They Call Me Mellow Jell-O

I wrote this before going into surgery yesterday morning as a vamp for time since I am anticipating having to have overnighted last night at the hospital. Unless something happened like no one on the surgery can find the keys to the operating room.

That will be funny, if this is indeed what has happened. Gotta tell ya, this writing in the future pluperfect is driving me crazy and I'm usually so close I can walk. And I would if I had pants but for part of today I'll be in one of those air-conditioned gowns the fashionistas in St. Tropez are modeling. And what, pray tell, is sexy about nearly-naked butt cheeks, freezing in the breeze?

I am more of a creature of habit than I might like. I spent the last days of February of last year in the hospital as well, at that time for a transient ischemic attack. I think next year I should try a cruise instead, news my wife would welcome I'm sure, as she was ashen by the time we went to the hospital yesterday (and may have been since I was told I required surgery last week, come to think of it).

Truth is, I think I'm addicted to the 'gelatine product' (not Jell-O, a trademarked term) every hospital serves as if it were lark's tongue in aspic. It's not.

I will do nothing today except watch the sun come up, assuming my health insurance allows a window, until it's time to go home and then we will and I'll take a nap because rest is not something you can actually do in a hospital. I wish it were just a matter of closing my eyes and when I re-opened them I was to the next point.

I would hope to be more chipper and cheerful tomorrow, assuming this goes as swimmingly as it's supposed to except none of that is my call. So if something has happened, I'm hoping I was under and missed it as I am the consummate coward.

In that case, thanks for stopping in and checking out this space for all these years and if you just stumbled by for the first time today, nobody else will tell you what you missed so you're on your own. As are we all.
-bill kenny

Free Falling

I'm not going to have very much from today, and I'm not happy about it or the fact that my happiness (or unhappiness) will have no impact on the course of the day at all.

Early today, much later than I normally get up but still early, I will be in the hospital undergoing surgery-repair of an artery (thankfully in my leg as opposed to someplace else). Granted, based on how I act sometimes, it's logical to assume I have been battling and losing to blood clots in the brain-but I have not.

The hospital is close to home this time. Last time around it was the Yale-New Haven Hospital which is a massive, world-class facility that (country mouse that I have become) I found decidedly daunting.

I'm at Backus Hospital in Norwich, less than a five minute walk from our house, though I am not sanguine at the prospect the post-op folks will let me hike home for lunch. I like the idea of ​​home and dry even if all it will be is an idea. I am working very hard to not get exorcised about anything that's going to happen today or tomorrow since I understand that NOTHING changes if I do.

My brain gets it-the rest of me not so much.

Most of all, I hate how it disrupts the lives of my wife and family. Being related to me is not always the barrel of laughs I may have advertised was always the case when this living arrangement was in the negotiating stages. I have the easy part-I close my eyes and then there's nothing but free falling .
-bill kenny

The Past as Prologue

With the Winter Olympic Games at Sochi ended and the Boys of Summer starting spring training in a matter of moments, there’s just enough time left for the Great American Pastime, Second-Guessing. Actually, there’s always room for Jell-O and enough time for second-guessing (but not about Jell-O).

Maybe because I’m a little fatigued from snow shoveling and our winter or maybe because I’m just tired of politely putting up with murmurings and mutterings from Norwich neighbors who not only know everything but know everything better (and if you don’t think so, just ask them), I’m less than tolerant of posturing and finger pointing than I usually am. Not that I ever tire of doing it myself.

And if you think I’m talking about the drama and trauma surrounding the Ice Rink as well as the Hampton Inn Resuscitation, you’ve just won yourself a heaping helping of Jell-O. You can pick the flavor. Guten appetit.

I admit the only thing I know about ice is it clinks when you drop it in a glass, thus proving I am unqualified to ever utter a sentence containing the phrase “we should.” Besides, I’m more comfortable with “we could.”

The Ice Rink is now a poster child for Six Phases of a Project: Enthusiasm, Disillusionment, Panic Search for the guilty, Punishment of the innocent, and Praise and honor for the non-participants. Not that any of that helps us develop a solution, but still we do it.

If I had a dollar for every person who, so far, has offered an “I told you so…” I would have enough money to buy a new chiller for every skater who has ever used the rink. Forever. And if my Mom had married a Kennedy, I’d be living in the White House. Aren’t you impressed with how smart we always are in hindsight? Yeah, me neither.

So what’s happened so far in regards to the abandoned hotel hear 395 South? Nothing-don’t care what you think you heard or read. Last week’s City Council scheduled a public hearing exactly a month from today, March 26, on the Norwich Community Development Corporation, NCDC, plan for Hampton Inn Project Development Plan. That’s it.

The eye-catcher in the plan is “Tax Increment Financing” which I believe lets us trade 100% of tax revenues on something certainly not worth very much right now for full taxes on a fully completed property later. Drive by 154 Salem Turnpike and see for yourself. Then do the math.

There’s a lot more in the plan but you’d never know it, judging from the on-line comments and Monday morning quarterbacking in local papers during the days that followed (the Super Bowl is over and none of us are going to Disneyland) mostly by people who weren’t even in Council Chambers Tuesday night.

The Hampton Project Municipal Development Plan-to give it its official title- is on line right here. You should read it, maybe in addition to the drive-by on-line comments or better yet, instead of them.

The only thing that continues to keep us from succeeding is fear and distrust based on a past we cannot change and will not forgive. We are prisoners of our history but have the key to our own chains.
-bill kenny

Backwards Is Also a Direction

I'm a huge believer in the indefinite article. I've spent most of my life differentiating between offering the solution when I really mean no more than a solution. While both may address a perceived need for a position, the former very effectively closes off further discussion, and that's rarely a good thing.

