Don't Do This and Don't Do That

"I've never let school get in the way of my education."-Mark Twain.

Back in June, today seemed to be so far away; no one gave it any serious thought. The weeks of summer rushed by, and those ads for back-to-school clothing and supplies started showing up more often in recent weeks in the papers, online, and on TV, and became increasingly hard to ignore.

The march of the calendar is inevitable and unstoppable. All of that led to all of this-later this week, school opens in earnest for children in Norwich. It began a few days earlier for those in Norwich Free Academy and in some parts of the state and perhaps a few days later in other places, but for us and now, it's here.

Thousands of children from every neighborhood across the city, and in some instances from beyond the city limits, will be heading for classrooms, language labs, music lessons and all of the other pieces and parts of what we think of when we say "education."

You'll see them waiting for school buses, partners to walk home with or pals to hang out with afterwards. The enthusiastic beginners heading to kindergarten (do you remember the last time you felt about anything the way those five-year-olds do today?), through those starting their final year at Norwich Free Academy and for whom the whole world waits.

When all is weighed and measured our success as adults, as parents, neighbors and residents isn't measured so much by the size of the Grand List (though a larger one is infinitely preferable to a smaller one), the number of businesses opening in Chelsea or expanding elsewhere or the number of bricks piled one upon the other we can concentrate in one area of the city, but rather, it is how well we can make where we live someplace our children and their children want to come home to and call their own.

With all due respect to the public works and public safety professionals, not just here but across our nation, we spend the bulk of our taxes on education-it's the largest investment we make as citizens, and we should expect the greatest of returns.

Our neighbors who serve on the Board of Education have a huge, nearly overwhelming responsibility to both we, the people who chose them as our representatives, and to the children whose education they must help oversee.

In recent years, times have not been easy around here-tightening budgets helped drive cost efficiencies that radically altered our children's educations, and not always for the better. We, the adults who could and should have known better but decided we could wait another day or created rationalizations for why we didn't do something, have to admit now, we have no greater obligation than to help every child succeed.

"The purpose of an education, said Dr. Edward "Fast Eddie" Bloustein, President of Rutgers College, to the Class of '74 when we were freshmen, "is to learn the rules of the game better than anyone else. And then change the rules."  
It's time to start to put that into practice. Ready, set, learn!
-bill kenny  

"Bayonne Vs. The World..."

Major League Baseball is only ankle deep in determining who gets to the playoffs and World Series, but It all comes to a head this afternoon at three for the 2026 Little League World Series and I'm sorry that it ever has to end because I, for one, need to witness and experience the joy of just living and loving what you're doing which is what the Little League World Series is all about.

In a world where we pay adult athletes wages that approximate the gross national product of some Third-World nations to participate professionally in a sport our children play for free, there is something about the exhilaration and exuberance of the competition in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, that I still find a tonic for the soul. 

The animation and engagement of the television announcers, some of whom as youngsters played on these same fields in pursuit of a championship, is contagious and inspiring. If you can listen to the Little League Pledge, almost as old as I am, or even just read it, and not get goosebumps, don't bother checking your pulse; call your coroner as you're no longer among the living. 

All you can be is reminded and refreshed about why you choose to follow baseball. Why, in an era of a dozen other sports all grabbing more headlines and worldwide attention, the simple beauty of a contest that, at its most basic, involves striking a small leather-bound, round spheroid with a stick, be it wood, metal, or some kind of composite, and doing it better than a like number of others attempting to do the same on the other team. 

For a few days, eleven-year-olds serve as role models for adults and an entire team of players, who've just been white-washed and whose run to the Series has ended prematurely and with a drubbing no one would wish on anyone else stand one behind the other along the first and third baselines after the final out and shake the hands of the team sending them home prematurely and tell them 'good game' and really mean it, because the Little League World Series isn't just about baseball, it's about life, as it should be lived. 

"... I will play fair.

And strive to win.

But win or lose, 

I will always do my best." 

-bill kenny

The Sadness of Silence

It was Shakespeare's Macbeth, who may have been the first literary figure to offer an argument on the virtue 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 an era of diminished expectations and shortened attention spans it's easy to understand how quickly we can seem to get lost as individuals and as political units from cities to our national government.

There's always more than one way to get from here to tomorrow. The more successful paths seem to often involve inspiration and perspiration in nearly equal amounts, that is, a brilliant insight or an original idea combined with hard work. And don't forget, some good luck. 

