Or Place it in a Hole in the Ground

Someone once told me our appetites increase geometrically even as our abilities to satisfy them increase only arithmetically. I live in a world that has seen the introduction of a Lincoln Continental pick-up truck, a Porsche sports utility vehicle, and even the Cullinan.  

And now, in answer to a question we've all asked, "Wait. What?" Here's the DBX707. 

With my apologies to Robin Williams, it should have been named cocaine because when you feel you have to have this car, God is telling you you have too much money.
-bill kenny

I'm Blaming the Snow

We had us some weather in these parts over this past week, and I'm not pretending to not still be feeling a little bit of that as I've been shoveling snow in my sleep which is sort of funny since when I was awake I looked about the same way as I was actually shoveling.

Nevermind.

You had to be there. 

I fell across something I wrote a few days more than eleven years ago that surprised me because I was so pleased with how it turned out. And because of that, I've decided to offer it again in this space and if it inspires/encourages/incites you to revisit a book that you remember from your own youth, perhaps a book that has caused some well-meaning parent somewhere to feel so threatened by that they'd like it removed from your local library, then by all means go and read it again, preferably aloud.

We certainly don't need to get into book-banning or burning because it's too short a walk to then doing it with people. At the time I called this minor opus:

People never notice anything

I can still remember the first time I read "Catcher in the Rye." I could hardly believe this was a school-assigned book especially when I came across the magic four-letter word that Holden tries to protect Phoebe from. Whoa! It wasn't a swear, it was literature. And right at the end of this stunning book that seemed to give voice to every thought I was having (it turned out, to the millions of thoughts that tens of millions of people were having) I realized Holden, "the Catcher", was in a mental hospital. Very much harshed that 'he sounds just like me" buzz.

In the fifty-odd (literally and figuratively) years since first reading it, I've revisited J. D. Salinger's book hundreds, if not thousands, of times (it was only a little older than I when both of us were much younger). It, Heller's "Catch-22" and Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" are probably the three books I have returned to more often than all other reading material combined. Heller and Pynchon wrote other books, some nearly as good, perhaps a bit better, and some not so much.

Holden Caulfield's eternal imponderable--"...I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park ... I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away."

I always loved Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and had I been brighter, I might have thought more about that story and its ending while racing through Catcher. As it was, I was breathless from the exertion of reading it as fast as I could. I struggled and often failed, to keep up with the torrent of words the protagonist used as weapons as he waged a one-man war on everything and everyone 'phony' only to realize he was, himself, one and the same with the thing he despised.

Jerome David Salinger died after almost half a lifetime spent in reclusive seclusion. Sometimes there's no second act, I guess. There's an ache, a dull one because he was gone long before he left, but the pain of remembrance of what was, and what might have been, remains. 

'What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad goodbye or a bad goodbye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse.'

"And a soul that is free can live on eternally." Goodbye Holden. 
-bill kenny

How Can I Miss Him

I really need to get out more in terms of my media diet. Aside from Highlights and Grit, everything I read or watch has stories on a regular basis about the inevitability of Donald J. Trump campaigning for the Republican Party nomination for President in 2024 and returning to the White House. 

I grew up with Republicans like Charles Percy and Edward Brooke, from Illinois and Massachusetts, respectively. For many years, in my home state, New Jersey, Clifford Case was a Senator, Millicent Fenwick, put that in your pipe and smoke it, and Peter Freylingheusen were in Congress and all of them were Republicans. 

Quite frankly, maybe it was just in Jersey, but for the most part, it was pretty hard to distinguish R's from D's in terms of policies and practices across most of the political spectrum. I'm not sure when that all changed but I'm damn sure it hasn't changed for the better and I've been watching it pretty closely since returning to the Land of the Round Doorknobs in the fall of 1991. 

Both sides of the aisle haven't exactly covered themselves in glory in recent decades but the nadir, at least so far, in my lifetime, has been the candidacy and subsequent election of Trump. And having lived through four years of his operating-a-roller-coaster-while-on-speed approach to any and all matters of state, I have zero desire to welcome back him in anything other than an orange jumpsuit doing a perp walk on the evening news. 

Trump's Presidency created a universe of alternative facts, fake media that was an enemy of the people, and turned truth into an NFT.

His words and behaviors both excused and emboldened the most abhorrent of boorish behavior on ALL sides of the political spectrum. Trump did not create the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the "Jews Will Not Replace Us" crowd, or even the QAnon Whack Jobs, but he allowed them visibility, viability, and validation they had never before experienced. 

