NSFW*

It has been, as of midnight, sixty-five days since we celebrated Christmas and yet it feels, at least to me, like the better part of a year. 

Meanwhile, by day's end today, we will have burned through the first two months of this year. Already? 

Whether you believe either of those observations makes no difference to me. I long ago learned the universe does not require your approval, acknowledgment, or consent. And with every passing day, even less, your existence.
-bill kenny 

Looks Nothing Like Terry

No matter how much snow falls in the course of any and every winter I make it a point of pride to always clear not only the sidewalk in front of, and the walkway too, our house but also the street as well. 

Not just because I'm a little ADHD (though, yes, there are snowstorms when I do stand outside with a shovel and attempt to clear the flakes as they fall and touch down on the ground) but because somewhere deep in my heart of hearts I'm hoping if I keep the space clean and clear the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol van will have room to park. 

I've loved everything about those giveaways since the days that Dick Clark and Ed McMahan were spokespersons even though I think that was for the 'other guys' but I don't remember who the other guys were or if they're even still in business. 

In much the same way as I edged towards the TV screen as a child and repeated, 'Don't die Tinkerbelle!' I believe in every aspect of the Prize Patrol (most especially the ballons) and while I know all about Terry Bradshaw and/or Steve Harvey as spokespersons, I didn't know bupkus about Howie Guja except that his fraternal twin is not named Harry Krishna.   

I confess I loved the story so much that in my next life, if possible I'd like to come back as Howie, or if that's not possible, as one of the recipients of Howie's checks, the bigger the better with lots of zeroes.
-bill kenny

And This Is How You'll Be Known for All Eternity

Say this about Clifford Ray Jones. He was no Ozymandias or even Ozzy if half of those stories are to be believed. 

However, with all due respect to Percy Shelley, Clifford made a far more memorable exit. 

Remember the admonition of the driver's ed teacher from high school: hands on the wheel at ten and two. Both hands.
-bill kenny

One of these Days

Habits are actions we take after we've trained ourselves (or others have trained us). Many of us remember as kids when mom would insist that we 'cover your mouth when you cough' or those around us might say 'God Bless' when we sneezed. Perhaps we still do one or both of those actions to this day because what we are now is where we were when.

I was thinking of this yesterday morning as I went to leave the house. Years ago, my wife mounted the monitor portion of our very super-duper weather station in the hallway between our living room and the kitchen in a very logical spot, right beside the closet where we keep all of our outer clothes, coats, jackets, scarves, and mittens (she has since relocated it but that will not change the outcome of this attempted parable at all). 

Her theory, proven repeatedly in the course of all the years we have lived where we do, is you can check the outside temperature as you're readying to depart and keep the 'whoa!' sharp intake of sudden surprise to a minimum when you step out the back door from the kitchen to the landing to the stairs. 

I am so gentrified. When I was a kid in Jersey we called the back landing a stoop, which is what it still is. It's not like I live in the part of Connecticut where I and my stockbroker neighbors wash our cars with a domestic light beer or are building twin-hulled catamarans on the weekend with an eye to challenge for the America's Cup. 

Yes, we do have a big backyard, but not big enough for a polo pony, so pardon me while I remember to NOT dye my roots but do call things by their real names. I'm thinking Royce would have been a good name for the horse. 

Anyway. 

I can tell the difference between two dollars and two hundred dollars. As well as between two dollars and twenty dollars. Maybe that's a habit, too. Worlds collide for me when I look at the outside thermometer on any given morning and it says 16.7 degrees Fahrenheit and I pause, trying to remember what it was the day before because in and of itself that's somehow important and/or will dissuade me from going outside. 

In terms of Galvanic Skin Response, GSR (not Gun Shot Residue), the skin on my face could better and more easily tell a difference of percentage of moisture in the mid-double digits easier than a difference of two degrees (maybe at Kelvin, but only maybe). Do I risk some form of cerebral surprise if I don't check the gauge before stepping outside and minimizing the possibility of atmospheric ambush? No clue and truth to tell, I don't know why I look, except out of habit. 

In the summer, if the display were to be a triple-digit reading at the same hour, I don't think I'd remove my trousers and leave them in the kitchen heading out in socks, Sakko, and a smile (so ein schmarrn). I can, however, think of one long-suffering spouse who's probably not willing to place money on that turn of events NEVER happening. One of these days letters are gonna fall from the sky, telling us all to go free. 

Of course, by then to save money, the Postal Service will have ceased home delivery entirely and to save even more, our schools will have eliminated literacy requirements. Will be curious to see if anyone left can tell the difference or to whom they would.
-bill kenny

Lucy Meets Bill W

Coming of age in the latter part of the Swinging Sixties, I was often confronted by social situations with recreational activities that had one of two paths, psychedelic or alcoholic. 

I'm confident that the statute of limitations applies to whatever my choices were back then but as a father of two grown children whose gaze I'd like to be able to continue when/if we gather for holiday meals, we'll treat my personal history as read and thank you for your understanding (and/or lack thereof). 

There were as we all knew the joys of better living through chemistry and the joys of juicing. I was more than a bit gob-smacked the other day to learn that Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was a more frequent sojourner on a variety of roads less traveled. 

