When You Give a Pig a Pony....

I know, 'Is this a screed about catering Trump's birthday party?' No, but I understand why today's title might have made you think so. It just came to me as I started to write this so now you have your explanation.

Which is better than I am doing. The following showed up in my email on Friday afternoon, titled, "228$ For Six Months Insurance," and since we took delivery of our new leased car last Saturday I was all ears and eyes, but only momentarily. 

Here's their written pitch, sort of a combination of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

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At first blush, it could be a transcript of part of one of the Orange Shitstain's stump speeches but there is no mention of Hannibal Lecter, sharks, windmills, or batteries to say nothing of dogs and cats on the menu. I think this was an attempt to get an AI Chabot drunk on turpentine and teach it English composition by correspondence course during a mail strike. Or not.
-bill kenny

Semi-Sermon

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." 

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair."
-bill kenny

Just Desserts

The cliche goes, 'You are what you eat." 

As this CNN feature reveals, I am 9 of 20, sorry Jeri Ryan, and not much higher.  

And just me, or are there NEVER enough napkins?
-bill kenny

Preserve Your Memories

When I was a wee slip of a lad and engaged in neighborhood cut battles (only rule: 'no mothers') a caustic comeback for someone who gave you a stupid look was 'take a picture, it'll last longer.' 

Cut battles, like so much else from my youth to include that clever piece of repartee, clean air, and a sense of right and wrong that wasn't so situational, have all gone the way of high-button shoes. I can remember behavioral modifiers like 'wait until your father gets home,' which these days has about as much relevance and relatability as saying 'You sound like a broken record.' 

So much of what was once is now no more. I saw an article the other day that the last full-size K-Mart, in Bridgehampton, New York, was closing. Farewell, Blue Light Specials I guess. 

This brings me back to pictures, and how long they last, vice digital imagery I suppose. When I was that sharp-tongued sitting on the stoop, all the pictures were taken with film cameras. Always had been, and always would be, or so we thought.  As did the folks who made it all possible in Rochester, New York.  

"Long ago it must be, I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you."
-bill kenny   

Some of Us Do Look Like What We've Been Through

I stare at my face every morning so the nearly invisible but always subtle signs of aging are harder for me to pick up in myself. When I encounter an acquaintance I've not seen in a while even though I (and they) always say, 'You're looking Great!' both of us are really lying. 

I saw a photo recently of former President Obama and was a bit nonplussed at how he has aged. Spending eight years in the hardest and most stressful job in the world can do that to you, I understand, but to my eyes, he seems to have aged faster since leaving office than he did while he was still behind the Resolute Desk.  

Remember being kids and not being able to wait until we were all grown? Yeah, it would be nice to have some wishes back again, right? But while aging is a constant the actual process of aging accelerates at varying speeds and while it might have been helpful to know this before now, here's some insight that's too late for me but perhaps not for you. 

"Cellular Senescence." And all this time I thought it was the name of a band.
-bill kenny 

A Moment from the Passing Parade

The older I get, the better I was. 

This is something I first offered almost fifteen years ago. Odd how many things have changed but still stay the same. At the time, I called it:

At the Sound of the Last Bell

Being a grown-up has its moments. I can stay up as late as I want; wear blue socks with brown trousers, and put as much chocolate in my milk at breakfast as I wish. Or I can choose to do NONE of those things, but in any event, it's on me and me alone.

Sometimes, the trade-off for not needing a grown-up's permission to cross the street or a taller person to get the good Monopoly game off the top shelf in the bedroom closet proves to be a loss of wonder and an absence of joy at the humdrum.

Driving home the other day, I took Route 32 through Montville instead of staying on my side of the river to the Pequot Bridge and taking Interstate 395. Route 32 is a main thoroughfare in Montville, which has houses all over the place. With school back in session, the wheels of the bus(es) go round and round a lot and come to a stop often.

I've ridden buses my whole life including back in Mrs. Hilge's Third Grade at St Peter's in New Brunswick to the corner of Easton and Bloomfield in Franklin Township. I watched our two children get on buses, in our daughter's case far younger, and go farther away, and come home. 

It's different when you're in the car behind the bus that rolls to a stop every twenty-two inches (it seems) as the yellow lights flash and then on come the red ones as the doors open and the smallest people you have ever seen get off at the end of another adventurous day in education. 

Yeah, traffic is slow, but so what. There's a lot more life lived at five miles an hour than at sixty-five. Having already been both, you'll have to take my word for it. Do you want to go fast? Use the highway.

