Postcards from Terminus?

You know how everyone you know is binge viewing The Walking Dead? What do you mean they're not? Waitaminit, I just realized nobody I know is doing that either. I guess we're too old, or too young.

Meanwhile, the entire rest of the country eats this stuff up with a spoon and I have to confess I don't like it at all. I am a traditionalist-I didn't like "Night of the Living Dead" (or any of the other 10,000 title variations) as a kid growing up and I still don't now that I am decrepit.

So my dilemma today is what should I feel having learned that our Army of One and all the other members of the Puzzle Palace Praetorian Guard has a contingency plan to handle the Zombie Apocalypse? Pleased, perplexed, or perpendicular (I was working on that trinity thing and came up short).

Of course the plan will be managed by Strategic Command, Stratcom, responsible for the nuclear deterrent protecting the Homeland 24/7/365-who else would you entrust with this?

A predecessor to Stratcom, Strategic Air Command (usually called SAC, though not usually to their faces), was once led by General Curtis LeMay who famously offered to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age (bus fare wasn't in the budget back in the day) so there's obviously something to be said for consistency of message and purpose.

I actually know professionally the "spokeswoman for Strategic Command" and was going to drop her an eNote teasing her until I realized we're fresh out of holy water at my house right now, so I may need a lot more Stratcom than either they or I was planning on if things go sideways.

As impressive as the alphabet soup of zombie threats is, reading the report, I'm most taken, so far, by the vegetarian zombies. And when I read about "dragon egg hatching contingencies" I decided at that very moment to never casually regard hard-boiled eggs ever again.
-bill kenny

Can't Lose My Job by Getting in a Rage

Skip the drive-through today. Take a pass on the coffee and donuts or waffles or chicken or falafel or bean sprouts. That person you really never think about, the one who sold you breakfast yesterday morning or served you lunch or dinner (what? lunch AND dinner, yipes!) needs you to see them today. All of them.

The people who make and serve us fast food are fighting for their lives and the least you can do is bring your own napkins to the brawl and do something different today and hope to hell the mega corporations who employ them get the message and start paying them closer to a living wage.

Not just here  in the Land of the Round Door-Knobs but all around the world. Finally, enough is enough. Want fries with that Fast Food Forward?
-bill kenny

Keep Those Cards and Letters

It's only fair, I suppose-actually more than fair. You put up with my noodlings here every day and in the newspaper once a week and it was bound to happen that I'd hit a nerve.

I've spent most of the previous fortnight learning how many people read the editorial page, at least on Wednesdays. Color me surprised (and tell the Crayola people I'll get with them later on fitting it into the box). I think the small dialogues we had with one another were constructive if not especially helpful (we didn't convince one another of anything we didn't already believe) but that was okay.

For those who stopped to speak with me near the salad bar at the grocery store or in the parking lot outside of it or while I was heading into Planet Fitness, I wanted that photo you mentioned at the top of the column for the side of a milk carton with a "Have You Seen this Dweeb?" caption. The Bulletin didn't seem to care but the dairy sure did; they said I was so ugly I'd frighten the children and sour the milk.

Might I offer, as a feeble counterpoint that if you could and did read the column you should have first thanked a teacher for making it possible. And I'm whining for effect, truth be told, because actually more people made it a point to seek me out to share their agreement with me than to offer a differing opinion, to which they are most certainly entitled though that's not my point (I'm wearing a hat so you might not see it).

I appreciated your thoughts and words but the people you should be speaking to are the same ones we all selected to be on the City Council. Being present for parts of both public hearings, and reading the meeting minutes on line at the city's website, I applaud everyone who spoke out and spoke up but almost none of  those who spoke at the hearings are those who spoke, sent email or wrote actual paper and stamp notes to me.

I don't have all the answers and you don't have all the answers; neither do the folks we've elected to the City Council. But each of us knows something and we are so much smarter together than we are separately that I get confused when we seem to choose to NOT be open and honest with one another in order for all of us to move forward.

There's still too much "for me to look good, you need to look bad" posturing and pouting going on. It's a luxury we literally cannot afford. We're all in the same boat be it with Gilligan or Fletcher Christian. And because the part of the boat nearest me has sprung a leak doesn't mean you don't need to help. If anything, that should mean you re-double your effort to assist because while we may be in a small boat, it's a vast ocean and we are a long way from shore.

The problem with not knowing where you're going, is not knowing when you've gotten there. I, like everyone on this anthill, don't know what I don't know. And many times what I don't know is what's important and critical. But let me suggest we cannot continue in the manner we have been going for decades-it doesn't work.

We have a crumbling infrastructure from sidewalks through public safety personnel to education, a stagnant grand list and over burdened property owners who see themselves more as hostages than citizens.