Sometimes, when you don't know where you're going any road will do.
-bill kenny 

Stealing a March on Saint Patrick's Day

As you probably read (I'd hope) in Friday's Bulletin, Norwich's Saint Patrick's Day Parade returns to a downtown corner near you a week from Sunday, March 6. I'd think you'd agree that we could all use a little something to cheer about as the last couple of years have been challenging in more ways than words can describe and if some wearing of the green, sampling the bubble and squeak, or sipping a Guinness helps lift spirits, let's have at it. 

Weather permitting (a phrase we use a lot in everyday conversation in these parts this time of year), the Parade steps off at one on Main Street in front of Otis Library and will go up Franklin Street with a left at Artspace onto Willow Street, and another left onto Chestnut Street past the Chestnut Street Playhouse, with yet another left down Broadway before a final left turn (kinda like NASCAR but with shillelaghs?) back onto Main Street. The best place to find out about everything going on before the parade, and most especially afterward, is here. 

The parade, like many of the events staged in our downtown in recent years, isn't just about walking around sort of in a circle (I do that most weekdays now), nor is it just putting 'feet on the street' which we all say is important but saying and doing are two different things. 

To me, the most important aspect of the Saint Patrick's Day Parade and ALL the Norwich Events we have in Global City Norwich is creating and deepening a sense of a place we can call our own. Having a downtown and supporting the spaces and places that make it a living breathing part of our lives must become second nature. 

Parades and unique events that help us develop the routines that draw us to the businesses and establishments in Chelsea on a regular basis can go a long way to growing our downtown and making it a destination every day of the year.  

The Parade, if nothing else, is another reason to stop and visit somewhere too many of us far too often simply drive through on our way to someplace else often while we complain about how ‘there’s never anything to do in Norwich.’ Which, I agree, can be true except when it’s not, such as next Sunday (or, quite frankly, many if not all of the days between now and then).

One of the delights, if not outright surprises, for me every time I've watched the Saint Patrick's Day parade is the number of people I've met who do not live in Norwich but heard about the parade and the family-oriented crafts festival that follows it, together with authentic food and beverages (both adult and the unadulterated) who decided to try it on for size and were very pleased that they had.      

Everyone is welcome to march, or mush depending on how much (more) snow we’ve had by the 6th, and let's be honest here, it’s really more of a brisk walk than a march in terms of distance, so you can smile and wave without breaking a sweat.  And you won’t be by yourself.

All kinds of organizations and both private and public groups will be striding with pride and if the past is prologue, pipes and drums, as well as marching bands will join our elected city leadership in helping celebrate this year's Grand Marshall, Angela Adams, the executive director of the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce, 

Let's face it downtown is a pretty cozy place to spend the first Sunday afternoon of March with your Irish Eyes smiling, along with (I'd hope) some friends you've just met. 

So even though March 17 is, and will always be Saint Patrick's Day, please find a space on your calendar and a place on a Down City sidewalk, next Sunday, March 6, for the Norwich Saint Patrick's Day Parade. Sláinte!
-bill kenny

Is This Why We Have The Internet?

I love cat memes as much as the next guy, maybe even more. And when it comes to sending half-assed snide comments on current events in 280 characters and less to complete (and incomplete come to think of it) strangers, I'm your guy (with the Mar-A-Lago Mussolini sidelined). Smart and Snark look the same, at least from a distance.

And it's all because of the internet. 

You don't have to know anything at all about anything ever. You just need to know where to look for it online, especially the stuff that supports your point of view.  

For instance, look at this piece of cleverness, and despair that you didn't find it first.

It's a fine line sometimes between a possessive, a preposition, and a number.
-bill kenny

Hip-Hip-Holiday

Abraham Lincoln's birthday is still on my calendar for 12 February but it has had less meaning for decades, since Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holidays Act and we rolled it into the birthday celebrating the Father of Our Country, George Washington (listed on my calendar for tomorrow, 22 February), but observed today as part of Presidents' Day. 

That George spent more than half of his farewell address warning his countrymen about the dangers of political partisanship, I find, in light of where we are today, astounding. That Honest Abe used his Second Inaugural Address to offer "(w)ith malice toward none, with charity for all..." at a moment in our history where we most fervently hated one another (with a ferocity that would cost him his very life a little more than thirteen months later) causes me to wonder why we, you and me and all the lunatic loudmouths and bombastic blowhards on either side of the political fence, can't pipe down long enough to work together to get this cart we're all in out of the ditch we've maneuvered it into. 

To put it into perspective when Washington and Lincoln were presidents, remember that people disagreed with one another so strongly to the point they pointed and fired weapons at one another--and you've seen those weapons. It took a LOT of work to successfully shoot somebody with one of them. None of this cap bustin' stuff-serious mayhem was on the agenda then. 

Where I am. Literally & figuratively

All this pouting and posturing we are up to these days on Sunday morning talk shows, the endless primaries, and in the Halls of Congress makes my brain hurt, and when we get all through sorting out who's to blame for all the wrongs and shortcomings, real and/or imagined, maybe we can devote a scintilla of that energy to fixing things. We certainly have a target-rich environment to choose from, don't we? 

