Crystal Water Turns to Dark

It's amazing how a religious devotion, a commemoration and remembrance really, evolved into an all-the-candy-you-can-eat-without-barfing exercise all the way to an adult party hearty event. Greetings, salutations, and Happy Halloween.

There was an ancient Celtic festival called Samhain that some sociologists theorize 19th-century Irish immigrants brought with them that helped create our current observance/holiday/day on which to go gluttonous on chocolate. It certainly caught on in the United States, but we are no longer alone. Far from it. 

Halloween is now celebrated all around the world, gladdening the hearts, I'm sure, of candy manufacturers in the days leading up to it as well as the bottom lines of dentists in the days and weeks following it. 

Alas, poor Linus, I knew him well. We can always content ourselves that Strongbad doesn't do candy, I guess. Did you have Trick or Treat for UNICEF in your neighborhood? Sign of the times now, I fear, I haven't seen or heard about it in years and years.

Remember how our Moms used to go through the goodies making sure that the apples didn't have unpleasant surprises and throwing all the unwrapped candy away 'just to be safe'. Would it have killed them to pretend the Mary Janes were unwrapped (talk about a dentist delight-it could take fillings out)--a candy that I don't think I even see at any other time of the year except now. And what about candy corn (which I love, btw)? 

If scientists are correct that cockroaches would survive an atomic war, I believe they would do it munching on candy corn indestructible, indescribable, often imitated but never duplicated. One of the many things I surrendered once my doctors made me understand, as an adult, I couldn't be a part-time diabetic. And I miss it more than I can say.

As a parent, I can recall some of the worst weather of the season always starting about two hours before the kids got organized to head out. So I'll keep my fingers crossed for all the goblins tonight. Every child, no matter how young, wanted to trick or treat with her/his friends. Only a baby goes out with a parent. 

So with a heavy heart and a quiet footstep, the trick was to figure out how far back to trail them as they went from house to house, and no matter how many times a child was told 'no running', what happened? Yep. Why was I always surprised when mine paid as much attention to me as I had to my parents? 

And every neighborhood had a trick-or-treater without a bag, usually one of the hyperactive kids from down the street who ate the candy as quickly as he got it. Can you imagine how much magic it was in that house later that evening? Me neither.

My own children long ago outgrew the doorbell ringing and candy-collecting aspects of the evening and we don't even even play anymore at my house. But the Dream Children and ghosts of ghouls past sometimes encounter one another on my porch when "Open, locks, Whoever knocks!"
-bill kenny

A Blast from My Past

I save everything or almost everything. You never know when it will come in handy. And even when it does, I usually still don't know. I found this rummaging around in the archives and lo and behold, we're in an election season so here you go. Back then I called it:

Vote for Me and I'll Fix Everything

Election season is like Trick or Treat for adults, except we registered voters seem to end up with a lot of Mary Janes and saltwater taffy and way too few Dove Bars and Reese's Cups. 

Six days from now, we'll be knee-deep in big muddy hitting levers, and blackening circles as the will of some of the people is transformed into the will of all the people. The miracle of democracy, coming to a ballot box near you. Unless you've opted for early or absentee voting (I did the latter).

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard ." Sing it, H. L.. I'll hold the hymnal while you turn the page. 

Living in one of the thirteen original colonies (I still think we should get silk jackets, have colonial colors, and maybe a secret handshake; just to shut up those ba$tards from the West Coast with their nice weather and fresh fruit all year round), I'm watching the wheels as I'll have the opportunity to vote for a President, a Senator, a Congressman, a state representative, and a state Senator. 

You probably have about the same range and scope of choices where you live, but only if you choose to vote. The same folks who'll sit on hold for twenty minutes for a radio call-in show can't take ten minutes to go vote on Election Day. 

Maybe we have neighbors who think you have to pay a fee to cast a ballot or lack a calendar that tells them when Election Day is. The same people who call Dancing With the Stars hundreds of times to get their favorite to the next round don't think it's appropriate to have an opinion on the direction the state or nation should take.

If you don't choose, you lose. And don't tell me you don't have enough information. In this country at this time in our history, if there's one thing we have TOO much of, it's information. The trick is to turn it into knowledge you can use to make an informed decision. Because that's what we're lacking...
-bill kenny

Boo!

