Don't Touch that Dial!

I work hard to stay up on current events, no matter how often the political news upsets me. In my defense, I will note that I don't have any of the 24/7 news screamers as 'favorites' on my remote (there's an oxymoron). I have to surf to find them, but I always do. 

I have a decent idea of the scale and scope of the weird scenes inside the gold mine we have going on here on the ant farm, though there are days I regret having given up drinking. 

What's disconcerting, as I do my hunter/gatherer thing with all the platforms for news and information at my command, is how surreal it is to see life being shared across the country/around the world as the new normal, while we hold hands for a summer season of seances.

News, with both our permission and tacit approval, has decided that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be a duck. We have local news kids breathlessly giving us exclusive looks at how the stars of national TV shows, which just happen to be on the same network, manage to get and keep those luxurious locks or how their breath stays so minty fresh. We always have more right after this. Seriously? Seriously.

A conversation with another of the Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame celebrities we idolize (they're like panda bears; no actual use, and a bit less fur around the edges) is promoted before the spot break and leads the news segment when we come back. 

Meanwhile, that report on how your state's budget deficit will impact your local schools gets reduced to a wrap with B-roll just before the weather guy eats a bug as part of his "Perfect Weekend Weather Promise" promotion that the Suits in Corporate Just Love. 

Can you say Ka-ching? Of course you can, and you'd damn well better. And then we have the generation that gets its news from TikTok. The old man that I now am says, 'Heaven help us all.'

We've got our mouths to the soda and have long since stopped regarding news, in any form, as a window to the world. We've decided translucent instead of transparent is just fine, and no trouble at all. The world is a car crash, or perhaps it's duck soup (or even something in between), and we can find a cable news channel to reflect your beliefs rather than inform them.

Too many facts make my teeth hurt anyway, so get the bubble-headed bleach blond on the set (would it kill her to undo another button on that blouse?) and where's that Ken doll we hired to read those stories the ugly guys write? Did you see that Dimple? Network will scoop him up in a heartbeat.

Turns out we know less now than we did then. We consider it bliss, but we know what it really is. I've learned all about makeup tips for the beach season, but still don't understand anything about speculation on oil futures and its relationship to the price at the pump. If the batteries ever die in my remote, I'll be blind as well as deaf and dumb. Just like everyone else.

-bill kenny

There Ain't No Limit to What Money Can Do

Across Connecticut, towns and municipalities are practicing their ability to walk on eggs while holding their breath, knocking on wood, and keeping their fingers crossed (mine already are-you can tell by my typing). 

In Connecticut, despite the calendar, which starts in January and ends in December, the municipal fiscal year starts on 1 July--meanwhile, the Federal government starts its fiscal year on 1 October. You can't tell the budgets without a calendar.....get yer red hot calendars...

Cities and towns whose sole power to tax is restricted to property are busy measuring three (or more times) and cutting once all across the state, as many, like Norwich, have requirements to have an approved budget for the next fiscal year by a date rapidly approaching.

The only thing the two political parties can agree on when it comes ot budgeting is that the other folks are wrong, probably criminal, and possibly communist (or some combination of all of those).

We go through this around here, to varying degrees, every year. And every year we all get a case of the heebie-jeebies and vow to 'fix' this 'broken system' and then suffer amnesia when the crisis passes. As a matter of fact, since it's so familiar and recurs so often, I'm not sure if 'crisis' is even an appropriate word to describe it, but we generally muddle through with a stoic smile as if we were under siege.

Better a horrible end than horrors without end, I suppose, but this annual dance could end with very little effort, if we could all sit together and work it out. After all, money talks. And some days you can't get a word in edgewise.
-bill kenny

Endorsed by Jimmy Webb and the Fifth Dimension

You know the words and the tune. 

This is still from the music video. 