Today, since it is a holiday, is as good a reason as any either of us can think of to use as a reason and a fulcrum to move one another closer together in order to form a more perfect union. And stop being so damn cranky with each other while we're doing it.
-bill kenny

Either/Oar

I'm kidding myself when I say I'm open-minded and willing to listen to other people's points of view. That is to say, I am both of those things provided I can then also attempt to persuade the holder of that different perspective to listen to mine and be converted. 

Like many (far too many), I don't really listen to hear anymore, I listen to respond and rebut. I have inadvertently perhaps become a subscriber to the belief that dueling monologues are as close to an actual dialogue as we're ever going to get. 

That would almost be funny if, and look at your world and tell me it's not the same, when I look around me I'm watching shouting at the tops of our voices becoming the new way we speak to one another all the time. 

Diatribes instead of discussions. Invective uber alles. It's not just me, and not just you, but the horses we rode in on (or not) and everything and anything in between. 

The Titanic sails at dawn. Everybody's shouting, 'Which side are you on?' 

-bill kenny

In Every Dream Home

There's a cartoon that makes the rounds every so often that involves two guys (not sure why it's always so gendered specific) with one asking the other, 'whatcha doin'?' to be told "nothing." And the first guy says, 'weren't you doing that yesterday?' and the second guy says, 'Yeah, but I wasn't finished.' Or sometimes his response is 'that's the trouble with doing nothing, It's hard to know when you're done.'   

When I retired my cardiologist told me a joke that I repeat to myself on a regular basis since then because it makes me laugh every time and it's a definition of retirement, "Every day is Saturday. Except for Sunday." Even a FARC like me cracks up when I tell it (I guess I just know how to tell a joke).

I assume at some point (prior to death) the luxury of doing nothing will wear thin, though I'm in no hurry for that to happen. When I was a little kid the most exotic thing you could ever imagine eating was 'pheasant under glass' (sometimes we forgot the H but that's a story for another time) which we all supposed would be wonderful but not if you ate it every day. 

I think that's the appeal of vacations where you actually go someplace else other than where you currently are. At the end of every Super Bowl, for instance, some football player gets to scream that he's going to Disneyland; I suspect that would be not that big a deal if the team played its home game there if you follow my drift. 

I mentioned Disney in particular because a recent CNN news story about Storyliving by Disney residential communities caught my eye. Sigrid and I drove past an exit on a Florida highway for "Celebration" when we vacationed in Florida after attending my nephew's wedding three years ago. I don't recall seeing rainbows in the sky or hearing happy children singing, but I had the windows rolled up in the car and the radio was on so anything is possible I suppose. 

I read the story twice and still can't figure out where, if at all, the folks who choose to live in these communities would want to go on vacation since at least in theory they're already living in the happiest place on earth.
-bill kenny 

The Highway Is for Gamblers

One of my enduring memories from attending the Browning School for Boys has nothing to do with anything that went on inside the walls of any of the classrooms at 52 East 62nd Street (thank goodness for therapy) but, rather, with a Friday afternoon activity of which I never tired. 

We (usually George, Dave, Arthur, and (occasionally) Roy) would skip hobbies and make a beeline for the ESSO Building at 75 Rockefeller Center. It's not like we were gearheads or anything like it but, we'd stop at the main desk and take turns telling stories to the guy (I don't ever remember a woman) behind the counter whose job was to help plan road trips. 

Oh. Those were in the days when glove compartments were crammed with road maps, and every brand of gasoline had roadmaps on racks inside where you'd stop in after you'd paid the attendant who'd fueled your car. 

The maps were free (our mom used to use them to make book covers every September when the school year started) and you could take as many as you want (within reason). We always thought of them as some of the most real things there were in the world but that, as it turned out wasn't always true proving that Ruth is indeed stranger than Bridget.   

Anyway, back inside at the ESSO building. We'd say to the planner that we wanted to go to Alamogordo, New Mexico (we would never say that at the time; that just came to me now), and the planner would grab a bunch of different maps and highlighters, and spread the maps out across the surface of his desk and begin to trace the route(s), plural because he'd ask you if you wanted to go the fastest way or the most scenic and sometimes we'd say one or the other and sometimes we'd say both. He never doubted our sincerity and we always assumed he was accurate and honest.

Each adventure might last fifteen or more minutes complete with asides like, 'there's construction near Indianapolis so you'll have to take a blue highway instead of the interstate' or words to that effect. It was a pause that refreshed and I've thought about those Fridays often in the course of the last half-century plus, maybe more than my fair share to compensate for all the times that Ray never got to think about them after getting dying in Vietnam shortly after arriving there in the autumn of 1970. 

Now, I get comfortable behind the wheel and talk to my phone, and Google walks me through the drive turn by turn. No magic, no mystery. No struggles to refold the map just the way you found it.  Nothing to remember and even less to forget. 
-bill kenny

If Only You Meant It

Do you still get a lot of catalogs in the mail stamped with 'this could be your final offer'? 

Yeah, we do, too, and I smile because the folks sending them know that the threat is just so much horsepucky because two weeks or so later there will be another 'this could be your final offer' catalog arriving. 

I've given up trying to guess when my next chance is really and truly my last chance. 