I tease the phlebotomist at the blood labs that 'I have a high tolerance for pain, other people's pain,' as I look away when she draws blood from my arm. 

At 72 and change, you'd think I'd be over my fear of the dark, but you would be very wrong. I don't like walking through dark rooms though walking outside at night doesn't bother me. Go figure. I was reassured recently that I'm not so special and unique when I came across an article on Why We Fear the Dark.

And since I tend to find myself awake from about one until four in the morning most mornings, I completely agree that those are truly the catastrophizing hours. Suggesting to me at least, if you talk in your sleep, don't sleep.
-bill kenny

Young and Innocent Days

I remember life before The Internet. Barely. But I do remember it. And you always capitalized it too. 

You used to have to actually look things up and write them down when you were having a discussion with someone whose opinion differed from yours. Do some serious research and not just run your mouth.

I remember thinking how much smarter we would all be once The Internet caught on. HA!  

Here it is 2024 and we are, if anything, dumber than at any time since I started to walk upright.  

-bill kenny

I Think It's Frostration

My fondness for Autumn is tempered by my knowledge of what happens next, not because of anything Autumn, itself, has ever done to or for me. 

In New England, we pride ourselves on the 'leaf peeping' weekends where excursions travel throughout the region oohing and ahhing at the multiplicity of colors garbing the branches of the deciduous trees as their leaves die.

Sorry. That's what they do, hell, it's what we all do. I'm not planning on taking a dirt nap yet but I'll concede I don't have that color thing going on for me unless grey is the color you're talking about and the only part of me thinning is the hair covering my scalp. But in recent days, for just a moment, Wow! it has been beautiful.

Industry left New England in the first decade after the end of World War II. We didn't know it then, but those who owned factories that made things got tired of paying the folks who worked in them ein apfel und ei so they shifted everything South by 900 miles or so and only had to pay ein apfel.

Mills that had been in Massachusetts for generations were shuttered as their doppelgangers opened in one of the Carolinas and then a generation later, lather, rise, repeat as the new location became somewhere it takes you ten minutes to find on the map, all in the name of value to shareholders. The business of America is business; remember your receipt.

In Norwich, Connecticut, where I've lived for over three decades, there are tracts of land, monuments to Mammon, sprawling factories in many corners of the city that have lain fallow for half a century or more, slowly disintegrating, releasing toxins into the air and poisons into the earth so that like the salt Rome plowed into Carthage to kill it, nothing will grow. No neighborhood is immune.

Some have been resurrected while others still have a ways yet to go like the Capehart and the gun maker in the middle of downtown as well as the small ruins that ring the approaches to the city, reminders of what once was, once upon a time. 

But this time of year, in the early morning hours before dawn when stepping outside, the stars seem so bright and so near you can touch them, you remember there's no ground light to dissipate their glow or make them seem as far away as they really are. It's nearly Halloween and mornings can be colder than a witch's teat and you know which way the mercury is heading. Dress warmly and mind the shadows.
-bill kenny 

A Pre-Election Scold

As you've probably guessed by now, I support Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States of America. The other major party candidate seeking a return to that office is so unspeakably awful and fatally flawed both as a human being and as a leader as to be no more than a joke, and a bad one, in my estimation. 

Is Harris perfect? No. The last time we had a perfect person walk the earth we nailed them to a tree if you believe the Bible, so I'm not holding out for perfection, but progress. This grand experiment in democracy for over two hundred and forty years is by no means perfect but, in my opinion, so much better than any other form of government anyone else has ever come up with.  

No one has a monopoly on the right answers. Heck, most of the time we can't even agree on the questions.

What makes me afraid is the lack of honest disagreement, at all levels of our politics. We are so enthralled at the notion of 'being part of the team' that we swallow our differences and thus start the process of silent fatalism that results in failure, be it of our schools, cities, economic system, and our way of life.

Our democracy is so swell, that in a little more than a week from today all across The Land of the Round Doorknobs less than 50% of us will bother to vote. But 100% of us will be very unhappy with the election results. Do not let yourself be in that number.
-bill kenny

Let's Hope Willie Is Right

As The Bard once offered, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other would smell as sweet." 