Bigly.
-bill kenny

See You in My Dreams

I've seen Bruce Springsteen more times than I can count, though once the Greedies took over concert ticket sales, I chose to make mortgage payments rather than buy nosebleed seats. By all accounts, he and the E Street Band are just as brilliant on their current tour as they are in my memory.

Maybe it's because we went to different high schools together or have grown up and/or old in tandem, but if I were to pick one "rocker" (not sure of the definition) I'd use to musically describe The Seasons of Man, it'd be Springsteen.

From the heroine of Blinded by the Light, 'she got down, but she never got tight-but she'll make it alright' to the near-prayer that closes Surprise, Surprise, "In the hollow of the evening, as you lay your head to rest. May the evening stars scatter a shining crown upon your breast. In the darkness of the morning, as the sky struggles to light, may the rising sun caress and bless your soul for all your life."

That I don't need to ever look up the lyrics, because they've been written into my soul, says maybe more about his ability to capture and convey an emotion than it does about me as a listener.

The brash kid on Greetings, 'when they said "Come Down, I threw up' to the world-weary adult, the husband, the father, the brother, and son of Working on a Dream, who penned a Eulogy to Danny to close out his words on that album, has been beaten in this life, but has never been broken.

He might shake his head at the wild-eyed optimist who 'pushed B-52, and bombed 'em with the blues' but knows, too, when he speaks to his father to come to bed on Independence Day, it is with our voice and is as much to ourselves as for ourselves.

We've gotten lost in a country Germans used to admiringly call "The Land of Unlimited Opportunities". Instead of seeing the promise of the sunrise, we see the inconvenience of the heat and worry about the loss of shade. What we once gave freely to one another, now some of us resent the taking, while others feel a sense of entitlement in the asking.

And if we don't want whatever edition of the American Dream each of us is working on to abruptly end, 'With a love so hard and filled with defeat; running for our lives at night on those backstreets,' we're going to have to redefine who we are, to ourselves and to one another.

Otherwise, "And in the quick of the night, they reach for their moment. And try to make an honest stand, but they wind up wounded, not even dead--Tonight in Jungleland."
bill kenny

Not Quite the Good Old Days

Don't know how your year is going, but the first five months of mine have been more than a bit unforgiving. Between long-ago friends shuffling off their mortal coils and straining to hang on to my own threads, it's been harder to be both in the moment and to savor it.

Hoping to hold the moments until they become memories, mine or someone else's.
-bill kenny

Cogito, Ergo Sum

Channeling Rene Descartes.

"I'm not your friend Or anything, damn. You think that you're the man. I think, therefore, I am. I'm not your friend Or anything, damn. You think that you're the man. I think, therefore, I am."
-bill kenny

Mother's Day

I figure everyone with a pulse, or an approximation, is waxing poetic today in honor of Mother's Day, as well we should. My mom wrangled six of us to adulthood, the last three for a significant distance without her partner of (at that time) nearly thirty years.

She, Franz, and Anni Schubert, Sigrid's parents, got along wonderfully well the only time they ever met long ago, even though they shared not a single syllable of a common language. Sigrid's mom was a Rubble Woman upon whose back the Federal Republic of Germany became the economic engine of Europe in the decade after World War II. Anni's husband passed decades before she did. The two women took no shit from anybody and raised children who are the same way.

My sisters, Evan, Kara, and Jill, are accomplished, masterful, and successful. They take care of their own families with the same devotion and the same discipline (no feet on tables, no glasses without coasters) as their mother did. Glenn, Russ (both now deceased), and Joe were fortunate to have them in their lives and smart enough to know it.

My two brothers, Kelly and Adam, and I are married to women, Linda, Margaret, and Sigrid, whose Moms raised them to give their husbands the confidence to go out into the world and try to reinvent it in our own image. When we come home at the end of each day, sometimes defeated but always undaunted, they convince us we can begin again on the morrow because of their love and support. 

This year has special significance in our house, as Michelle, our daughter, and her husband, Kyle, are awaiting the birth of their first child later this summer (Oma and Opa are pretty psyched about all this, as you can imagine). 

