Starting Here and Starting Now

Old habits die hard. I keep a wallet crammed with foolscap. It works out well unless you were to rob me, as there's rarely any money in it, though not necessarily because of the foolscap.

Many years ago, in a galaxy far away I couldn't let go of my anger and lived mostly in a state of rage. I was lucky to find someone who could help me, but he insisted I had to help myself. He came up with the foolscap.

Every time something angered me, I had to write it down on a piece of paper and put that paper in my wallet. But it had to be on its own, separate, piece of paper. No doubling up. By the end of the day, I could have hundreds of slips of paper in my wallet. 

I then had to review ALL these slips each night and on a different sheet of paper, write down all the items I was still ANGRY about. Then, every week before I saw him, I had to review seven pieces of paper, and transfer anything I was still angry about to a separate, clean sheet and bring that to our weekly conversation.

Within a month, I had no lists. I'd review the slips of paper of all the things every day that made me angry and realized I had no idea what was written on most of them or what the words I could read meant or concluded whatever had spun me up wasn't that important after all. Practical magic. 

How about this week especially as we approach the anniversary of 9/11, we try that? Live your life and allow others to live theirs and try to be more mindful. There was a time in this country when we disagreed with each other without being disagreeable. But not anymore.  

Some people tune to certain TV shows just to yell at the talking head who’s making a fortune yelling back at them. Others of us read a newspaper aloud and follow every line of the article with a scowl, a gesture, or a deprecation. And we keep getting louder and angrier about more things, and more people, every day. We don't know how to get off the escalator-and most of us don't even know we're on one.

Passion is fine and necessary. If our primordial ancestors didn't care if they evolved and developed legs to carry them from the pond and then grew lungs, every day would be Friday, if you follow my drift. It's the grinding though, that is wearing us out; the pitched battles we are waging to benefit who knows who or for what purpose.

Do you want to start to fix how we now get along with one another, but you don't want to use the foolscap? Tell me five things this country was angry about before the airplanes on September 11th, 2001. Go ahead, I'll wait. Too hard? Then give me three things, Still too hard?

Did you say you want to take a break from all this head noise and hate to concentrate on the real and critical issues we face as a nation? Then let’s start to do that, starting today. I'll make a note of where we were and when we started to heal. 
-bill kenny

The Ring Should Be Made of Mashed Potatoes

If you have never read Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it's probable that most of what has been happening for decades here in Middle Earth seems shocking to you. 

It shouldn't be and without meaning to be the spoiler alert, it's going to get worse before it ever gets better, assuming that we live long enough for anything to get better ever again. 

The big difference between us here and now in 2022 and the Roman Empire is that the Roman Empire had decent roads. We, on the other hand, have this and I for one cannot wait for the Olympic Committee to decide whether it should be included as part of the games, though the only question may well be Summer or Winter. Probably along with fart-lighting.

Yeah. Because those are the questions we should be asking ourselves.
-bill kenny

September Thoughts

Leave it to the unofficial closing of another summer to make me nostalgic, bordering on maudlin. Technically, I'm enjoying my 70th Labor Day, though in truth, I have no memory of the earliest ones and I've yet to get a clear sense, despite a reasonable amount of reading, of how old we are before we have memories. 

Is that true for you as well? I'll suddenly flash on something from my childhood and not be altogether sure if it's real, or a remembered clip from a movie--my Mom's youngest brother, Paul, when we visited her parents in Elechester out in Flushing, Long Island, (before the World's Fair and Shea Stadium), always calling me 'droopy drawers' and pulling down my trousers and laughing. I can recall being a small child helpless to prevent this and enraged at my own impotence (though not realizing at the time that's what I felt). 

Growing up, I always heard relatives say I looked like Paul, which made me tighten my jaw and hold on to my pants. I think they said that because we both had freckles and lots of them. I know my coloring made me burn up in the sun as, after twenty minutes without sunscreen, 

I looked like a lobster and when the burn finally faded, I wasn't tanning but peeling. At times later in our lives, my sister Kara reminded me of Paul, especially when she laughed which is a little odd because, by the time she was born, Paul and his family were living out on the west coast and rarely came east. 

