Pluto's STILL Not a Planet Anymore

I wrote this a year and a day ago. 

So. Should I be pleased that so little has changed in those three hundred and sixty-eight days, or dismayed at how we continue to have the same day over and over again? Really hope this time a year and a day in the future I've at least stopped shaking my head (the noise between my ears is making me even more cranky).

"I realize we're only three days into 2015 but for those who make their living from the body politic of the United States (sort of like constitutional fleas), it's more like it's already three days into 2015.

According to NBC, we have a baker's dozen (and some crumbs to spare) to keep an eye on in the race for the White House in 2016. Except, here's the thing and it's not personal, the list makes me throw up in my own mouth.

A parade of the gray suited grafters, a choice of cancer or polio-Mick and Keef nailed it and they're not even US citizens. No, that's not what I want to howl at the moon about so early in this year, not at all.

We've become a nation of ADD but such an ailment adds nothing to who we are and more importantly to whom we can be. Somehow we've managed to lose sight of "e Pluribus Unum" (from many, one) as close to a slogan as any nation has any right to have and have opted, it seems to me sometimes for 'Quia fried poma cum terra, vis?" (do you want fries with that?)

I hope my right of center friends (assuming I have any; an assumption that also can be made for those on the other side of the aisle as well) will forgive me when I opine that I have little to no interest in what your party does in either the House of Representatives or the Senate as long as whatever it is they believe is in the best interests of the greatest number of us who live here.

Instead of working on a 140 character tweet or an eye-catching bumper sticker for Hillary, Rand, Jeb, Chris or Marco (or Polo) or any of the other folks who called shotgun in the electoral college clown car, how about we spend at least the rest of this year with some words from a long time ago?

These are some memorable words from a thoroughly flawed man who did his best even when his best wasn't good enough, "My country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

As we've discovered for the last fifty years or so, our civil discourse has continued to coarsen and we've stopped listening to one another in order to discuss the issues of the day only waiting until it's our turn to talk, we have a long way yet to go and a finite number of days to get ourselves gone.

Worries about 2016 are distractions from the task at hand, getting through this day in 2015 and the next one and the one after that. I agree with the shriekers on both sides of the political spectrum, there is much "wrong" in this nation but not so much that it cannot all be repaired in a day by what's right. More sentences and paragraphs, and far fewer words. Starting now."
-bill kenny

Too Late for a Retrospective?

The first weekend of the new year is over halfway done. We only get fifty-two of them, and yipes! the first of them is just about gone despite all that stuff we promised ourselves this time last week that we would do this week and every week beyond. 

I stumbled across a closing-of-the-age epistle I launched in this space back when writing and posting the words every day was sort of scary, not just to others who might come across it, but to me. Maybe most especially to me. I updated some of the references because, in the almost a decade since I first wrote it, only God and I knew what I meant originally and now that number has been halved.

I started writing this blog, rant, bark at the moon, confessional, in October 2008. I stumbled across this mechanism to post it, otherwise, I would have had to invent it, and being an idiot, that would not have been pretty. 

If this is the first time you've been here, I could tell you this is just part of an off-day, but then you'd look at another entry and realize that was untrue. If you've been here before, thanks for the use of your eyes and your brain--as you've long since figured out, I don't write this for you, or anyone else. I write it for me. I had decades with no place to put my words and now there is here. 

I had every intention of sharing some of the early scribblings, so to speak, today but I've changed my mind. I sometimes forget I can do that and not have to worry about disappointing anyone (except myself). I'm still struggling with how much 'new me' I can stand for the new year (and that whole 'old dog and new tricks' thing keeps popping up and it's a valid point, much like the one on my head, I'm sorry to say).

I think we both know we can change our way of living and thinking anytime we desire to so do; we needn't tie it to a date on a calendar though I often feel most comfortable doing just that. In a sense, that's the nice thing about us as a species; we can start anywhere at any time and we can also start again. 

I keep coming back to a song stuck in my head about 'we're a short time here and a long time gone,' so if you're waiting for a sign to do or to be here in the New Year other than what you were in the Last Year, consider that graphic above that I lifted from Adam your sign. 

And remember, s/he who hesitates is lunch.
-bill kenny

And the Buildings Scrape the Sky

Real winter, with unkind skies and chilly temperatures, arrived here in the Northeast, as we knew it would, right after Christmas. Sort of a Gift of the Magi without a sales receipt so no refunds and a very difficult exchange policy.

