

We keep insisting that contagions like COVID-19 are once in a generational happenstance when, perhaps more ominously and logically, they should be seen as the consequences of how we misuse and abuse an eco-system in which we are but one of millions of organisms struggling to exist. 

That old adage about don't shit where you eat comes to mind but we don't seem to be paying it very much attention. And as if we need another example of how we are not being very good stewards of a planet we claim to be lords of, our bad habits and self-centeredness are disturbing the sleep patterns of, and doing more damage to, bees, whose pollination efforts, directly and indirectly, make possible our continued existence on this orb (see Joni Mitchell's admonition on this subject) though I guess now because we're so enlightened we'd sing Uber instead of taxi.  

We've waged war on one another since the dawn of time, but if we pick a fight with Mother Nature, we will be punching above our weight with unavoidable and inevitable consequences.
-bill kenny

Hammerin' Hank Has Left the Building

At some point yesterday, Hammerin' Hank Aaron passed away. I realize for many, baseball is about as relevant as high-button shoes but when I was a kid, it was everything, and Aaron broke Babe Ruth's total home run record of 714, going on to finish his career with 755, making him the king of everything at that moment.

Years later, his record fell in the middle of the steroids-are-everywhere-era of baseball but for me, he is and was the home run champion. And now he's gone, along with so much of what was important about America at that time.

So now I have to decide if I'm going out to the garage and remove the baseball from the glove I've got in the back mousetrap of the bike now or wait until Wednesday, February 16, when pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training. Goodbye, Hammerin' Hank.
-bill kenny 

We Will Raise this Wounded World into a Wondrous One

There were so many amazing moments within, among, and beyond the inauguration of President  Joe Biden on Wednesday, aside from the most obvious one: that Joe Biden was inaugurated, period. For those who love politics, there were the remarks by the President and others; for those who watched for the music and the spectacle, pick your favorite artist and they were there and performed and people cheered and it was all pretty amazing. But...

I love words, which if, after over twelve years on of reading this every day you hadn't yet noticed, I hate to be the one to rain on that parade; and for me, the revelation, the thunderbolt, the pitch-perfect messenger with the message I didn't know I needed to hear until she spoke was Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet ever. 

From the same rostrum from which Robert Frost warmed cold hearts in the Cold War Capital in the winter of 1961, her words Wednesday set the heavens ablaze with, I believe, enthusiasm, exuberance, and an urge for leaving on the journey at the very moment we needed to be about the going.

"And so, we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. 

"Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped; that even as we tired, we tried; that we’ll forever be tied together, victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division." 

The Hill We Climb. Finally, together.
-bill kenny

     

By the Dawn's Early Light

I postponed my morning walk yesterday so I could catch all the pageantry of the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States and found no time to watch the whimpering end of his predecessor's term. 

Let the day begin.
-bill kenny  

Now that the Shine's Worn Off

We’re just about three weeks into a shiny new year that I, among others, couldn’t wait to arrive because it had to be better than its dismal, dull predecessor (right?) and less than a week after it starts it basically said “hold my beer,” and along with you, I watched scenes in high-definition television of what some have suggested (and more) should be considered high treason and insurrection.

We have a republic, said Benjamin Franklin, if we can keep it though in recent weeks and months, we’ve been mostly keeping our fingers crossed (making it hard for me to type though I can’t use that same excuse for my spelling) as we stumble our way forward to later today, where, at the stroke of noon, somewhere in Washington D.C. will be the quadrennial celebration of our continuing peaceful transfer of political power which every U.S. Presidential Inauguration is supposed to be. Except of course when it isn’t.

My point (and I know you’ve been patiently waiting for me to make it), is there's what we know and nearby BUT unconnected to that knowledge, is what we think we know.  They can be, and often are, very different.

We spend more time worrying about what could happen or we believe should happen rather than what is actually happening, fearing a tomorrow we can neither conceive of nor control rather than living in the here and now while working towards the next.

In light of where we are right now, across our country, and here in our city, the singular point is we are all we can rely on to move us forward.  Look at our history; we have always been all we’ve needed when we were in trouble and no matter where your politics places you, we can agree we are at least knee-deep in Big Muddy. That whole 'we share the same biology, regardless of ideology,' refrain I like to hum to myself. 

