Passion Calls Shotgun

I drive a Subaru Forester. I mention that not because I hope for a sponsorship quid pro quo (though a new Tribeca would fit quite nicely in my driveway) but more so that you have some idea of my automotive erotica level.

The car (and I call anything I drive a 'car' until it won't start and then I've another name for it) is black, if that helps fructify your fantasies and if tell you it has a leather interior do you need a cigarette break or a cold shower? One or the other, not both.

Coming out of my gym (it's a fitness center and doesn't have someplace to play basketball which for me is the critical separator between the two), on my way back to my car past a lot of dripping wet people and discarded cigarette butts, I passed a grey and white Smart car. Actually, as it said on the passenger door, I was walking past a Passion.

I don't get Smart cars, any of them (it's you and not me, I think) and Passion would not have been my first choice for a name. It looks like a shipping container on a grocery cart suspension but I'm sure looks are deceiving. And if you own one, I'm sure you are hoping they are.

All I ever think of when I see them is that they are an argument on why intelligent, energy-efficient and environmentally friendly cars will never catch on. As I had just been in the fitness center and it was still oh-my-Gawd-it's-early o'clock with few folks inside I knew who the driver was, Teva Churn's are a give-away, and I rest my case.

Smart Car people: As it is right now your car is homely, not cute and quite frankly so ugly it would frighten me every morning to open the garage door and see it inside, waiting for me and I do NOT need any more incentives to hate going to work. That's part of my employer's job.

In much the same way as many more people would eat broccoli if it tasted like chocolate, bribe the Lamborghini folks to design your next body. Or if they're busy, get Lindt on the phone. Actually in the interests of sales, you'd be better served by partnering with M & M otherwise all that passion is a cocoa puddle come summer.
-bill kenny

Hemingway Was Right

Unless you're intending to spend the day in bed and if you're still abed at this hour you're well on your way, no matter how yesterday's election results turned out, both for you and I and our preferences and desires, as well as for those of our neighbors who offered to stand (and/or stand again) in the fire for what we like to think of as 'the greater good,' and serve the community, the sun will rise and this day will run its course.

Just as it did the last time we went to the polls and the time before and the time before that, lather, rinse, repeat, despite what we hoped or feared, we've proven the only constant is change (and pony rides, even if they never catch on).

It certainly isn't voter turnout but I'm done wringing my hands over stay-at-home voters. Passing the Wauregan the other day, I remembered a quote from a purported, long-ago guest, Abraham Lincoln, Perhaps we should all invest in oven mitts just in case it really is eaten as hot as it's served.

Regardless of how we voted yesterday, either by casting a ballot or by NOT voting and allowing other people to make decisions for us, we will all now live with the consequences. Those elected yesterday regardless of your or my ballot are now our alder(wo)men-elect and Board of Education.

Those chosen offered to help lead, and we need to extend to them the courtesy of listening and then speaking, be it in support or in opposition, but most especially in that order. Maybe that's why we have two ears and one mouth so the proportions work out right.

But even as some prepare for new responsibilities or to bear, again, the burdens of elected office, we owe a kind thought and a debt of gratitude to everyone who was a candidate. Whether you were a Victor or a Yugo, thank you for offering to help. If you triumphed the glow of victory you felt may resemble a different kind of fire a little lower on your body in the not too distant future as we, who turned to you now turn on you.

There will be days when you wondered why you ever thought running for office was a good idea, but whether we know it or nor (or are willing to admit it) we need you to be who you are and where you are right now.

There's far more right in our city than we may be willing to admit even to one another and somehow you'll have to assemble and assimilate those successes to build a critical mass and move us ahead, farther and faster than we have already gone, and perhaps more than we are prepared or willing to do.

You and we are now joined and when you succeed, so, too, do we. Together we can do anything but we must accept that we can't do everything. When you asked us about public education, infrastructure, public safety, economic development and improvements in our quality of life, we told you so you know our expectations.

Somehow, you must balance what we want with what we need and what we can afford. As happy as some are today, others will be a lot less so much sooner than they'd imagined. It's the price we pay to live where we'd like with those whom we love. The wheel never stops-it paused yesterday but is in motion again.