Pretty much like everything else in my life. 
-bill kenny

I Walk Slowly but I Never Walk Backward

Of all the discoveries, innovations, and inventions in the history of the world, I think we'd agree one of the ones that most of us enjoy the best is the three-day weekend and, glancing at the calendar, I see we have one coming up this weekend. 

I can remember as a kid we had off from school on both Lincoln's Birthday and on Washington's Birthday (we also heard from the sixth graders 'they don't celebrate Lincoln's Birthday in the South because of The War'). Children of the Baby Boom, and part of the cohort that was in the first part of that boom, I'm not sure all my classmates understood exactly which 'the war' those sixth graders were talking about.

We had, after all, learned to duck under our desks and turn away from the windows during the air raid drills we seemed to have on a daily basis. I wasn't that old when something happened in Cuba, or near it, that scared the willies out of the grown-ups and we started having drills at school almost every day. Still, I didn't understand what war "the South" was angry about until catching a TV show (I think on ABC) on Saturday afternoons about The Civil War. It turned my world upside down.

I think we're all similar in that we are, each, the center of our own universe, and we assume the world as it is, is how it's always been. The idea that some of my classmates in Mrs. Hilge's 3B would have been considered property a hundred years earlier struck me as surreal. As I grew older (not matured) and I learned how prevalent slavery was, and in some places still is, and how much carnage the so-called Civil War created (and maybe, even more, a century and a half after it ended), the more profound became my admiration for Mr. Lincoln.

Who didn't already admire the Father of Our Country, George Washington (though I never did figure out who the mother was)? The chopping down of the cherry tree, the crossing of the Delaware River, "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." It was amazing to me as a schoolchild to have had two Presidents born in the same month with such a profound impact on our country.

And now, see how we run. We have a Monday holiday to honor all of those who have been President including Warren Harding, Millard Fillmore, and James Buchanan. I'm sure each, well and lesser-known, has had a hand in making us who we are today. So far, all we've elected to the Presidency are men, and only white men, with the exception of Barack Obama in 2008.

I still believe I live in a country where anyone can grow up to be President and that, more than any specific person who's ever been President, is why I celebrate this holiday. It's not a reason to go to the mall and clean up on the post-Valentine's day stuff at Victoria's Secret (in light of those outfits where would Victoria keep anything secret anyway?). 

I think it would be proper and appropriate to find a moment and spare a thought for the tens of thousands of our best and brightest young, and not so young, men and women we have across the globe in far-off places that are in the news much too frequently as well as the far more numerous places whose names we struggle to pronounce who protect, among other things, the rights of all daydreamers to imagine they, too, could grow up to be President.

As Teddy Roosevelt said, "Believe you can, and you're halfway there."
-bill kenny

Dominus, Go Frisk 'Em

I was baptized a Roman Catholic, received First Holy Communion, as well as Confirmation. In recent decades (ie since Jack Perry drowned in an icy river in Greenland in the summer of '76 for reasons eluding all efforts on my part to understand), the Lord and I have agreed to see other people. 

I bite my lip and/or change the channel/turn the page when there's a story in the news about some religious leader telling the rest of us how to lead our lives since I don't take kindly to hypocrisy and/or bullshit especially when, in this country, it comes from folks affiliated with a tax-exempt organization who have, too often I think, forgotten all about the 'render unto Caesar' advice they received a long time ago. 

We have coast to coast Mega-Churches that for the most part seem to be MAGA Churches, looking at you, Joel Osteen, and cathedrals of more traditional religions that I sometimes wonder if God. Her/Himself would even recognize. 

As a rock and roll kid, I recall Eddie Money's If I Could Walk on Water; little did he know.  

The pool ain't in but the patio's dry. God's little acre's up for sale.
-bill kenny

The Cry of the River

When I retired almost three and a half years ago, I thought it would allow me more time to be with my wife, whether she liked that idea or not. Just to make sure, I didn't actually ask her since I have never dealt well with rejection. 

Today is one of my most favorite days of the year for two reasons: another day above ground and, first and foremost, with the person who makes me want to try to be the best person I can be but who still loves me when, as is always the case, I fail.  

Never mind the flowers, the chocolates, the incredibly clever pop-up cards that inflate into dirigibles flying over a fifty-piece marching band behind a float that says 'I Love You.' 

On our wedding day

Today and every day we have remaining, "hold me close honey say you're forever mine And tell me you'll be my lonely valentine."
-bill kenny

Roamin' With Numerous Numerals

Today is the greatest day in the history of the planet. All of civilization as we know it, or might wish to know it, has led us to this day. After today nothing will be the same ever again. Until this time next year, of course.

It's almost time for Super Bowl LVI! OMG! I thought it was on last Sunday (the store I was in had a TV the size of a small wall and the gridiron 'warriors' were hugging each other) but turns out it was a different game, more like flag football than anything else. By the time the fourteen-day pregame show finally expires over on NBC later and it's time for some football, how many of us will really care?

I've been on earth for ALL LVI of these things and I still don't get the roman numerals part of the package. The first one was in the LA Coliseum and wasn't a sell-out (GASP!). But from small acorns, such mighty oaks grow.