Our Mayor earlier this week held the first meeting of his Community Interest Panel to accelerate the process. The comments on the newspaper article are hilarious, to me, as they prove that it takes more power to be a light than a horn (and we have plenty of horns in Norwich)

My father was fond of invoking 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 of them have that in common with a plan. But critical to any plan are 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 very well for Jiminy Cricket, we're having a critical shortage of wishing stars right now, so we'll have to make do the old-fashioned way. For what it's worth, don't take Pinocchio to any of the seafood nights at local restaurants, at least not for the next few weeks.

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

Articulating a plan means making sure that everyone who needs to be on board 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 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 care not 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

Remembering the Dream

Today, August 28, 1963, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on a hastily constructed platform in front of the Lincoln Memorial at The National Mall in Washington, D. C.. For a moment on that day, America stopped to listen. Today we can be forgiven if some wonder how much any of us have heard. 

Dr. King was the final speaker at what was, at the time, the largest day-long civil rights rally in American history, a rally that demanded, not asked for, "jobs and freedom." It attracted a quarter of a million people who heard a powerful declaration of purpose that King himself had titled "Normalcy-Never Again." 

The normalcy of the United States as our nation's capital simmered in the late summer heat that summer was very much a separate and even more different nation than the one in which we awoke this morning. And yet it is very much the same. 

While for some of us, the events of 1963 could just as well be those of 1863, because they seem so long ago or, for some, before we were born, it is for many just the turning of a page, a look back both in sorrow and in anger at broken and battered lives as well as at missed and misspent opportunities. 

The United States of 2026 struggles with so many of the same challenges. What we have learned (or should have) is that poverty, of the soul or of a bank balance, has little interest in or use for race, creed, or color. Money doesn't talk; it swears. 

Thanks to our politics of division and divisiveness, many of us have become harder people, less willing to give, to share, and even less interested in caring about the rights of those like, and often unlike, us who are our neighbors and fellow-citizens. In some ways, the snapshot has yellowed but hasn't changed all that much in all those years.

Dr. King's America on that August day in 1963 had, as it did every day, despite fine-sounding and high-minded efforts in ten decades since the Civil War's end, black people who were still systematically disenfranchised with more than two-thirds denied the right to vote; where 'separate but equal' was still more prevalent throughout our country than the right of access to integrated schools, public washrooms, drinking fountains or buses and trains. 

We were then, as difficult as it seems to those looking at recent Supreme Court rulings on voter rights, two nations who rarely spoke with one another about our shared goals or common ideals. 

Instead, too often fueled by fear and ignorance, we were two tribes who scrupulously avoided dialogue and discussion on an ever-growing divide of desires and aspirations. 

For those of us whose children are just starting/returning to our schools as another academic year begins, Dr. King's speech and the society and nation in which he spoke are a distant half-remembered historical dream of a long ago that disappears in the harsh daylight of Hard Times in the Land of Plenty with which so many of us must contend every day. 

It was only after Dr. King chose to speak from his heart and less from his notes at the podium that afternoon that the power, the longing, and the joyfulness for which "I Have a Dream" became famous became apparent. 

His oratory soared, carrying everyone to new heights, those present in The National Mall and the millions more who watched on televisions across the country because while TV didn't know exactly what was happening, they did know it was important. 

All these years later, Dr. King's dream is our dream. We are, at our best, a nation whose struggle in pursuit of our dreams lights the souls of those around the world and for whom we are a last, best hope. 

King never said our journey would be easy, and it isn't; nor is it over. Far from it. 

We have come a long way and yet we have a long way yet to come. We cannot get there by ourselves but only by taking the hand of the person to our left while offering ours to the person on our right-and stepping forward, together. And always. 
-bill kenny

Found A Scapegoat

Tariffs and trade wars.

The not-quite-a-war-with-Iran.

Abduction of the President of Venezuela.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) improving the performance of the Federal government.

A TV weekend anchor as Secretary of  Defense War.

Self-dealing in government contracts, stock market manipulations, and nepotistic business arrangements.

And what seems like literally hundreds of other foolish, ill-thought-out, gratuitously evil policies and actions ranging from immigration and customs enforcement through environmental protection to public education policy.   

All at the feet of Donald J. Trump. But how did he happen? 