I flash forward to that same uncle in the back seat of my car, with my father's step-brother, Father Jim (an actual priest) in the shotgun seat, as we rode to the cemetery in East Millstone, NJ, to bury my father. I think that may have been the last time Paul came east as some years later he was diagnosed with I-no-longer-remember-what from which he died. 

I was in Germany, in the era before cheap long-distance phone calls and the Internet so letters and cards were the bridge from home and I learned we only read you when you write and no one likes to write bad news when it's still news, so I learned of his death months, if not longer after it had happened. 

When I was a kid, we hadn't yet gone back to school, that happened after Labor Day and when the New Year began, I'd always look ahead on the calendar to see when the first Monday in September was, always hoping for the 5th or 6th, as if wishing would make it so. 

This year, if the schools were opening that way, a lot of kids' parents would be deeply bummed and the kids wouldn't understand why. Thank goodness we now structure school calendars by union agreements and not on any educational goals, requirements, or needs.

I've never attended my high school or college reunion--one of the places I worked for some years used to hold worldwide reunions every two years, in different locations around the globe and I never worked up the interest or the passion, or, in all honesty, the courage, to attend any of them. 

I have a growing-more-dim-by-the-day memory of being one of 400,000 at Watkins Glen in upstate New York for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band, but all three of these bands are long gone with members dead, and the souvenir tee shirt "Ball 'n' Boogie" went from the dresser to the rag bin to the garbage decades ago. 

My cohort grew up in the swamps of Vietnam and in the aftermath of the murder of JFK, MLK, and RFK. We survived Timothy Leary better than he himself did, had parents who didn't understand us (until we became them as it turned out), and stayed up late to watch a man walk on the moon. 

We were part of what sociologists call the Pig in the Python generation and yet, I suspect when the last of us has passed (and we will, which, when we were kids, was inconceivable) we'll have left a hole akin to the one in a bucket of water when you pull your fist out. 

And it'll be our children's children who wrestle with the consequences of our decisions on the environment, on energy, on public policy of all shades, and worldwide diplomatic outreaches, and these days, as hard as we think they are, will be viewed as the Golden Ones as they "hang round 'neath the vapor light." 
-bill kenny 

Labor Day 2022

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the Legion boys come 'round
She always stood her ground.

Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union.
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.

This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies,
She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys.
She always got her way when she struck for better pay.
She'd show her card to the National Guard
And this is what she'd say

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies auxiliary.
Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.

Now I'm a union man, amazed at what I am. 
I say what I think, that the company stinks. Yes, I'm a union man
When we meet in the local hall, I'll be voting with them all.
With a hell of a shout, it's "Out brothers, out!" and the rise of the factory's fall.

Oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die. Until the day I die.

The union has made me wise to the lies of the company spies
And I don't get fooled by the factory rules 'cause I always read between the lines
And I always get my way if I strike for higher pay
When I show my card to the Scotland Yard and this is what I say:

Oh, oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die.
Until the day I die.

Before the union did appear my life was half as clear
Now I've got the power to the working hour and every other day of the year
So though I'm a working man I can ruin the government's plan
And though I'm not hard, the sight of my card makes me some kind of superman

Oh, oh, oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die.
Until the day I die.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die.
Until the day I die.

-bill kenny

Same Holiday, Different Perspectives

 

Hazel Dickens

Phil Ochs

Sweet Honey in the Rock

-bill kenny

The Bigger the Cushion

I've stopped spending a lot of time online doomscrolling news sites or watching 24/7 TV news stations for hours at a time because the variety and number of problems/challenges facing us just continues to multiply like those brooms Mickey takes an axe to in Fantasia. 

That's why I was relieved, I think, to come across a wire service story in one of my local daily newspapers that suggests someone somewhere is taking a stab at trying to mitigate the Brazilian Butt Lift crisis. 

This is something people do and do so dangerously they lose their lives getting it done. Seriously?
-bill kenny

Paging Ichabod Crane...

I've mentioned more than in passing that I am not a fan of autumn. It's not autumn's fault; my problem comes from what I know follows autumn and there's nothing that will ever change that.

To include the folks who, earlier and earlier every year by my calendar, start putting pumpkin and pumpkin spice in everything imaginable and a few things unimaginable (like pumpkin spice brake pads and calipers this week only $99.99, installed). 

And then you have Duane Hanson.  
-bill kenny