So these Are the Good, Old Days?

I attended Norwich City Council meetings since the winter of 1993 when those on that Council and the members of the Board of Education differed so strongly on the funding levels for the school system in the proposed budget that the Council's hearings were relocated, as the hearing was just beginning, from City Hall to the gymnasium at Kelly Middle School. 

As I recall, dozens of speakers implored and berated the aldermen (and woman) to reconsider allocations for the Norwich Schools while hundreds of others sat and listened. Nothing changed.

In the three decades since, we've had the same struggles on the same topics at this time of the year, every year. The people in the front of the room have changed and as I've looked around City Council chambers, so, too have those who attend the meetings. 

With cable access coverage of Council meetings, meeting agenda and minutes readily available from the municipal website, extended accounts by at least one local newspaper reporter, and sometimes caustic comments from that newspaper's readers (guilty as charged), the scale and scope of involvement has seemingly expanded.

The issues we come to the Council with haven't really changed all that much--they are the folks to whom we turn for repairing our roads, extending a sidewalk, asking about additional police patrols, understanding why schools close--the daily operation of our city. 

They, in turn, route our concerns and questions to and through the City Manager and his Department directors for answers that more often than not generate additional questions and sometimes don't end with the happy ending we sought.

I'm not sure, even though in theory we vote for City Councils to partner with the Mayor in working on Big Picture issues like long-term economic development and community improvement, that we're comfortable with having anyone actually do that. 

Some divide our city into 'us', never well-defined perhaps because 'we' already know who 'us' is, and 'them', another unknown group who is keeping 'us' from returning Norwich to its days of grace and glory when downtown was jammed on Thursday nights and Eisenhower was President.

If it were only that simple--sitting at the confluence of the Shetucket, Thames, and Yantic Rivers we, of all Connecticut cities, should be most aware no one one steps into the same river twice because both we and the river have changed. 

Yet we want someone, somewhere to make the cost of city government what it was in (pick a year, or better, a different decade) when times were good and the living was easy. This year's budget, in another very austere financial environment, has been painful to watch as it has developed.

We, as a city, a state, and a nation have spent money for decades (at least as long as I've been alive, not that I'm suggesting cause and effect) as if we'll find enough paper money in our trouser pocket or enough change between the couch cushions in the living room to offset the stagnation in the Grand List. 

Just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't, I guess. At least not so far. But what never changes is how swiftly and ruthlessly we seek out someone other than ourselves to blame. Every time.
-bill kenny

A (Long) Look Back

Found this while looking for something else. It's from a long time ago; I think I once knew the guy who wrote it. At the time the title was:  

In through the Out Door

On Saturday mornings I breakfast away from the house. I hike to the corner with a pocketful of change and buy one of the two daily newspapers in New London County (we get the other one delivered to the house) square the block back to the house and head for the Golden Arches.

Ours, much like yours, is not at all like the one in the TV commercials with fresh-faced young people eager to serve customers behind sparkling clean counters where every order appears like magic, piping hot and steamy, in seconds. The folks behind the registers, like those of us wandering towards them, are still half-asleep and transitioning from a dream world to the real one and not doing a very good job of it.

When I was a kid, none of these places served breakfast-that was a meal your mom made for you and you ate it at home (after all, didn't she always say 'breakfast is the most important meal of the day'?), but for the last decade or more, the pace and rate of life in these United States have changed so much we load up on empty calories wherever we can get them, and for a lot of the fast-food establishments the breakfast meal is a huge profit center.

There's always a line inside though on a weekend where the temperatures touched ninety degrees and the humidity was so high you were sweating just thinking about the heat, no one really minded standing in the air-conditioned indoors watching the condensation from the outdoors build up on the windows. None of us were in any particular hurry to go back out into it.

I grabbed my grub, found a seat at a small table still large enough so I could spread out my newspaper while eating breakfast, and was probably about halfway through when I felt eyes on me over my right shoulder. 