Submitted for your consideration:

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

-bill kenny

"I Would Grow Tomatoes as Big as Beach Balls....."

I took advantage of blue skies and low humidity on Monday to visit Mohegan Park. After a rainy weekend kept most visitors away, the chipmunks and squirrels were stopping passersby on the trail around Spaulding Pond looking for handouts. I forgot to take peanuts with me. 

The looks of disappointment, disdain, and dismay were plainly visible on their faces as I tried to explain that my decision to come to the park was pretty much spontaneous after visiting the post office. They weren't interested in my alibis.

Many of us are knee-if not hip-deep in back-to-school preparation(Norwich Public Schools students don't go back until 3 September, but Norwich Free Academy gets started later this week), so, aside from moms and dads with small children, I had Spaulding Pond to myself.

Late August summer sunshine is bittersweet. It has much of the warmth of its July cousin, but also a foreboding undercurrent warning of the season's change. You can still enjoy August sunshine, just not as much as you could when summer began. 

I love Mohegan Park and used to clock four or more laps around Spaulding Pond back in my salad days. Now I struggle with my trusty Rollator to get two laps under my belt, but it's still better than none, right? 

Otis Library has set up pathway placards, ala Burma Shave roadside ads, as Story Time stations around about half the pond. I hadn't been there in a while, so I don't know how many I missed, but the current one was perfect for the weather, about a little girl deciding what to grow in her garden (I won't spoil the ending; go up to Mohegan and read it for yourself).

From what I did read as I walked from placard to placard, she is a very wise little girl with just the right combination of practicality and whimsy (not a lot of people would plant seashells, but she did), with excellent taste when it came to vegetables. 

Today's title was part of her garden but the kicker was the second line, as you made it around the bend on the far side of the pond where the egrets like to fish (there were none today, not sure why), and her thought to help me on my way was, "And the carrots would be invisible, because I do not like carrots."

Ah, if it were only that easy to handle the unpleasantness that awaits all of us once the story time ends. (And I think she meant kale instead of carrots.)
-bill kenny

Early Days

It's a fine line between childlike and childish, and I ride on it balanced like Duna on a bike in a John Irving novel. 

I was born months before Eisenhower was elected president and remember (without fully understanding) how sad everyone was when John F. Kennedy was murdered.  

My family used to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on Sunday evenings, but we made an exception the night of  February 9, 1964. I didn't know I was waiting for The Beatles. Hell, I wasn't yet twelve years old and was unaware of puberty. 

And they changed it all, not just for me but for all of us who saw/heard them and (pardon my 'OK, Boomer' attitude) for everyone who was to follow us. They didn't invent rock and roll, but for me they might well have, as I never listened to music the same way again. 

Klaus Voormann's Revolver album cover 

Pick your current favorite performer and remember how you felt when you first experienced them. Multiply it by a thousand, and then that number by a million, and then that number by a trillion, and you're still not within shouting distance of the impact of the Fab Four. 

My generation always says 'you had to be there,' when describing almost anything. In the case of The Beatles, it's a vast understatement. Even if you were there, this video can help deepen your appreciation of the four men who wrote so much of the soundtrack of the movie of my growing up. 

Yes, it's a long video, but then again, so is life. 
-bill kenny

When All Is Said and (John) Don(n)e

For a large number of reasons too boring and maudlin to get into here today, I've developed a more than healthy respect for the passage of time and its effects on me as a traveller here on the Big Blue Marble. 

I rediscovered a video over a rainy Sunday afternoon that I find both soothing AND disquieting (sort of like the Doublemint Twins). Hope you enjoy.

That it's called "Existence" is surely coincidental. Don't you agree?
-bill kenny

What If There's NO There, There?

I keep a wallet filled with foolscap, absolutely crammed. It works out well, unless you were to rob me, as there's rarely any money in it, though not necessarily because of all the foolscap.

Many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a little too tightly wound. That gasp of incredulity you may have heard from people who've known me for decades is legit. 

The me of Back Then makes the me of Now look comatose; I may have actually slept with my jaw ratcheted closed. I cannot imagine in hindsight why I didn't have a stroke, unless, perhaps, it's because I'm a carrier.