Perhaps, but as H. L. Mencken countered, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”

I'm not sure which one of them I'd send to the store to buy the snacks before The Big Game but I'm thinking the Campbell's folks may have a marketing challenge on their hands since deciding to tinker with the name of Pepperidge Farms' 'The Snack that Smiles Back.'

Someone, somewhere has decided to temporarily adultify the name and they will be known for an unspecified limited time as Chilean Sea Bass. I kid you not. It's just as well I'm not sending Will or HL to the store to look for them as they will only be available online. 

Why? You ask. Because we can, I guess. 

Yes, we could cure cancer, or feed the hungry but that doesn't impact the bottom line. Subject to your questions, that concludes my briefing.
-bill kenny

Meanderings and Musings

Tuesday was a road trip day in my house. My wife and I headed to Manchester from our home in Norwich because of all the stores clustered in Manchester instead of NONE of the stores clustered on our side of the Connecticut River.  

After thirty-three years of living here, she and I still haven't gotten used to the number of Connecticuts inside our state boundaries. There's the Gold Coast from the NYC line to just about New Haven, whose crowning achievement is the Merritt Parkway, a 'controlled access highway' designed and built before the Second World War when White Men ruled the Earth. 

There's a lot of money in Fairfield, New Haven, and Litchfield Counties in our state and not so much anywhere else. Tolland, Windham, and New London are kind of like the Jersey Pines in my estimation with New London being of the most interest because both Native American casinos in the state are located here. 

All are located on the far side of the Connecticut River which serves as a semi-demarcation line between between where Lance and Buffy keep their polo ponies and where otherwise you might hear banjo music (And I wonder why the Connecticut Tourism Office doesn't hire me to write copy).

Not my photo, but from Mother Earth

Anyway. We were making our pilgrimage to the Hobby Lobby store I detest not just for its politics but for its simple existence while my wife loves it. Every holiday season (don't tell me you haven't started preparing already? Slacker!) we journey there to get all the fixing for the gifts she creates for each of our neighbors. 

The stockings, the ribbons and bows, the fake holly, the trim for the stocking, and of course the contents all assembled into personalized packages, each one different for each of our neighbors. I am always impressed. I don't know most of these people's names and she knows their food allergies. Guess which one of us they all wave to, using their whole hand and not just one finger.   

This time of the year the drive along Route 87 is breathtaking when the weather is nice, as it has been (fire hazard nice as it happens as we sure could use some rain) and the leaves that have started turning in our neighborhood are in full fall foliage along the route. And as lovely as it all is, I'm dispirited because I know what happens next, winter. And no amount of Happy Holidays Cheer can change that.
-bill kenny

A Reprise

This should sound familiar because it is, as it should be.
When I first wrote it, I called it:

41.5243° North, 72.0736° West

The Friends of Otis Library hold their Fall Book Sale this weekend as part of National Friends of Library Week. Despite my basement now having almost as many books as the Otis Library has in theirs (as my loving and lovely spouse has repeatedly pointed out), I’ll be on the hunt for (even) more books because we help the library when we support the book sale. 

As a kid, I grew up reading Tom Swift. His adventures were my dessert, so to speak as a reward for 'real reading' that we did in my parents' house after we came home from school and had finished our homework.

Our father was a teacher and our house was filled with newspapers, magazines but most especially books. I got my own library card for my seventh birthday. The sense of power it gave me was remarkable and something I can still very vividly recall. 

That first library card was my passport to anywhere and everywhere in the world anytime I wanted to go. My parents even got me a wallet to put it in even though I was a decade away from having anything else to keep it company.

No longer did I have to plead with my Mom when she was checking out books from the library or try (and usually fail) to negotiate with my dad along the lines of 'for every Sir Walter Scoot and Ivanhoe and Mark Twain and "Connecticut Yankee," I can also have a Chip Hilton or a Hardy Boys book.'

I know it sounds like "back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth" to anyone who's come of age in our current Converged and Connected World of non-stop noise and news but there really was a time when downloading a book to read meant using a step stool in the library to reach a book on a high shelf.

If you have a library card from the Otis Library, you don't need me to tell you about all the places you can go in terms of materials to check out and enjoy, be it music on compact discs feature-length movies, and of course every manner of book imaginable.