Looking up slowly, I was about fifteen feet across the restaurant from a blue-eyed boy, head full of wild blond hair, maybe eighteen months old (I'm not good at guessing ages and weights, so running away to join the carnival is one less career option) who was looking at me, then quickly looking away only to look at me again. Peek-a-boo.

I like to think of myself as good with kids (I'm not, as I fear our two would quickly tell you if asked, so don't ask, please; but I like to think I am) so I, too, started to play the game, all the while smiling with what I hoped was a reassuring grin though I've been told by some it is anything but. 

I feared that might be the case when a woman (I refuse to tell you what I guessed her age to be but it didn't reflect her being the mother of a child) came towards me to apologize for Derek, or Daniel or David (the name started with a D, that's about all I got out of it) who explained that perhaps the child was taken by my resemblance to her brother, his uncle, Paul.

That was a name that resonated because my mother's youngest brother's name was Paul. He died decades ago, and far too young, from an illness I was always a little fuzzy about. He and his family had moved to the West Coast when I was in my early teens (= a very long time ago) and I hadn't thought of him or them for at least thirty years until that moment. I do remember as a child fighting fiercely with Paul, whenever we visited Grandma and Grampy (my mother's folks), whom I resembled right down to the constellation of freckles.

I looked into the woman's face but saw no resemblance between her and me, leading me to wonder (to myself) how I could remind her of her late brother or her son of his uncle, especially, since as she added her brother had been killed in Iraq in 2003. My math skills are never regarded as mad but are certainly good enough to have computed that the woman's son had never laid eyes on her brother, at least not in this life.

I offered condolences, more to make conversation than anything else, and said I had forgotten the war in Southwest Asia had consequences this close to home which is when she explained that she and her son weren't from here, but passing through heading for home in New Hampshire. 

She apologized again. I wished them a safe trip and she returned to her table to pack her child up and get ready to leave. Holding him on her left arm as she walked towards the door, I smiled as he waved goodbye to me and, wondering if I'd next see him in another life, I waved so long, but not farewell, to him.
-bill kenny

Illegitimi non Carborundum

I live in a city of a bit less than forty thousand folks (pending a visit from the ICE Shutzstaffel) in the heart of New England (some have repeatedly suggested a different part of the anatomy) also known as Connecticut, "The Land of Steady Habits."

We often, perhaps too often, confuse talking about something with actually taking action and doing it. Part of the reason why, I suspect, is we have figured out that if we don't do anything (about downtown revitalization, the Occum Industrial Park, the stagnation in the growth of our municipal grand list, to say nothing of the heartbreak of psoriasis), we can't do anything wrong.  

Some people in our state see us as losers, which is harsh but it takes one to know one, I guess, but I see us as 'discouraged experts,' when what we need are 'enthusiastic beginners.' If we had a spirit animal it would be Eeyore when what we could use is Tigger. I never get lost when walking because even total strangers are quick to tell me where to go. Hospitality is an acquired skill, it seems. 

Point, in fact, we spend most of our time waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the subordinate clause that follows '..but...' as we allow our enjoyment of the many good things we could have to be marred by our concerns about the bad things that most assuredly are just around the corner.  

A pessimist, I'm told, is somebody who feels bad when they feel good, out of fear that they'll feel worse when they feel better. There's always been more of that than needed and probably more than necessary. Especially here, and especially now.

This a tough time to be a positivist since so much of who we are and how we live seems to be devolving into nativist and tribal groupthink with little room for rational and reasoned discussion. We're in such fear of failing that we've given up trying which is the ultimate failure.
-bill kenny

Farther Fathers

The memories are flashes more than full sequences. 

I can recall a white mug with a round soap in the bottom of it, a brush with the softest bristles I could ever imagine standing on its red handle like a bayonet not yet fixed next to it on the shelf to the left of the mirror and a double-edge single-blade razor that used Gillette Blue Blades (Look Sharp! Feel Sharp! Be Sharp!)-none of that multi-blade $hit or heated shaving gel.