Professional sports in the USA at one time were at least a little bit, about sports. Now, it's cue the bread and circuses but never forget it's high drama. That's why every announcer has an analyst and every analyst has a counterpart who's also her/his counterpoint. 

We may not be able to understand what motivates religious zealots of every stripe to wreak hate-filled havoc on the rest of us or how to pacify the restless masses, but if you need somebody to explain the weak side button-hook on a 3rd and short within the context of the Children's Crusade, we have former football players who will have that for you, right after this Doritos commercial and a word from your local station.

Of course, when all the t's are crossed and i's dotted, about the only thing we'll be making in this country will be professional athletes, funny television commercials,  and prime-time reality show hosts, but don't worry about it because we've got a stockpile of roman numerals to last us until at least MMCCLXXVIII, or 在我们中国，直至取消抵押品赎回权。

-bill kenny

I Waved Goodbye to My Other Life

I'm nearing the beginning of my seventieth year here on The Big Blue Marble and the inexorable march of time and the gallant though losing battle with ailments, illnesses, and injuries finds me more often melancholy and morose than is my wont as my Natal Anniversary approaches.

As a kid, when I had the world figured out, I decided I could be the President of the United States, a baseball player, a cowboy, and an astronaut all at the same time. As the years have unwound, the number of people I could be has continued to shrink until it's just me, as I am.

Not the most impressive or reassuring sight in the mirror every morning, I'll concede, especially when the wired world brings me picture postcards from paths I could have chosen, but chose not to, despite their breathtaking beauty   

I'm not anywhere. I'm here. For now and, I guess, forever.
-bill kenny

You'll Have to Make Your Own Bed

My wife and I have a houseful of furniture from IKEA. We would NOT have such a situation if I had to assemble any of it as I have so little mechanical aptitude I can barely get the flat packs open that the furniture comes in.

For many years in our house, either my wife or our daughter, who has her mother's looks and mechanical aptitudes and my eyebrows, did all the assembling; and a fine job of it they did. We had IKEA furniture when we lived in Germany and it was shipped across the ocean to our home here in The Nutmeg State. 

Until we had an IKEA in New Haven, right off I-95, and another one in the wilds somewhere in Western Massachusetts that we went to once but not ever again, we used to drive to Elizabeth, New Jersey because that's where the nearest IKEA was in relation to our house. Yep, we're fans, but there's a lot about IKEA I never knew, or in this case, cared to know. 

See what I mean? What's that about the truth will set you free? Hell. Not even the birds are free. They are chained to the sky.
-bill kenny 

No Bloody Vikings Were Harmed

My wife is a far more adventurous diner than I am or will ever be who loves SPAM.  She will enjoy it with fried or scrambled eggs as breakfast or as any other meal and at any time. 

Neither of us cares much for the other kind of spam that the orange asshat from Mar-A-Lago probably thinks of as alternative e-mail (actually Meth-head Conway probably calls it that).

Think of it as the worst of both worlds

Sigrid insists that the fine folks from Hormel have created something that is much better than its reputation and that's as maybe but for my part, I'm in no hurry to ever find out. And I'm even less of a fan of potted meat whose existence and origins are best filed under 'don't ask, don't tell.' 

With all the attention in recent days on podcasts (I always think of Stan Freberg calling records, 'pay radio,' and wonder if he'd see podcasts in the same light), I fell over a 100% Joe Rogan-free podcast about SPAM that I found fascinating.   

Though I am wondering if Terry Jones and Michael Palin were as amused. 
-bill kenny

Getting from What Is to What If.....

I offered what follows just about a decade ago and here we are, coming full-circle again and so often, you'd think we would be dizzy by now.

I suspect though cannot prove it we here in Norwich like beginnings and endings a lot more than we seem to like all the stuff in the middle (explains those discarded Oreo cookies I see roadside, along with those tossed nips bottles). We correctly see elections as harbingers of change but don't always appreciate change is a never-ending process and not a product—a journey, rather than a destination. There is no Grandma’s House towards which we’re driving. And the road can and does often feel like it goes on forever. 

Every day, despite COVID concerns and public health precautions, city administrators and their professional staff, joined by, and with, volunteers on advisories, board, commissions, and committees, all of them our neighbors, begin again as every aspect of municipal government’s ability to deliver goods and services in response to our desires for a particular program (sometimes to complement another one and sometimes in competition with it), is balanced against the ability to afford the delivery of those goods and services.

Government at all levels shouldn’t be a spectator sport, but because of the pace of our lives, we sometimes do not or cannot choose to invest the time in much more than glancing at a headline about an issue, if we're lucky, or more often (and more, unfortunately) when someone posts an observation on a social media platform we treat as fact. Making informed decisions means evaluating actual and factual information. And that is NOT an opinion.

Most of us have a general sense this coming budget season in Norwich will involve hard choices almost pre-ordained to make no one happy. That's not exactly news, it's been happening for years so it's likely to continue. 

What shouldn't continue is our lack of interest. If politics is the art of the possible, then, without our informed opinions and observations, we’ll see elected and appointed officials attempting mission impossible and when the fog lifts and we look for someone to blame for results we don’t like, we should remember to look no further than the nearest mirror.