I couldn't let go of my anger. The Air Force, to my relief as their employee, rather than dump me amongst the flora and fauna, decided to send me to the head of the Psychiatric Services Wing at the Rhein Main (Air Base) Clinic, Colonel Doctor Robert G. He was terrific-and very funny (because he thought I was, if I'm being honest) and very willing to try to rescue a wild-eyed junior enlisted Sammy Glick impersonator who kept wading out into the deep end.

He came up with the foolscap. Every time something angered me, I was to write it down on a piece of paper and put the paper in my wallet. But every time it had to be on its own, separate piece of paper. No doubling up, no lists. By the end of the day, I could, and did, have hundreds of slips of paper in my wallet. 

No worries-I had to review ALL these slips each night and put on a different sheet of paper, all those items I was still ANGRY about (I could put those on a single piece of paper), and then I'd put that list on my nightstand. 

The night before I would go to see him at the hospital, I had to review the (six) pieces of paper, transfer anything I was still angry about to yet another piece of paper, and bring that one piece out to our weekly conversation.

Within a month, I had no lists, simply because I'd review all the slips of paper of all the things that made me angry and realized I had no idea what the heck was written on most of them or what the words I could read actually meant or concluded (after reviewing the note and thinking about it, which Dr. G. told me later was the key point) whatever had happened to spin me up wasn't that important after all.

How about this week or real soon (and I mean real soon) we all decide to try that?  Watch the news, read a newspaper, check out a social media website--we are REALLY CRANKED about a lot of stuff. 

I know people who tune in to certain TV programs just to yell at the talking head in the vapor box who is making a fortune by yelling at them. I guess they watch because it feels so good when the show is over (explains the uptick in cigarette sales, I guess). 

Others insist on reading columnists' words out loud and follow every line of the writer's argument with a scowl, or a gesture or a deprecation. And we just keep getting louder and angrier about more things, and more people every day. We don't know how to get off the aggravation escalator-and most of us don't even know we're on one.

Passion is fine and necessary. If our ancestors back in the ooze didn't care if they evolved to have legs that carried them from the pond and helped us grow lungs, every day would be Friday, if you follow my drift. 

It's the grinding though, that is wearing us out; the pitched battles we are waging to benefit who knows who or for what purpose. You wanna feel silly about how we now get along with one another, but you don't want to use the foolscap?

Okay--since we're just weeks away from the 25th Anniversary of the worst day in most of our lives, tell me five things this country was PO'ed about at eight AM on September 11th, 2001. Go ahead, I'll wait. 

Too hard? Gimme three things, then-how hard could that be? No?
You want to take a break from all this head noise and hate to concentrate on the real and important tasks at hand instead? Go ahead, I'll make a note of where we were, and we can get back to it sometime real soon.
-bill kenny

Shame on Us

Not the most cheering of news headlines yesterday at so many levels
I won't bore you with the specifics.

Being a half-full glass kind of guy, I'd point out the Navy is considering doing something it should have done decades, if not a lifetime, ago, recommending MA2 Miller for the Medal of Honor. 

But the grey cloud around that silver lining is the suggestion that the renaming would honor our current Commander-in-Chief, the one who holds those who've served in the military in such low regard he worked as hard as at any time in his life to avoid joining them. 

I think that, should the renaming occur, there could be pickleball courts instead of a flight deck. Surely, that activity wouldn't aggravate the CinC's bone spurs. 

-bill kenny

Slouching Towards Jerusalem

In the Late Sixties/Early Seventies, one of the first jobs I ever had was as a stockboy in a grocery store (a Shop-Rite in South Bound Brook, as I recall). I had my own box cutter and price stamper, as we had to 'throw the truck,' that is, unload a tractor-trailer delivery, route the boxes to the correct aisles, cut open each box, price every item (can, bag, or box), and put them on the store's shelves.  

You, the shopper, would cruise the aisles, scooping up items and putting them in your cart, taking them to the front of the store where you unloaded them onto a conveyor belt at a cashier's station, and the cashier would ring up every item you placed on the belt. 

One of us stock boys would place your purchases in brown paper bags (cans on the bottom, eggs and loaves of bread on top) and put the filled bags in your cart. You'd pay cash for your groceries and leave. Sort of a circle of life, but with Chef Boy Ar Dee and Fluffernutter. 

Fast forward fifty-plus years, and we scan everything.
It's called progress (though some of us call it something else).

Barcodes have been the norm for so long; it could be painful when they're gone, and make no mistake, they are going away. 