We had the Revolutionary War: irate letters to the King, pretty easy stuff; dumping tea into a harbor and behaving badly on Breed's Hill, an entirely different level of trouble. Fast forward to a pair of world wars and an ever-more interdependent world. Straight through growing pains that included Civil Rights Marches, Vietnam, JFK, MLK, RFK, Silicon Valley to the present day. And when you look around right now, what do you know? We turned out to always be the people we have been waiting for.

It just takes some time (I admit) to get our attention, but we'll come around. We've figured out it's not just Wall Street in Manhattan, but Bog Meadow Road in Norwich. It's not only the homeless in Asia Minor or the hopeless sleeping on a subway grate in Chicago, but the seldom-seen indigent struggling to make ends meet on the street where you live right here in Norwich. 

I’m at a difficult age, between being born and being gone, but I have a lot of company and I think among us, we can find our way. I know you get tired of reading this, but not as tired as I get of typing it. We are in this together and now that you, too, realize that, let’s agree we may as well do what we always do, and win it together.  
-bill kenny

Gonna Miss This Like a Toothache

I have a folder of graphics entitled Trump Dump I have maintained and added to on practically a daily basis on an external drive of my computer since the day DJT rode the escalator down in Trump Tower to insult Mexicans and announce his candidacy for the office of the President of the United States. If he'd had to take the stairs he might never have announced, much less won. #ThanksOtis. 

Shortly after noon tomorrow, when President-elect Biden removes the hyphen and all that follows it from his title and his predecessor is, I'd hope, exchanging the nuclear football for a pair of handcuffs provided by the US Marshall Service, I'll delete my folder of attempted funny because, touch wood, I won't ever need to mention or contemplate Trump, his name, his shame, his grifting family of grafters ever again.

So think of this as the last call at Olde Queens Tavern in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where we used to hear, "you don't have to go home, but you do have to go." 

And don't let the gate in the Rose Garden hit you in the ass on the way out. 
-bill kenny

We Need Resolve not More Monuments

Fun fact, that's only the latter and not the former: Anne Frank and Dr. Martin Luther Luther King, Jr., were born in the same year. Two defining persons of the 20th Century associated with entirely different eras. Well, I find that interesting.

Not nearly as interesting as how many of us think having a day off to honor Dr. King's birthday (which was last Friday if you were thinking of sending a card) and reflecting on the state of civil and equal rights in our nation as well as in our local community followed tomorrow by business as usual doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. And yet we persist. 

Here's a thought, not an original of mine but an original nevertheless, for the rest of today, maybe: "If King were here to celebrate his holiday with us, he would ask us to show him justice, not statues; changed hearts, not new names on freeways." 
-bill kenny

An Open Mouth Screams and Makes No Sound

We're living in a world of late that has too many home fires burning and not enough trees which isn't necessarily as bad a thing as it sounds like unless you're one of the (too) many in need of assistance and the rest of us can't seem to see or hear you, judging from how little aid we're offering.

Sunday is always a good day to remember there are two types of sin and I don't mean mortal and venal. I'm speaking of omission and commission. 

Like you, I'm a mixture of both.

Thus endeth the lesson if not the learning.
-bill kenny 

You're Like a Bird that Will Not Be

The problem with childhood when you are a young child in a family with older children I once read is that your growing up seems to be like having had too much to drink. Everyone else remembers your awkward and embarrassing moments better than you. Imagine my tactical advantage as the eldest of my tribe.

Let me demonstrate (and this will work a LOT better if you know one of my brothers or sisters). Today is our sister Jill's birthday.

I'll offer but two words: goody bags. Otherwise, my lips are sealed, but my seals have lips.
Enough.

Happy birthday, Jill. With many, many more to follow.
-bill

The Scarcity of Veracity

By the time the Senate gets around to taking up the second impeachment of Donald Trump and convicting him, he will be an ex-President. That's not quite as acceptable to me as being a never-was President but I'll take what I can get when I can get it. 

I watched the televised House impeachment proceedings Wednesday alternately impressed and infuriated by GOP members' insistence, echoing Pantload45's own public statements, that his speech the previous Wednesday exhorting the YeeHawdists of Vanilla Isis to storm the Capitol was "totally appropriate," when in actuality it was anything but. 