It had been incredibly glorious weather-wise until then in many of these parts, I read in some places the warmest December since Hades started franchising or something to that effect, so kvetching or complaining is uncouth.

I really liked it and didn't expect it to last but was sad when it ended. On the other hand, when you live where we have all four seasons, we tend to get them. Sometimes chronologically, sometimes alphabetically, sometimes by height. But they all show up if you hang on long enough.

It was nearly forty yesterday morning when I awoke (it's a habit of mine bordering on a resolution: I make it a point to get up on the first day of the new year and for some odd reason that makes getting up all the other days that much easier to do) and I walked to the Norwich Harbor.

The Harbor is the confluence of the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers that form the Thames River which flows into the Long Island Sound. I love offering the long explanation; I sound  a little like Lewis and Clark especially if you think by Lewis I mean Jerry Lewis.

I would have been happier with a nicer first day of the year; it makes the other 365 that follow a bit easier to handle, but it is what it is. The days are already starter to get brighter earlier and stay light longer, which for a Seasonally Affected Dolt such as I, is very good news indeed. The struggle is real so don't let it bring you down.  
-bill kenny

The Danger and Allure of the Road Not Taken

Welcome to 2016 (here on the East Coast of the United States). It's still dawning elsewhere as it arrives but arrive it shall and will. The next bright penny in our calendar of a lifetime that will be as dirty and dulled by that which we have done, and not done, by the next thirty-first of December.

But that's for another time. This is now and this now is new. The blank page can be a little intimidating until you start to write and then, I'd hope, the words will flow (don't use this as an example).

For some this year will be the next chapter, while for others this will be the final chapter. Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. Our lives, I'm told, are really compilations and combinations of everyone we meet, and of every situation in which we find ourselves.

I always bear in mind that disclaimer I see on the side of boxes of dry ingredients of all kinds: "Some settling of contents during shipment may occur."

That said, and I have stopped making resolutions for each new year (which means I have stopped breaking my resolutions), might we all entertain the idea of Never Settling for Anything at Anytime by Anyone?

We deserve the best from one another always and this time around, with a leap year, we have a new opportunity to be the best we can ever be, until we are here in this place and space again. Until then turn your face to the brand new sun.
-bill kenny

A Toast to Innocence

This is a day I always get wrong. Do I look back at everything I failed at this past year or failed to accomplish and attempt? That takes care of the sins of Commission and Omission that Father Costello used to warn us about in those uncomfortable lectures he did after Mass on First Fridays at St. Peter's Church. 

My other choice is to look forward, but to what and how far? Should I be preparing to celebrate a cure for the heartbreak of psoriasis or having a fruit cup with thick syrup? Don't trivialize my choice of alternatives, okay? But feel free to see them as a cautionary tale for yourself if not tonight then at some time.

Do you make resolutions and what are their subjects? I stopped a long time ago before I met my wife before we had our children (technically, she had them) and before we came to the Land of Round Doorknobs. The only resolution I can recall ever making, and the one I encouraged our two children to also make, is to do my best every day. I'd encourage you to do the same and I don't care what it is you do or don't.

We spend too much time every day interacting with people who did us a favor showing up, be it for work or for whatever the life event is. If you have no passion or reason for doing or being what you are, where you are, spending any amount of time with you is too much, at least for me. In the year that arrives on little cat's feet in less time than it takes to tell you about it, promise to never be that person, ever.

Be an exclamation, and not an explanation. Live out loud and at the top of your voice as more than one person I know is fond of saying. Be happy that you're here because you won't be here that long, and don't worry how others feel about you; that's their business, not yours. Leave nothing undone and even less unsaid. 

Some left us in the course of this year and I hope they were so marvelous we shall always feel their absence and miss them forever. Make it a point to toast absent friends, knowing that all of that is part of all of this and the dance goes on even as the partners change because they must. The same procedure this year? The same procedure as every year.
-bill kenny

Out with the Old! (but then what?)

There're been a lot of words written in review about this year, rapidly ending, and between now and New Year’s Eve, there’ll be a few more, I suspect. These mutterings and murmurings should not be perceived as any of that. 

I confess to finding something disquieting about the neuralgia of nostalgia--seen through the prism of the past, events can often take on a rosy hue, far more in retrospect than you might recall they had at the time they were current.