QR uber alles? Indeed. At least until whatever comes next. And no worries, something will always come next.
-bill kenny 

Has Anyone Checked for Change in the Couch Cushions at the Otis Library?

I don't have a particular politics, especially when we're talking about my local zip code. When cornered, I will admit to being a Relentless Pragmatist. 

I think if you look at the correspondence between the Founders, the documents they used to create this nation through to The Federalist Papers, they weren't too keen on ivory tower concepts, preferring down-to-earth as they built this Republic. 

I don't think I'm alone in NOT seeing government, at any level, as either the solution to every problem or the obstacle to finding solutions.

I don't pretend to know if it's us or the times in which we live, but we (and I mean all of us across the country and not just here in The Rose City) suffer from selective memory while also lacking the capacity to forgive. 

Not even a year ago, we elected a substantially different City Council and Mayor than we had previously. One of the promises each of those elected had made while a candidate was to do what he/she felt best to advance Norwich economically, politically, emotionally, and socially. That promise is the critical component in making our government work.

I leave to your judgment what has happened, or not happened, beyond our City limits. I have just the right size brain to think locally, and so that's what I do. 

All of us have to believe those whom we elected to the City Council or the Board of Education will do the best they can for all of us, to the best of their ability, always (or at least more of the time than they won't). 

Many of us voted for the very people whom, in recent months, we've had less than kind thoughts and words about for their attempts to master economic (and other) challenges none of us could have possibly imagined. 

Too often we've become so partisan, even in much of what goes on in our State Capitol, that I wonder what's gotten into us. We're spectators, actually consumers, of political campaigns where a candidate decides 'for me to look good, my opponent needs to look bad,' and no issues of substance are ever debated or even mentioned. 

As awful as that is, in terms of tone and tenor of a campaign, it's even worse for us, those who must decide whom we support and choose a direction when so many others are leading us in circles.

This election, we are choosing a Governor, a Congressional representative, and populating a whole new statehouse, upper and lower chamber, as well as literally dozens of other offices and deciding local ballot initiatives. 

Photo by Norwich Bulletin

Here in Norwich, it will be a yes or no vote to bond 55 million dollars for a new police station downtown to replace one that's been inadequate for about the last thirty years. 

This is not the first time around the block on this initiative. Every eight to ten years we try to pass this referendum item, for usually ten million dollars more than the last time, and we never succeed (because 'it costs so much!'). But we all see the need for a new police station. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. 

We just keep kicking the can down the road and hoping (maybe) that the Mayor will have a Powerball scratchoff ticket that pays for it all rather than bite the bullet and do what we know we should do. I fear we won't, and then we'll wonder why the next time the proposal comes up it costs more money. On this issue, for me the choice is simple, especially since I already know what happens when we do nothing. 

-bill kenny          

Stuck in My Head

Welcome to a quick demonstration of how I think, assuming you have any belief I actually think at all. And thank you for the extension of that kindness, or, if you have doubts but remain silent, for that courtesy as well. 

For the last few days, I've been thinking about a marvelous piece of nonsense by Edward Lear that I had to memorize as a child and willingly remember to this day. I know from experience that it will eventually go away, but not right away, unless I try to exorcise it, sort of. So here goes:

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. 

They took some honey, and plenty of money 

Wrapped up in a five-pound note. 

The Owl looked up to the stars above, and sang to a small guitar, 

"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are. 

You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!" 

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl, How charmingly sweet you sing! 

Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried: 

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the bong-tree grows; and there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood, With a ring at the end of his nose.

His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose. 

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?" 

Said the Piggy, "I will." So they took it away,

And were married next day by the Turkey who lives on the hill. 

They dined on mince and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand on the edge of the sand They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon." 

Subject to your briefing, that concludes my questions for now. 
-bill kenny

Relentlessly Cheerful

When I write about national politics, something is going on. Either I have become incredibly insightful, erudite, and educated on electoral dynamics and the psychology of the crowd.

I'll pause until the laughter subsides- in space they can't hear you scream, but in cyberspace I can hear you mock me- or we went from knee deep in the stupid to hip deep in the last decades. I'm thinking it's the latter. And you're hoping that's the worst of it but fearing it isn't.

We are slowly going broke, with the slowly part accelerating on a daily basis. We are so deeply in debt within a generation that all hope of finding our way out will be extinguished forever, and we will be a nation trapped in involuntary servitude to whoever holds our treasury notes (even if they're in a language we don't know how to read).