Welcome to through the looking glass where up is down, black is white and left is, well, left is socialist and radical and practically Communist. Yeah. The Mango Mussolini reaped what he had sown and that his party had not only allowed but also enabled for most of the last half-decade but let's let bygones be forgotten while we take out the guitars and sing a few songs together around the campfire that's still burning in The Capitol lobby, just don't ask how it started, that's poor form.  

The American Carnage of which Trump first spoke in his Inaugural address on January 20, 2017, was delivered with interest on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, and his enablers in the House of Representatives and the right-wing media echo chambers can do and say nothing to change that.

To the 1/6 Truthers saying 'but Trump didn't participate in the insurrection,' I'd point out, Bin Laden didn't fly the planes into the Pentagon, the hills of Pennsylvania, and the World Trade Center nor did Hitler kill a single Jew, and yet, in the verdict of history whom do we hold accountable?
-bill kenny

It Was a Powerful Day

When I was a kid I often went with the school group my dad organized every spring break on a week's trip to Washington D. C. The goal was always the same to see all the big sights and lots of smaller ones as well to include everything from Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington (we were there one year when the sentry challenged someone who was walking beyond the permitted area), Mount Vernon, George and Martha's homestead, as well as the FBI Building, the Smithsonian, the White House and of course, The Capitol. 

Dad would usually arrange to get gallery passes from Peter Frelinghuysen who was what we might call now a Rockefeller Republican which even more recently is a RINO, I suspect, because people worked with one another across the political aisles back then to get things done rather than score points ahead of the next election.  

We've been sliding down the mountain for decades. Last Wednesday's attempted coup didn't so much accelerate the speed of the decline as make it evident to those who didn't wish to see it. 

Those I watched on television yesterday arguing against the impeachment of the Arsonist-in-Chief for starting and fueling the flames of the attempted insurrection, the 1/6Truthers, are part of the next illness in our body politic, a disease Ben Collins who works for NBC News described as "(T)elling the truth is not the point. The point is to never lose the argument in the moment, and never look back." 

Too much talking AT and not enough speaking with; that's where we are while over 4,000 of us die every day because we elected an infantile incompetent to our highest office four years ago and he failed us at every step of the journey. And with less than two weeks to go until the end of his error he launched his army of malcontents at the heart of our nation to do as much damage as was conceivable, and even more that was inconceivable. 

And that's why right now, not just in the halls of The Capitol, but in statehouses all across this country, men and women, our neighbors in National Guard units are standing as a bulwark against the ignorance and arrogance we have unleashed against one another. While those who emptied the jerrycan of hateful vitriol are safe as houses at home in the sleep of the just.
-bill kenny

 

  

Lightning Makes No Sound Until It Strikes

This Monday is a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day, the observance of the anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. whose actual birthday is this Friday, the 15th. Schools, with classes in session and/or in virtual learning, as well as government operations, will be closed as communities across the country join hands and hearts if only for an all-too-brief moment, to celebrate his life and to consider our progress as a nation in the ongoing journey for equal rights for anyone and everyone.

This is quite the moment in history to attempt to calculate the distance we've come and, perhaps, more importantly, start a discussion about what still lies ahead for us and how to achieve it. The observance of his birthday could reduce King's life and death (and everything in between) into what I fear has too often has devolved into a fast-food, bumper-stickers as policy discussions, and dueling toxic information ecosystems  'race relations' place-holder event instead of a means of stepping back and seeing a larger picture where he is another chapter in the struggle for equal rights that includes and encompasses Black Lives Matter, but so much more above and beyond. 

Then on next Wednesday, January 20th, is the Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Last Wednesday, like you, I'm sure, I sat in gob-smacked disbelief as, in the words of the Speaker of the House and a former US President, armed rioters, fueled by falsehoods and false hopes, chose 'their whiteness over democracy' in what looked, sounded, and smelled an awful lot like an armed insurrection. 

Both events are inextricably linked one to the other and, like the White Lion arriving in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, are part and parcel of hundreds if not thousands of steps, made with sometimes powerful strides and other times, halting and unsure, as we continue to wend our way from who we once were to whom we hope to become. It may be the journey of our lifetimes, and that's fine as long as we don't falter or stop.