On Sundays, we had every newspaper you could imagine scattered all over the kitchen table from the local (then called) Daily Home News (Nat C worked for it a lifetime later; enjoy the bigger and far better he went on to; breathtaking stuff) through the NY Daily News that, before our parents met and became our parents the Mayor of New York read on the radio during a delivery strike just before World War II ended, through the NY Times, America's newspaper of record and the dreariest newspaper with NO funnies of any kind and hardly even a photograph on the front page.

The good thing about going to church on Sunday was the breakfast that followed and entrance into the kingdom of Heaven (wanted to get that in just in case Monsignor Harding is reading this despite his being dead and all). 

After Mass, there were hard rolls with scrambled eggs and bacon. Actually the bacon was cooked first and the grease used to cook the eggs that were made with milk and fluffed so big they looked like yellow clouds.

Our father died forty-four years ago this past Memorial Day. I've spent part of every day since his death trying to have the last word of a discussion I never started with him, hoping but never believing, I could finally understand him. 

For too many years, I was terrified of him; his wit, his insight, his caustic observations, his heavy hands, his unyielding expectations that each of us be the absolute best it was possible to be, always.

For too many more years, I simply hated him. I vowed to be everything he never was and, instead, along the way became, in so many ways, the person he wanted me to be because he wanted me to be the best me I could. I didn't know that had a lot to do with my inability to see who he was and to know who I am. He was right, of course, you cannot define yourself by who you are not, but only by who you are and what you try to be.

We were six children but really more like two cohorts of three children, each group relatively close in age with disparate interests and ideas. We have all grown to be adults he would have enjoyed-whether he could have ever made us understand that is another matter entirely. 

Our father was very complex, with delights and demons in almost equal numbers. I see him when I see pictures of my brothers and I feel his nearness when I am with my own children, who are confident if not outright cocky, bright if not brilliant, fabulous if not also a little flawed and I realize the hardest job he ever had was in being our father.

I've grown old thinking I could know everything and have had to grow up to accept I will never know everything better. I remember the fights though never the causes. I can recall the antics and reactions but never the background or the final resolutions. I can't tell you if we had a million arguments or just one that lasted for decades but I know now it took two of us to create a blaze that could consume two people so completely. I have scars that will never heal and the realization that I gave as good as I got.

This year, perhaps, I can close the book on the bitterness of memories I can't change and put the shadows of what could have been to bed for the rest of my life. I can do nothing over but my children are proof I can do everything better because of what I learned and from whom. I cannot believe I finally got to this place. Happy Father's Day, Dad, and to you reading this, whoever and wherever you are on this Father's Day as well.

-bill kenny

If You Can Believe in Something Bigger than Yourself

Between now and Election Day, we will hear every single person seeking office in the United States of America invoke the flag in support of whatever it is they are advocating.

That is their right, just as it is mine to arch my right eyebrow and aim a caustic comment or two (I get them by the gross, they're much cheaper that way) in their general direction, certainly no longer in the hope of dissuading them or any adherent from pursuing a particular course of action I'd rather they not, but because it's hygienic and perhaps therapeutic for my own mental state.

I, along with millions of others since before this nation was a nation, have served in its armed forces, worn its uniform, followed the lawful orders of those placed in leadership positions, and done as best I could what was expected of me in defense of my country and my family. In recent days, we've had headlines that might cause some to wonder about the importance of defining and defending both.

The American flag is a symbol of our nation and means to each of us what we wish to see in it every time we look at it. Today is Flag Day and we will hear a lot about 'the flag' and 'our country' before we make decisions this November about who we are and who we shall continue to be.

I'd remind you of the words of Carl Schurz, words about "my country" and how far too often pseudo-patriots have selectively edited and condensed/corrupted his words to support their own agenda. Here's all of it in one place: "(O)ur free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

It doesn't fit in a post on Truth Social or other social media so you rarely, if ever, hear the whole quote in much the same way as we use the flag to cover a multitude of venalities. Today, Flag Day, it's good to remember our flag shouldn't be a prop for personal or political posturing but rather a symbol of our nation's resolve and unity.
-bill kenny

Happy Birthday, US Army!

And....