If that proves to be the case, in a matter of weeks this, too, will be part of a 'Good Old Days' memory and perhaps that's good so. Meanwhile, in twenty-four hours we turn the page on the calendar and start anew. It’s not table rasa, nor need it be another link in a chain of tradition. We can and should create a new path with the understanding that when you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

There are signposts enough along the way to the city and community we aspire to be if we choose to see them. November’s elections were a shift in how we govern ourselves at the most local of levels.

It was a start of a journey, but by no means not the journey in its entirety because I don’t think any of us actually know what our destination is. Instead of worrying or quarreling over who is holding the map or steering and who called shotgun, let’s keep our eyes on the shared road and all our hands on the wheel.

Let's promise one another to work with all elected officials, regardless of their political affiliation, or ours, as they work to do their best for all of us. It's not easy holding elected officer anywhere in the United States these days and I've often thought it's a little more challenging than it needs to be around here. I fear we tend towards a pessimistic mindset because that way we can only be surprised and never disappointed.

If Norwich were to have a mascot, it might be Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh's homefry. He embodies caution and caution is a good thing but always waiting for the other shoe to drop makes it much harder to dance in celebration. Maybe if the chance presents itself in 2016, we could trade him in for dancing shoes? Couldn’t hurt.

Not sure how you measure progress and our individual mileage probably varies, but as we’re assembling our 2016 resolutions let’s resolve to be a tick slower to anger and a heartbeat faster to give one another a benefit of the doubt. 

Maybe, just maybe, we'll realize the only way we can get to where we want to go is by going there together. That it's often not eaten as hot as it's served is both a truth and a truism and is valid for where you live as well as for where I live. Grab a napkin and tuck in.

-bill kenny

Light Is Changing to Shadow

In English we say, "wait and see." In 2015, in looking at those who would be President a year from now, we should have used "seriously?" On both sides of the aisle, there was a lot of overstatement and hyperbole and outright bull$hit, though on the last of those, one of the two national parties comes to mind more readily and frequently, at least for me. 

So vexed have I become by dueling factoids, I offered a quip the other day elsewhere in the Ether to the effect that a good resolution for 2016, a/k/a this Friday, might be 'if you didn't hear it with your own ears, or see it with your own eyes, don't invent it with your small mind or share it with your big mouth.' 

I am more than chagrined to concede I will have in all likelihood probably ignored/renounced or otherwise obliterated both the spirit as well as the letter of that resolution no later than seven AM New Year's Day and that's only if I sleep in until 6:45.

In response to that post, a Facebook friend asked, "And how do we get people to research and thoroughly investigate before forming irreversible opinions?" 

And excellent question made more so by my inability to formulate an even pedestrian answer. I will agree it is the (choice of definite article deliberate) challenge we face in the 21st Century as connectivity and convergence allow each of us if we so choose, to create an info bubble that is really nothing more than info babble. 

By choosing outlet A over B, we construct a reflection and approximation of a reality that not only varies from each of us to the next of us but may also be at a variance to actual reality.

Pick a hot-button topic. Climate-change. The war on terrorism. The economy. Civil and equal rights. Wage equity. Every one of us has an opinion based on facts as we've chosen to gather them. But what is true? And what is right? With dueling factoids, who is to know if there is a way or is it the way?  

And are those terms still of any use in a world we started out to enhance and enrich through our technology and now we've corrupted and ensnared with grumpy cat memes, pseudo-news sites where private agendas masquerade as discussions of public policy.  

We have taken to looking at only one side of every ideological and political coin, based in part on our values and beliefs and in another part on the reinforcement of those values and beliefs by whom we choose to get our 'news' from, all the while insisting we are being even-handed and open-minded (when we may not actually be either). 

More information, I would submit, has made us less tolerant, not more. We have become intellectually more insular and insulated than our parents ever were with far fewer tools to deliver the world to us. 

We need to work harder, MUCH harder, to speak TO one another rather than AT one another (starting with me). There are people in all walks of life with whom each of us can disagree, but when we choose, as I have in some instances, to become disagreeable, the chances of dialogue replacing diatribe diminish and facts are forced to yield to nearly primal fears. And decisions made from, by or with fear always fail.

I don't have the answer to the 'how' question but I don't think we can pretend it wasn't asked or more ominously that no one has an answer. A lot to think about as the calendar pages turn and we turn away.

-bill kenny