Jason Collins Is Perpetually Happy?

Washington Wizards' center Jason Collins announced he is a gay man. He didn't have to announce he was a black man, not because no one hadn't yet noticed, but because it matters not to anyone. Perhaps he should have mentioned he's left-handed, but only if he is.

Brittney Griner who redefined women's college basketball in the course of the last four years came out last week while being the #1 draft choice (of as many as two dozen different clubs in eleven different leagues on four different continents). I have no idea what if anything I should feel except relief that the UConn Lady Huskies won't ever play against her again.

We may be bracing for rapid-fire announcements from various and diverse sports figures about their sexuality. The right to tell me exceeds my right to care, to be honest. I can't hardly stand it. I should point out being a flaming heterosexual has never done anything for my baby hook and it certainly didn't make me any better at the diamond and one defense.

You already know my point. The farther out in space you go the more alike we look. Maybe we should take the hint and learn to build bridges from our similarities instead of walls with our differences. And celebrate who we are with one another, whoever we are.
-bill kenny

People Take Pictures of Each Other

I am rarely this pleasant on a Monday. Come to think of it, though I am reluctant to admit it, I am rarely this pleasant on any day. Perhaps it has something to do with the double birthday celebration we had in these parts yesterday featuring our daughter, Michelle, whose birthday is this Thursday and her codger of a father, who hit 61* last Friday.

My wife, Sigrid, who took the picture, and our son, Michelle's brother, Patrick, were with us on the opposite side of the table .While Sigrid is NOT happy about the back lighting in the restaurant in this shot, she concedes it's a pretty decent picture of half of the family, emphasis on the word  family.

We don't keep keep pictures in our wallets anymore, at least I don't. Instead we store them on line and in albums in 'the cloud' whatever/wherever that is and share humongous long strings of characters, numbers and letters, called universal resource locators, url's, to give to one another so everyone, everywhere, can see proof that we really existed. Just in case someone thought they had missed it.
I have a photograph, preserve your memories; they're all that's left you.
-bill kenny

A Reminder of Why We Have Dominion over the Beasts of the Fields

It's been a rough couple of weeks around El Rancho Terra Firma. What with earth quakes in Asia, catastrophic fires on the Indian sub-continent, continuing snowfall (yes, it's late April but so what?) across the Mid-West of the USA and the approaching, encroaching police state response to the senselessness of the Boston post-Marathon bombing, we've given each other some hard lessons lately.

Our lives and times seem much harder than they once were, and I'd suggest, they are. But being the Crown of Creation is a full-time job and like it or not we are up to the task, despite occasional setbacks and slip-ups...

In case you think we're losing our touch, cast a look and give a listen to this video that NASA, yeah, that NASA, the one so many of us mumble and grumble about at budget time and wonder 'what do they bring to the table?' has created.

Lilies of the Field? Nice. Selected primates' use of primitive tools. Okay. The achievements of a criminally underfunded agency dedicated to our unceasing exploration of this universe and all the ones we can find? Check, please.
We may be lonely but we are not alone, except with our thoughts......  
-bill kenny

Good Will (Rogers) Hunting

Yesterday I celebrated a birthday-a new kind of birthday complete with my browser hovering over the Google Chrome logo and perhaps because I'm on Google plus (Michelle, our very smart daughter's, theory) there was a caption wishing "Happy Birthday William!" (I may have added the exclamation point; Google is very much a declamatory operating system).

More interesting and amazing, as a man who can count his friends on fewer than five fingers of one hand (and you've guessed which finger I am), I received the most cheerful of greetings and salutations in Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Farsi (I believe), German and English as well as Jersey (ha-ha! THUNK! Sound of me laughing my head off).

I call all Social Media Facebook, FB, and I've mentioned the dichotomy of flesh and blood friends (F&BF) and Facebook Friends (FBF). With my mad math skills I calculated of the birthday greetings I received, 99.79% were from people I have never met, not shall I ever (in all likelihood). We aren't familiar strangers-neither they nor I would know one another if we tripped over ourselves.

Are the contrivances and edifices of Social Media a form of cloaking of those of us who are members of the lonely crowd or are we creating variations of Erich Fromm's egoism a deux? Are we now more, or less, alone than we were a decade, a generation, a lifetime ago and for what end and to what purpose have we allowed these invisible airwaves to weave a tableaux, a Story of Us, we can tell to ourselves to keep the dark of night at bay?
-bill kenny

If You Can't Laugh then Smile

I am sixty-one years old today. At some point I will call my mother to thank her as she is infinitely more important in this process than was I. My father passed away many years ago but he's the denominator to the fractional transaction that is I.