No matter the conditions even though the dogs howl in protest, the journey continues and the caravan moves on. With or without you.
-bill kenny

Today's Four Letter Word

Our polls open at six this morning and close at eight tonight. I imagine yours are about the same. Don't buy the hype about 'it's just a municipal election.' Yes, getting to vote for the President, Senators and Congressmen/women, is all so exciting I almost always want to smoke a cigarette after I do (and I gave that habit up seventeen plus years ago). And I'll concede the rush of voting for Governor, State Senators and state House Representatives does rival some other activities that I recall fondly but we are at the point where the road and the sky collide.

The President cannot get the streetlight in front of my house fixed (mine work, but such as it is, that's my example). The Governor will listen sympathetically to my tale of woe about the paving on So and so Boulevard, but all the heavy lifting to get bulbs replaced or asphalt spread in my town happens with the neighbors I choose today for tomorrow.

And that's how it works where you live and if it doesn't you need to change or move, whichever works for you. I may not like your choices and wouldn't be surprised to discover you cannot stand mine, but we don't have to. We're not choosing the King or the Queen of the Prom today just the people who most immediately impact, positively or negatively, our quality of life.

Our parents used to say 'you get along by going along' so you need to get along and find your polling station and cast your ballot if not upon the waters than in a machine, a ballot box or a scanner. We've done a lot of talking about what's wrong since the flood waters started to recede and I for one think what with the end of Daylight Savings and all that it's high time for doing.

So stop reading and start deciding which side you're on and how we can make where we live better. It all begins with a ballot, so vote. Thanks.
-bill kenny

Adventures in the World of Self

I have, in recent weeks, made it a point usually in the middle of the morning, to change into what I used to call sneakers but now I think of as my sexy red kicks (I picked that up on urban dictionary in a forlorn and ultimately failed effort to understand a note someone my children's age had written to me) and head over to what, when I had sneakers, was a gym but now that I have kicks is a fitness center.

We use language now to mask meaning rather than to enhance it. A decade ago instead of referring to staff members' spouses who were with child as 'pregnant' or 'expecting' (the worst? a miracle?) we used 'generating dependents.' From the language of Shakespeare and Wordsworth comes such a gem. Our parents should be so proud. I am no longer afraid of dying but being living impaired scares the bejabbers out of me.

I mention fitness centers in my kicks and the sounds of one hand clapping, the gap between Ben Cohn and a zen koan gets more narrow by the moment and the precise unit of measurement to plot this gap is called Leonard. But I digress.

I was walking on the indoor track which is suspended overhead above the rest of the facility which includes what appears to be acres of basketball courts and volleyball whatever-they're-called, weight machines and free weights (like I know the difference; one or the other stroked me out in February and I did an overnight in the hospital (for which we have no trendy alternate name, how about 'Wellness Warehouse' or 'Salubrity Central'?)) and those heave and ho kettle balls and what looks like a small mountain you climb up and climb down, leaving me to wonder why climb at all.

I walk and do so at a very brisk pace because I get so angry at work in recent weeks that I fear I will set fire to all the wooden objects in my office and then use passers-by in the hallway to put the blaze out. I am especially afraid that other people have been compiling lists of folks I should use and will offer me a copy of it while passing along kindling. Some of those doing the compilation are already on my list so I think surprise may be about to make its debut on the periodic table of elements.

I listen to very new, to me, alternative metal and other abrasive near-musics (some of it sounds like a cat dropped into a blender; I now know how my father felt about The Rolling Stones) while so doing because there's little risk I'll sing along to songs I've never before heard (though not NO risk).

I looked down the other day at the handful of other people using the various equipment and realized we were all wearing headphones (or ear buds, another newspeak term that makes me smile). I was on my Planet Me which all the other not-quite Celestial Terrestrials on their respective planets could not acknowledge nor need to, wie du mir so Ich dir, and conceded we were alone together, like two year olds in parallel play, gaining nothing from the social interaction because there was none.

Judging from the aroma, one of them might have been wearing lighter fluid as an aftershave unless my nose deceives me, but a wish is a hope you make with your heart. Would definitely have to lose the tin foil hat. Then we'd see the sparks fly.

-bill kenny

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

With all due respect to the vernal equinox, today is the longest day of the year if you count only the hours in it. In the oh-bright-early moments of Sunday we set our clocks back all across the Land of the Round Doorknobs except where we didn't. Must be magic living in the Navajo Nation as Arizona around you doesn't set its clocks back though with its current governor, they're already at least a century behind.