Martin Luther King Day is a good day for inventory on how well we're sharing the American Dream. I believe we have come a long way in my lifetime, and his, in how we live with one another, but acknowledge we still have a long way to go. As it turned out, he wasn't able to be with us at the mountain, as he had feared for very probably the reasons he knew, but celebrating his birthday helps underscore how important each of our lives is to all of us and to one another.

Change is incremental and individual and is simultaneously a team sport and intensely personal at the same time. Don't ever believe you can't change something because you're only one person. Rather, please know that all you need to be is one person and while you can't change everything you can still change something. 

I'm thinking that on Monday and then extending to all the other days of the calendar, we should see the words and deeds of Dr. King as a call for each of us to find our better angels and where each of us finally lives in a nation where we are not judged by the color of our skin but by the content of our character. 

Such a vision truly implemented would transform King's dream into our shared reality and would, I hope, empower and enable each of us to reach and teach those like us as well as those unlike us. As we should have realized by now, it's this fear of 'the other' (be it race, creed, color, or political ideology) that creates the greatest barrier to equality, freedom, and justice for all.
-bill kenny

Sic Transit Grifter

How it starts: 

How it ends: 

Thanks, Wolgang K!

Bigly and not Soonly Enough. 
-bill kenny

I Read the News Today

Somedays truth is stranger than fiction and other days Ruth is stronger than Bridget and then I read in my local Sunday newspaper a story sourced to YouGov.com that surveyed close to 1,500 registered voters last Wednesday as the Vanilla ISIS excrement smeared by the Hillbilly Yeehawdists was being scraped off the walls of the corridors in the House of Representatives about assigning responsibility for the terrorist attack on the Capitol and 35% or so of the respondents concluded it was <envelope please> Joe Biden. 

But, in my opinion, the rancid maraschino cheery on the shit sundae of survey data was the revelation that 45% of the Republicans surveyed supported the attack.

Talk about Tales.
-bill kenny

The Infection of Insurrection

This year is barely into double digits and it's making 2020 look like a Scout Jamboree. What do you make of overwhelmingly white guys (PRESENT!) fueled by falsehoods armed with false hopes (a turn of phrase I'm co-opting from the last Republican President (and probably will be for the foreseeable future), George W. Bush), in describing the long-promised by Pantload45 "American Carnage" delivered, and boy, howdy, was it, on Wednesday.

The Liar in Chief had often prophesied/threatened on the 2020 campaign trail that there would be riots if Joe Biden were elected, and damn! if he wasn't right about that which, considering his track record as veracity-challenged makes that achievement even the more remarkable.

All weekend long I've been reading GOP national leadership (= seditionists) argue with less than two weeks remaining in the Orange Shitstain's term of office it's too late for the House and Senate to impeach and convict him for his role in the Deplorables' Insurrection that produced "Murder The Media" scratched into a House chamber door and had a mob roaming the hallways of The Capitol shouting "Hang (Vice President) Pence." 

The same GOP leadership who, eight days before the 2020 election felt it was appropriate to vote to place Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court after arguing four years previously that the Kenyan-Muslim Socialist President couldn't nominate Merrick Garland to the same court. What they lack in consistency and honor they make up for in the absence of ethics, courage, conscience, and simple decency. Find the time to listen to this. 

I've had polyps removed from an intensely personal and private part of my body with more integrity than Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley and I don't know what to make of the House GOP membership who not only watched the Trump Feces hit the ventilator Wednesday but also got covered in it as they ducked behind desks and were rushed to secure locations while the toothless gorms who were Trump's Minute Men Moron Militia surged around them, wild-eyed and wasted, and still they wanted to argue about a stolen election that wasn't.

Fun fact: you can impeach and convict a President of the United States even after he's left office, whether he has a Twitter account or not. He needs to go to jail and never, ever, be allowed to breathe free air again. In a country that has seen raging incompetents such as James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon, he still managed to easily establish himself as not only the worst president of our nation's history but also the worst American of all time. Finally, #WINNING 
-bill kenny

You Can See the Stars and Still Not See the Light

In another lifetime, as a young pup (so you know it was a long time ago), I was stationed at SondreFjord, Greenland, ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle while working in radio and television as a member of the US Air Force. Our station was three miles from the base, up the side of Mount Ferguson as we called it, near a glacier lake whose name if it had one I never learned.