For those who observe.  
-bill kenny

Jeff and Rod Touch (Ron) Wood

Interestingly, there are so many more concerns about, today, Friday the 13th in a nation of fifty states, founded from thirteen original colonies than just about anywhere else on earth 

From the notion of seven years of bad luck if you break a mirror while crossing the path of a black cat and not throwing salt over your right shoulder, to dozens of local and regional variants, we all know people who, today, are as quiet and immobile as they can, 'just in case...'

Here's a puzzler, filed under 'Things from England', that suggests if you worry enough about anything, you can, and will, get sick. Like the old saw about how paranoids are convinced people are out to get them and when, because they alter their behavior, people are indeed out to get them, does this mean they are cured?

I visit the snopes.com website to debunk junk I see online or TV. That's where I can check out topics ranging from 'tariffs are paid by the country exporting goods to the United States," 'Amelia Earhart was Barack Obama's Secret Santa' and just about any combination of either of those we could think of. But Friday the 13th is a slippery slope even for snopes. 

After I've suggested you not step on a crack, or do anything else with it, or have any interaction with a ladder of any kind for any reason, I'd offer, in a half-full glass kind of world, perhaps we're all better off if we consider today as the second coming of Thursday the 12th, only supersized.
-bill kenny

Nine Years On...

It's obscenely ironic in an age of instantaneous communication how much of what is important doesn't survive beyond a single news cycle. There is so much information and so many vehicles to share it, that we are inundated and ultimately overwhelmed, as news and events just wash over us. 

Nine years ago, today, the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida was The News for all the worst and wrong reasons. What follows are words I offered a year after it happened knowing that somewhere events just like it would keep happening. At the time, I called it: 

Collateral Damage in the Age of Style

There's been so much killing and carnage since it happened I'd almost forgotten. It was one year ago that an impotent, life-long loser murdered forty-nine people in the Pulse Club in Orlando, Florida.

Murder in the Name of the Lord has practically become a daily occurrence and was so even before Pulse but no matter how often it happens, and how great the death and damage, it never, ever starts to feel "normal" or a part of any kind of 'just another day at the End of the World.' 

Pulse nightclub victims 

As a card-carrying First Worlder, without ever knowing it or knowing of it, I helped create the world order that has hundreds of millions living in squalor and penury so profound and institutionalized they will never escape it. The world, as they know it, has conspired to leave them with nothing.

The institutions I have created and support have, in turn, constructed protections and insulation for me so that I have as much, or as little (preferably) interaction with or even knowledge of their existence. I'm not indifferent to their struggle and plight; I am oblivious to it. And they have no personal contact of any kind of me and mine. We are on parallel but separate planets.

Except, of course, we share this one. And because we are our own closed system, one with the other, we guarantee that this dance of death and doom will go on until no one is left standing. 

When you have nothing to live for it makes death as deliverance attractive. And with nothing to live for, it's easier to find something to die for which is only partial solace unless and until you can make someone else die for it, too.

I'm never sure if God created man in His image and likeness (some things you must take or leave on faith alone), but I'm very sure we created God in ours, leaving me to wonder who will forgive us.
-bill kenny   

Keep the Dog in the Basket

I love rock and roll music and have a very expansive definition of what I consider it to be (hint: does not include any Rastafarian country and western or any variation of crunk polka). I do not play a musical instrument, and I cannot sing, though that doesn't mean I won't try. Forewarned is forearmed.

For me, music sounds like what feelings should be and I applaud any and all who make it, and I most definitely include in that number, Peter Bence.

Treat yourself to this eargasm, and enjoy!
-bill kenny    

Waiting on a Dial Tone

I just realized as I was typing the title for today's epistle that I am truly a fossil. 

I'm not sure how many, if any, of the people I've known and or worked with in all the years we've been back in The Land of the Round Doorknobs, have a landline telephone (we do) so my reference to waiting on a dial tone might be as inappropriate as characterizing someone's complaints as 'sounding like a broken record.' 

It's okay, I suspect I'd look good in high-button shoes and a waistcoat with a handle-bar mustache (channeling my inner Ben Davidson). Despite having a cellphone for (guessing here) about twenty years, I still have difficulty making or receiving calls, especially the former as I wait for a dial tone that is never coming. Some day in the not-too-distant future, no one on earth will know what a dial tone is.   