Some of the youngsters I saw were so tiny, that they came down the bus stairs one step at a time-left foot down, joined by the right foot on the same step, and then over and over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Just past the Mickey D's, beyond the intersection where the Tri-Town supermarket used to be, the bus halted again and eventually, a tiny tot stepped off with a grin that adults have a name for we're not supposed to say in front of kids. He took, perhaps, three steps, and a butterfly from one of the honeysuckle (maybe. What do I look like, a botanist?) vines near the fence landed on his backpack.

He'd taken it off his shoulders as quickly as he'd stepped off the bus because, I think, it weighed more than he did. I'm not sure he was even exhaling as he watched the butterfly walk across the Iron Man decal. He studied that butterfly as intensely and intently as one life form can study another in fifteen seconds. And when the insect decided it, too, had learned all it could and took off, the child's already wide grin became even wider and his eyes danced.

He followed the insect's flight path for a moment then saw a discarded water bottle, snatched that up, and grabbed his backpack, all in one motion, waved to his mom who'd started down the steps of the house, and disappeared inside through the door she held open for him. Not a bad day on the way to growing up, at least that's what it looked like to me.

-bill kenny

I Love Lists

I am a sucker for headlines promising the 'Ten Greatest Rock Albums of All Time" or "Eight Hundred and Twenty-Seven Uses for that Stale Heel of Bread." (in my estimation there are WAY too many of the former lists and, to the limits of my knowledge, mercifully NONE of the latter).   

So I  was hooked from the moment I saw the title, "The 10 Rudest (and Most Polite) Cities in the U.S." and was delighted that NYC didn't make the rudest list (or the nicest, but who are we kidding, right?)

My moment of Zen, as a Jersey Guy and a Yankee Fan, was the delight of seeing the City of Brotherly Love and Bahstown placed where I, and legions of others who've struggled to cope when being there, always thought they should be. 
-bill kenny 

 

Probably Should Skip This Date Entirely

I was on my way to one thing today as I started to write this, and then got sidetracked to an entirely different thing. Sort of how life imitates art. 
Or how Art (Carney) used to eat Life (Cereal) when Mikie wouldn't.
I could be misremembering that.

What I'm not misremembering was forty-one years ago today at a little after half past nine in the morning in the administration office of the 435th Tactical Airlift Wing (TAW), I signed on the line and turned in my green Armed Forces Identification Card and became a private citizen again, ending my association as an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. 

It was a Friday and I would begin the next chapter in my life the following Monday returning to my previous assignment, now as a civilian employee, for considerably MORE money than as a GI (so much more I wondered what took me so long to cross over to the shirt and sweater brigade). 

In the eight years that followed, I was to work in four different organizations before, in an irony that proves God has a sense of humor and I am Their punchline, also on this date I was in a very different office of the same admin section picking "Grow-ton, Connecticut" as where I and my family would be living as my employment disappeared from Germany and with it my lifestyle and that of my wife and children. 

I had been notified in March I was part of the NATO Surplus to Requirements Overhead and would be reassigned, ready or not. At first, it had looked like we were going to Winchester, Virginia, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley to do who knows what with who knows who but that fell through. 

And then up popped a job in Grow-ton as I was told it was pronounced. In Connecticut. Only a few hours from where my brothers and sisters and others related to one or the other or both lived. Not that I was keen about telling them I was coming nor would they have been especially overjoyed to learn of their pending good fortune.

We each have lived lives of quiet desperation, and, more often, perspiration. My arrival with two children under double digits who spoke no English would have been interesting but not earth-shattering for any of us. 

In retrospect, in the last three-plus decades the person who has failed to immerse and then emerge has been me, more often than not. I'd say 'Color me surprised,' but I'm not.

-bill kenny

  

Don't Know Why

I watched with apprehension and a vague sense of unease at the calendar as I turned it from August to September and now that the day and the reason have arrived, I'm still not ready: the start of autumn, 

I'd like to think I'm braced for what's to come but I know I'm not.  And spare me the 'To every season,' I'm not listening. I do not enjoy any aspect of this new season which the calendar says starts today but around here began a bit earlier as the trees prepared for it at some point a couple of weeks ago.