Rows of treasure stacked (nearly) to the ceiling

But this weekend, actually, starting Friday, you don't even have to have a library card because it's the Friends of Otis Library Semi-Annual Book Sale, held in the basement of the library, open to everyone.

It's a great fundraiser for the library and it gets bigger and better every time it's held.  As I said, it starts on Friday morning with an early bird hour from 9 until 10, which will cost $10 to get a first look at all the treasures.

Officially the sale runs from 10 until 3 on Friday, from 9 until 2 on Saturday, and on Sunday from noon until 3 as your last chance to get huge bargains, and, I'd hope, enough reading material to get you to the spring sale. See you there?

-bill kenny

"No Gots"

It's probably been around a while (I don't get out much, not that anyone is complaining), but I'm impressed with the ubiquity of the phrase "You Got This!"

I hear and see it almost everywhere and am even more impressed by the numerous non-answers to my question of 'What is it I've got?' from people who just a moment previously had told me I got it. My evil twin Skippy thinks that 'You Got This' has replaced 'Have a nice day,' in the fill-up-the-awkward-silences when we don't know what else to say sweepstakes we have with one another.   

He may be on to something. I get characterized by a lot of folks as standoffish or aloof because I suck at all that Hail Fellow, Well Met! horseshit that masquerades as meaningful interaction among so many. I have, at times, heard myself say to people in need of solace that I have no words to heal their hurt. I'm being honest, I don't. 

I would have no idea when or why to say to another person 'You Got This!' (It's not even good English for crying out loud) so I don't, though I might be tempted if in response to my saying 'thank you,' they were to reply, 'No Problem.'
-bill kenny 

Forever Happy Endings

At 0920 on this date in 1977, in the Offenbach Rathaus. 

You are my favorite love story.
-bill kenny 

Labels Work for Clothes

How would you describe an orange to someone who has never eaten one? (Hint: there's no right or wrong answer). Despite that, it doesn't keep us from trying I guess. 

As my hearing has faded I spend a lot of time watching TV with subtitles, 'captions' is the current favored phrase. I always smile when whatever show I'm watching has music in the foreground or background because the captioning is akin to the taste of an orange. 

I'll see phrases like 'moody,' 'dark,' or 'jazzy,' (that one is my all-time favorite) and try to imagine what someone who can't hear (unlike me, who is someone who doesn't listen) makes of the descriptions. Strange days indeed.

But descriptions and labels as a form of shorthand can be helpful at election time when like so much else in life, used in moderation. Too much thinking can come to no good end for some of us,  it seems.

Remember in high school with too much homework due at the same time, you'd grab a Cliff's Notes version of one (or more) of the mandatory reading assignments and rationalize it with 'what's the harm?' Let's face it, it's not like they made cheat sheets for trig or chemistry like they did for Tolstoy, right? 

I look back and realize some (or more) of my English teachers had to know I was dialing it up and phoning it in. They figured, correctly I'd argue, that the guy getting the short end of the deal was me since I was depriving myself of actually enjoying and learning from some of the best of 20th Century American Literature. Probably still not caught up.

And that's the danger of the label and the drive-by analysis. All ducks are birds, but not all birds are ducks. If you can reduce the world in which we live to a one-word political perspective in how you will be guided, and or how you will lead if chosen, I have a very different word to describe you and it's a lot more accurate than you'd like. I cannot believe you just clicked on that link and now you're angry at anyone other than yourself for so doing! C'mon...

My point: nobody eats just chocolate ice cream, or just vanilla, or just any single flavor at all. We see the world through a perspective developed by everyone we've ever met and ever known. We are all of those people, just not all at the same time. We are the most complex organism on the planet, the crown of creation (with apologies to Marty and Paul) so it's silly and stupid to limit yourself to one-dimensional thought, especially in a world as complex as the one in which we are living. 

We owned all the tools ourselves but not the skills to make a shelf with. The Never Ending Now becomes a prison and not a sanctuary. Too late, we recognize the face of the jailer as our own.

-bill kenny

 

Stop though Not in the Name of Love

We (or at least I) have reached the point in the election cycle where I spend a lot of time responding to text messages with "STOP" or "STOP2END" or some variation of one or the other. 