I made my livelihood with words in one form or another for about fifty years. Spoken or written, I threw them against walls and sometimes they stuck, and sometimes no luck. But the words I seem to return to in search of solace and closure (?) are the words I never shared.  

We all get busy or lose sight of someone who once meant the world to us. Sometimes the dynamics change and what was once a friendship devolves into an acquaintanceship or even less. Sometimes there's collateral damage on the human highway and after we've slowed down to look at it, we resume normal speed and never think about it again.

In recent days, mutual friends shared the sad news that someone I'd known and worked with over four decades ago, and who had reintroduced us through a social media platform a few short years ago, had passed away. Our online relationship had been both thoughtful and thought-provoking (all thanks to him as I certainly couldn't contribute a meaningful thought on a bet).

Just the day before receiving the news of his passing, I sat down to drop him a line and what passed for thoughts in my case and got distracted by the hurly-burly of the day and never finished my note and now, of course, I never shall.

And then, perhaps because there is a Master Clockmaker in our universe, I came across an article that reduced me to tears and also offered me a comfort that I hadn't expected or intended. If you've never encountered a Wind Phone, now you can say that you have. 

And you needn't journey to Japan to use it. Just a reminder from me to you that 'Hello' is the first step in a journey we start anew every day. 
-bill kenny 

Forty Years Runnin' Down the Road

Forty years ago this month, Bruce Springsteen released his seventh album, Born in the USA. He's been in the news quite recently because, as far as I can tell, significant numbers of people who didn't understand the album or the title track back then still don't understand him now.

I think he and Samuel Clemons would have gotten along famously or at least better than Elmo and Donny Dorito. 

Happy Fortieth.
-bill kenny  

Burning Brightly

As a grade school child, today, Pentecost, was one of the most difficult Sundays we had all year as Roman Catholics. As a loyal son of the Holy Mother Church, I struggled to wrap my head around the Holy Trinity and God as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (later changed to Spirit, which I always thought was a great marketing idea, as all I ever thought of was Casper, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't supposed to be the point).

Just as I was getting used to the idea of three persons in one Godhead, along comes Pentecost Sunday. When you're a kid, because you don't know the words 'disquieting' or 'surreal', you say 'weird' (a lot). Now, as a world-weary adult, I look at the Gospel of John, usually used as part of the Mass, and envy that school kid with his unthinking faith and belief.

John, say the Scripture scholars, was reconstructing what might have been said at Christ's last Supper-but, but because of when those same scholars think the Gospel was written, it's possible  John, himself, heard none of the words spoken he quotes. 

Ironically, John himself becomes the proof of his own theory that belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, taken on faith alone, by those who did not witness his miracles, is at least as powerful as belief by those who were present.

The tongues of fire, we were taught in catechism (when I was in public school and attended religious instruction in the church basement once a week) and, later, when in parochial school, were to cleanse our hearts and minds of doubts and questions. Seven-plus decades into the journey, I guess they needed to be a lot hotter because the former remain and the latter abound.

But honoring the notion of symmetry and hoping the truth in the lesson is so simple and obvious even I can grasp it, I cling to the example of John and his testimony of faith and belief in that which he had not seen. 

-bill kenny

Do As I Say

We had an Incident in Baltimore Harbor the other day, but with so many oil spills and the like, it's becoming really hard to get as upset about them as we need to to change our habits. 

It seems to me waaay too many of us prefer talking about doing something to actually doing something. And in this case, we've decided that since all ducks are birds, all birds must be ducks. And, before you get cranky I AM NOT downplaying the destruction caused by the incompetence, arrogance, avarice, sloth, and who knows how many other of the deadly sins that have created the latest incident.