The leaves silently depart as the light of day grows shorter and the winter of our discontent approaches on cat's feet.
-bill kenny

We All Know Someone Who Talks Out of It

Between the attempted assassinations of one of the Presidential candidates (hint: the old, fat, hate-filled, orange, and stupid one) and the fabulist fiction of Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, you may not have heard about the most recent batch of Ig Nobel prize recipients. 

Yes, it's in good fun and slightly tongue-in-cheek but also very serious science and (somewhat improbable) research. 

Recently honored work included US research to house pigeons in missiles to help guide them to their targets; UK investigations which found that claims of extreme old age tend to come from areas that have short average lifespans and a historical lack of birth certificates, and a French study which found that scalp hair tends to whorl in a clockwise direction, though less so in the southern hemisphere.

As fascinating as all of those efforts seem to be, they pale in comparison to the research team from Japan who captured the top prize by discovering mammals can breathe through their anuses.

I have no idea how this got here, honestly (sort of)

And you thought I had made that up. 

I was hoping to learn if those mammals could also talk out of the same orifice simultaneously because if not, there's at least the hope they might suffocate.
-bill kenny
  

Brevity Is the Soul of Something

I love words and have my entire life, I've watched with a cautious disdain rivaling Richard Cory's as we've devolved from words to and through emojis (I still call them emoticons which makes me think of Decepticons which is from a movie (I believe) that I've never seen. And is as close to hip as I get these days). 

In this interconnected age, I'm handicapped as a typist in online conversations, mostly with Nigerians seeking business partners, because I'm a terrible typist but mostly because I spell out every word and try to be correct in how I spell them. 

In the interests of speed, I avoid transubstantiation and words of its ilk, because I rarely text The Vatican and very few folks beyond the Papal balcony even know what the word means much less how to spell it.    

As for abbreviations? I'm making an uneasy peace with them in that I use them though not as often as people corresponding with me do and I have to look up so many of them so often because I have no idea what some of them mean. 

Which is why I may keep this article handy as a kind of crib note. 

I will point out, however, that it's missing my current favorite, FAFO.
-bill kenny

Let's be Frank about Saint Francis

Who among us doesn't know, or think they know, the Franciscan Serenity Prayer? 

I say it's long past time time for an update.  

I have ideas for updating The Ten Commandments as more like Ten Suggestions but waiting for approval on corporate sponsors. Maybe a light beer or an energy drink? Stay tuned.
-bill kenny

The Tyranny of Tomorrow

It was William Shakespeare's Macbeth, who may have been the first literary figure to offer a cogent argument on the virtues of planning your work and then working your plan when he offered, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day..."

In addition to its eloquence, it's memorable for both its utility and applicability-though in this era (or error?) of diminished expectations and shortened attention spans it's disheartening to realize how quickly we can seem to get lost as individuals and as political units from the municipal to national government level.

We were much more flexible and forgiving when we were younger. I know, “OK, Boomer,” but we were in so many aspects of our lives. And now? Look at us, ossified and petrified and clinging to our beliefs, behaviors, and habits often despite all evidence to the contrary.

We’ve forgotten there's always been more than one way to get from here to tomorrow. The more successful paths involve inspiration and perspiration in nearly equal amounts, that is, a brilliant insight or an original idea combined with hard work. Not forgetting some good luck.

My father was fond of citing the Pennsylvania Dutch as the source of one of his favorite expressions "the harder I work, the luckier I get" but I defer to wherever your mom or dad say they heard it, too. Luck, like hope, is a four-letter word and both have that in common with a plan. But critical to any plan is having definite, precise, and clearly defined goals with a strategy of how to use the tools at your disposal to achieve those goals.

Without all of that, a plan is just a wish you make with your heart. And while that worked out well for Jiminy Cricket, we're having a critical shortage of wishing stars right now, to so I guess we’ll have to make do the old-fashioned way. Personally, I think the top hat and spats played a larger role than previously believed.

There's been enough words written on "how get this city/state/nation back on track" where we each insert the name of the place where we live, step two paces back and admire our handiwork, seldom realizing a good beginning is only that, a beginning.

Articulating a plan means making sure that everyone who needs to be in agreement with it, and that usually means everyone where you live understands what you're sharing, the reasons for what you're proposing, the impact of the sacrifices they will need to make for a common good and then to get on board with the program and own the plan for themselves. All or nothing at all.

Top down, bottom up, there's no one path because there's no one destination-only a journey that has a beginning of each day and never ends. The only constant in our world has always been change and the need for change.