I am more than the sum of my parents-I am the sum of everyone I've ever met, so if you are in that number, thank you and if not (yet) I hope you'll be a good sport should our paths cross.

"I was born in '67 (not really), the year of Sgt. Pepper and Are You Experienced.
Into a suburb of heaven, yeah it should've been forever. It all seemed to make so much sense. But after a while you realize time flies. And the best thing that you can do is take whatever comes to you. 'Cuz time flies.

She said luck is what you make it; you just reach out and take it. Now let's dance a while. She said nothing ever happens if you don't make it happen. And if you can't laugh, then smile. But after a while you realize time flies. And the best thing that you can do is take whatever comes to you. 'Cuz time flies.

And laughing in the summer showers that's still the way I see you now.

How does time break down with no marker, things slow down. A conference of the strange and your family is deranged. I could tell you what I'm thinking while we sit here drinking, but I'm not sure where to start. You see, there's something wrong here. I'm sorry if I'm not clear. Can you stop smoking your cigar?

And the coat you wore to Alton Towers is still the way I see you now."
-bill kenny

Emptying the Ocean with a Spoon

I have a reputation for enjoying the Grand Gesture. And truth to tell, there are two magistrates who are on record as telling me if I made those gestures in their jurisdiction, the next time I wouldn't get off with just a caution, so I consider myself chastened.

Looking out the window on to the world that near-universal connectivity affords those of us who can pay for it (remember when computers were turned on like it was a special occasion and not like an appliance? Nope, neither do I), I came across this short report from The Beeb (I like typing posh).

It reminded me a little bit of a rounding up campaign the JC Penney folks were involved in last holiday season where your change on a purchase, let's say it came to $19.28, would be rounded to the next dollar and the difference, in this case 72 cents would be donated to a charity.

I like the idea very much and I hope it hops the Atlantic and goes global because someone, everywhere or everyone, some place, is in need of help. I like to think we each would help more, and more often, if we weren't so frequently daunted by the scale and scope of the perceived need.

We all know the expression "a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step" (after, of course, you have the perfect pair of socks, comfortable shoes and those orthotic inserts from Dr. Scholl's) and if that step is caffeinated or more a decaf moment, just getting started may prove to be the hardest part and the sweetest victory.

Perhaps today is the day when each of us starts to empty an ocean of misery, one spoonful at a time.
-bill kenny    

Ike's Kid

I was born the same year Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. I mention that not to impress you with how old I am ('and look, he can still dress himself! Well, sort of) but, rather, to help you understand what the dog-eared snapshot of America in my wallet looks like.

We lived in Suburbia. Dad, and all the other neighborhood fathers, got up early to get to the train station for important jobs in The City. Mom made Dad breakfast and drove him to the station and then came back and got all of us up, fed and dressed for school. She waited for the school bus with us and was there at the stop when we came home in the afternoon.

In Eisenhower's America you had air raid siren testing with under-your-desk and look-away-from-the-flash-at-the-window drills and no one found any of this odd or unusual because we had always done it and assumed we always would.

All the boys after school played war and all of us were brave soldiers with guns keeping the suburban sprawl backyards safe from all the enemies we saw on night-time TV shows.

Cold War kid that I was, I lived as a member, small and young, of one of the tribes of America, the middle class white American tribe. My circle of friends and playmates was so white we glowed in the dark. If I had any after-school playmates of another color, any color, I don't recall them.

I do remember Mrs. Henderson, my third grade teacher, a tall, black woman who was a dynamo in the classroom though I had no idea at the time why she worked so hard to prove herself. I figured it out many years later, long after being her student, proving (I guess) that not all learning happens in the classroom.

Growing up, I watched the civil rights movement on television newscasts and in the headlines of our daily newspapers (one in the morning and one that came out in the afternoon), on street corners in downtown and across our playgrounds.

As a teenager, grainy film footage brought The War (always capital letters) in Vietnam directly into our living rooms every night at dinner where it sat on our  trays along with dessert. The universe was getting more dangerous, the pace was getting faster and we were growing to assume our place in a world we were creating as we went along.

We were the children of the Greatest Generation and too often had the same sense of history a cat does. It's been decades since I thought about the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" or Wide-Wale bell-bottoms, just two artifacts of a long ago age of arrogant innocence (or ignorant arrogance if you want to be kind), when we took for granted everything we had, never wondering where it came from or how long it might last.

And now, as our children impatiently wait for us to relinquish the leadership roles we inherited from their grandparents, it's our turn, as did they, to wonder what it is we're leaving for them and what they will make and where they will go with whatever gifts we have given them.
-bill kenny