But......it's not just the oil industry (multi-national, poly bendable, super attenuated, hyphenated, and poly-unsaturated). When I last went car shopping, do you know how many vehicles, similar to what I bought, got better fuel economy? It's a trick question, not because I didn't tell you what I bought, but because I don't know (either). I didn't ask-because I didn't care. I 'knew' the vehicle got decent mileage and that was fine. I cared more about the cloth seats than I did about the hydrocarbon emissions and hand on your heart so, too, do you.

We read oil spill stories on Facebook or other social media and click on the angry emoji or maybe the sad one and move on. If we were to be as honest with one another as we say we are (and we lie something awful, don't we?), we'd do away with nozzles at the gas pumps, and replace them with HUGE gauge syringes and IV bags to mainline the oil, diesel, kerosene and gasoline, because our appetite for 'the stuff' remains unsated. For every hybrid car sold, there are sales of TEN V-8 models (for all I know; I'm in rant mode. Do I look like I have time to research facts?).

Yeah, we all want wind, solar, and other alternative energy, (okay, not Donny Dorito) unless it costs more than our current fossil fuel fix, or involves changing in any way how we live. That's why Facebook is so great! I just click on the appropriate button and my soul is cleansed. Sorry about the gulls, and it's too bad that all those coastal animals in the marshland ecosystems are being destroyed. Dude, that's so sad I can't bear to watch very much of it on the TV news anymore.

If only we could get to the source of the greed, go deep beneath the waves, and cap the rapacious gluttony that has us chugging down those fifty-five-gallon oil drums like waterfront whores knocking back cheap tequila shots during Fleet Week.

Imagine having a blade in your hand in front of the mirror while staring into the vacant eyes of the junkie whose addiction created this affliction, what would you do? Sure explains the stubble doesn't it? I know! We could start our own fan group, and get everybody to 'like' us! We'll call it "Save the Earth! (for Dessert)" Bet we could get a bajillion hits by lunchtime and still change nothing (if we're not willing to change ourselves).

I'd offer to be the first (to sign, not to change) but I'm booked solid right now with my day job. You see, I lay traps for troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay. Business is booming.
-bill kenny

For the Original AntiFa

I remember the two days we were there in the late spring of 1984, how blue the sky and the ocean were. That hadn't been the case, the historians assured me, forty years earlier. 

It was soothing to see how the sand seemed to go on forever along the shoreline but, when you turned to face inland from the beaches, how quickly the landscape changed to thick bushes, scrub trees, and rocky terrain. 

I found it hard to imagine what it all must have looked like as the landing craft lowered their ramps and men and machines poured from them struggling to cross the water to the beach all in the face of murderous counter-fire.

I was traveling with a US Army Helicopter Company from Hanau, Germany, to walk the beaches of Normandy, France. Walking, as we did for hours in the sand, can wear you out and the fatigue is profound. I could only wonder what, on D-Day, a GI with a seventy-pound rucksack, and all hell in front of and around him, was feeling on what we now call the longest day. 

When you read about Normandy and the planning and staging that led up to it, it feels very different when you can walk the beaches you've read about. There's a taste in your mouth from the salt air and a breeze coming off the water that helps the screams of gulls carry even farther. 

I wonder if those struggling ashore, from the landing craft or parachuting down onto those maintaining their watch on the Atlantic Wall had a moment in which to take any of that in--on a day when so many would die, was there a split second to savor life? There was no one to ask except those we visited the next day, friend and foe alike, at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

When you can struggle to climb to Pointe du Hoc (up the stairs carved into the soft stone and NOT the way the Rangers had to, directly vertical), you can almost, but not quite, grasp what it was like for the soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, first to seize this emplacement (actually to capture artillery that had already been moved) and then, as the Nazi High Command realized, finally, the invasion wasn't a ruse but the real thing, and threw itself at the Rangers trying to drive them over the cliffs and into the sea, how they held their positions for two days.

Today, June 6, 2025, we mark the 81st anniversary of D-Day, the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the tyrannical, homicidal terror of the Nazi's Third Reich. Young American men had been in Europe thirty years earlier, in the War to End All Wars that, as it turned out, didn't. And what they couldn't know as they waded ashore and struggled to stay alive long enough to shoot back at those shooting at them, in less than a year, all the shooting in Europe would be over.