For national political campaigns that are forecast to have spent almost sixteen Billion dollars (American dollars) that money has to come from somewhere, and it does: mostly you and me (though I'm not always sure about you) but when compared to the largesse of Elmo Elon Musk, we are pikers., my friend.  

He and the plutocrats and oligarchs who control so much of this country, and the world, have the money so they have the power and they do with it what best suits them. I'm neither surprised nor angered by this. We all operate from self-interest, or should. And Musk's choices aren't the only ones that cause raised eyebrows but I digress.

As the presidential campaigns wind down the tenor and tempo of solicitation text messages increases and we've now arrived at the point that I am weaning myself off of everybody's mailing lists. I mean, sorry but if you need my twenty-five bucks to get elected, there's a lot more wrong with our system than just the Electoral College if you follow my drift. 

Besides, I get uncomfortable when folks running for elected office beyond my niche in Middle Earth ask me for money. I'm pretty sure Rick Scott, a Senator from Florida, is actually Gollum from Lord of the Rings, the resemblance to me is striking, but I don't live in Florida and already know I don't like out-of-state people telling me how to vote in Connecticut much less donating to candidates in places I don't live.

I'm sure the causes are pure and true or as much as they can be in the world in which we now live where situational ethics and transactional immunity seem to be used in the same sentences repeatedly and copiously. And yet I remain unmoved.   

Someone told me it's called 'donor fatigue.' Maybe, I just know that it's closing time. And I don't want another drink, I only want that last one again.   
-bill kenny

Barefootin' the Truth

Who can forget the claim 'they're eating the dogs and cats,' offered by one of the candidates seeking the office of President without a scintilla of actual fact to support the assertion? 

Yes, it's the same person who's explained, because his uncle taught at MIT, that he has an instinctual grasp of science, which perhaps accounts for his assertion that windmills cause cancer and that solar power is useless at night.  

I'm unsure how to explain his choice of a shark over an electric battery-powered sinking ship, but I will acknowledge that some roads are better off less traveled (and that may well be one of them). 

In all candor, sanewashing almost anything (and everything) the forty-fifth President of the United States and thirty-four times convicted felon (one and the same person) says is exhausting. 

I mean, where do he and all the MAGA Minion Mutton-heads come up with this shite? Jewish space lasers, post-birth abortions, the government controls the weather. No more for me, thanks, I'm voting.

Mark Twain, it's claimed once said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." (possibly faster if the shoes are slip-ons, I'm guessing). I'm not sure how that translates to Russian, especially in the age of the Internet, but it should, especially because it's frighteningly true.

Meanwhile, many people are saying 'dogs flew spaceships.' Change my mind.
-bill kenny 

An Illogical Imponderable

I've heard people ask (and have said it myself, sadly), 'Why can't you be reasonable and just do it my way?' I'm not sure the whole "My Mind Is Made Up, Don't Confuse Me With Facts" has ever been more true in my lifetime than it is right now. 

I look at people with Trump/Vance bumper stickers with the same disdain and incredulity that I am sure they have for my Harris/Walz decal. The difference, as my evil twin Skippy would point out, is that I am right and they are wrong. My tongue may have been in my cheek when typing the previous sentence.

My point, and I removed my Blue Wave ballcap so you can see it, is we seem to live in a time when opinions shape facts instead of vice versa (as has been traditional in all thought, since time began). 

I encounter people mostly with red ballcaps who tell me they don't "believe" in Climate Change (as if it were some kind of Santa Claus or Easter Bunny), but who, in their next breath endorse the theory by the Nitwit from The Peach State that 'the government' controls the weather. Somehow these two thoughts seem to exist simultaneously in their heads. 

I'd like to understand and also be understood. To that end, I came across an article online whose title, alone, was a reason to read it: Why People Who Are Wrong Think They Are Right.

But don't just read the article, read the study the article is about.

I've always believed the expression, 'My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge' was a joke. Turns out we're all the punchline.
-bill kenny

As Election Day Nears

We are a culture that celebrates ourselves as unique individuals, except, for the most part, we don't define ourselves by our humanity but, rather, by our utility. We are what we do. Our unique specialness is tethered to our place in the world instead of the other way around. In essence, we already know what we are, all that remains is an agreement on the price.