This time of year forty-five years ago when I was there (told ya it was long ago) it was total darkness, the sun never rose above the horizon (and was still weeks away from doing so) and when that finally happened we had a party which lasted for a lot longer than the amount of daylight we were celebrating.

I hated the snow and the cold and the dark and the winds that screamed coming off the Ice Cap to our north and crows so big they had six-foot wingspans and rabid arctic foxes that had lost their fear of humans and followed you everywhere at all times of the day or night. 

But I did like one thing. I'd bundle up when we had one of the 'canned' programs from our headquarters on the airwaves, and go out on the deck the Danish engineers had built on the back of the station, overlooking the lake and I'd watch the Northern Lights play for hours and hours without, as near as I could determine, ever repeating themselves. 

There was nothing to hear, just the frozen expanses surrounding me but the lights were spectacular and now thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope I can approximate that feeling of 'alone in the universe' with, amazingly enough, a form, if you will, of the music of the spheres as data sonification (yeah, a real word), adds a soundtrack to the movie of the farthest reaches of heaven.

You better inhale because you're about to have your breath taken away. And there's a whole universe, literally, waiting for you to hear.  
-bill kenny    

Is That So?

I don't do retrospectives as the year ends/begins. I've never seen a point to them and that's not what this is, but rather, a compendium of interesting stuff that I missed out on and you may have as well, courtesy of the New York Times via Elevator.

I noticed, Michael Pack, there wasn't a single word about WD-40 (inside joke), meaning you are exactly who I thought you were.  
-bill kenny

Sedition for Fun and Profit

After all the dismissed lawsuits in more jurisdictions than I even knew existed, press conferences in front of landscaping supply houses, releases of more Krakens per square yard than has been seen in the modern era, with thugs and loons storming the halls of governance at the request and behest of an infantile incompetent and far too many Republican congressional and senatorial representatives forgetting their oaths as officers of the US Constitution and prostituting and debasing themselves in a failed effort to appease their about to be the former head of their party, the 2020 Presidential Election will end with a joint session of Congress held in the House of Representatives. 

It's almost like Ullyses S. Grant was tweeting from the gallery looking at Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, "There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots." It's a cinch he wasn't looking at Mike Pence or #Pantload45 when he said 'patriots,' and in less than two weeks, neither will any of the rest of us. 

Sic transit 18 U. S. Code § 2385.

Finally.
-bill kenny    

Failure Is a Bruise and Not a Tattoo

The more things change, we’re told, the more they remain the same; that’s a truism that has the added advantage of also being the truth. And as calamitous and challenging as 2020 was, as I look forward or try, to 2021 I admit it can be hard to be an optimist about where I live when there’s so much proof that the beauty of pessimism is you can only be surprised and never disappointed.

The first weekend of this new year arrived with distressing and depressing news that the developers of the Reid & Hughes Building which has had a sadder life than anyone or anything else I can think of, have decided they will not continue with their restoration and revitalization project.

Then 

We in Norwich may call ourselves The Rose of New England, but if we have a spirit animal it’s Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. You scoff? Consider this: within moments of first reading about the developer’s change of heart (in pre-pandemic times, financing was problematic on a good day, and after our lives were turned upside down last March, the millions of dollars required for development and permanent financing simply could not be secured), social media commenters weighed in and it was way less than pretty, but very much in keeping with that Eeyore-like view of the world that I’ve encountered so often since I and my family arrived here in the fall of 1991. You can read some of it for yourself here. 

I always see ‘historic’ used in connection with the building’s name but intending no disrespect, I don’t use it because I have no idea why it’s considered historic, though convincing me should certainly not be regarded as essential or important. In the interest of full disclosure, the Reid & Hughes Building for me has always been a destitute and derelict pile of broken bricks, mangled mortar, and memories that fewer and fewer of us who live here now share with those who lived here then.