How much we've learned as a species all those years on is a matter of debate and discussion (and for some, despair) as the young men, of all sides, who survived D-Day pass from our earth at a rate of thousands every day, taking with them every memory and meaning we might have shared, assuming we had cared enough to ask. 

Santayana noted that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' but those who remember it was Santayana who said this are also few and far between.
-bill kenny

Close to No Words

Our mom used to say 'If you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing.' I, her first-born, have adapted that to read, 'If you don't have anything nice to say, sit next to me.'  

The older I've become, the less tolerant I am of feebs and dweebs. When I look at the kakistocracy we have installed in the White House, I'm surprised there's any room left to sit near me. But as it happens, many of my fellow Americans are not at a loss for words when it comes to the Fanta Fuhrer. 

And those are just the words you can use in front of children. I suspect the pejoratives really get intense after a few more tariffs, ICE Neighborhood sweeps, or watching the elderly clip coupons for dog food as Social Security disappears. As for the Veterans Administration, two words: buh-bye. 

And yet there's a constant core of voters who stick with Donny Dorito through thick and thin. They hang on his every word, despite how hateful and hurtful so many of them are. No matter what. I used to believe they were misunderstood but I suspect they are Red-Hatted Zombies who have been terminally gaslit.

Cannot wait for tomorrow to get here.
-bill kenny

Smile and Say .....

Hallmark hasn't gotten here yet with the cards, but I'm sure they're on the way. And why not, we have cards for everything else so Happy National Cheese Day!   

As a lifelong fan of Cheezits (not Cheez Nips!) I'm nearly all in. Except for Blue Cheese and Chuck E.; other than those two, I'm good. 

Besides, what a perfect reason to share this.
-bill kenny

Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

It happened on this date, sixty years ago but I can barely remember it.

"I'm coming back in and it's the saddest moment of my life."

My generation and I watched it happen with open-mouthed wonder. 

And then we traded our blue skies and dreams for a better tomorrow for a fire-engine red BMW. Would you like fries with that?
-bill kenny 

Vile and Pernicious

Toiling as an undergraduate in mass media studies, I fell across a book that was not on the syllabus called The Electric Fire (that so far, I am unable to find online in any configuration) that suggested the moving images on our television (and by extension, here in 2025, our computer monitor) screens are processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, where most of our dreaming and day-dreaming happens.

I'll be the first to concede that today's television, especially news, public affairs, and commentary programs, are primarily well-dressed white people whom we'll never meet pontificating, proselytizing, or preaching, usually at the top of their lungs, imparting little to no information. 

Watch a news program (regardless of channel) with someone else and at the end of a half-hour ask them what the lead, or first, story was about. Less than ten percent will be able to recall. That old left hemisphere voodoo that you do so well, right?  

But there are smiles along the way. Somewhat.

C'mon! From a distance, a smile and a grimace look nearly the same.
-bill kenny

Save the Veterans Administration

This time last week we were up to our butts in hotdog rolls, race cars making left-hand turns, to say nothing of softball bats and gloves. Who knows where the time goes, right? 

This will definitely NOT surprise you. These are strident times in the Land of the Free. We have all manner of talking heads and websites pandering to every political flavor in the rainbow and tolerance and accommodation are in awfully short supply. 

We've become heavily entrenched in our own beliefs and less interested than at any time since the Nativist movement in what those disagreeing with us have to say about anything. Besides, they're wrong and if you don't think so just ask us.

Perhaps, not as timely a reminder as anyone would like, are words that closed the second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, all seventy-four of them. 

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." 

Maybe we could use them as words to live by and as a fitting memorial to all those we honored just a week ago.

-bill kenny

Silent Scream

I have a battalion of physicians, nearly as many as my health insurance has under contract when I start counting noses. And I need all of them because I am very much out of warranty and have discovered like the boxes of Cheez-Its that I love to eat even though I shouldn't 'some settling of contents in transit may have occurred.' 