In economic hard times, still ongoing for many in our country and for many others around the world (when America gets a cold, other nations are in intensive care), a hidden cost harder to recover from than a bank statement or a bottom line, is the injury to that part of ourselves we can't put a price tag on, our pride in who we are.

In the frenzy of an election season where there's more action than date night at Piranha High, the highs are higher and the lows are deeper, at least when the other side is telling the story. But the thing to NOT lose sight of when the edge is off of the rhetoric on Wednesday, November 6th no later than noon or so when we realize there is no revolution, just power changing hands, is that a few more of us have become the walking wounded. That old coaching admonition to 'just shake it off' only goes so far.

An adult without hope or dignity hurts, and then, in turn, hurts others, usually those closest to them so what began as a personal tragedy too often becomes a community calamity. Sing a song of sixpence for your sake, and take a bottle full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds in a cake and bake them all in a pie. Crow, too often, tastes the same.

-bill kenny

Twenty/Twenty Hindsight

Yesterday marked seventeen years since I started this daily blog. I've missed only one day. I wanted to catch my breath before starting the next seventeen years. You may want to do something else, somewhere else. I promise not to notice.

When I began mucking about in this corner of cyberspace. I screamed to prove my existence but was also afraid someone would discover I really had nothing to say. So far, so good. So what? I understand enough of the world and the technology that drives it to appreciate I was yelling theater in a crowded fire and might very well happen to catch the eye and ear of those whose native tongue is other than my own.

I make no apologies for or to you if you have stopped by. I appreciate the notes that crop up and pop up either here at the bottom of the page or via an email link that I still don't understand (I am consistent) but a suggestion like 'walk east until your hat floats' isn't useful since while I only occasionally wear a ball cap, more often than not, I'm bare-headed (and mostly bald-headed).

My point, though not at precisely this moment, is I write this for me. It is therapeutic, perhaps equal parts Jung and Fromm (more hopefulness in the latter), or maybe not. I'm not sure I'm the one who can tell. Some years ago, I visited with a doctor to help reassemble pieces and parts of my life, who suggested I didn't really like myself. I was thrilled as he and I finally had something in common. 

This space serves as the wall against which I fling handfuls of, well, you can guess what I fling, and no matter what you choose, you'd be right. But make sure you're wearing gloves should we meet because I like to shake hands. And if you are, I'll try to lick the side of your face, because that's how I roll (over and fetch).

I've gone back and looked at this stuff from the start through here and now. It must be artistic or autistic because I don't get it. Would that I did and pretty arrogant of me to then hope/assume it would mean something to you. That does sound like me, to be honest. I think 'sound' is the operative word.

Having spent most of a lifetime in people's cars and houses, the inevitable and occasional knast (JVA Stadelheim and Marchy and Magnus come to mind) on and in the radio, I'm used to working things out in a semi-private manner, more because I have to than because you want me to. And the beauty of radio over face-to-face is when you give up and walk away, I don't know it, and continue on like that tree in the forest.

The bigger the world has gotten in scale and scope the more intimate it has become through connectivity that was created for other reasons but upon which I have now hitched my wagon. I started writing this because I had no voice where I lived and even less where I worked. I had, like so many of us, freedom of speech as long as I didn't use it. I was Powderfinger and discovered I wasn't alone in feeling that way, but so few were willing to raise their voices, much less the alarm, when everything that made us who we are started to get stripped away. Red means run and numbers add up to nothing.

In my part of the enchanted forest, we were being rendered invisible and if I learned nothing from my father, and the jury's still very much out on that, I learned to wield words as weapons that could wound and hurt those who would harm mine. "Let the bastards thrive, for all I care. Since I can do nothing to stop them except embarrass them by running away." (Thank you, Joseph Heller). Illegitimi non carborundum, do NOT let the bastards grind you down. I certainly never do.

It should be sobering, all these years after starting to clean out the stables, there's still as much once-processed equine output as there is everywhere. Most, far too much, of it, comes from the biped variety. I live in a target-rich environment and so do you. We can complain or we can clean up but we can't do both, at least not at the same time. I've opted for the latter.

I've chosen, macro and micro, to witness who we are and how are with one another when we think no one is watching (actually, especially when we think no one is watching). I'm not better than others because I know I'm fatally flawed (that would make me the tallest dwarf). 

