Awaken from this Illusion

By now you've almost discovered all the clocks and assorted timepieces you didn't set back an hour on Saturday night/Sunday morning when Daylight Saving Time ended. Don't be sheepish about it; I have it happen every time we do this leap forward or fall back dance. 

You glanced at the dashboard display in your vehicle and your pulse raced for just a moment this morning as you feared you were late for work or perhaps an assignation only to catch yourself and remember, perhaps smiling ruefully in your rear-view mirror.

Think of all of the beasts of the earth and name me another who has created the artificial divisions of time we have. I'm hard-pressed to think of another species wearing a wristwatch and who among them has an opposable thumb to hit the display button on the cell phone and learn the time? Just us-the only species with the ways and means to destroy ourselves and the entire planet. Would seem to be a built-in incentive to invest this 'extra' hour in some manner of self-improvement or benefit to the planet.

Between now and March 12, 2023 (assuming we're all here at that time), when we 'spring forward' again we will have lived through 127 days, 3,048 hours, 182,880 minutes, or (gulp!) 10,972,800 seconds (Talk about blink and miss it.).

Do you have plans for even one percent of all this time? Would you share those plans with me, because all I have is what I'm doing right now, fretting at a keyboard in a kind of motionless glide.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing."  

Perhaps nothing more than the time to awaken from the dream of life and live.
-bill kenny

A Generation of Still-Breeding Thoughts

This time today was yesterday when it was already yesterday. This morning in the wee, dark early hours, we fell back an hour (I've always liked how we keep that straight, 'spring ahead' and 'fall back' and that 'wander stupidly like a drunken lemur' I hear so often is, I guess, only used to describe me) all across the country.

I've never been clear how much of the rest of the world does this time-travel-but-standing-very still-stuff although daylight saving time is utilized across significant portions of the earth's Northern Hemisphere. 

I've always wondered about hourly employees working overnight shifts when the clocks change directions....do they work seven and get paid for eight in the Spring and then work nine and get paid for eight in the fall? Is there a law or a workplace practice that covers this and why on earth is a seventy-year-old retiree, pecking away at a keyboard in Norwich, Connecticut, worrying about stuff like this? When you have no life, interest in the obscure becomes a crusade.

The why we move clocks forward and back is the part I will NEVER understand no matter how erudite the explanation. Science makes my hair hurt. And that's another thing I don't understand.

We share the planet with a nearly infinite number of other life forms from single-celled amino acids to the full scale and scope of the abiogenesis catalog (now available for only three easy payments, and if use your credit card right now...), and none of them have watches much less the concern for time and its division and measurement that we, Homo sapiens, have.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day/Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way. And then we look up in surprise and dismay at the time and wonder where it's gone when it hasn't gone anywhere. The end of a television program, a movie, a radio serial, or other entertainment, a relationship with another person or business, or a political alliance. All past tense now.

You don't have to be Richard to have misgivings about time and what we do with it. Merely being human will qualify. "I'll leave the sun behind me and I'll watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by....I can see the world and it ain't so big at all. This time tomorrow."

-bill kenny

Move It to the Exits

Probably NOT just me, but (so far) this year has been, for the most part, another shit show just like the more recent ones we've had (a pattern I find distressing) so why do we continue to do the forth and back with our clocks and watches, as happens tonight (technically tomorrow morning) at 2 AM is beyond me. 

Show of hands: who's happy about getting an extra hour, a heaping helping, and a double-dollop, of 2022? Yeah, That's what I thought. 

I'm already trying to guess which clock I'll find about this time next week or so and whose hands I completely forgot about during the great Fall Back of 2022. 
-bill kenny 

Jimmy Webb to the Red Courtesy Phone

If the title is a puzzler you are either younger than I am (a very dangerous place to be emotionally, trust me on that) or you didn't pay enough attention to the little records with the big holes (45 rpm) when we were all kids going up.  

Here, let me save you some time. Yeah, pretty amazing stuff. I was introduced to him with his work for Glen Campbell and then, of course, MacArthur Park (prefer Richard to Donna but to each his own) but I will always love his work with, and for, The Fifth Dimension. 