And such extremism at one end of the spectrum was, by Newton's Laws, bound to provoke equal extremism at the other end of the spectrum, leaving little room for compromise and even less for agreement.

Every single one of us became worse human beings, not just bad Americans, because of the increasing coarseness and disappearing civility of our civil discourse with one another. Combined with the ideological online biospheres created through all manner of social and electronic media far too many of us have engaged, and continue to so do, in 'Us vs. Them.'

Rational thought has been replaced by harsh invective whose goal is no longer to engage and persuade but to demonize and denigrate those with whom we disagree. Trump is our mirror image and too many of us like what we see.
-bill kenny

Some Age Like Wine, Others Like Milk

What follows I first offered exactly ten years ago on the occasion of my youngest brother's birthday. I don't feel bad about re-presenting it here; he is, after all, still having a birthday so what's good for one should be good for the other (I tell myself). 

You don't need to be part of this conversation so I'll skip it. A decade ago I called it: 

Madam I'm Adam

When you grow up in a large family keeping track of your siblings’ birthdays becomes a major undertaking. You can cheat when you still live at home because Mom worries about all of that, but once you’re gone, you can never come back when you’re out of the blue and into the black.

We grew up under one roof, or more precisely a series of different roofs, as six children in the same family but closer to being two clusters of three children reasonably close together with a pregnant pause (pun intended) in the middle (that may get me a pop on the nose from one or more of my brothers and sisters). 

Evan Dolores, Kelly Christopher, Kara Melissa, Jill Marie, and Adam. 

My mother hadn’t run out of middle names by the time she got to Adam, but the check engine light on the whimsy dashboard was burning brightly. Mom loved to tell of the day Adam, whose birthday today is, was being baptized and Father Stosh expressed (mild) surprise at his having but one name. Our mother explained to the good priest ‘he was God’s first and he’s my last. Pour the water.’

I’m not sure any of us kids gave any of that a moment’s thought. Adam was another Kenny Kid to be piled into the Chrysler Newport station wagon that was eventually replaced by a Ford Country Squire because in the pre-fab sprout era of America, what else could hold that many children? 

I am inordinately fond of my youngest brother and make no apologies for it. I have my reasons and they’re not mine if I tell you. We look nothing alike but I suspect people guess easily that we are brothers (so much for the element of surprise). I'm the more handsome but also the more modest, while he has the talent and the wisdom (to not argue about the looks and modesty). 

Adam has all the brains one of us older children suggested might be genetically possible without actually realizing it. We were the promise, he was the performance. He was my wingman at Rutgers College-too young, yet, for school himself, I took him with me to courses sometimes every day for a week or more. I never asked him what he made of his first college experience (he is a devoted RU football fan, despite being a CU Buffalo Alum) or what, if anything, he got out of listening to music on eight-track cartridges in my Pinto, at max vol, rushing cross-town in New Brunswick (before its renaissance) to classes on the various campuses.

I lied to him later, not so much a lie as pulling his leg, when I promised him an armadillo when I was going to Air Force basic training in San Antonio, Texas, or later, as I assured him I’d bring him back a penguin from my assignment in Greenland (I think he had long known penguins were found only at the other pole; I learned that only after having purchased a pigeon in a tuxedo six months after arriving at Sondy.)

The six of us Kenny kids are a rambling, shambling assortment of aspiration, inspiration, and perspiration but as long as we all continue to practice respiration we’ll never lack for company. 

I'm not sure what our spouses make of us and we rarely enough ever get together so the danger of that is minimal. I'm still numbed how much more rapidly (in comparison to me), Adam has gotten older especially as today's celebration makes it official. Take a deep breath and have a Happy Birthday, Adam!
-bill kenny 

The Joys of Hunkering Down

Saturday was certainly one of those days, wasn't it? 

Even if you wanted to go somewhere, or perhaps more especially despite a need to be somewhere, the weather, Winter Storm Kenan (according to the National Weather Service) and/or Nor'easter Winter Storm Bobby, said Channel 3, made motion and movement more hypothetical than actual. 

For anyone at their posts in a public safety job and manning grocery stores and gas stations for those who ventured forth, a large and heartfelt thank you. 