Enough syrupy sweet sentiments, before you think I've gone soft, I'm invoking the deathless words of Ray Wylie Hubbard to close. Love ya, Mom(s), all of you.

-bill kenny

Make the World Better Today

With FedEx, UPS, DHL, and dozens of gig-worker-driven delivery systems, we forget sometimes about the service Benjamin Franklin established, the United States Postal Service, or, as most of us call it, the Post Office.

Postal workers have long been the butt of jokes, subject to derision, suspicion, and all manner of indignities as they make their rounds, but today they are doing more than delivering mail; they need all of our help.

Stamp Out Hunger, going on today, is a nationwide outreach in support of local food pantries that are under more stress from more patrons than at any time in their existence.  

You will not only make a difference, but you'll be the difference.
Please, help stamp out hunger.
-bill kenny
 

Two Is Too Few

If you're like me, you have a pretty high threshold for pain. Sounds like a good thing until I concede (in my case), I'm talking about other people's pain. I can be surprisingly stoic when we talk about how 'somebody needs to take one for the team' right up until I get in the batter's box and beanballs start whizzing around my head.  Then my ardor and interest in jungle rules whiffleball cools noticeably.

We have the same aversion to pain when the calendar rolls around, as it has again, to municipal budget time, since it is our wallets absorbing the pain. Our motto  becomes 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable.'

You remember the City Manager's proposal, department hearings, and public hearings? All opportunities to deploy pronouns like "us" and "we." Instead, and as always, 'them' and 'they' wound up as culprits for everything in that document no one likes, including the type font. ("A little too Bodoni Bold for my taste," I heard no one at all say.)

Our language reflects our perspective. Even though the farther out in space you go, the more alike we look, down here on terra firma, we can elevate differences and distinctions to an art form when it suits our purposes. 

"Those people" in City Hall have no idea what "we" are going through. Maybe you didn't say that, ever, but I know I have. It's not important who says or thinks it, but rather, how it colors how we act after we do.

Every year, we have the same tug of war for finite public dollars among those of us who want more for education, public safety, employee recruiting and retention, infrastructure, capital improvements, and economic development. When "we" wonder what "they" were thinking of, something close to the reason we formed government is getting badly lost in the noise and language.

Someone tells me s/he is 'for education.' Of course you are, what's the alternative, ignorance? Don't forget that all of "us" support enhanced public safety, but do you seriously believe there is anyone who doesn't? When we define which ones are inside, we are also creating an outside. 

What we mean by what we say is where we tend to disagree. Maslow's hierarchy of needs helps us articulate and prioritize our desires and wants as well as our abilities and capabilities of satisfying them. Here's the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO): 'they' are 'us.' It is only together, me and you that can become 'we' and 'we' need all of 'us' all the time.
-bill kenny

Not About the Strait of Hormuz

Getting gas the other evening, I watched a guy with a double-axle pickup truck rail against 'those greedy b'tards' for what he's paying for (I'm assuming) is diesel or high-test. I've never owned a fuel pig, so I don't know what you feed them.

I do know the bed of that truck was so clean you could eat off it, because I looked, which tells me his health insurance doesn't pay for penile enhancement surgery, which is why he bought The Beast in the first place. Pays to advertise.

When I last shopped for a car, I spent more time wondering about the leather seating than I did on the hydrocarbon emissions. Because I'm a bad person? I don't know; are you? Not really, we're just a little mutton-headed and set in our ways. Leather trim, I understand, but breathing air I can't see....not so much.

Look at our coasts, north and south, or east and west. All this offshore drilling, and the press for even more, who is that for? Us or U.S., you choose. If we were being honest with one another (but we lie as often as we blink and in the blink of an eye commit atrocities against one another), we'd eliminate nozzles at gas pumps and replace them with heavy-gauge syringes so we could just mainline the oil, diesel, kerosene, and gasoline, because our appetite for 'the ooze' is practically insatiable.