When I say I do not forget, I don't mean I'm single-minded (though I am two-faced). I'm eidetic and cannot forget. I remember everything that has happened to me: who was there, what they wore, what they said, and most importantly what they did (and didn't do). When I say I don't forgive, that's when I'm vengeful and vindictive. I have over seven decades of scores, real and imagined, to settle, as futile as that really is. Leave it to God? Please. He crucified His own Son-He couldn't care less about my injuries.

For the kindness of your company these seventeen years, I thank you. I wasn't always aware you were here, when you arrived or when you left. Thank you nevertheless. I suspect I was not the best company but you're not all that surprised, since you knew that when you picked me up. 

I started this as a cyber shout to prove how different I was and have, to this juncture, more often celebrated how similar we are. I think that part has been mostly your doing, and thank you for that as well. 

To be continued tomorrow, despite popular demand.
-bill kenny

Suspect Only I Celebrate This.....

I had two choices seventeen years ago in light of how frustrated and aggravated the Machiavellian Machinations of those in power where I live had made me: go crazy, or go public. I chose the latter. 

I will admit that often in the ensuing years, it has felt a lot like howling at the moon, and have been told by some it reads that way, too. Everybody's a critic I guess. 

This was the first of 6,227 (so far) entries I have offered in this space, and while the actors have changed, it's pretty much the same movie. I called it:

And to Think That I Saw It on Norwich's Streets

Driving past Washington Street this morning, it looks like a growth industry is the hardware business; selling neighbors large plywood sheets and paint so they can erect signs to yell at one another on the issue of spot zoning.

New signs insisting on the right to do with their property what they wish, possibly from those who've sold options to developers, angry at 'the select few' (as their sign says) who insist this commercial endeavor be turned away.

Another sign boasts about the increase in tax revenues and the additional (service) jobs a new mini-sprawl, I meant mini-mall, will bring to Norwich (even though the pharmacy hailed as 'new' will be an existing one from across town).

Jobs, much like Einstein's matter, can neither be created nor destroyed, at least in development models. If we take six inches from the front of the blanket and put it on the back, the blanket is NOT a foot longer. Let's hope we do NOT need a thirty-seven-minute PowerPoint slide show Monday night at Norwich City Hall for that to be understood.

Everyone's signs ignore or seem to, our inability to look ahead and plan accordingly.

When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
Right now, most of us think any movement, even the circles in which we are turning, is the same thing as direction. 

Most don't know the difference between smart growth and economic development (all ducks ARE birds but not all birds are ducks) and until we learn that, we're fated to waste a lot of time thinking we're having a contest between 'property rights' and 'NIMBY'. It's not really what it's about.

Meanwhile, those whose agenda is not and will NEVER be that of advancement and enhancement of Norwich's economic basis will prosper while residents remain reactive instead of proactive.
-bill kenny

Goodbye, Columbus

This is from a long time ago, but not quite long enough ago if you follow my drift. At the time I called it:  

History. Personal as well as Misremembered

I returned to the Land of the Round Doorknobs, thirty-three years ago today. I had very little choice; move or starve-my family had less. 

I tell people I ended up in Norwich, Connecticut because I lost a bar bet. Point in fact most surveys of those residing in The Rose of New England suggest it was they who lost the bet.

Columbus Day is almost the perfect American holiday because Christopher Columbus is exactly like us. He didn't know where he was going when he was going there, didn't know where he was when he got there, had no idea what to make of what he found where he ended up, and squandered all that he received for his troubles and effort.

When we were kids, Columbus Day was a big deal. In New York City the Department of Public (almost dropped the L off that; awkward) Works used to paint the white line on Fifth Avenue purple for the annual parade that was always held on the real date of the holiday, October 12. 

In light of so much, I as a man of now-over-seventy know that as a boy of twelve, I didn't about the Rape of Paradise which ensued after Columbus' arrival, perhaps blood-red might have been a better choice of colors.

When I was a kid, all I ever cared about was the day off, just like kids across the country. We all recited the rhyme because that's how we knew what we did know about Columbus and since there wasn't a snappy couplet about genocide we didn't hear anything about that aspect of discovering the New World (I also don't remember the Arakawa natives part but some of my little gray cells have had some rough days).