He may or may not have commercially peaked (I was going to type a different turn of phrase but this is supposed to be a family-friendly space) by the time he collaborated with Frank Sinatra but who am I to say? 

I think if you were to wonder why I thought of him when I watched this clip, we'd both agree it probably means (fingers crossed) absolutely nothing.
-bill kenny

Four Legs Good

More and more of us around the world are struggling to make ends meet. Somehow, someone has moved the ends and the means that we had are no longer even close to sufficing. 

But so many suffer in silence that I'm encouraged to try it myself. 

At first, I found this news story funny. But now I think I'm pissed. 

I'm so angry in fact, I'm gonna re-read Animal Farm and this time I'm not gonna cry when Boxer gets into the van.
-bill kenny 

Somewhere Between the Soul and the Soft Machine

I wanted to write about where we could be a week from today, which by my calendar is the day after election day, when, depending on your politics, the world will have either been saved or ended. 

Except, I think we’d agree in the heat of the hyper-partisan atmosphere in which we are all trying to live, neither outcome will be true. And I apologize that’s not a more cheerful insight to offer you while also exhorting you to use your vote as your voice next Tuesday.

Lost in the trick-or-treating, costuming and who-knows-what is that Monday’s Halloween began as All Hallows Eve (Vigil of the Solemnity of All Saints), a reference to yesterday's Feast of All Saints (which in these commercial endorsement times, you may be surprised is NOT an extra value meal offered by a fast-food chain).

As a grade schooler who found himself a pupil of the Sisters of Charity (not that many of us saw much of that) at Saint Peter School, New Brunswick, New Jersey, we knew All Saints' Day was a holy day of obligation.

I came of age, if not reason, in the Catholic Church as Vatican II was just beginning so things like celebrating the Mass in English rather than in Latin or, more significantly, being able to attend Mass on Saturday afternoon to satisfy the Sunday obligation simply did not exist. I know, what a kid remembers, right?

Today, All Souls' Day, however, was for me the saddest of all the dates on the calendar (ours in the kitchen had the names of saints in the date blocks for every day with sometimes more than just one saint’s name in the block).

Considering what a hash I have made of the faith into which I was born and baptized, I will not be amazed if I got this part wrong tool but in my memory, we have Three Churches: The Church Triumphant (those who have died and gone to heaven), The Church Militant (those of us still on earth) and The Church Suffering (those who have died in a state of grace but who still have penance to do for their sins and so they are in Purgatory).

That last group was the people we always prayed for in Catholic school and the part I used to find especially sad was the notion that there was no fixed amount of time a soul stayed in Purgatory. So, you could be praying, I thought pragmatically, as a child of eight, for someone who either had made it to Heaven or was still suffering. I suspect His Holiness and the Curia would shake their heads in bewilderment at my concerns

The part I never understood was what happened to souls in Purgatory when everyone they had known while on earth had also died because now they had no one left who remembered them and who could pray for them. Being abandoned for all eternity terrified me, and it still does. That we always had All Souls Day just as daylight saving time was ending and darkness fell everywhere and earlier made it all that much more frightening.

I'm not sure what happened to my childhood faith but on this one day of each year, and I'm not certain I'm helping anyone with any prayer I could offer (considering the source), I still say one anyway, just in case.
-bill kenny

Equal Goes It Loose

I'm married to a German woman whose English is far better than mine, despite my having a home-field advantage and while I can make myself understood in her language I'm forced to conclude based on results of forty-five years of matrimony, I'm not carrying the day very often when I use it.

Anyway. My point, assuming you had wondered, is that while every language has words and or expressions that can trip up non-native speakers, English, possibly because we've borrowed so much of our language from everywhere, has a lot, if not the most.

In my wife's language, 'abwarten und tee trinken' (let's wait and have some tea) is equivalent to our 'wait and see'. My favorite kinda-sorta phrase is how we in English will say 'that's Greek to me' for something we don't fully grasp while Germans say 'es kommt mir sehr Spanisch vor' (it sounds very Spanish to me).

There are, of course, German turns of phrase, like the English translation I'm using as my title for today that we just don't get at all. But turnabout is fair play and here's a short list I found that probably helps serve as a discouragement to everyone everywhere who's thinking of learning English.  

Gleich geht es los, ehrlich.
-bill kenny