Almost every day and evening there are public meetings on the nuts and bolts operating issues and many of the spice of life aspects that define us as a city--be they Board of Education, the Historic District Commission, Public Safety, Commission on the City Plan, Public Works and so many others-usually without anyone from the public participating. Yes, I know, 'Jeepers, Wally, it's hard to understand how to use Zoom meetings,' except it's not. If you want something badly enough you'll find a way; if not, you'll find an excuse.

Check the city’s website, pick a meeting and settle down at your keyboard and monitor if you cannot personally attend. That's the blessing within the curse of COVID, the convergence of technologies that allows us to remain physically separated but intellectually engaged in how our city is run, from in-person, via the city's website, online meetings. or email conversations with elected officials and/or one another. 

We can do this because quite frankly we have to. We're all there is and we cannot leave decisions about tomorrow for anyone who is not ready and willing for today.
-bill kenny

An Ice Cold Memory

Yesterday was a really long time ago so I can't even calculate the distance a score of years would have to cover, but that's what this post has already traveled. Sort of explains its somewhat bedraggled syntax, I guess. At the time I called it:

Watch the Ripples that Unfold Unto Me

Had a pleasant surprise the other evening in my email inbox, a postcard from my past. I had a kind note from Johannes D in Regensburg to chat, briefly, about a Graham Parker project he's working on and to share with me his memories of listening to me on the radio, in another life, on the multiple occasions Graham was kind enough to stop by the station and visit.

The 'station' was American Force Radio, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main in the old days of the two Germanys; in this case in West Germany, known as the Federal Republic of Germany, to distinguish it from the People's Republic of Germany. 

Those were Cold War days, not that I had a walk-on part in any of that as a skeeter-winged Airman in the US Air Force who played records, wrote and produced public service announcements, and interviewed rock and rollers for GI listeners and their families numbering into the hundreds of thousands. And don't get me started on the millions in the 'shadow audience' (citizens of the nations in which US forces were stationed).

I had the time of my life. Though to be honest, I had also enjoyed AFRTS Sondrestrom, Greenland even when it went to seventy-five below zero on Christmas Eve 1975 and stayed there for three weeks in the twenty-four-hour darkness. Sure, it was miserable, but we were all miserable.

Being an Airman, even a jeep (junior enlisted personnel), in a primarily Army organization, like AFN, was, a day at the beach by comparison and you never had to worry about the sands of time getting in your lunch. Except, of course, they did. Rock and Roll kids grow old, even if they don't grow up. The number of nights in the week where you can hang with the trolls and the gnomes radically decline after the gigs start to shrink as Neverland recedes in the rearview mirror.

I smiled reading Johannes' note for all that it brought back to me and for all that has escaped forever, never to return, because had I realized then he was listening as intently as he was, I might have tried harder to be better at what I did than I proved to be. 

Could have worked out more, or harder because  "...you can't be too strong. You decide what's wrong. Can't be too hard, too tough, too rough, too right, too wrong."
-bill kenny

Butter (E-Mails)

Did you see what I did with the title? Pretty suave, huh? I hope you're not expecting more like that because I emptied out the tank to come up with that. 

And speaking of tank, though not necessarily an empty one. 

I'll bet he's still thrilled about getting the rubber bands off.
bill kenny 

"...and God Forbid, Somebody Walks into a School with a Book and Starts Reading It Out Loud!"

Somewhere in a box in the basement on a shelf, I imagine (maybe with what's left of Teddy, the stuffed teddy bear I slept with at the time), is my first library card to the Madeline E. Lazar Memorial Library, which when I was a second-grader at Pine Grove Manor Elementary School in Franklin Township, New Jersey, was just about the most important place on earth I could ever hope to get into.

Adult me looks back at those memories now and realizes the library was basically an unused basement apartment in a complex near the school that somebody had set up with tables and chairs and bookshelves and proclaimed it to be a library. All I knew is it had more books than I had ever seen, and definitely, way more than I had ever read.    

I think Dillon Helbig would've liked the place, and maybe his book would be as hard to keep on its shelves as it has proven to be to keep on the shelves at the Ada Community Library's Lake Hazel Branch. 

Just down the shelf from Maus, I'd hope.
-bill kenny 

Or Place it in a Hole in the Ground

Someone once told me our appetites increase geometrically even as our abilities to satisfy them increase only arithmetically. I live in a world that has seen the introduction of a Lincoln Continental pick-up truck, a Porsche sports utility vehicle, and even the Cullinan.  

And now, in answer to a question we've all asked, "Wait. What?" Here's the DBX707. 

With my apologies to Robin Williams, it should have been named cocaine because when you feel you have to have this car, God is telling you you have too much money.
-bill kenny

I'm Blaming the Snow

We had us some weather in these parts over this past week, and I'm not pretending to not still be feeling a little bit of that as I've been shoveling snow in my sleep which is sort of funny since when I was awake I looked about the same way as I was actually shoveling.

Nevermind.

You had to be there. 

I fell across something I wrote a few days more than eleven years ago that surprised me because I was so pleased with how it turned out. And because of that, I've decided to offer it again in this space and if it inspires/encourages/incites you to revisit a book that you remember from your own youth, perhaps a book that has caused some well-meaning parent somewhere to feel so threatened by that they'd like it removed from your local library, then by all means go and read it again, preferably aloud.