With way too many hours to myself over the weekend, I ended up about ass-deep in snowdrifts but barely ankle-deep in my own thoughts. The good news is that I didn't need a lifeguard, the bad news is it gave me time to compose this. 

Growing up, one of the things that stuck with me was the later in the day a phone call came, the less likely it was to be good news. In my family growing up, we knew better than to phone home after 8 PM, no matter what, and no matter where we were.

At almost seventy, I am, I suppose, all the adult I am ever going to be. The growing old part worked far too well and the growing up part didn't seem to take at all. I still get nervous going into a darkened room and will search out the light switch even if I'm only passing through. 

And phone calls now? Even with, or perhaps especially because of, caller ID, when the phone rings in the evening, I am always startled (maybe wary is a better word). Our phones take two rings to show me the number and name of the caller, and I stand, transfixed, watching that little display.

Despite 'do not call' registrations, I get a lot of folks who technically don't want to sell me anything, which is prohibited by the registry, but rather only want to take a few minutes of my time for a survey on a multitude of issues, services, and products which, many times, always seem to end in what sounds suspiciously like a sales pitch. Or they're just genuinely concerned about my car warranty. All of these unsolicited intrusions I can, and do handle with a skosh more gusto and enjoyment than I really should have, truth be told.

When I see the name and number of our son or daughter in the display, however, my bravado evaporates and I start making horror movies in my head. I mutter 'please don't be anything bad' at least three hundred kajillion times between the second ring, which displays their name, and the third ring that never comes because I answer the phone. 

Both of them would find it cute that their old man breaks out in cold sweats when they call him after dark--if my wife answers the phone, I pace and fret within eyesight and earshot, lest she forgets to tell me of the cataclysmic catastrophe that has befallen one of them which in my fantasy is the only reason they are calling in the first place.

When we brought them home from the hospital, and they still had that 'new baby smell', I used to sit in a corner of their room and watch them sleep. I was fascinated by their breathing and with any and every movement they made while in their crib. I had no need for television-I had found my must-see and did so many times, for many hours, as they grew up.

As an adult, I can understand and internalize the realization that I cannot protect my children, who are in fact, adults, themselves now and who live with their significant others many hours distant from us, from every evil and misfortune in the world, but when the day gets dark and the phone rings at night, my inner grown-up is nowhere to be found. 

And the me that remains can do little more than stare at the phone and hope the monster under the bed has gone away by the time I answer it. 
-bill kenny

Petty Pace Sold Separately

Dear 2022,

Appreciate the opportunity for a free trial of your first month, but I would prefer to not extend my subscription. 

PS: Just me or does the shortest month have the most drama?

PPS: The nicest thing I can say, in advance, about February 2022 is it doesn't have 29 days.
-bill kenny  

A Day in the Life

Disclaimer: I spent eight years on active duty in the United States Air Force and a little more than thirty-five subsequent years as a Department of Defense civilian at various times for the United States Army, the United States Air Force, and the United States Navy. When we speak of the 'military-industrial complex,' except that I'm extremely simplex, I am the poster child. 

Last week one of my local daily newspapers, in the regional section (though if I recall correctly it was on the front page of the first section, admittedly below the fold) offered a "Report cites 'outstanding' year for Connecticut's industrial base" that unless you were reading it carefully you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a jobs/prosperity story.

Here in the Land of Steady Habits, but not just here, war and preparations for it are good business, except when they are great business and business is booming right now. Every single year, like clockwork, the National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA, breezes through the lower and upper chambers of our Congress with rarely a voice raised, ever, to question 'what the fuck do we need all this weaponry for?' much less 'against whom are we planning on ever using it?' It's like all of our representatives were raised by my mom who used to say 'don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer.' 

And here's the obscene part about our national defense spending. The United States in terms of dollars expended is #1 in the world, and we have the foam finger to prove it, outspending the other nine nations in the Top Ten, combined (eight of whom are, more or less, and depending on the day of the week, our allies). 

Meanwhile, the same Congress that makes sure we have all the killingry we could ever want or need, looks at pressing national concerns such as universal affordable health care, college student loan forgiveness/free college and/or trade school, living wages for every worker and a dozen other critical elements of livingry and always asks 'who is going to pay for this and how?' 

I'm thinking this could be the year the Air Force has a bake sale to pay for an F-35 or perhaps the Navy can offer magazine subscriptions to pay for a submarine. Or, as has been the case since forever, probably not.

-bill kenny