There's never an end to progress-only pauses along the way and no matter what happened yesterday, tomorrow will be here in a moment and cares not a whit about those successes and failures.

We can learn from them, and we can build on them, but we can't live forever on their memory or their meaning. As Banquo admonishes, "if you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak."

Far too often, all that remains is silence.
-bill kenny

I'm Too Something or Other for My Shirt

I have never claimed to be a fashion plate. Growing up in parochial and then prep schools, wardrobe selections were out of my hands. I was in the military and the Air Force, for all its supposed liberal leaning, always frowned on tie-dyed combat utility uniforms. 

So here I am in the winter of my years, dressed mostly in short-sleeve tee shirts with snappy sometimes(to some people) offensive sayings when not wearing rock and roll band and branded shirts 

I have some spiffy sports shirts, and I think at least one with the guy on the horse, in my wardrobe, I don't think I have any of the shirts that have an alligator on them, or with an alligator eating a guy on a horse (I think we'd both remember that one). 

I see a lot of people of both sexes (or should I say 'of all sexes'?) at the gym (when I go) in shirts and outfits that really make me feel every day of my seven-plus decades. I've encountered women who look to have spray-painted their exercise clothes on. I can always tell with the tops because there are two buttonholes too few and on a cold morning too many party hats. 

Make no mistake: I am happy you are comfortable with your body (after all, you're the one inside of it); can you understand me not so much?

The other day two guys were wandering the facility while I was cursing the treadmill (as it was kicking my butt again) in the kind of clothes that lead you to believe their households are governed by that 'first one up is best one dressed' rule and they are late sleepers. On the front of the one's black tee shirt in white letters was "Weakness is for Tussies" but they used a P instead of a T when they made the shirt. On the back, was "Balls to the Wall" (without a second S for wall).

The fellow alongside him had a shirt back with "Train Like a Maniac" and when he turned around, he had what appeared to be a self-portrait of himself on the front. And people wonder why I insist on earpieces and listening to the audio player(s) on my cell phone. When I encounter someone while out and about I NEVER remove the earpieces, and as they are speaking simply repeat over and over again, 'I won't hear you, I won't hear you.' Some think I should say can't but I've chosen that verb deliberately.

I actually have a shirt with a slogan I got years ago that's still true. People smile when they read it though they shouldn't. It says "I probably don't like you either." In light of how many of my social interactions haven't been working out, it might be more useful to get a shirt with my name and address on one side and 'other side up' on the reverse.
And then hope all those folks from the Literacy Volunteers keep their funding.
-bill kenny

No Single Drop of Rain

I take a lot of static from folks while I'm out walking when I stop to pick up discarded litter of almost all kinds (I draw the line on sharps and dog shit, but everything else is fair game) and the common refrain I hear is, 'you shouldn't have to do that!'

Except somebody should but nobody does.

Not my job. Who of us doesn't say it? 

Except it is our job to be decent human beings, watch out for one another, and care for this planet and its creatures and the creation entrusted to us.

Some of us, it seems, didn't get the memo. 

I know, who cares? AmIrite?
-bill kenny

Helluva Sermon

Business is always brisk at churches of all denominations on Sunday mornings.

And the piety is almost always practiced nearly all the way back to the parishioners' cars for the drives home.
-bill kenny

Hello, I Really Must Be Going....

Thanks to an unfortunate combination of looks, personality, and absence of any discernible skills and abilities, I tend to keep myself to myself. This, as anyone who ever spent time with me under the same roof either when we were growing up, or perhaps later as I was growing old, can tell you, is not a bad thing. 

My wife on the other hand is a very open-hearted and caring person (she took in a mutt like me so whatever argument you offer has already been mooted) and people genuinely like her. I am fortunate that they do because for the most part that means they tolerate me. 

I will confess, and concede, I don't put a large amount of effort into being liked. We lived in the same house for almost thirty-three years with pretty much the same neighbors and I hardly know their names and can rarely even come close to guessing first names. 

'Hello,' seems to cover a multitude of sins, both of omission and commission. When neighbors drive by and wave I can see them mouthing "Hello, Sigrid's husband!"  And for my part, beneath my somewhat forced smile, I'm muttering 'Hi, whoever you are.'  

I mention all of this because I found a fascinating article written I assume because having a good excuse for leaving a social gathering is seemingly a critical need. Judge for yourself.

