Hiding from the Weather

One of the downsides to living where there are four seasons is the transition from summer to autumn, especially for the trees and their leaves. I am very much of the 'live and let live' persuasion which translates to the 'lie and let them lay' position on leave gathering. I've noticed this year in my neighborhood, some of us have gathered so many, it's as if we're waiting for them to fall from the trees and nab them on the first bounce. 

We rake them up and some of us, maybe you have the same kind of neighbors where you live (maybe you are that neighbor where you live) place them in black plastic bags awaiting pickup by the trash folks.

If it happens around here the way I watched it happen just the other day in Waterford (the home of the speed bowl, not the crystal), the dustmen empty the plastic bags into their trucks and discard the bags. Causing me to wonder what the point of the plastic bag was/is. 

Elsewhere I've seen these VERY large paper bags filled with leaves-in theory because the paper is biodegradable, all of it can go directly into the landfill--or do you think they're headed for incinerators? Around here we have trash to power incineration units though I've no idea how much energy we get from such an operation.

For millions of years, I estimate, we as a species did nothing with the leaves as they fell. You see all that dirt all around us? I have a funny feeling where some of it might have come from and I'm not sure what we're accomplishing by how we're operating now. While I wasn't looking compost has become a lost cause, it seems, perhaps even a dark art. In its place, we have created a first-class annoyance, the leaf blower. 

We went from devices that looked like vacuums and picked up fallen leaves and plopped them into bags (do you remember those?) to a gadget that hangs from your hip and can be used to blow leaves that have fallen on your property into someone else's yard or out into the street.

I think leaf blowers are a much more accurate and contemporary symbol of America in the 21st Century than either the Bald Eagle or the Stars & Stripes. There's nothing that says "Wha?!" more than a guy on a Sunday morning working a leaf blower wearing dark shades with Ibuds in both ears. And I'd ask him why he's doing what he's doing, but he's as oblivious to me right now as I am to him for the rest of the year. Ahh, Sweet Suburbia. We've got Mother Nature on the run--now what?

"This is my street, and I’m never gonna to leave it,
And I’m always gonna stay here If I live to be ninety-nine,
’Cause all the people I meet, Seem to come from my street.
And I can’t get away, Because it’s calling me, (come on home)
Hear it calling me, (come on home)."
-bill kenny

With the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster We Get Pasta

I don't know if End Days are coming. 

I mean, let me rephrase that with apologies to James McMurty, 'Every day's the end of days for some,'  And when you've been wandering in the desert without manna or water or even a shred of hope for either for as long as I have (thanks, Google Maps!) you can get surprised at how much Religion, capitalized because as Lenny Bruce once called it, it's Religions, Inc., has changed. 

It's a fine line between the Prince of Peace and Pasta, but some of us are walking it like Duna riding a bicycle (bell on the handle sold separately, Garp). And if you look upward while praying to whomever it is you are offering adjurations, then the Aetherius Society might be your cup (and flying saucer) of tea. 

Neither Tom Cruise nor John Travolta is listed as a member, so it already has that going for it.
-bill kenny

Maybe It's the Leaves

I've done enough reading about Seasonal Affective Disorder to know I'm sad, not SAD. 

I go through it every autumn and for the same reason: I hate winter. Coward that I am I take it out on the falling leaves instead of the falling snow and blustery winds. 

And in addition to the sadness, I have this nagging and growing doubt that's slowly elbowing aside my pseudo-self-confidence and I'm not sure what to do about that. I've spent most of my life frequently in error but rarely in doubt so this sensation is both very new and unwelcome.

The Germans call it Tor-Schluss Panik, the fear that the doors are starting to close. 

And in my case, those fears are very rational and I have the somber-faced health care professionals to prove it. I'm kind of hoping for a mild winter, both of my discontent and our immediate area. I'll get back to you on how that all works out, assuming it does.
-bill kenny 

Late at Night When I Can Dream

Thank you for your service Dennis Baptiste, Rik De Lisle, Craig Miller, Roger Williams, Bill Swisher, Estevan Vasquez, Michael Slattery, Nat Clymer, Gerald Martin, Lowell A. Whitman, Mark van Treuren, Walt Zielenski, Bill Clark, Jhi Laveyl, Carey Chet Campbell, Mark Cornell, Lee Hilliard, Bob Close, Mark Streeter, Christopher Hall, and Richard Real.