Now

I don’t know who owned the Reid & Hughes Building when I first started walking through downtown almost three decades ago but whoever it was didn’t take care of it and as someone who was constantly told he was NFH, Not From Here, it seemed to me those in charge of the city at the time, like so many others elsewhere before and since wanted to believe that talking about a problem and coming up with a solution was one and the same thing. As Eeyore himself might say to that, “oh, well…”

In 2017, the City Council, came to a development agreement stabilizing the building and sparing it from the wrecking ball in what probably would have looked like knocking out two front teeth in downtown. The developers hoped to create living spaces above streets in Down City filled with small businesses and restaurants that needed, and still need, as many people living there as we can have.

When so many of us stand around with our hands in our pockets waiting for initiatives to fail so we can rush online to proclaim “I knew it all along!” it makes my hair hurt. Not succeeding is NOT failing. Not trying is. When we fall, and we will, then we need to get up and try again and not stop until we get to where we're going.  
-bill kenny

This Aged Better Than It Had a Right to

I did more than just turn back the clock for this; I dropped it and it smashed into pieces. I then scooped up the hour and minute hands and all the numbers and put them in a sack and shook it vigorously. Sort of like Hamburger Helper without the hamburger and the helper. 

Consider yourself warned. At the time I called it: 

Fare Thee Well Cold Winter

It's still the first week of the New Year and has that just-baked aroma (to me though I'm working on a head cold so I could be off I suppose). I'm glad I was born a human since I lack any special skills or abilities that would have enabled me to survive to anywhere near my current age as any other life form on this planet. ('Look, Livingston! It's a ring-tailed bandicoot trying to access blogger.com!' Or not. And thus ends my homage to H.H. Munro (I hope it has earned your seal of approval)).

No other species divides the rotation of the earth around the sun in quite the rigid and unyielding demarcations we create-and let's be honest here, we are very good at it. Because we wind up with extra hours and fractions of time that accumulate as merrily we roll along, every four years we have a leap year, though this isn't one of those. I've never personally known anyone born on Leap Day (if that's what February 29 is called) but I've read enough stories about the birthday celebrations and such to be happy that my mother had the good sense to wait until Spring to have me.

Meanwhile, it's a new calendar page, but the challenges and opportunities look very familiar, don't they? We need to resolve (assuming you didn't make any resolutions (I always resolve to NOT keep any I might make and therein lies the contradiction)) if such a formality is, indeed, required, to move from the 'talking about a problem' to 'finding a solution' (use of the indefinite article is deliberate there. I'm always disquieted by folks who tell me they have found 'the' way rather than 'a' way. (Not that I don't admire their confidence; I just don't share it. See: YMMV.)

My concern in this New Year, much like in any previous one, is that we get distracted while on the way to addressing a situation, and end up accepting less than our best effort as a solution and leave undone something we meant to do. And then at the end of the day, or the end of a life, we don't reflect on where we started and how we got there, but rather turn the page and begin again oblivious that we've lost a day but are no wiser or better for its passing.

Perhaps this is the year we try "a small sprig of time and as much of prudence, you mix them all together." Thanks for the recipe, Tim Hart. It looks like we'll go the rest of the way without you.
-bill kenny

Don't Believe Everything You Think

I've never been known for my thinking. I try to avoid it most of the time especially when I'm going to speak because I like to be as surprised as the person listening to me. And for the most part, it's worked out because we're a species of reluctant thinkers. 

And, if you're like me, you know when you encounter someone who thinks before he/she acts because the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little bit and I sort of look at that person with a side-glance while wondering what their problem is. It's usually us, but I digress. 

So much of what we think is driven by what we see, or better phrased, what we think we see. You'll want to bookmark this link and come back to it in dribs and drabs because not even I, William the Wastrel (that was almost my gang name or would have been if had I been in one), can devote two-plus hours in one sitting to view it, though I'd probably be a better person for it if I did. But what would be the fun of that, right?   
-bill kenny

All the Worms and the Gnomes

We got to close to forty-five degrees, with a light breeze and mostly clear skies yesterday in these parts which was a lot nicer than the grey day we endured as the year began on Friday. 

I went for a walk right up the street from our house (two-plus years on and I'm still not tired of typing 'our house') where Lincoln Avenue meets Washington Street (I call it the Presidents Day Intersection because my last original idea died of loneliness) on what's known as Chelsea Parade. 