I hate to be harsh, but just from reading their rationale for using them, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near any of the folks who use those excuses. I'll show myself out.
-bill kenny 

Fingers Crossed

I found this in the archives, among the endives, and decided today was a good day to revisit it and, no, I have no idea what prompted the early part of this sentence. Honest. For fourteen years ago: 

Fuggedaboutit Meets Friggatriskaidekaphobia

WARNING: The Surgeon General has determined blah, blah, blah, awful stuff, blah, blah, whenever it's Friday the 13th and fear of blah, blah, blah. The End. C'mon, none of us ever read disclaimers all the way through anyway so I figured I'd offer you a mock disclaimer, a slice of that mock apple pie made with Ritz crackers, and a tall frosty glass of something other than milk from a cow to wash it all down. Mmmmm. You got a little something on your upper lip, sunshine.

We've got the most highly developed brains of any species on this planet but are also the only species who hate and fear one another for reasons such as different religions, skin colors, or political beliefs. 

So if any other species has the gift of speech (and I guess, the ability to read as well and a thumb that works a scroll ball) now might be a good time for one or more of them to ask aloud, 'How come the bi-peds are the crown of creation., anyway?'

On top of all those misplaced prides and prejudices (you don't suppose Jane is related to Steve, by any chance? I'm trying to imagine Fitzwilliam Darcy having a discussion with Oscar Goldman) we have the mother of all irrationalities, Friday the Thirteenth and the fear of it.

Of course, it's only irrational if you don't put any stock into any of the literature or folk tales you've heard since you were young. There are seven point two katrillion jillion websites (a number I just made up and have you ever known me to lie to you?) on every aspect of this day and date combination, and one's as good as the other, or as bad, depending on how you feel.

You might have a lucky number, or a special letter, or maybe a pony ride for your birthday (you ba$tard!), so far be it from me to pooh-pooh, pshaw, or tsk-tsk (I love it when I can use classic ancient words; I am, after all, wearing Old Spice. And you thought I was kidding about the pony. And STOP clicking the link!) your values or beliefs. If they help you place your universe in order, that's fine.

I put all the cash in my wallet in order by denomination (Catholics go first, obviously) and then in sequence based on the serial number. My wife used to find this quirk endearing; now, not so much. She's helped me manage my compulsion by making sure I have very little folding money. Everyone standing behind me in lines everywhere as I used to put the bills in order is very grateful.

In a way, I guess it's counter-intuitive to wish you a happy Friday the Thirteenth especially since we'd be here all day on what a 'happy' one might look like. Be advised, there's another one in December so how lucky can superstitious people get?  I don't know if Hallmark has cards, but I wouldn't be surprised. 
-bill kenny 

 

Pretty Can Be a Reason

I was raised with 'Have a reason for everything you do.' 

It's worked well for most of the seventy-two years plus I've wandered around on the ant farm with beepers but today, 'because it's just really nice wins out.'

I think you'll agree.
-bill kenny 

Sky of Blackness and Sorrow

I've watched this anniversary date approach for weeks, knowing that words are never enough. It's a hole on the calendar, about the size of the hole in my heart. It doesn't hurt less knowing so many of us ache for the same reason. Twenty-three years on, recalling the events of 11 September 2001 doesn't diminish the pain of remembrance.

Four planes, people whose lives were suddenly and horribly ended in the air and on the ground, three buildings- two totally destroyed, the other deeply scarred, and a Pennsylvania field forever transformed into a memorial. And all these years later, the sharp edge of regret and loss may have dulled slightly, as time has worn it down, but the hurt gets worse as the heart gets harder.

New York’s World Trade Center, WTC, towered over 'The City' as a presence, more felt than seen. Manhattan looked to the WTC the way the fingers on the hand looked to the thumb. 

The destruction was no less real at the Pentagon, in Washington, D. C., where so many in and out of uniform who served America and worked to preserve her peace had war visited upon them, without warning or reason. 

Nor was the devastation across a Pennsylvanian hillside less painful or complete where, for weeks and months afterward, no blade of grass grew, and no bird flew. All we felt was a raw ache.

We seemed to listen more carefully to one another, at least for a time afterward. We spoke to each other instead of at each other. Having witnessed how frail and fragile life could be, it seemed we had resolved to see past and through the political differences, find the essentials, and seek common ground. 

And then tomorrow and tomorrow and that well-known petty pace crept in, and we found ourselves standing together at anniversary remembrances of today, but not as close as we had stood the year previous.