And also thanking Sara Jacoby, Donna Scheel, Sally Foster, Diana Danis, Ellen Gunther, Linda Thompson, Bonnie-Erin Reiley Page, and Gloria Zielenski for your service on this, your holiday, Veterans Day.

As Barack Obama observed not that many years ago, "In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it." I am honored to know all of you and to have served with many of you. And, yes, together, I believe we can and must change the world. -bill kenny

A Sky Full of Holes

Not everyone will make it to Taftville's Memorial Park tomorrow morning at 11 for their annual Veterans Day observance sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2122 and the American Legion Post 104. 

Holidays that are observed where they occur even if it’s in the middle of the week present their own challenges in terms of organization and attendance which is why shifting stuff to Mondays became popular but I’m glad we don’t do it for Veterans Day.  

But we'll miss you as we pause, if not exactly stop, and thank all of those who wear and have ever worn the uniform of any branch of our armed forces.

Some folks I know roll their eyes at some (okay, at a lot) of the things I write or say, and all I can do is smile, shake my head and suggest (mostly using my inside voice, I hope) that they attempt to do something anatomically difficult (though if successful, it might be the most productive endeavor some have been engaged in for years) in response. 

I hate to be difficult, although I am very good at it. I spent eight years serving my country in an Air Force uniform defending freedom of speech and on occasion I insist on exercising a little of it for myself as well.

Tomorrow is not Memorial Day-we honor everyone in uniform, living and dead, past and present. When I was a kid, it was called Armistice Day, because it began as a commemoration of the end of The World War, which was later known as World War I for the sadly obvious reason that we had a World War Two. 

I'm never sure what lesson I should be learning when I realize just about the only things we seem to number with Roman numerals anymore are world wars and Super Bowls, though I am happy that there are so many more Super Bowls. 

Many nations across the globe, including our neighbor to the north, Canada, call tomorrow Remembrance Day and there's a part of me that likes that title a great deal because I think about all those with whom I served while in uniform and for those decades afterward as a Department of Defense civilian.  

We have a day when we recall those in uniform who gave their lives for our country, Memorial Day, and I have always appreciated the idea of a separate day set aside to honor everyone's service. One of the traditions of Veterans Day observances is the moment of silence to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 when the Armistice that ended World War One was signed.  

We had people serving in the military before we even had a country. After all, geographically as well as historically this is where the American Revolution started with farmers and shopkeepers grabbing muskets and forcing the world's most powerful nation at that time, the British Crown, after a profuse flow of blood, to concede to the inevitable and allow all those up and down the Eastern Seaboard to become the United States of America (not that we've always been that ever since or even are that on most days in recent memory).

At any given moment, many of those in uniform serving down the block or across a continent can be called upon to run towards whatever danger we, as a nation, face with no thought for themselves or their own families and loved ones. Heroes and heroines in uniform are making a difference every day and allow all of us to somnambulate with our eyes open as we don't see the lives we could have led because of the incessant assault they withstand.

It's a dangerous world with new ways of war but those making the sacrifice to protect us are the old souls who have always borne the burden--not just those at Forward Operating Bases marked with dots on maps of countries we cannot name but all who whet the blade of the sword they wield in defense of everything we are and will ever be.

And while it's hard sometimes to see the line from the Battle of Lexington to the traffic on New York's Lexington Avenue and from the farmers' fields, crowded urban landscapes, and the splendid isolation of wooded lowlands to the marbled halls of the seat of government in the District of Columbia, it's all a part of what every veteran made possible with their service.

We are more filled with self-doubt as a nation than at any time in the last six or more decades. There will always be light and dark, but we shall prevail because we must. For anyone, anywhere, now, or then, in uniform who placed service over self, whenever and wherever that is and was, thank you.