Looking at the world as it is and how all settlement and civilization has developed, I'm not sure it's just Old Chris we should be putting in the defendant's docket and charging. I'm thinking a look in the mirror, as well as a glance out a window, might increase our catch significantly.

And to compound the cacophony of facts clashing with opinions is the realization that not only did Columbus not discover the New World, but he also wasn't the first. We've spent hundreds of years observing a historical event that is neither historic nor an actual event. 

And now, as it's the dot on the "i" in the Monday holiday (observed tomorrow), we have another excuse (and sale opportunity) to buy bedding, or is that just me in the last couple of days? Sandwiched between the 'My candidate is on the special advisory committee to Gawd while yours eats bugs" commercials have been a steady stream of ads selling mattresses. I'm not sure there's any more of a connection of one to the other than there was to India from Bermuda back in the day.

Speaking of which, you have to cross an ocean from a basement warehouse at Bertramstrasse 6 in Frankfurt am Main to get to a certain city in Ohio. That's as may be. All I know for sure is such a journey can take decades and cost you more than you ever believed you could pay when you first started. But it's worth every penny, for your thoughts and otherwise. 
-bill kenny

"Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

Yom Kippur began last night at sunset. For those of the Jewish faith, it is the day of atonement, and a day of repentance and fasting for personal and community/communal sins committed in the past year in the hope of forgiveness (with forgiveness being the critically important aspect).

I was raised a Catholic who was taught to see Jews as (also) people of the Book (the Bible) but who limited themselves to the Old Testament and a God of Vengeance and Punishment. 

Jesus, as I remember, came, we were taught, to fulfill the Old Testament and by so doing, and living, and dying, created a New Testament. I think my problem with my church became reconciling the New God with the Old Testament one. After all, what kind of a loving Deity would crucify His own Son?

Music such as this to mark the Day of Atonement, has convinced me while I may have lost faith in my church, I'm not sure I've abandoned a belief in God, if that's Who inspired such beauty, majesty, and ineffable sorrow in one piece of music.

Present-day Israel, surrounded on three sides by enemies and on the fourth by the sea could not be in a more precarious position than the Jewish people themselves have been since the start of The Common Era. 

And yet, countless persecutions later, they stand, as self-anointed as God's Chosen, and regardless of your own religious beliefs or the depth of your persuasion, you have to admire their devotion to Him and their belief in His providence for them.
-bill kenny  

Brisk Morning Meditation

We had pretty glorious weather this week in my part of the world. Not too hot, light breeze, no humidity, glorious skies a deeper blue than the ocean, and the sobering realization that Autumn, as wonderful as it is, will not last until the Spring.

The house we live in has a front lawn and a backyard. They were both great to have when our two children were younger as they gave them and their friends someplace else to play. 

Our kids are grown and flown now so I spend a lot of time alone, cutting the grass and cursing the lawn. This time of year we watch the leaves pile up as the season changes, but there are no trees to speak of on our property.

I get a kick out of the propeller pods I see everywhere. Do you remember those from when we were kids? Another great invention by nature to better assure the perpetuation of all the various species of trees-not that we ever saw it that way when we were smaller. 

There are so many this year and so many of them land on the walk leading to the house that every footfall sounds like you're walking in Rice Krispies. It makes it impossible to sneak up on anyone.

The squirrels in the neighborhood love the helicopter pods and can tear through them in a blink to get to the seed in the center. The pods are so numerous that the squirrels have actually been leaving the peanuts we throw to them for later while they gorge themselves on the pods. Would seem to be a luxury but unfortunately for them, the blue jays are quite happy to eat their share of the peanuts.

It was cold yesterday morning-crisp is a word my father would use and so do I, in his honor, and that's the signal the next phase of the journey has started. The darkness comes earlier now and the shadows lengthen sooner as the afternoons move on. 

Soon the winds will shift and more often come out of the north and pickup in speed and intensity and the simple joy of crunchy sidewalks on the way to the corner as I start on a walk will be gone as the animals and birds spend more time gathering and storing food with one eye fixed on the fall skies as a hazy shade of winter creeps inexorably closer.

-bill kenny