I am a flaming heterosexual (in keeping with my beliefs I did NOT say the flaming heterosexual) who is also a Caucasian male of middling height and weight (with a dazzling smile; checking to see if you were reading). I had no control over any of these things (okay, I'll give you the weight), which is just as well since, given choices, I'd have no idea what to choose and what to choose from.

That's why when we started to catch up across the USA and around the world in recent years with the realization it takes every kind of people and that selectively persecuting or prosecuting one or more lifestyles because they are different from what we consider 'normal' was just goofy, I exhaled as it appeared we'd weathered another storm of our own making on the dark and rolling sea of life.

But then I read stories like this, and like this, and I get dismayed and disturbed. We still haven't fully grasped that no matter how quickly we move we cannot outrun our own shadows and that each of our our lives is filled with other people. To pretend it's okay to choose to exclude suggests we've started down a path of no return marked with photos of people with shaved heads and colored stars and perpetually fired furnaces. Certain catastrophe for victim and perpetrator.

As a species, we evolve; not devolve. If we have learned nothing from the life and times of people like Alice Herz-Sommer then we are destined to be dust ourselves, and deserve nothing more. Hate is a wasted emotion and in light of the fragility of our planet, an egregiously stupid way to get along with one another. We are, as Dr. Seuss might suggest, all sneetches just waiting for our stars to be added and/or removed.
-bill kenny

Crawling Down the Alley on Your Hands and Knee

It was in Friday's Washington Post but I first heard about it online through a reference in the Bill Moyers & Company.

It's a perspective piece (=editorial vice news) Anatomy of the Deep State, by someone unknown to most all of us but well-known to those who push and pull the levers of power and by the time you're done reading it, if you are not disturbed about how we have been played by every single institution, from religion through the military to the media, then you are not paying enough attention.

It's a LOT more than a dyspeptic New World Order, though it is all of that. It may well mark the Point of No Return for our democracy because as you'll realize when you read it there's no longer anyone watching anyone else who doesn't have a dog in the hunt and when the bullet meets the bone and we round up the usual suspects, there are no innocents left at all.

The jails are filled with unindicted co-conspirators. Guilt is beyond discussion but the crime has not yet been determined.
-bill kenny

Mr. Showalter Has Halted

When people say Truman, I'm never sure if they mean Capote, the movie with Jim Carrey or the 33rd President who was opposed to any attempt to air condition food preparation areas.

I'm thinking about the man from Independence, Missouri when I read this from ESPN as the Miami Dolphins begin counting the costs of mistreating Jonathan Martin. Small potatoes. Not for Martin but for everybody else.

I think just having to admit they are/were connected with the Miami Dolphins is punishment and maybe punishment enough, but I've rooted for the Jets (okay in my desultory fashion that masquerades as loyalty) since they were the Titans, so I may be biased.

(Attempted) Humor aside, unless one of those minions sacked is also moonlighting as the head coach, general manager or even the owner, the net isn't wide enough and not enough pain has been inflicted. If that's a little too Old Testament for you, sorry, except I'm just apologizing to be polite; I'm not really sorry but I am angry and you should be as well.

Bear in mind in the context of the universe, all of this is less than a blip on the screen but within the confines of the only life Jonathan Martin and his family and friends will ever know, what went on was huge and inexcusable. Or perhaps inexcusably huge or even inexhugeable (patent pending).

And the Dolphins have decided the guy who hands out the towels, in essence, is one of the culprits. Not sure what the wire diagram of their organization looks like but it must be a work of modern art if they can hold the offensive line coach responsible for what happened but the head coach isn't accountable.

And as I said earlier, if I had any passion as a fan of the Dolphins or the NFL in general, it would be shaken now and I would be crimson with embarrassment. But a heaping helping of comfortably numb is the best I can do and I'm thankful I see the NFL as a multi-billion dollar multi-platform entertainment entity designed to leave 'em laughing when they go.

Except it never leaves, and now, never will. Pro sports is life, many of its loudest apologists tell us. Yeah, I know. I'm thinking that's my problem with it.
-bill kenny

The Return of Unmentionables and the White House

Back in the pre Pre Fab Sprout era was (there's a few reference, and not just you, will not get) a former Democratic Governor of Arkansas ("The Natural State") who in his quest for the Oval Office, used the music still-playing music version of Music Television (MTV) to help him on his (successful despite a dalliance with Gennifer Flowers) journey to two terms in the Oval Office.

He wailed on saxophone thus staking his claim to the bebop hipster doofus vote but contrary to popular memory that musical interlude was actually with Arsenio Hall whereas the Moment of Zen on MTV might well have been this "Inquiring Minds Want to Know" question from Vox Publicum . 

I concede that as questions go, it's better than "if you were to cloud what kind would you be?" that I always expect George Will to ask, and then answer, himself usually followed by a very bizarre baseball sort of trivia question because George loves baseball more than life itself, but like life, understands not so much.

The moment is a landmark in American Presidential politics or was, until Monica Lewinsky's dry cleaning was picked up but in the course of the last decade and a half, decorum has more or less ruled and it's been kinda quiet on the foundation garments front. And thank you, all of you, for that. 

Until this. I can well imagine the "cringeworthy" commando factor Bradley had experiences as, hand on heart, I had experienced my own while reading that report in an online feed. I found it odd to The NY Daily News Ellen would use "Hot Scoop" Degeneres as a source since I suspect she herself would be surprised. 

My concern now, of course, is if we have guests who went 'unten ohne' while visiting the White House (as Angela Merkel might say), just how big a couch is Ellen having on the show to hold them all. I, for one, hope they bring their own sheet music.

-Bill kenny