Batteries of lab tests have indicated I'm anemic (I needed NO lab tests to know I was pathetic), though I sort of knew that without benefit of tests or medical school from just how exhausted I am very nearly all the time. As I've understood my hematologist, the anemia is closely related to my stage four CKD (cousins as opposed to brothers and sisters I'm thinking). 

I'm in bed most nights by about a quarter after eight which was a treat when I was a seven-year-old but not so much now when I'm in my seventh decade. If they make yawning an Olympic event, you'll find me on the medals podium struggling to keep my eyes open (and probably failing). As it happens, yawning is a bit more complicated than you (or more especially me) might have first thought.   

Simpleton that I am, I see yawning as my body's way of telling me my battery is at twenty percent. Or it's a silent scream; I can't decide which.
-bill kenny 

I Hear the Old Man Laughing

Do you know how Christmas or your wedding anniversary can sneak up on you? It's weird of course, because they shouldn't really. You know when those events are (unless you're an atheist and/or a polygamist), you remember where you were when they happened and yet suddenly there they are and you're surprised.

I have a more elaborate, self-created, challenge. Because of 'fog of life' issues, try as I might, I can't get into focus (for me) a defining moment, the death of my father. When I say he died forty-four years 'over the Memorial Day weekend', that's the best I can do in terms of specifics. And having it subject to the Monday Holiday rule doesn't help me much either.

I know and will always know, the moment my wife and I were married; the minute and hour of the births of both of our children, but I'm unable, actually unwilling, to nail down any better than 'over the Memorial Day weekend' as the date of my dad's passing.

I've wrestled with every aspect of that relationship for almost every waking moment and it's all added up to zero. I'm very much writing today to exorcise demons rather than for any other point or purpose. I keep thinking every year I've flicked the scab off that wound. 

But as I sit here, I can feel my throat tighten, the rock in the pit of my stomach grow heavier and the taste of ash in my mouth become more pronounced. Again I'm seven, not seventy-three, and waiting as I did most days, with dread, for him to come home from the City. And so it begins, never to end.

We, the six children he struggled to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide everything under the sun and in-between, are ourselves, parents, and in some instances, grandparents. I don't pretend to know the hearts of my siblings, but only speaking for me, I've worked as hard as I could to not become our father with varying and sobering degrees of success.

And if the years have taught me anything (and that proposition is still subject to debate), it's that his intentions, like those of every parent, were the absolute best. And yet one by one, as we could (when we could) we disappeared, leaving those younger behind to be his children. Until he, himself, suddenly, left and no words could fill the void or cover the silences.

I'm never sure if it's the horrible son or the failed father who's to blame for all that was lost years ago, but I know the face I see in the mirror every morning belongs to the person responsible now for not letting go of the poisons of the past to savor today and secure tomorrow. It wasn't mere coincidence this time years ago I needed to be talked down from the ledge because I'd become addicted to loathing the view. I couldn't look but I couldn't look away.

Each of his children will try to make peace with the world he gave us and that we lacked the strength to reject aloud while he was here to hear us. I wish us well in that endeavor. At the time silence equaled consent and thus we became accomplices in our own victimhood. 

I want to shout at the man whose knowledge often overwhelmed the nuns who tormented, rather than taught, each of us, "If Jesus exists, then how come He never lived here?" instead of nearly choking on the words, knowing I always shall.

-bill kenny

How's Tricks?

We never said 'How's Tricks?' as kids and, as best as I can remember neither did our parents. Mom's dad, Grampy, always used to say it and the memory of him doing that, actually just the memory of him at all, just made me smile. 

In German, they say "Wie Gehts?", 'How Goes It,' since the Germans are not especially keen on tricks apparently (I may be making part of that sentence up; I'm no longer sure), but they are fastidious about punctuality and being where you're supposed to be before you're supposed to be there. 

All of this is my way of broaching the subject of how much time of our lives we spend doing a variety of tasks. And, for those who've encountered me after they've arrived late for whatever it was we said we were doing, helps explain my rage, not anger, when people waste my time.

But, speaking of time, what are people doing with theirs? 

"Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving. But how can they know it's time for them to go?"
-bill kenny