My goal, which I achieved (and I mention that because there will be too many days in this new year when I don't achieve my goals) was to make six full circuits around Chelsea Parade as part of my attempt at ten thousand steps a day. I know from experience it usually takes me about fifty-five minutes or so to do it. The older I get the slower I am. I can't change that; it's Science. 

On my second lap, I crossed paths briefly with a man with a greyhound on a leash. They never look anything like the bus so I'm always a little wary of them and I realize it's the way they're made but I'm of the 'Cassius has a lean and hungry look' frame of mind when seeing them. Chasing mechanical rabbits will do that I guess; great chasing but lousy eating. 

The greyhound seemed to neither know nor care that he was on a leash or with a human and paid me even less mind as we parted ways where the sidewalk splits the Parade between the statue of the Union Soldier and the memorials we've erected to those who've served in almost all the other conflicts.

I just realized as I was typing that sentence that I don't recall commemoratives for The Barbary War, The War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, or the Spanish-American War, among way too many conflicts in my opinion which is why I added 'almost' in there). If we just memorialized one-third of the wars on that list, we'd have no grass at all on the Parade because every square inch would have a monument. Not sure bellicosity is a word but if it were it would describe us to a 'T.' 

Anyway on my last lap, coming from the opposite direction was a really big guy with those 3/4 pants that I'm never sure if they're intended to be shorts or if he beat up his kid brother and took his jeans, with a dog so large that, under the right circumstances, could easily blot out the sun. 

I'm five feet eight inches tall and this dog's back was about level with the nipples on my chest (I was wearing a shirt so you'll have to take my word for this). He was the kind of dog that grows even larger as you approach him/her/it. The man had a fistful of chain tightly wrapped around his right hand as they walked and I made it a point to step from the sidewalk onto the grass to make sure however the dog defined its space that it had all it needed. 

I'm not a dog person. I'm not an animal person, actually. And as many people around here can attest, I'm barely a people person. I socially-distanced decades before Dr. Fauci advocated it and the Orange Shitstain mocked it and have sixty-eight-plus years on my tachometer (so far) to show for my caution.

As the pair continued to walk toward me I noticed the man had a black bag in his left hand for, umm, doggie souvenirs. We have 'clean up after your dog' ordinances on the books and posted for owners since dog literacy rates are so sadly low and about twenty feet in front of me the dog paused and squatted and its owner had reason to use the bag, which as I passed him, I now realized was actually one of those black plastic forty-two-gallon contractor bags. 

That's a lot of plastic bag but, as I said, that was a lot of dog, as well. By this point it was straining oblivious to my existence while engaged in its ejection activities when the owner and I locked eyes for a moment as I passed and offered what I intended as encouragement, 'I guess even the best of us suffer from performance anxiety.' In light of the glare (the owner, not the animal) I received it may be wiser if I spend the rest of January getting my steps in on the treadmill in our basement. 
-bill kenny           

If You Can Remember Just One Thing

In some ways, perhaps, the pandemic and the precautions make our lives a little more subdued, or is that just me? Yes, life is still roaring at my window, but not as ferociously as it did when I was working mostly for people who, at best, paid no more than perfunctory attention to who I was or what I was doing. 

It was ironic and also appropriate that I never felt the need to see the approval in their eyes because there was no place or space for me anywhere in their gaze. Once I pulled into a side road on the human highway some two and half years ago, I was still aware of the rats and their races, but I hear the sounds now through layers of gauze and indifference I didn't have earlier.    

The changes in our world as a result of This Plague didn't impact me and mine nearly as severely as they might have had this happened three or more years ago and I'm grateful for that, though it reads oddly even to me as I look at the sentence now. 

With all the advice you got as you struggled to square away and secure the souvenirs and lessons learned in 2020 and simultaneously prepared for the launch of 2021 and the start again of the drill, try to hold on to this, just this, and just for a moment.

And while it's easy to believe in it, it's hard to do. Believe me. It takes a lifetime. This is the first weekend of the new year and if you need a bigger reason to do something for yourself, you'll need to look elsewhere because I'm all out of bravos and bromides. 
-bill kenny