We certainly don't need to get into book-banning or burning because it's too short a walk to then doing it with people. At the time I called this minor opus:

People never notice anything

I can still remember the first time I read "Catcher in the Rye." I could hardly believe this was a school-assigned book especially when I came across the magic four-letter word that Holden tries to protect Phoebe from. Whoa! It wasn't a swear, it was literature. And right at the end of this stunning book that seemed to give voice to every thought I was having (it turned out, to the millions of thoughts that tens of millions of people were having) I realized Holden, "the Catcher", was in a mental hospital. Very much harshed that 'he sounds just like me" buzz.

In the fifty-odd (literally and figuratively) years since first reading it, I've revisited J. D. Salinger's book hundreds, if not thousands, of times (it was only a little older than I when both of us were much younger). It, Heller's "Catch-22" and Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" are probably the three books I have returned to more often than all other reading material combined. Heller and Pynchon wrote other books, some nearly as good, perhaps a bit better, and some not so much.

Holden Caulfield's eternal imponderable--"...I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park ... I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away."

I always loved Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and had I been brighter, I might have thought more about that story and its ending while racing through Catcher. As it was, I was breathless from the exertion of reading it as fast as I could. I struggled and often failed, to keep up with the torrent of words the protagonist used as weapons as he waged a one-man war on everything and everyone 'phony' only to realize he was, himself, one and the same with the thing he despised.

Jerome David Salinger died after almost half a lifetime spent in reclusive seclusion. Sometimes there's no second act, I guess. There's an ache, a dull one because he was gone long before he left, but the pain of remembrance of what was, and what might have been, remains. 

'What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad goodbye or a bad goodbye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse.'

"And a soul that is free can live on eternally." Goodbye Holden. 
-bill kenny

How Can I Miss Him

I really need to get out more in terms of my media diet. Aside from Highlights and Grit, everything I read or watch has stories on a regular basis about the inevitability of Donald J. Trump campaigning for the Republican Party nomination for President in 2024 and returning to the White House. 

I grew up with Republicans like Charles Percy and Edward Brooke, from Illinois and Massachusetts, respectively. For many years, in my home state, New Jersey, Clifford Case was a Senator, Millicent Fenwick, put that in your pipe and smoke it, and Peter Freylingheusen were in Congress and all of them were Republicans. 

Quite frankly, maybe it was just in Jersey, but for the most part, it was pretty hard to distinguish R's from D's in terms of policies and practices across most of the political spectrum. I'm not sure when that all changed but I'm damn sure it hasn't changed for the better and I've been watching it pretty closely since returning to the Land of the Round Doorknobs in the fall of 1991. 

Both sides of the aisle haven't exactly covered themselves in glory in recent decades but the nadir, at least so far, in my lifetime, has been the candidacy and subsequent election of Trump. And having lived through four years of his operating-a-roller-coaster-while-on-speed approach to any and all matters of state, I have zero desire to welcome back him in anything other than an orange jumpsuit doing a perp walk on the evening news. 

Trump's Presidency created a universe of alternative facts, fake media that was an enemy of the people, and turned truth into an NFT.

His words and behaviors both excused and emboldened the most abhorrent of boorish behavior on ALL sides of the political spectrum. Trump did not create the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the "Jews Will Not Replace Us" crowd, or even the QAnon Whack Jobs, but he allowed them visibility, viability, and validation they had never before experienced. 

And such extremism at one end of the spectrum was, by Newton's Laws, bound to provoke equal extremism at the other end of the spectrum, leaving little room for compromise and even less for agreement.

Every single one of us became worse human beings, not just bad Americans, because of the increasing coarseness and disappearing civility of our civil discourse with one another. Combined with the ideological online biospheres created through all manner of social and electronic media far too many of us have engaged, and continue to so do, in 'Us vs. Them.'

Rational thought has been replaced by harsh invective whose goal is no longer to engage and persuade but to demonize and denigrate those with whom we disagree. Trump is our mirror image and too many of us like what we see.
-bill kenny

Some Age Like Wine, Others Like Milk

What follows I first offered exactly ten years ago on the occasion of my youngest brother's birthday. I don't feel bad about re-presenting it here; he is, after all, still having a birthday so what's good for one should be good for the other (I tell myself). 

You don't need to be part of this conversation so I'll skip it. A decade ago I called it: 

Madam I'm Adam

When you grow up in a large family keeping track of your siblings’ birthdays becomes a major undertaking. You can cheat when you still live at home because Mom worries about all of that, but once you’re gone, you can never come back when you’re out of the blue and into the black.

We grew up under one roof, or more precisely a series of different roofs, as six children in the same family but closer to being two clusters of three children reasonably close together with a pregnant pause (pun intended) in the middle (that may get me a pop on the nose from one or more of my brothers and sisters). 

Evan Dolores, Kelly Christopher, Kara Melissa, Jill Marie, and Adam. 

My mother hadn’t run out of middle names by the time she got to Adam, but the check engine light on the whimsy dashboard was burning brightly. Mom loved to tell of the day Adam, whose birthday today is, was being baptized and Father Stosh expressed (mild) surprise at his having but one name. Our mother explained to the good priest ‘he was God’s first and he’s my last. Pour the water.’

