Pantload Vs. Pantsuit

Hank is chuckling, I’m sure. Actually, he’s probably halfway through a full-throated belly laugh by now which, when he catches his breath, will become uncontrollable sobbing because he can “laugh and cry in a single sound.”

By Hank, I mean Henry Lewis Mencken or as he’s known across the ages and throughout the world, H. L. And we’re working overtime from the pages of his playbook, “Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.”

I’ve always preferred HR, Pufenstuf to Block, though I was neighbors to another one for the better part of a decade, but Mencken is the man when it comes to all things vaguely democratic (small “d” please) here in the Land of Unlimited Possibilities (and Bombast, and another word that starts with B and ends with T and has an S in the middle). I don’t want any more angry letters from the Legion of Decency (not until they learn how to spell at least) so connect the dots for yourself on that one.

I still haven’t taken the “Feel the Bern” sticker off my car’s back window and I may become that curmudgeon in the neighborhood all the kids avoid, the one with a Back to Mono button on my cardigan sweater struggling to mow the grass around my imaginary Bernie lawn sign because the current menu of mental midgets, defective and derelicts seeking the nation’s highest office causes me to throw up in my own mouth, just a little.

Do not waste my time preaching about Jill Stein and/or Gary Johnson. They’re not going to win so a vote for either of them is nothing more than the equivalent of taking a pee in a dark blue suit. It gives you a nice warm feeling and no one notices. I almost admire your principles but where the hell were they when the folks currently Rope-A-Doping in the center ring of the circus were still scuffling to get there?

Save your moral indignation at having to choose between the Lesser of Two Weasels. None of us are gonna be around forever but our kids and their kids (touch wood) will be and I don't want their lives, and beyond, determined by Supreme Court Justices one of the two major party candidates promises he will nominate.

There were lots of folks who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Gore back in 2000 (that sleazebag Bill Clinton, you know, and a moral repugnance at his alleged sleazeball behavior); they were not even willing to hold their noses and go for Gore so, instead, they cast their unique to them and precious ballots for Ralph Nader and felt very good about themselves. 

You remember the Nader Presidency; it was wonderful, wasn't it? Right up until the moment that chad, of Chad and Jeremy, reared its ugly head in the Florida recount and we ended up in Diana Ross’ court where Shrub won, 5-4, after penalty kicks. None of which would've or could’ve happened if half the smugly superior Floridians who voted for Nader hadn’t. 

And here we are sixteen years on in a world where huge amounts of change happened because of and despite that one selfish decision to seek the moral high ground and the hell with the rest of us. To review: we have an orange guy who is frighteningly proud of his ignorance and a buttoned-up woman who may be genetically incapable of telling the truth. So much for freedom of choice. What too many of us want is freedom from choice. It's a little late for that, Sunshine. 

Eighty-seven days until we have a once in our lifetime (I hope) chance to fulfill H. L.’s prophecy, “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” You know what? I can wait. Seriously, I can wait.  

-bill kenny

Hairy Thunderer or Cosmic Muffin

One of my favorite short stories is Honore de Balzac's "The Atheist's Mass," though my own boxing matches with God, owing to my exceptionally short arms, have been painfully one-sided and less than successful.

Voltaire suggested 'if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him,' though if your beliefs waver or fluctuate I can see how you'd flip that quote on its head without breaking a sweat.

Meanwhile, as headlines remind us every day, we have murderous morons who have managed to misinterpret holy writings of all the major religions of the world to buttress their own mutton-headed and muddled vision of a divinity where everyone else is wrong and deserving of punishment.

Added to that, we have the politics of the expedient that have the men and women in power creating additional differences and distinctions between and among us because political power multiplies when you learn to divide us into smaller and smaller subsets.

I'm sixty-four and spend more and more time, for pragmatic and actuarial reasons, pondering a lot of the wondrous, and many of the less so, ways of this life and worrying about what's over the next hill. As Yogi Berra once observed, "it gets late early around here," and more so with every passing day, so I'm starting to pay a lot more attention.

I'm not sure I'd want to spend time (much less all eternity) in the presence of a divinity who created us in Her/His image and likeness and then left us here to our own devices, or one who is an aloof abstraction watching indifferently as we wage war on one another for what we perceive Her/Him to be.

I keep hoping for a sign of some kind to help me on my way and might even settle for a picture postcard from the other side, even with postage due.
-bill kenny

Explains that one.....

In certain circles, to include one I once ran in, it was not unusual to express one's unhappiness at another's behavior by suggesting there was something that person could do, and the threat was also intended for that person's faithful steed.

For Cirilo Castillo, it's not a threat so much as a summary of charges for which he, himself is the culprit. When I saw "Edinburg" in the story I confused it with a
Scottish city and wondered about an ugly sheep. But that truly a horse of a different color.