Slowly, we chose a return to a country that always seems to involve blaming and shaming, shouting and pointing, pushing and shoving, posturing and pouting, until here we are, so many years older but no wiser.

Many have forgotten, or choose to forget, that we have always been where everyone else on earth has wanted to be. No one seeking to come here has ever thought we were perfect, but believe we allow everyone and anyone the opportunity to dream and to become their dream.

We were the nation with open hearts and open minds, who rolled up a sleeve to help a neighbor or someone we'd not yet met halfway across the world; who looked you squarely in the eye and whether we agreed or not, always let you speak your mind and tell us your heart.

Some see today as a national day of service. That is a path worth exploring as we can still use a lot of help even if we're not sure how to ask for it. We can start on a return to being the greatest nation on earth everyone else continues to believe we are and to be the Americans that everyone else sees when they look to us.

We could get along better, maybe by muddling along together, by rediscovering the beliefs and values that bring and keep us together, making us who we are, and seeing how that goes. And perhaps we could begin to do all of that today. 
-bill kenny

Ohne Mich

All anyone is talking about today is the Harris/Trump debate tonight on ABC television carried just about everywhere else simultaneously.  

Everyone EXCEPT me. 

Months ago I purchased tickets to see James McMurtry, whom I revere at a level only shared by Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Ray Davies, perform tonight in Fairfield, Connecticut, a decent distance from where I live but even farther than where he does. 

I have waited YEARS for McMurtry to come this far north and east and I have no hesitation or regret about my decision to catch him in concert and skip the televised debate. It probably helped my decision-making process I had decided months if not years ago, no matter who or what the Democrats chose to run against the Orange Shitstain I would be supporting.  

DonOld Trump should be jailed for the crimes he's already been convicted of. When Jack Smith gets through with him and he's found guilty of inciting insurrection, I hope he receives the same punishment John Brown did for his actions at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. I'd pay to watch that happen. 

As for me and McMurtry, I'm hoping we have ourselves a time.
-bill kenny

Summer Held Its Breath Too Long

It's hard to believe the golden summer for which we so yearned while slogging through snow and ice this winter, has, for all intents and purposes, come and gone. Those plans for vacations and days off we hoped to enjoy have had their 'best used by' dates disappear before our eyes and here we are at that place on the calendar where we start the next season and turn the page.

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. You knew it was gone as you readied them to return almost two weeks ago now. What's that about time and how it flies? What happens when it's crawling?

If your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

Many are still hitting the stores with lists of school supplies and struggle to juggle after-school activities, jobs, and fractious households that don't run themselves. Soon many will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Now, and when city budget discussions heat up in April, is really the only time we devote any thought to education which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, and actually, to all of us. This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money, but, and it's a cliche, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together and trust me on this one-different elementary schools, too. Our schools were so different from the ones our children attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen, or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony, by the knowledge age. 

This is typed on a workstation keyboard. Our (grand) children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make our desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to, and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world they and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young help no one at all.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that means all of us, must recognize the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again. 
-bill kenny

Braced for Mother Nature

We do this every this-time-of-the-year here across the Northeast, in varying amounts: preparing for a visit by one of any number of hurricanes that will either wreak untold and uncalculated havoc or just threaten to blow us all away and/or drown us in rain. 

And when we look just slightly to our South, there will always be someone who got it worse than we did.

My wife spent a great part of her yesterday storm-proofing our yard--securing all the stuff (benches, feeders, bird baths) her boob of a husband walks by every day with open eyes and never sees. 

The stuff, that, in a strong wind, gets blown right through a window or lifted over a fence after which I react with dumbfounded shock and incredulity because I am incapable of linking cause and effect in a timely manner for any practical purposes.

In a way it's good that she did that since I can recall being a small child, when Mom and Dad rented bungalows in Atlantic Highlands, watching hurricanes come in off the ocean while standing on the beach. 

Their sheer power thrills me still. I don't know why. 

My favorite part of The Wizard of Oz is when the house and everything else is lifted by the tornado and I used to wonder growing old (as I've never grown up) if you could really and truly ride a bicycle while in the funnel.

This is serious stuff for many people and I don't mean to trivialize it or minimize its might or its majesty. As a matter of fact, I'd point out I'm doing just the opposite. While many of us have already and/or continue to stockpile milk and toilet paper (that's how we roll here in New England, pun intended) because if you reach the magic number, nothing happens and Gravity's Rainbow passes over you, 

I'm somehow comforted by the thought that there are forces more powerful than any we can create or unleash. And at some point on the horizon, silhouetted against an open sky, you, me, and the most powerful or wealthy men and women in the world look exactly the same as the eye of the storm descends upon us. 