It's not as public decoration that those platforms and rigs ring around the coastlines or those derricks raping the landscape hammer into the earth in search of fossil fuel. It's cold, hard commerce, my brother and sister, coin of the realm. If it didn't pay, it wouldn't happen. 

It's okay because we tell ourselves we could kick the petrol habit at any time; assuming, of course, we all wake up tomorrow morning and are Amish. How do you bake bread anyway? Yes, I'm mocking them-it's not like they're surfing the Internet and will read this. And if they did, what's going to happen? Are they going to build a barn in my backyard? Don't get your shawl in a bunch, I'm kidding.

But I'm not about this: We all "would prefer" wind, solar, and other alternative energy, unless it costs more than what we're paying now or involves changing (in any way) how we would prefer to live. If it does, well, sorry about the seagulls, those tarballs, and fracking for natural gas and benzene in your drinking water. It is really too bad about those coastal animals in the marshlands who were destroyed, but (what's that expression I love, oh yeah) you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

So don't worry about the price of gasoline because we're oblivious to its true cost-until the next time we have to send 18 and 19-year-old kids halfway around the world to sit on the lid of some third or fourth-world country whose sole value to the Bastion of Democracy is they have oil. If you look really hard in the mirror you already know what we are-it's all down to agreeing on a price. And picking out who has to pay it.
-bill kenny

Dick the Butcher May Have Had a Point

Our son and his wife have a greater appreciation for Homeowner Associations and the importance of retaining an attorney than I hope I will ever need to have. Is it just me, or is so much of our daily lives somehow entangled with the legal system?

"I'll see you in court," has become the new "Have a Nice Day," and no one (except me) seems to notice or care. 

My youngest brother is a member of the New Jersey judiciary, having spent the earlier part of his life toiling in various aspects of the law as an attorney. I fear more than one of these "7 Truly Bizarre Things People Have Sued Over" sounds horribly familiar.    

Maybe just me, but I think Naruto should have hired one of those lawyers we see on television to file an appeal.
-bill kenny

¡Que tengas un feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Across the USA today, many of our friends and neighbors will celebrate Cinco de Mayo even though many can speak no more Spanish than is used at Chipotle or Taco Bell.

For a lot of us, today is a good reason for a party, and we certainly don't need a second invitation to do that. Except for parts of the American Upper Midwest, the weather should be conducive for frivolity and debauchery (assuming the weather needs to be even remotely pleasant for those of us who will 'observe the holiday').

Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862

It's too bad we north of the border of Mexico don't have a better grasp of our own and our neighbor's history to more fully appreciate the significance of a holiday on calendars other than our own.

-bill kenny

Ruth Is Stranger than Bridget

In the course of the last decade or more, as hyperventilation and hyperbole joined forces to pass judgment on everything from elementary education through politics at every level of government to life in these occasionally United States, I would, in rare moments, needle drop on Alex Jones' fever dream, Infowars. 

For a long time, all I thought he had was a website, and then, through a former colleague (whom I barely knew when we were stationed in Germany (separate locations)), I found he had a YouTube channel. And as horrified as I was to make that discovery, there are many YouTube channels even more bizarre than Jones'. 

Talk about a waste of technology. His stuff was lunatic fringe for the longest time, and somehow (I never understood how) joined at the crazy with QAnon, which (by itself) put the  "F" in "WTF." That otherwise sane people, almost all only white men, swallowed his bunkum, confounds me, but never really involved me until he weighed in on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, insisting it was all fake. 

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child, much less having a loudmouth lout insist that none of what you were experiencing was real, that you and your deceased child were crisis actors. Decency should have dictated that Jones stop, but decency is a lost value, and it took a long, arduous legal battle to shut him down, and bankruptcy to shut him up.