We have lost the war on drugs. We long ago lost the war on poverty, and from what I've read online, the war on literacy, while going splendidly, means soon we'll have no one who can report on its success, which is just as well, as we no longer have anyone to read about it.

And speaking of war, though we don't talk about it anymore, we were at war in Afghanistan for two decades without once ever explaining to ourselves what victory there would look like. 

Americans of all ages and both sexes in our armed forces there who aren't killed or wounded in combat or murdered by the very people they were told we are there to help came back so beaten and broken by what they'd seen and done they cannot ever be made whole, which is just as well because we can't afford to fix them. Luckily we have lots of street corners they can stand on with squeegees and rags. 

Having finally walked away from that car crash in Southwest Asia, we turned around and repeated all the mistakes we made in Afghanistan and Iraq in the Strait of Hormuz, trading desert sand for salt water devoid of shipments of oil and natural gas that the world needs to run. 

Since I mentioned helping and healing, let's not forget universal affordable health care, which many third-world nations, including the one ninety miles off the Florida coast already have, but we sure don't, and aren't you proud to be an American where you can die waving the flag (!) because you lack the money for a doctor or medicine to make you better.
 
And perhaps it's better that we die now since we've criminally underfunded and fleeced private sector pension plans, and anyone depending on Social Security will soon feel like George Armstrong Custer waitin' for the guys from the fort to get here.

It's the saddest part of Catch-22 where Yossarian tries to help his mortally wounded comrade and ends up dressing the wrong wound as Snowden freezes to death while bleeding out in the skies over Pianosa. We won't even have the luxury of a silk or golden parachute if we don't stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by chatter that doesn't matter. 

We've 77 days and a wake-up to Election Day in November. I'm tired of standing this fire watch by myself while the pyros take turns trying to put a match to everything we worked to build. And argue all you want, but we did build this.
-bill kenny

Over the Rooftop Sails Billy....

I love living in a society where everyone believes we should take turns (probably because, as a now-elderly white heterosexual man, I was born on third base and have spent my life thinking I hit a triple). 

As long as the entitled get to go first. I, too, believe the Lord helps those who help themselves, which is why He/She gave me two hands to grab it all and two pockets to put it away. But there's always someone with a better idea.

I'm wondering how much more we might get done if we began every meeting, from a town hall or city council session to a US Senate hearing, by trying the balloon trick. 

At the very least, we'd have an opportunity to meet someone both like and unlike ourselves. Of course, as Mae West pointed out, the danger with balloons is that it takes only one prick to ruin everything.
-bill kenny

O, No!

On my way into an office building the other day, I saw a sign on (what proved to be)  the only working elevator in the facility that read "OOC." I must have been raised by hermit crabs or something, since most of the stuff everyone else seems to know automatically I not only never knew but, upon learning react very badly in responding to. 

This elevator thing was both the former and the latter. I learned OOC, notice the caps, is "short for 'out of commission.'" Really? Actually, as I pointed out to the explainer, broken is short for 'out of commission'; I'm not sure what OOC actually is except stupid because of the second O.

My problem with the second O? Since when does 'of'' get its own letter? We are Living in the USA, not the USOA, which is what we should be if the elevator is OOC. Perhaps it's a 'good for the goose, good for the gander' rule, as SL could mean almost anything but we all know about SOL. And why isn't it SOOL since the o's are for 'out of'?

Do you remember "FYI"-for your information? Now it's been moved upscale and uptown to FYSA, for your situational awareness. Huge improvement, don't you think? I am not making that up-I got a note in the mail recently that began with a paragraph explaining FYSA with this doozie: BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front.

If the purpose of the acronym is to speed communications, but, in so doing, you must halt the conversational flow to explain your intellectual shorthand, what have you saved, and for whom? And is that always, or even more than sporadically, a good idea? 

It's not like we can buy anything with all this additional time, and I don't know where you can trade it in for vowels and consonants to make even more words to explain that cunning stunt (say that three times fast) you invented. But I'm willing to give it a go if you are, OIBiY. Oh, I Believe in Yesterday. Saved you a whole 2:05 right there. You're welcome.
-bill kenny  

Take a Number

These are dog days politically in Norwich this summer. So many of us are angry about so many things; it's truly a target-rich environment here in the Rose of New England. 