No matter who we are, what we own or do, we are all finally and fully equal and can only hope to hold on until the heavens clear. I'm just never too sure about the something good part....
-bill kenny

So I Hang Upon My Altar

I accept that summer is over but I'm not ready for what comes next, much less whatever it is we call what we have right now. If I didn't know any better, and I admit  I usually don't, I'd wonder if I'm not a stunt double in a Leonard Cohen music video for Last Year's Man. 

I mean, it sure feels like what he's singing about, and not just here at my house but across the region as everywhere you turn on the East Coast, hurricane season is the topic of concern.

I'm not really worried so much about the rain as I am about what Dylan Thomas referred to as the dying of the light.  Almost everyone my age I know, and there are not nearly as many of us left as I'd have thought should have survived to this point, is, like me, bone weary all the time.

We get up tired, slog through our days semi-comatose, and crash on couches in middle-class fever dreams we never envisioned ourselves as ever living in, to go to bed and fail to dream and get up and do it all again. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm disappointed in myself and in my life, so far, but I'm not unhappy. I met and married someone who loved and who still loves me though I haven't done anything remotely lovable in a ridiculous number of years. 

We have two children who are now, themselves, adults and who are getting on with their own lives rather nicely without us, which is the whole plan as I remember the orientation briefing at Dad School from back in the day.

I, and by that, I mean my peers and I didn't crash or go down in flames, we surrendered a little bit every day until we really ran out of things to give away. We traded our blue skies and beliefs for BMWs and shipped good paying jobs to low-wage third and fourth world nations so that their people could have an opportunity to earn forty cents a day making sneakers that I buy at a hundred bucks plus and never even think twice about it.

In another fifty years, some of those places are going to have indoor plumbing and potable drinking water, and those people, or maybe only the ones who survive until then, will want to put up a statute for folks like me. Don't worry about it, you're welcome and keep the cholera blankets. Hell may freeze over and you could use the warmth.

At some point, we turned into our parents, who are laughing their asses off now as they really didn't do as terrible a job as we kept insisting they had. And considering how we could fuqq up a one-car funeral procession (twice so far and don't ask me about the wet dream in the desert), it might have not been a bad idea to quit while we were only slightly behind instead of pressing on and losing sight of the entire caravan. 

We thought the future was Twenty Questions but, instead, it proved to be Hide 'n Seek in a dark room. And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began, when Jesus was the honeymoon and Cain was just the man. Same as it ever was and I knew coming in that going out would be the same.
-bill kenny

I Don't Know if I'm Dying or About To Be Born

Coincidence, said Albert Einstein, is God's way of remaining anonymous. A couple of weeks ago, arriving by mail, was David Crosby's final album in this life, For Free. 

It's brilliant but what first attracted me was the reports of a collaboration between Croz and Donald Fagan, two more (to my mind) disparate musicians I could not imagine. That song, Rodriguez for a Night, was what whetted my appetite to finally buy the album some three years after its release. And in light of his passing, it makes this song transcendently beautiful.    

Now, about the coincidence part I referred to earlier.
Sitting at my computer while listening to Crosby's album through my hearing aids (this is, after all, the age of miracles and wonder), wandering across the internet, I found the onlyvistonce.com website.

I think Al was on to something, I really do.
-bill kenny

Who Would Choose a Felon and a Liar?

The former President of the United States and current and thirty-four time convicted felon, Donald J (for Chickenshit; the J is invisible) Trump, staged himself quite a photo opportunity on the last Monday of August at Arlington Cemetery. 

What kind of self-absorbed asshole gives a 'thumbs up' in a cemetery? 

It was the third anniversary of the Kabul Airport Attack that cost thirteen US servicemembers their lives and was set in motion in no small part by Pantload45 himself and his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but blame, as is well known, is better to give than to receive. 

Trump's moment at Arlington was yet another opportunity for self-aggrandizement, this time with family members of dead service personnel serving as props. They should be grateful for good weather since the former Commander-in-Chief is notoriously less than fond of rain. Funny thing about the self-proclaimed lover of the military. He's a life long fake and a phony. 

Given the opportunity to, himself, be a member of the US Armed Forces, he was unavoidably unavailable to join the 1,857,304 inductees who saw combat in Vietnam. There were too many Vietnam War casualties from New York, but his name was never in danger of appearing here. 