If we're not willing to tell one another what we want and how much we're willing to sacrifice to have it, we'll have no one but ourselves to blame when we fail. We can lend a helping hand or choose to ball a fist. We decide.
-bill kenny

Daze of Future Passed....

Nothing like the present to make you readdress and reassess the past. I've kept a wary eye on Florida ever since the 2000 election with Chad, hold the Jeremy, and the joys of hanging, out and otherwise. Sort of like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store, if you follow my electoral college varsity sweater, daddy-o.

We're heading towards Memorial Day, Flag Day, and Independence Day (in chronological order) and I find myself studying the signatures on the Declaration of Independence and marveling at the mass of civic courage and just plain smarts so many of those signatories had.

We could have chosen any of dozens of Revolutionary War leaders as President of these United States and been well-served. And here we are almost 238 years later and a walk through the 2016 Presidential Talent Pool doesn't seem to even come to most people's ankles.

And who's offering to be David Hasselhoff as we recast Baywatch? This guy. I can see him in the red baggies now, silver whistle banging on his chest as he slow-mo runs down the newly created beach in Gainesville where the ocean is suddenly.  Another believer in the gunmen on the grassy knoll creating bad weather-I love folks like this.

My entire involvement with science in school, all of my schooling, was a plaster of Paris volcano and knucklehead that I am, I grasp the nature of causality between human activity and changes in our environment. Suspect Marco won't tap me for Veep, though he won't be spoiled for choice from what I can see.

The transcript from the ABC interview is only disquieting if you had hoped for something more than what we've been getting at the national level of our political culture for (I'd suggest) far more than a decade and closer to a generation. More speaking at one another rather than to each other.

Do you think less of me when I tell you I am nevertheless surprised? And still I keep looking at those faded signatures on that distant document which seem to grow larger but still harder to read with every passing election.
-bill kenny

Algorhythm and Blues

I was tempted to type just about every perverse word or phrase I know in both English and German just so the search engines would drive metric boxcars of traffic to here and the server would crash and I could feel a rare sense of accomplishment on a Monday.

I decided to forego that cheap thrill because I can't compete with the breathless headlines of all day Sunday into the early morning hours of Monday on the selection of Michael Sam by the St. Louis Rams (I almost typed Cardinals, except they selected Sam Michael who looks just like him).

I'm not sure if the selection of the first announced homosexual football player is historic or hysteric and at what point do the rest of us perform an Air Force salute (a slow shoulder shrug) and return to our own lives, already in progress. Are we closer to the day when we concede that this is silly and says more about us than it ever will about Michael Sam, or anyone else whose sexual preference is public knowledge (I'm not wasting time on the why behind that question)?

Is the attraction that he's a distraction? Are we nearing the moment where we can pause and wonder if any of this is worth anything at all? "I'm just a tick in a box on a questionnaire, another moment that flashes into nowhere, a brand name on a  pill that gets you there so don't get me to fill up your empty lives."
-bill kenny

Redux Deluxe: An Ounce of Mother Is Worth a Pound of Clergy (Slight Return)

This is a return visit to an earlier post because it worked then and I think it does as well now. I wrote this a couple of years ago and it's as true now as it was then, except maybe more so. 

I stole the title from a remembered proverb and with it being both Mothers Day and a Sunday I couldn't resist. After all, I am my mother's son, as well as the husband of my son's mother (and of my daughter's mother as well, but I was on a roll and wanted to balance the sentence).

I've read "The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new." And the image that came with that quote is a beautiful bonus, like one of those 'it came with the frame' pictures we all have in our homes.

Families look to a mother the way the fingers on the hand look to the thumb (said the middle finger of our family, me) so I hope wherever you are today you can reconnect with your family, however you see them, and celebrate both mothers and Mothers Day. I have one, my Mom, in Florida,  (she's very peripatetic and the the last time I looked that's where she was) and one, my wife's Mom, in Offenbach, Germany.

Each of their husbands passed away years ago after being married to them for a very long time leaving them alone, but never lonely, and even from the long distances we are from them, I can feel their attention, their concern and their love in every waking moment. 

I see in their eyes what I see in my wife's eyes when she speaks of our children and know that all mothers' hearts are the same, not just on this day but on all days. Happy Mothers Day.

-bill kenny

Another Not Ready for a Hallmark Card

Could not allow this to escape unremarked upon for the entire week, though I did try. I've seen nothing about it on anybody's news casts (seems like a natural for Fox, but maybe Sean and the crew just pay lip service to women's rights) and it climaxes, pun intended, tomorrow on Mother's Day.

There's a serious organization combating a terrifying problem facing women across the globe responsible for the creation of International Clitoris Awareness Week but this, the second annual observance, is still the schoolboy stuff of sticky-sweet and snickers behind the hand romance.

It's just as well there aren't any cards-how would the envelopes get sealed?
-bill kenny