I Waved Goodbye to My Other Life

I'm nearing the beginning of my seventieth year here on The Big Blue Marble and the inexorable march of time and the gallant though losing battle with ailments, illnesses, and injuries finds me more often melancholy and morose than is my wont as my Natal Anniversary approaches.

As a kid, when I had the world figured out, I decided I could be the President of the United States, a baseball player, a cowboy, and an astronaut all at the same time. As the years have unwound, the number of people I could be has continued to shrink until it's just me, as I am.

Not the most impressive or reassuring sight in the mirror every morning, I'll concede, especially when the wired world brings me picture postcards from paths I could have chosen, but chose not to, despite their breathtaking beauty   

I'm not anywhere. I'm here. For now and, I guess, forever.
-bill kenny

You'll Have to Make Your Own Bed

My wife and I have a houseful of furniture from IKEA. We would NOT have such a situation if I had to assemble any of it as I have so little mechanical aptitude I can barely get the flat packs open that the furniture comes in.

For many years in our house, either my wife or our daughter, who has her mother's looks and mechanical aptitudes and my eyebrows, did all the assembling; and a fine job of it they did. We had IKEA furniture when we lived in Germany and it was shipped across the ocean to our home here in The Nutmeg State. 

Until we had an IKEA in New Haven, right off I-95, and another one in the wilds somewhere in Western Massachusetts that we went to once but not ever again, we used to drive to Elizabeth, New Jersey because that's where the nearest IKEA was in relation to our house. Yep, we're fans, but there's a lot about IKEA I never knew, or in this case, cared to know. 

See what I mean? What's that about the truth will set you free? Hell. Not even the birds are free. They are chained to the sky.
-bill kenny 

No Bloody Vikings Were Harmed

My wife is a far more adventurous diner than I am or will ever be who loves SPAM.  She will enjoy it with fried or scrambled eggs as breakfast or as any other meal and at any time. 

Neither of us cares much for the other kind of spam that the orange asshat from Mar-A-Lago probably thinks of as alternative e-mail (actually Meth-head Conway probably calls it that).

Think of it as the worst of both worlds

Sigrid insists that the fine folks from Hormel have created something that is much better than its reputation and that's as maybe but for my part, I'm in no hurry to ever find out. And I'm even less of a fan of potted meat whose existence and origins are best filed under 'don't ask, don't tell.' 

With all the attention in recent days on podcasts (I always think of Stan Freberg calling records, 'pay radio,' and wonder if he'd see podcasts in the same light), I fell over a 100% Joe Rogan-free podcast about SPAM that I found fascinating.   

Though I am wondering if Terry Jones and Michael Palin were as amused. 
-bill kenny

Getting from What Is to What If.....

I offered what follows just about a decade ago and here we are, coming full-circle again and so often, you'd think we would be dizzy by now.

I suspect though cannot prove it we here in Norwich like beginnings and endings a lot more than we seem to like all the stuff in the middle (explains those discarded Oreo cookies I see roadside, along with those tossed nips bottles). We correctly see elections as harbingers of change but don't always appreciate change is a never-ending process and not a product—a journey, rather than a destination. There is no Grandma’s House towards which we’re driving. And the road can and does often feel like it goes on forever. 

Every day, despite COVID concerns and public health precautions, city administrators and their professional staff, joined by, and with, volunteers on advisories, board, commissions, and committees, all of them our neighbors, begin again as every aspect of municipal government’s ability to deliver goods and services in response to our desires for a particular program (sometimes to complement another one and sometimes in competition with it), is balanced against the ability to afford the delivery of those goods and services.

Government at all levels shouldn’t be a spectator sport, but because of the pace of our lives, we sometimes do not or cannot choose to invest the time in much more than glancing at a headline about an issue, if we're lucky, or more often (and more, unfortunately) when someone posts an observation on a social media platform we treat as fact. Making informed decisions means evaluating actual and factual information. And that is NOT an opinion.

Most of us have a general sense this coming budget season in Norwich will involve hard choices almost pre-ordained to make no one happy. That's not exactly news, it's been happening for years so it's likely to continue. 

What shouldn't continue is our lack of interest. If politics is the art of the possible, then, without our informed opinions and observations, we’ll see elected and appointed officials attempting mission impossible and when the fog lifts and we look for someone to blame for results we don’t like, we should remember to look no further than the nearest mirror.

