"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

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    

Gather Round, People, Gonna Tell You a Tale

I know I'm old. At a skosh beyond seventy-four revolutions around the sun, I'm less at ease every day in this world that technology hath wrought. I yearn for days past, when sex was dirty, and air was clean. 

When a half-gallon container of ice cream was actually a half-gallon, and when toasters lasted more than the time it took you to bring them home from the store, unless you ordered them online, in which case, have you noticed, the Amazon next-day delivery that you're giving them $139 annually is now more like the day after the next day. Maybe..

Some settling of contents in shipment may have occurred. No shit, seriously?

Stuff lasts less time now than it did when we were younger, and it breaks easier. And we don't fix anything anymore; we throw it away. Or my favorite bit: we put it in a recycling bin where, at some point, it's hauled, we know not where, and meanwhile a third- or fourth-world country gets buried in our unwanted detritus. But it's okay, out of sight, out of mind. And we feel great for saving the Earth. Apparently for dessert.    

Grown-up word from expecting less, and getting it, is entropy. But somehow, that doesn't really cover it. Stuff just doesn't work the way it used to, and if you wait long enough, it will get worse. And no one knows why or can do anything about it. But, to be honest, entropy is much too nuanced a word. Here's the perfect description of the dystopian hellscape we've created, a real grab you by the throat visual. 

Talk about The Ballad of the Night the Clocks All Quit and the Government Failed. Because that's all we can do: talk about it.
-bill kenny 

A Ray though Not of Sunshine

Eighty-one years ago today, the United States dropped a plutonium atomic bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. Exploding at 11:02 a.m. at a height of about 500 meters, the blast killed an estimated 40,000 to 75,000 people instantly, with the total death toll reaching roughly 74,000 by the end of the year.

Today is as logical a choice, as any day this month to mark another anniversary: when Ray Bradbury first offered this short story in 1950: "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains."

Then it was fiction.

Now, we have global warming, famine and disease across many of the Third World countries; hatred of others unlike ourselves all across the globe, warfare and destruction from the Strait of Hormuz to the Crimea, and greed and cupidity fueling ignorant arrogance everywhere in the land of my birth. 

We're on the path of perdition, paved with perfidy, and don't seem to know or care.
-bill kenny

It's Only Water in a Stranger's Tear

I had someone once explain to me, as if I were not aware of it, that 'Norwich is not ...' (a town in this region known for having Julia Roberts work in a pizzeria). 

The person making that observation looked nothing like Carmen San Diego, who would know these things, but I've lived in southeastern Connecticut long enough to recognize the truth in that statement. 

As a matter of fact, the list of other places that Norwich is NOT is longer than my arm, but I think that's part of the problem that residents, old and new, have with our city and with one another.

"How can we be in if there is no outside?'
We need to agree on definitions of who we are, as residents and neighbors, and why we are here. I will concede some people have settled in Norwich as a result of losing a bar bet; we can probably remove them from this discussion, but everyone else, old, young, male, female, whatever color in the rainbow you choose to be, all the rest of us are in this together, some more so than others.

And if I may, let's define ourselves in positive terms.

As a parent of two young children, when my wife and I settled here in the fall of 1991, neither we nor Norwich are the same as we enter early August of 2026. What we are looking for now, a small city with interesting places to meet and restaurants in which to eat, is different from what those with school children seek, or those working shifts at one of the casinos, or those who lived their lives here and are looking forward to a quiet retirement. 

And all of us look to those who lead the city to deliver to each of us what we want.

Those who have been here for decades have memories and meanings that those who've arrived more recently can't comprehend or understand. Long-time residents look at downtown and see the ghosts of Norwich past and fear that none of what once was can ever return. 

Others, driving through the same downtown to work beyond the city, see potential and promise all along the route even if it's not 'textbook downtown,' while still others see only empty storefronts and defeat. 

Our challenge is not that we each see a different Norwich but that each of our visions of where we live shares a common theme that has us as victims who are powerless to change our own story.

That's where we need to accept that change begins with us and moves from house to house, street to street, and across every neighborhood. We've tried countless variations of "help needs to come from Hartford or Washington or from the lone developer on the grassy knoll." And when all is said, nothing is done. 

Some of us seem to think we must do everything ourselves and wait, somewhat aloof, until the world is ready to find us. Except Norwich has always been at its best when it has been a part of the bigger world. It's when we've retreated into our separate villages and eyed those approaching from beyond our borders with suspicion and distrust that we have failed. We've spent so much time waiting for a moment that we cannot even define, much less recognize.

It's what we do in the space between our birth and death, choosing to be an exclamation or an explanation, that matters. We have become a city of cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Every new idea, every different proposal, is examined to see what benefit 'they' derive at 'our expense.' How about this: who f'ckin' cares? 

Some of us think squabbling is dialogue; it's not, but it is destructive. When we talk to one another, not at each other; when we choose collaboration over confrontation; no matter who we have been until that moment, we all become citizens of the same city, the city we each call home, no matter our language, culture, or color. Let's face it, literally: we are Norwich
-bill kenny

She Was Easily Undone

There are some people you always remember the first time you met them. In my case, my wife and, of course, my two children. I knew the first time I saw her that I'd marry my wife. 