I often wonder who on that list was the one who may have replaced the deferred-Don in a rice paddy and instead came home in a body bag while he was cheating contractors in all Five Boroughs of New York City. 

As a convicted felon, he is not eligible to serve in the US Armed Forces much less to be their Commander in Chief.  He is a failure as a businessman, as a President, and as a human being, If you're looking seriously looking at him in November, you need to look in the mirror and if the view still doesn't bother you, congratulations.
You deserve one another.
-bill kenny 

DIY DEI

I'm dating myself, and I've reached an age where I probably should be carbon-dating myself, when I mention The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Access to Tools). It was, before the Internet and Google existed, as close as possible to being an internet of things as a book could ever hope to be.

Most people remember it, if for nothing else, than its cover of Earth, a photo taken by one of the astronauts from Apollo 8 who walked on the moon, called Earthrise. I've always felt it was the most eloquent proof that the farther out in space we go, the more alike we look.

I mention all of that because a Norwich Native Son, (technically he was born down the road in New London), John-Manuel Andriote, whose writings span medicine, music, and children's literature, once noted in the pages of a column he used to author in his hometown newspaper, The Bulletin, if America is a melting pot, then Norwich is a saucepan.   

I love John's simile. It's both truthful, true and absolutely nails it in terms of describing our city. Norwich is a  terrific example of Robert Palmer's Every Kinda People. Thanks to efforts by Global City Norwich and the outreach on behalf of our children by the Norwich Public Schools, there are many ways each of us can help celebrate all of us and in the end, for my money, that's what a community is and should aspire to be.

This Monday, September 9, the abstraction and the reality meet again at Chelsea Parade beginning at five in the afternoon, rain or shine (so let your smile be your umbrella) as the the Rotary Clubs of Norwich (Sunrise- Noontime-RCC) hosts Celebrate Cultural Diversity.  

It's an annual celebration of the too-many-to-mention cultures that we have here in Norwich and the surrounding towns. The goal is to increase awareness of our region's cultural diversity and to highlight and spotlight the area’s many available multicultural resources. 

In our current politically charged atmosphere where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, DEI, are too often depicted as some sinister and subversive 'threat to our way of life' (your mileage on 'way of life' may vary, btw), the celebration is an affirmation of what we already know, or should, about one another. 

Yes, we are different, and quite often very different, and yet, despite those differences, what we share and why is so much larger and more important than what separates us. 

When you come, you'll learn there is no inside because there is no outside. Leave the idea of 'us or them,' at the corner of Washington Street because at Chelsea Parade it's just 'we.' You'll be mingling with the Pluribus that complements the E and Unum. 

Admission is free and there will be at least two metric tons (by my reckoning) of family-friendly entertainment for all. Have my sense of direction (People tell me where to go all the time and still I get lost)? Easy-Peasy. Chelsea Parade is across from the Norwich Free Academy.

The Food Tasting tickets are $10 per person and will be in high demand as things kick off at 5 pm with a scrumptious sampling of ethnic foods to enjoy, all from local area restaurants (some of which you'll discover perhaps for the first time), and you'll swing and sway to music from the many places around the world our Norwich neighbors call home. Bring the family, as children under six years of age eat FREE. 

As the afternoon becomes evening, there's the seriously important business of presenting the Lottie B. Scott Diversity Award and a Community Diversity Award to the resident and an organization, respectively, who helped promote peace and understanding across our city.

It's an opportunity to meet friends you never knew you had and in these times who among us couldn't do with a few more friends, right here where we all live?
See you there.
-bill kenny

Money Doesn't Talk

And most of what money screams is obscene. 

Robin Williams once observed "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money." These days, with all due respect to the late Mr. Williams, it's real estate, baby.

In the not too distant past, one in every five hundred of us in this country experienced homelessness. Last autumn, on average, every night over ninety thousand New York City residents availed themselves of homeless shelters because they had nowhere else to stay.  

We all know/are/were someone one paycheck or less away from being on the street. And yet, we continue to consider ourselves the richest nation on earth. So what might it cost to 'fix homelessness?'

Yeah, sure seems to be expensive especially when we have more far more will than wallet. Speaking of wallet AND the obscenity of money, try this on for size, starting at $9,400,000. 

Maybe they have Moving-In Specials. Remember: If you don't ask, you don't get.
-bill kenny