You probably did what I have done/am doing, slept through it and will spend the rest of today and into tomorrow (and maybe Tuesday) finding timepieces I forgot to set back last night. In fairness, I will point out now, I will also forget to set them forward whenever the heck it is we next do that. (Which will be March 9, 2014. I looked it up because I'm anal that way; you're welcome because you are, too.) Time flies except when it crawls.

Every other life form with which we share this planet would look at us with pity and dismay if they were capable of such emotions as we are the only species to meter and measure what flows like rain, the time we have for life. Today, we have an extra hour to our glory or to our shame. It is up to us to decide whether we are a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

Be an exclamation not an explanation. Start today while you have the time.
-bill kenny

20/20 Hindsight

I am trying to understand the Republican Party or at least that portion of its membership wandering the halls of Congress. I have all my shots and agree with the adage, 'lie down with dogs and get up with fleas,' but still I'm sad.

Led by a self-aggrandizing junior Senator from Texas, they took this country to the brink and beyond of fiscal and moral bankruptcy (and, as it turns out gave me and mine sixteen days of paid vacation I didn't ask for or earn-not that I'm offering to give the money back) over what they called "Obamacare" which doesn't actually exist because it's called the Affordable Care Act.

They blinked and lost the battle though based on the troubles healthcare.gov is having just staying up it seems had they shut up they'd have advanced their own cause and yet, Republicans is as Republicans does...can't see the Forrest for the Gump.

Now, they're having hearings because they're outraged, I tell you, o-u-t-r-a-g-e-d, over how spectacular and epic the failure of the government's web portal for Affordable Care, the aforementioned healthcare.gov has been when exposed to the light of day. Huh?

You'd think they'd be thrilled. Gloating and strutting-and they are, but they are lecturing and feigning a degree of concern I really didn't think the Koch Brothers had budgeted for when they bought this lot. To me, all the theater on TV and you know it's theater when Faux Gnus covers it live because those prehensile cretins never allow anything whose outcome they don't already control to slither on to their news set.

But there we all are, eating it up with a spoon. You go ahead and squirm Kathleen Sibelius-that sound you hear is the bus under which your President has thrown you. If you think, Madame Secretary (heh-heh, I said Madame), more than a handful of the stuffed shirts in the front of the room know how to even turn a computer on, well, perhaps that's a line of inquiry best left for another time.

The United States is thisclose to finally having universal affordable care and the website doesn't work. If that's the biggest problem we can exhale now. Here's what it comes down to and please, Kathy, Barry asks you pretend you didn't know this when we exit the hearing, okay? 

I think the computer mouse in the lower right corner is a nice touch, don't you? And while Dylan suggested 'nothing is revealed' I think perhaps that's a little too hasty this time around, #4.

If we ever make hindsight an Olympic event, there will not be enough room on the medals podium for all the folks to receive their honors, but that's proof in and of itself of the concept since when that happens the rest of us can turn to one another and say, "I knew that would happen, Bang and Blame, it's all the same."
-bill kenny

A Holy Moly Day of Obligation

Don't even try to roll over and sleep off that sugar high, my itty-bitty Pretty One even if it's more likely to be high fructose corn syrup (everybody's favorite villain these days). 

If you went door to door with the kids, let's face it you knew which houses were giving out apples and bran flakes (sounded better in my head than it looks typed out here) and stayed way far away from them. And there are still houses who handed these out. They've been around for almost a hundred years and I'm pretty sure last night's haul were part of the original production run. 

Perhaps you went to an adult Halloween party as oxymoronic as that reads. You certainly didn't come here, as whenever I hear people refer to Halloween as a 'holiday' I throw up in my mouth just a little bit. Those who see Halloween as an adult holiday are also the same people who organize trips to Comic-Con and parse the sentences in Frazier's Klingon Bar-Mitzvah speech. nuqneH yIn Suq.   

As you try to find all the pieces of your costume and as your eyes adjust to the light, figure out what were you thinking when you brought that slumbering bundle to your boudoir early this morning, let me be the first to wish you a Happy All Saints Day. 

You knew there was a reason last week why you wanted to go as Drew Brees, but you couldn't find the words, right? Gotta tell ya, that was scary. Had the College of Cardinals seen that clip, complete with Jorge Mario Bergoglio lurking in the corner, Pope Kelly I would be officiating his first Holy Day of Obligation Mass even as I type. Oh, where is our solace, Lord?
-bill kenny