Almost every day and evening there are public meetings on the nuts and bolts operating issues and many of the spice of life aspects that define us as a city--be they Board of Education, the Historic District Commission, Public Safety, Commission on the City Plan, Public Works and so many others-usually without anyone from the public participating. Yes, I know, 'Jeepers, Wally, it's hard to understand how to use Zoom meetings,' except it's not. If you want something badly enough you'll find a way; if not, you'll find an excuse.

Check the city’s website, pick a meeting and settle down at your keyboard and monitor if you cannot personally attend. That's the blessing within the curse of COVID, the convergence of technologies that allows us to remain physically separated but intellectually engaged in how our city is run, from in-person, via the city's website, online meetings. or email conversations with elected officials and/or one another. 

We can do this because quite frankly we have to. We're all there is and we cannot leave decisions about tomorrow for anyone who is not ready and willing for today.
-bill kenny

An Ice Cold Memory

Yesterday was a really long time ago so I can't even calculate the distance a score of years would have to cover, but that's what this post has already traveled. Sort of explains its somewhat bedraggled syntax, I guess. At the time I called it:

Watch the Ripples that Unfold Unto Me

Had a pleasant surprise the other evening in my email inbox, a postcard from my past. I had a kind note from Johannes D in Regensburg to chat, briefly, about a Graham Parker project he's working on and to share with me his memories of listening to me on the radio, in another life, on the multiple occasions Graham was kind enough to stop by the station and visit.

The 'station' was American Force Radio, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main in the old days of the two Germanys; in this case in West Germany, known as the Federal Republic of Germany, to distinguish it from the People's Republic of Germany. 

Those were Cold War days, not that I had a walk-on part in any of that as a skeeter-winged Airman in the US Air Force who played records, wrote and produced public service announcements, and interviewed rock and rollers for GI listeners and their families numbering into the hundreds of thousands. And don't get me started on the millions in the 'shadow audience' (citizens of the nations in which US forces were stationed).

I had the time of my life. Though to be honest, I had also enjoyed AFRTS Sondrestrom, Greenland even when it went to seventy-five below zero on Christmas Eve 1975 and stayed there for three weeks in the twenty-four-hour darkness. Sure, it was miserable, but we were all miserable.

Being an Airman, even a jeep (junior enlisted personnel), in a primarily Army organization, like AFN, was, a day at the beach by comparison and you never had to worry about the sands of time getting in your lunch. Except, of course, they did. Rock and Roll kids grow old, even if they don't grow up. The number of nights in the week where you can hang with the trolls and the gnomes radically decline after the gigs start to shrink as Neverland recedes in the rearview mirror.

I smiled reading Johannes' note for all that it brought back to me and for all that has escaped forever, never to return, because had I realized then he was listening as intently as he was, I might have tried harder to be better at what I did than I proved to be. 

Could have worked out more, or harder because  "...you can't be too strong. You decide what's wrong. Can't be too hard, too tough, too rough, too right, too wrong."
-bill kenny

Butter (E-Mails)

Did you see what I did with the title? Pretty suave, huh? I hope you're not expecting more like that because I emptied out the tank to come up with that. 

And speaking of tank, though not necessarily an empty one. 

I'll bet he's still thrilled about getting the rubber bands off.
bill kenny 

"...and God Forbid, Somebody Walks into a School with a Book and Starts Reading It Out Loud!"

Somewhere in a box in the basement on a shelf, I imagine (maybe with what's left of Teddy, the stuffed teddy bear I slept with at the time), is my first library card to the Madeline E. Lazar Memorial Library, which when I was a second-grader at Pine Grove Manor Elementary School in Franklin Township, New Jersey, was just about the most important place on earth I could ever hope to get into.

Adult me looks back at those memories now and realizes the library was basically an unused basement apartment in a complex near the school that somebody had set up with tables and chairs and bookshelves and proclaimed it to be a library. All I knew is it had more books than I had ever seen, and definitely, way more than I had ever read.    

I think Dillon Helbig would've liked the place, and maybe his book would be as hard to keep on its shelves as it has proven to be to keep on the shelves at the Ada Community Library's Lake Hazel Branch. 

Just down the shelf from Maus, I'd hope.
-bill kenny