Our current top blood boiler (or close) is the ongoing operational and jurisdictional tug of war between/among four of the five volunteer fire companies in the Town Consolidated Districts, who, together with the paid fire department for the Consolidated City District, maintain our fire protection. 

The Jersey boy in me thinks it's a turf war, but that's probably an unkind oversimplification. Or not. Anyway. Everyone has lawyers, and who knows how long this will continue. But it makes for lively social media, trust me. 

The police are desperate to have a new, more up-to-date facility. They've been making do with a building that's been too small for the almost thirty-five years my family and I have lived here. The solution has always been, 'let's wait until economic times improve' before taking on a lot of added debt for construction. 

That mindset had voters reject a proposal for a thirty-million-dollar facility about a decade ago and then years later, a forty-million-dollar facility. Since it's never been built, the current price tag voters will look at this November for a new police station is now fifty-five million dollars. And still I encounter fellow residents who don't understand why the cost keeps rising.   

We have a possible massive expansion of our Grand List, which might help homeowners like me who have about 70% of the property tax burden right now, with an Amazon Fulfillment Center being sited in our still-has-that-new-industrial-park-smell-on-it in the Occum Industrial Park. There will be public hearings on this, since online chatter has been all over the map, with support and opposition reactions.    

All three of these issues have many aspects: economic, public safety, political (what isn't these days, right?), and rarely spoken but plainly visible, purely personal. We are a small town with lots of like-minded people to match, and we're happiest when we're unhappy. At this moment in the summer of our discontent, like it or not, we are delirious. 
-bill kenny

Picture This

Thanks to smartphones, everyone and anyone can be a photographer.
Not necessarily an Ansel Adams, or in my case, Gomez Addams, but we can dream, can't we?  

I admire great pictures. FULL DISCLOSURE: I consider any photograph I like 'great,' so there's a circular circulation thing going on there, and I have known some very talented photographers willing to be seen in public with me. 

But today, I wanted to share these images because they're breathtakingly beautiful.
-bill kenny

Better Living through Chemistry

There's been a generational changing of the guard with (illegal) drugs in America. When I was a wee slip of a lad, not that I or anyone I knew ever partook of The Herb, in the late Sixties and early Seventies "drugs" was marijuana and if you were flush, hashish. Stop asking about those Uriah Heep and Lothar and the Hand People albums in my collection, okay?

It was all very social and sociable, both communal and community at the same time. You rarely heard anyone say 'I have weed, I'll see you later' but more often, 'We have weed, man am I hungry.' I've been told marijuana may have been responsible for the spread of fast-food places to all sorts of off-campus locations across the country. 

Don't know if it's true, but will point out that I lost more than one friend who went for a shake and an order of fries and never returned. Funny. Once governments at all levels figured out how to tax it, marijuana was legalized. Sort of like the miracle at Cana.

The Eighties saw the spread of Chutes and Ladders and pharmaceuticals like Quaaludes, perhaps the dumbest drug ever created (until fentanyl). We cranked up the crazy in the Nineties with just enough malice and mayhem to require a separate category for 'hard drugs' like morphine, heroin, methamphetamine and the ever-ubiquitous crack.

And as the drugs got harder, so, too, did the people who dealt them because it became a multi-billion dollar business. The head shop with the dime baggies under the counter between the patchouli oil and the electric bongs gave way to the cigar boats we first saw on Miami Vice, which, in turn, were co-opted by narcotics submarines and human mules. 

It was we who helped create the appetite for self-destruction that fuels businesses which create cascades of cash, and the violence needed to protect that cash and all the trappings and trimmings that go with it, while at the same time funding a "war on drugs" that siphons off nearly as much money as the disease it purports to be battling. 
-bill kenny

Der Bingle Was Right

I came across a thought from Dr. Robert Anthony, who enjoys a reputation as a relentless optimist, prompting an acquaintance to offer wryly, 'he's never been to Norwich.' That would be funny if it were not also true.

I've adopted the good Doctor's mentality as my own, because in the dog days of summer, I can use all the help I can get and because the last time I had an original idea, it died of loneliness. Here's his most (to me) memorable observation: "Most people would rather be certain they're miserable than risk being happy."

Seriously.
Who does that sound like? Anyone we know? 