Proving God's sense of irony is alive and well, The Onion successfully bid to acquire Infowars' assets (though, thankfully, not its head a$$hole), though there's still some legal fandangoing yet to happen, which is why all that is available right now is this brilliant send-up of the usual tripe Infowars was notorious for. Enjoy.
-bill kenny

Thoroughly Thoreau

Health issues have hobbled me for a little over a year, forcing me to be nearly homebound, to the polite dismay of my wife, who married me for better or worse nearly forty-nine years ago, but not necessarily three meals a day, every day.

Until about a month ago, I could walk without resting for a little less than one hundred yards and navigated from one perch to another whenever I had a reason or need to walk any distance. I purchased a Rollater and regained my appetite for walking.  

Late last week, with a cerulean blue sky and abundant sunshine, as my local TV meteorologists are fond of saying, I visited one of my favorite places in The Rose of New England, Mohegan Park. It's been a while since I've been there (close to two years or so), but it didn't disappoint. Let me show you.

All we are saying is Give Bees a Chance

1963 Spaulding Pond Dam Flood Memorial

My favorite place

Have a great Sunday!
-bill kenny

Happy Birthday, Kiddo!

Today is our daughter's birthday.

At two days old

As not seen from a drone

   

Who doesn't love a Happy Ending?

Hope it's amazing!
-Love, Dad. 

Lawn Ornaments Riding Carousel Ponies

Tomorrow is the 152nd running of the "Fastest Two Minutes in the Whole Dam World or Something Like It." Yes. It's Kentucky Derby Day, the Race for the Roses, and a hundred cliches that those who follow the Sport of Kings (and I wasn't sure what they meant for quite some time about that growing up) take as seriously as those who follow the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the Stanley Cup take their sports.

The difference being you don't get to ride a teammate around a track in a counter-clockwise direction (I think; and do they change directions in Australia for the obvious reason), which is too bad because I imagine a placekicker riding around on a linebacker would be quite striking visually.

All I know about the event tomorrow is what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 when I was barely eighteen years old. It tore my mind in two; your turn. And, you're welcome.
-bill kenny

Shovel Down Six Feet

I was born the same year Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. I mention that not to impress you with how old I am ('and look, he can still dress himself!' Well, sort of) but, rather, to help you understand what the dog-eared snapshot of America in my wallet looks like.

We lived in Suburbia. Dad and all the other neighborhood fathers got up early to get to the train station for important jobs in The City. Mom made Dad breakfast and drove him to the station, then came back and got all of us up, fed, and dressed for school. She waited for the school bus with us and was there at the stop when we came home in the afternoon.

In Eisenhower's America, you had air raid siren testing with under-your-desk and look-away-from-the-flash-at-the-window drills, and no one found any of this odd or unusual because we had always done it and assumed we always would.

All the boys after school played war, and all of us were brave soldiers with guns keeping the suburban sprawl backyards safe from all the enemies we saw on nighttime TV shows.

Cold War kid that I was, I lived as a member, small and young, of one of the tribes of America, the middle-class white American tribe. My circle of friends and playmates was so white we glowed in the dark. If I had any after-school playmates of another color, any color, I don't recall them.

I do remember Mrs. Henderson, my third-grade teacher, a tall, black woman who was a dynamo in the classroom, though I had no idea at the time why she worked so hard to prove herself. I figured it out many years later, long after being her student, proving (I guess) that not all learning happens in the classroom.

Growing up, I watched the civil rights movement on television newscasts and in the headlines of our daily newspapers (one in the morning and one that came out in the afternoon), on street corners in downtown and across our playgrounds.

As teenagers, we watched grainy film footage of The War (always capital letters) in Vietnam directly into our living rooms every night at dinner, where it sat on our trays along with dessert. The universe was getting more dangerous, the pace was getting faster, and we were growing to assume our place in a world we were creating as we went along.