And I tease our children that thanks to technology, I knew who they were long before they knew me (I sometimes wonder if they could have, would we have still met, but I see no reason to start down a path whose twists and turns, and ending, I cannot foresee). We had names for them months before they arrived, and I took enormous comfort knowing I wasn't bringing a stranger into my home from the hospital.

Now, in an era where so much social media and technology have supplanted person-to-person, it's different in terms of 'the first I read your tweet' or the first 'like' someone placed on an image you'd posted. 

I sat alongside someone at an event recently who very politely made it clear as we spoke that Facebook, LinkedIn and Blue Sky were all fine but he still preferred the knock on the door and the 'hello, may I please introduce myself to you?' routine.

As Dylan observed in another life, those who are not busy being born are busy dying, and today will be another busy day here on the ant farm. All mouths, no ears. 

Some blame the pagers and cell phones. I think it's the batteries. Without them, we'd have none of our current devices unless we could accommodate the tether. But perhaps we could, since not even the birds are free; they are chained to the sky.
-bill kenny  

All in All

Our two children were raised on Duplo and Lego. 

This was PPC, pre-personal computer, of course, and the other competitive and complementary activities were books, board games, television, and the Outdoors.

Their minds grew, and imaginations flourished as they manipulated the brightly colored bricks and blocks. Somewhere in our basement, we have boxes full of the bricks, including the pirate ship and the space shuttle, but those two I can remember. Truly magical toys that are something new every time out of the box.

I don't think you or your children had to have ever played with any of that to be impressed by all of this. Just sit back, enjoy, and near the end is a menu of all the others that exist so you can go from one to the other. 

The video takes about forty minutes, and you already know you don't need to ask me how I'd know that, right? Absolute rubbish, laddie.
-bill kenny

Well, The Telephone Was Ringing....

I have the good fortune of rarely remembering my dreams, which would be a disappointment to oneirologists everywhere if I were a public figure of any import whose existence mattered to anyone at any time anywhere.

I say 'good fortune' because I'm wrestling with one I had recently, which I remember all too well and that disquieted me a great deal. My wife and I were home in her country, though I don't know where, and I actually don't know how I know that, as in the dream we never left the apartment where we lived with a third person whom I never managed to identify.

In the dream we had no children-just one another though I have no memory of whether we were young(er) or old(er) than we are now. And everything in the dream was in shades of brown.

I'm not sure in the dream if I realized it was a dream, which, I'm assured, in itself means something though what or why I do not know. That I could have a dream guide on my cell phone 24/7, iPhone or Android, is curiously of little solace to me but does speak volumes about the entrepreneurial spirit and greed of code writers here in what I fear is becoming the last century.

Nothing looked familiar to me, causing me to wonder if I'd become Pirate Prentice as I kept looking to the skies for Gravity's Rainbow, somehow feeling better that if I had seen it but never heard the roaring across the skies, I was safe until Tyrone Slothrop returned from an outing. And even then it could be a stairway to the stars.
-bill kenny

Bloom Where You're Planted

Each of us can summon a hundred reasons in an instant on why things in our lives haven't gone to plan. But the bottom line is that if you want something badly enough, you'll find a way. If not, an excuse.

Be an exclamation, not an explanation.
-bill kenny

Comcast & the 8th Amendment

 

US Constitution

David Figueroa may not be a Constitutional scholar, but he has some real-world experience with cruel and unusual punishment that they never mention in law school. 

Hopefully, he gets his just desserts.
-bill kenny

Beneath the Bottom Line

Someone told me the Good Book cited money as the root of all evil. I figured that made me a Saint, New Orleans or otherwise, but the real eye-opener was the discovery that it's the LOVE of money that's really at the root. 

Internationally, nationally, regionally, and locally across this country, we've gotten ourselves jammed up trying to understand what happens after you throw money at problems that don't go away, and then you run out of money. 

Many of us are living in spaces and places where there are a lot more for-sale signs on front lawns than vote-for signs across our towns as we head into the last month of summer and towards the post-Labor Day Election Scuffle and Shuffle. 

It's not your imagination; we're living in a hellscape, and if the experts are to be believed, it's not going to get noticeably better any time soon.

We're going to elect 435 congressional representatives, 33 Senators, and 39 Governors come November. I'm guessing those CNN poll-takers opted for 'unseat' because 'running out of town on a rail' wasn't an option. More's the pity.

I'm not sure at the macro level; it's not unlike attempting to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. And with all due respect to those in the political prognostication business, a shift in a seat here or there may mean little more than we've traded up for a tablespoon. 
-bill kenny

August Already?!?

Today marks the start of the eighth month of the year.  I can still recall looking forward to the beginning of 2026. Actually, that's a lie; I dreaded its start. I had just begun kidney dialysis and was struggling with it very much, and feared I was nearing the end of my rope.

Winter passed and then spring, and now we're in the last full month of summer. Much of my life has adapted and adopted a new routine that revolves around a cycler for ten hours or so every day (evening). 

I'm grateful I have health insurance to pay for the bulk of all of my treatments and confess to not knowing how people who have no or only a little health insurance can manage to stay alive if they get sick. I'm aware that for many black-hearted and red-hatted fellow Americans, that worry, among others, makes me a Lib.

Challenge accepted.    
-bill kenny