Having arrived here almost thirty-five years ago with my family, I believe I've been here long enough to consider myself from Norwich, but I'm still not used to the cheery cheerfulness with which we expect things to fail.

The poets say "it's always darkest before dawn," and often it seems our clocks are stuck at a minute before daybreak. To make matters worse, assuming that's possible, not only are too many of us permanently unhappy, we seem to begrudge others any happiness as well. As if happiness were something so finite and so rationed that every time I smiled or laughed, you lost an opportunity to do the same.

What we have is a system that dictates that for me to look good, you need to look bad (at whatever you do or whomever you are). Everything that is perceived as successful is because of my efforts, and failures are despite my attempts. Each of us is quick to claim the credit but even faster to parcel out blame. 

But the problems of any city are bigger than any one person or one group of persons. Instead of concentrating on creating a definition of our city's economic and political challenges and opportunities (the indefinite article is deliberate), we have little tribes, some larger than others but all working in an intellectual and cooperative vacuum, who each claim to have devised the solution that must be accepted and implemented immediately.

That's when the waiting game begins-the waiting to see an idea fail; not 'if' it will fail, but 'when.' We can then search for the guilty, reward those who were not involved in the attempted and now discredited solution, and become enthused for the next Flavor of the Month proposal that comes along. We may secretly believe it, too, will fail completely, but no one wants to say that aloud and not be a team player.

We value false comity over genuine collaboration. What's needed is a team vision that attracts supporters and a process to produce results for the benefit of everyone rather than at the expense of some. Government that's done for people and not something done to them. Perhaps then we'll start to see happiness.
-bill kenny

B-52's, Clean-Up in Aisle Seven

I was taking a shortcut last Tuesday afternoon, looking for Triscuits in my grocer's. I assume stores in big cities have aisles reserved just for specific products, in my case, Cheerios, Cheez-Its (only the originals; NONE of the variations), and seedless grapes, but then I remember that I live in a small town and we can't have all the amenities we want. Some settling and sharing of contents may occur in shipment, and there's not a whole lot any of us can do about it.

By taking the shortcut, I ended up confronting the lobsters in the seafood department. I should tell you that the Gordon Fisherman needn't brave the dark and rolling sea for me. I eat fish sticks and just about nothing else. 

And if I were to be honest, what I actually eat are tightly compacted breadcrumbs that may or may not have fish in/near/close to them. One of the 'great things' people I worked with always told me as I was preparing to relocate to The Land of Round Doorknobs was how I could now have all the seafood I liked. I never had the heart to tell them I had all the seafood I liked by the time I was five.

Living in Southeastern Connecticut, where the farther north you head up the coast until you're Down East, the wider the A gets in lobstah, I cannot eat them and have trouble even looking at 'em. 

I'm a card-carrying carnivore; pork, chicken, lamb, beef, have napkin will travel. Fish, shellfish, crustaceans (nattily-attired and otherwise) not so much. If you and I were to be marooned on a desert island, you should kill me immediately, since I can tell you right now, I'd eat you right after you'd fattened yourself up on all the fish you'd caught. Doubt me? Doze at your peril.

Staring at the lobsters in the glass tank (why do they have to be kept like that? This is somehow more humane than a box with metal sides? ) I was almost going to type forlorn looking but I have no idea what part of the lobster is the face, though I think I know what the mouth is (but NOT why it looks like they're talking all the time) and I've no clue what a forlorn one would look like in comparison to a joyous one. 

I suspect the easiest way to tell them apart is a joyous one probably doesn't have giant rubber bands around the pincers (claws?) because it's on the ocean floor instead of in a glass tank in a supermarket.

I wanted to ask the guy behind the counter if the store feeds the lobsters before people buy them (and if so, what?), but they were selling so quickly the question was moot. It's strange watching them stacked atop one another, not really grasping the deal with the rubber band and still trying to get at each other in such a confined space. 

If they're capable of thought, are they sitting there thinking 'this is the crappiest day of my life!' Until the hand (and arm) of Fate surprises them and they're momentarily borne aloft and suddenly learn there are worse things in life than being in a glass tank. 

I ducked into the next aisle, Prepared Food, when I flashed on the notion that for all other carnivorous predators on this planet we are unprepared food. Yes, Virginia, there is a free lunch. We're eating it now. Praise the Lord and pass the cocktail sauce.
-bill kenny