We were the children of the Greatest Generation and often had the same sense of history a cat does. It's been decades since I thought about the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" or Wide-Wale bell-bottoms, just two artifacts of a long ago age of arrogant innocence (or ignorant arrogance if you want to be kind), when we took for granted everything we had, never wondering where it came from or how long it might last.

And now, our children impatiently wait for us to relinquish the leadership roles we inherited from their grandparents. It's our turn to wonder what it is we're leaving for them and what they will make of it and where they will go with whatever we have given them.
-bill kenny

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress

My current obsession is learning everything there could ever be to know about Artemis II and its mission to the dark side of the Moon. 

The kid who wanted to grow up to be a baseball player, and the President, and an astronaut cannot get enough information about the effort and accomplishments of  Artemis II. 

The romantic optimist in me wonders, 'If we can do this, what can we not do if we only try?' It's why I have a tough time with taking no for an answer on topics ranging from immigration (from space we all look the same), universal affordable healthcare, living wages for everyone who wants to work, shoes, clothing, and shelter for everyone in need to why can't the Yankees win the World Series (I know, it's early; I fret and like to avoid the rush). Perhaps even get some answers to.....

  

I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I -- I tripped, and I missed my star

I fell and fell alone, I fell alone
The moon's a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone
The moon's a harsh mistress
She's hard to call your own.

-bill kenny

Where the Rubber Meets the Road, or Something

Everywhere I turn, the costs of goods and services are escalating, with some (looking at you, gasoline) accelerating (didja see what I did there?). 

I have a defective desk calendar since a certain someone assured all of us that prices would go down on "Day One" of his administration, and here it is, the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 2026, and damn, if it still hasn't happened.

I feel for the gas station operators, the grocery store employees, and all those in wholesale and retail. They're being held hostage and can do little about it except to pass along the additional costs to me and mine here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs

Yes, I suppose eggs have come down from their dizzying price heights, but milk, bread, and butter are up, so that breakfast of French Toast is a little more pricey than it used to be. Tell you where else inflation has hit, because of the very-nearly-but-not- quite-a-war-with-Iran, condoms.

Did you think I was making that up? Now you know better. Hit the drugstore and see for yourself. Tell the pharmacist you've been hired as a clown for a child's birthday party and you're looking to save some money on balloon animals. "Thank you for your attention to this matter."
-bill kenny

No Need for Carriage Return

Last week, my computer zigged where it normally zagged. The keyboard stopped responding. I should confess that I'm not a very good typist. Or liar, since the preceding sentence was an understatement. 

I am a terrible, terrible typist (one terrible will simply not do) who has no concept of touch typing at all and who punishes every keyboard, hitting them with a unrelenting and frightening ferocity. It is very possible (and practically inevitable) that if you're very quiet right now, wherever you are, you can hear me typing.

Much like breakers against a jetty on a beach, my unceasing pounding of the keys has resulted in the letter "A", the one below the "Q" and above the "Z", an anchor of the home row, to have worn away to nothing. The key is there, but the letter on top is gone.

Not only am I not a touch typist, I'm a simpleton who has to look at the keyboard all the time I'm typing and also say the word aloud as I type it. Pathetic, I know. Perhaps the sound card in the computer chose to work in reverse, and the keyboard was finally able to hear what I was doing with it all this time. Perhaps not. 

My screen saver, John Lennon in National Health glasses, stared as unhelpfully and blankly at me as I did, a lifetime earlier, at his Yoko sideboard watching Get Back, both to the same end and to no avail. 

I have no idea how to repair a computer keyboard, but here in the Brave New World, I don't need to. The solution was so 21st-century — pitch it and get another. They don't grow on trees, admittedly, but it's not like mining gold, and it's actually cheaper than repair.

So here I am, with a brand new keyboard whose letters gleam as they are bathed in the late April New England sunshine of sorts streaming through my window, still surprised to look down and see ALL the letters in all their glory and majesty. The "P" may be silent in pneumonia, but the "A" in Aardvark is visible from space.
-bill kenny