I’m not sure any of us kids gave any of that a moment’s thought. Adam was another Kenny Kid to be piled into the Chrysler Newport station wagon that was eventually replaced by a Ford Country Squire because in the pre-fab sprout era of America, what else could hold that many children? 

I am inordinately fond of my youngest brother and make no apologies for it. I have my reasons and they’re not mine if I tell you. We look nothing alike but I suspect people guess easily that we are brothers (so much for the element of surprise). I'm the more handsome but also the more modest, while he has the talent and the wisdom (to not argue about the looks and modesty). 

Adam has all the brains one of us older children suggested might be genetically possible without actually realizing it. We were the promise, he was the performance. He was my wingman at Rutgers College-too young, yet, for school himself, I took him with me to courses sometimes every day for a week or more. I never asked him what he made of his first college experience (he is a devoted RU football fan, despite being a CU Buffalo Alum) or what, if anything, he got out of listening to music on eight-track cartridges in my Pinto, at max vol, rushing cross-town in New Brunswick (before its renaissance) to classes on the various campuses.

I lied to him later, not so much a lie as pulling his leg, when I promised him an armadillo when I was going to Air Force basic training in San Antonio, Texas, or later, as I assured him I’d bring him back a penguin from my assignment in Greenland (I think he had long known penguins were found only at the other pole; I learned that only after having purchased a pigeon in a tuxedo six months after arriving at Sondy.)

The six of us Kenny kids are a rambling, shambling assortment of aspiration, inspiration, and perspiration but as long as we all continue to practice respiration we’ll never lack for company. 

I'm not sure what our spouses make of us and we rarely enough ever get together so the danger of that is minimal. I'm still numbed how much more rapidly (in comparison to me), Adam has gotten older especially as today's celebration makes it official. Take a deep breath and have a Happy Birthday, Adam!
-bill kenny 

The Joys of Hunkering Down

Saturday was certainly one of those days, wasn't it? 

Even if you wanted to go somewhere, or perhaps more especially despite a need to be somewhere, the weather, Winter Storm Kenan (according to the National Weather Service) and/or Nor'easter Winter Storm Bobby, said Channel 3, made motion and movement more hypothetical than actual. 

For anyone at their posts in a public safety job and manning grocery stores and gas stations for those who ventured forth, a large and heartfelt thank you. 

With way too many hours to myself over the weekend, I ended up about ass-deep in snowdrifts but barely ankle-deep in my own thoughts. The good news is that I didn't need a lifeguard, the bad news is it gave me time to compose this. 

Growing up, one of the things that stuck with me was the later in the day a phone call came, the less likely it was to be good news. In my family growing up, we knew better than to phone home after 8 PM, no matter what, and no matter where we were.

At almost seventy, I am, I suppose, all the adult I am ever going to be. The growing old part worked far too well and the growing up part didn't seem to take at all. I still get nervous going into a darkened room and will search out the light switch even if I'm only passing through. 

And phone calls now? Even with, or perhaps especially because of, caller ID, when the phone rings in the evening, I am always startled (maybe wary is a better word). Our phones take two rings to show me the number and name of the caller, and I stand, transfixed, watching that little display.

Despite 'do not call' registrations, I get a lot of folks who technically don't want to sell me anything, which is prohibited by the registry, but rather only want to take a few minutes of my time for a survey on a multitude of issues, services, and products which, many times, always seem to end in what sounds suspiciously like a sales pitch. Or they're just genuinely concerned about my car warranty. All of these unsolicited intrusions I can, and do handle with a skosh more gusto and enjoyment than I really should have, truth be told.

When I see the name and number of our son or daughter in the display, however, my bravado evaporates and I start making horror movies in my head. I mutter 'please don't be anything bad' at least three hundred kajillion times between the second ring, which displays their name, and the third ring that never comes because I answer the phone. 

Both of them would find it cute that their old man breaks out in cold sweats when they call him after dark--if my wife answers the phone, I pace and fret within eyesight and earshot, lest she forgets to tell me of the cataclysmic catastrophe that has befallen one of them which in my fantasy is the only reason they are calling in the first place.

When we brought them home from the hospital, and they still had that 'new baby smell', I used to sit in a corner of their room and watch them sleep. I was fascinated by their breathing and with any and every movement they made while in their crib. I had no need for television-I had found my must-see and did so many times, for many hours, as they grew up.

As an adult, I can understand and internalize the realization that I cannot protect my children, who are in fact, adults, themselves now and who live with their significant others many hours distant from us, from every evil and misfortune in the world, but when the day gets dark and the phone rings at night, my inner grown-up is nowhere to be found. 

And the me that remains can do little more than stare at the phone and hope the monster under the bed has gone away by the time I answer it. 
-bill kenny

Petty Pace Sold Separately

Dear 2022,

Appreciate the opportunity for a free trial of your first month, but I would prefer to not extend my subscription. 

PS: Just me or does the shortest month have the most drama?

PPS: The nicest thing I can say, in advance, about February 2022 is it doesn't have 29 days.
-bill kenny