Sometimes we forget the very words we meant to say but as long as we don't forget those who earned that gratitude we will always be worthy of their sacrifice. 
-bill kenny

A Victory Lap for a Real Victory

I wrote this twelve years ago to celebrate the Fall of the Berlin Wall on this date in 1989. For a moment, and not a lot longer than that, I actually hoped we had turned a corner as a world and that bigger and better things were just ahead. Obviously, I'd never be successful as The Amazing Randi or even Madame Marie when it comes to future forecasting. <Sigh>

When I first offered this back in 2009, I called it:

Only the One in Our Hearts and Minds Remains

It's almost already Tuesday in Germany (depending on when you read this) and that means observances celebrating the Fall of the Berlin Wall should be in full swing. 

As one of about twenty-five percent of all Americans who ever served in the US Armed Forces, I had the opportunity to be stationed, and live, in what was called West Germany. I was there as the Evil Empire, Warsaw Pact, call it what you will imploded and went out of business, starting at Bornholmer Strasse (I have a piece of The Wall in my basement. I've never known what to do with it, but I'll never get rid of it.). I remember it as a rare moment when I truly thought we could do anything we set our minds to.

I've saved this note for quite some time, as my secret treasure and pleasure, because I now live many thousands of miles away from Berlin and Germany, just Germany (no East or West) in an area where many of my neighbors consider a trip to a foreign land as akin to a journey to Disneyland. 

We're such a large country, sprawling in all directions, with so many different kinds of people, we see the rest of the world more often than we should as a sideshow. I once read where in New York City, alone, there are more people of Irish descent than live in Dublin, the capital of Eire, and more people who claim Jewish ancestry than in Tel Aviv. I wouldn't be surprised to learn in the Bronx there are more Who's than in all of Whoville.

It stands to reason, and mathematics, we have more people with German bloodlines than live in Der Vaterland (though they love their muttis, make no mistake-Germany is a Fatherland) and so perhaps across this country today there will be some notice of events from damals and their impact on heute. 

Unless, of course, one of the Kardashian children does something (anything), or one of the other media prima ballerinas attracts a camera (they're like pandas in the zoo. You've seen 'em, I've seen 'em. They don't actually do anything but we stand and stare at them for hours. What's the matter with us?). Yeah, I'm not sanguine that we'll look up and see the sky.

My two children, both now adults approaching middle age, were much younger when the country of their birth took its first, halting steps towards reunification. I don't know how much of it they remember as I've never asked but they exist because their father found himself a guest in their mother's country and then he found their mother and together they found a family. 

I've read where we each are the sum of everyone we've ever met and if only because the fall of The Wall expanded the pool, it would be memorable and historical. I'll always have the movie in my head of the Trabants that rolled down the A3, south of Frankfurt towards Heidelberg.

That the end of a divided Germany put an exclamation mark at the stunning acceleration of events that resulted in The Death of Communism, I leave to the brilliant P. J. O'Rourke to write about and hope you enjoy. 

Today, spare a thought for a moment when the world grew larger, and smaller, simultaneously--when the Good Guys won and a lot of people who had never had anything to smile about learned to laugh. We could do it again, and do it today (and every day) and, believe me, it would never get old because for someone, somewhere, the next time will always be the first time.
-bill kenny

My Grant Rant

When did Americans become so very difficult and at times impossible? How come we have so many problems that transcend animus to become full-blown enmity with one another and what can we possibly have against all the horses we rode in on?

Seriously, if this country were a reality TV show, and I'm NOT saying it's not, we'd be sitting in our living rooms frantically hitting the button on the clicker and changing the channel to anything, even QVC in ASL.  

If you haven't noticed on any excursion of any duration outside your bubble, a lot of our stuff is, to put it plainly, broke-ass. We have flooding, collapsed buildings, broken bridges, potholes in the streets that aren't yet destroyed, sewers that don't sewer, and pipes that burst combined with wires that of those that aren't crossed are burned out and we've neither the talent nor the inclination, it seems, to fix any of it.

When did infrastructure become partisan and when are the rest of us going to tell the folks who insist that it is that they need to sit the fuqq down and shut the fuqq up? 

Wanting paved streets, healthy children, safe neighborhoods, good schools, well-paying jobs with benefits and dignity, adequate food with clean water, and equal opportunity for everyone should be just some of our common goals. And only some.
There's a lot more to do, so #ThankYouBrandon.
-bill kenny