Poor Cirilo probably should have been wearing sneakers with shin guards, or, since he was shoving right off for home, topsiders.
-bill kenny

Summer's Setting

I keep staring at the calendar and mentally adding "only" to the date. After all, today is "only" August 10th, but three weeks from today is the first day of school for children in Norwich Public Schools, who will be joined by Norwich Free Academy's 9th graders. By Friday, September 2nd, everyone's back in school just in time to be off on Monday for Labor Day where we more or less draw a line under the summer of 2016.

Not that I wanted to harsh your buzz or discourage anyone from turning out tonight at six, weather permitting, at Norwich Harbor's Howard T. Brown Park for Meleana and the last concert of 2016's Rock the Docks series. Talk about time flying, eh?

I had someone tell me a couple of weeks back, and they meant it as a compliment I know, that the concerts are 'something Norwich does really well.' Except, like so much in Norwich (and everywhere else for that matter), many of the community outreaches and celebrations we all enjoy are organized and staffed (meaning all the heavy lifting and long hours) by a very small number of volunteers who don't do it for the 'thank-you's' which are few and far between but because they enjoy helping their neighbors and their neighborhoods.

It's as true for those who created the Taftville Block Party as it is for the return of the Greeneville Fire Hydrant Painting contest and the Spirit of Greeneville Day Celebration 2016, the Norwich Winter Festival Parade, and various ceremonies and observances year-round that honor local veterans and hometown members of the armed forces.  

There's a rule of volunteering and not just the well-known 80/20 one about all the work and who does it, that says the more willing you are to do a hard job well the more willing people are to watch you do it and to point out the parts you didn't do to their satisfaction.

Here's my point (I took my hat off so you can see it better): we have remarkable community activities, driven by energetic community activists, that can and will only get better when and if you become part of that effort.

There's not a single event, from Walktober through Wreaths Across America to the Saint Patrick's Day Parade that wouldn't welcome helping hands and yours might be the perfect size to make a difference.

And if you'd like to stay closer to home, look no further than your nearest Norwich Public School. It seems the only time we pay attention to our schools is in the spring during City Council budget hearings. And while the children in my house who attended Norwich Public Schools, perhaps like yours, are grown and gone, their graduations shouldn't mean the end of our interest and engagement.

If all you can do is find the time to attend a Board of Education meeting, start there (rumor has it they have terrific coffee and wonderful cookies) and see where it takes you. Is this part of some kind of an 'it takes a village to raise a child' speech?
That depends. If it gets you involved, then yeah, and welcome to a bigger village.
-bill kenny


 

A Day Late

As I’ve aged (less than gracefully as has been repeatedly pointed out by many) it takes more and more to get me to do less and less. It hasn’t yet happened but I can easily see in my more immediate future a day where it starts to rain as I drive to work and that precipitation serves as my incentive to turn around and go home (and to trigger a rather unseemly celebration at my place of employment).  

I wanted you to know that before I pass along how we missed what sounds ‘trivial,’ ‘insignificant,’ and, maybe, a little goofy but most assuredly is not. Yesterday was Earth Overshoot Day. As you’ll read right here, not exactly a slap-happy occasion complete with unbridled huzzahs, streamers, marching bands, parades, balloons, and cake (I am a sucker for cake). 

We are, it seems, sort of deep into the dark matter here on the Big Blue Marble. We’ve been living like Wimpy for decades with Tuesday creeping ever closer even as we discard the hamburger wrapper. And, unless I missed it on World News Daily, that Plan B, where we all bail to another habitable planet with breathable atmosphere, plentiful natural resources and 4G LTE Wi-Fi has come a cropper mainly because we haven’t identified the alternate planet.

Without making too fine a point of it, as I read through the materials posted on based on Global Footprint Network (I can see a seven figure sponsorship deal with a sport shoe manufacturer, can’t you; although it’s probably thinking like that which has brought us to this place, metaphysically speaking) we’re in a race against time we cannot afford to lose. And if what we’re doing has gotten us into this disaster, we are at a point where we need to change direction and set a new course before we become past tense. 

And keep an eye on those profligate bastards, down under, where women glow and men thunder, who behave as if they were us. I knew granting the Bee Gees visas was a prelude to a slippery slope. And now look. 

-bill kenny       

Turn the Page

I've rooted for the Yankees most of my life. At times they competed for my affections with the New York Mets and, improbably, perhaps for an East Coast kid, the San Francisco Giants (my dad rooted for the NY Giants and his loyalty and allegiance followed that carpetbagger Horace Stoneham to the Left Coast), but it's always been the Yankees at the end of the day.

The Yankee teams after the loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in the '64 World Series, were rough on the eyes for a couple of years afterwards at least in the won-loss column, and a later era when Billy Martin would be hired and fired as the manager often in the same week, weren't the most fun as a fan you could have with your clothes on either.

I've discovered this year's team rarely caught and held my interest which is more a reflection on me. Like a million fans of a thousand different teams, I always say "we" when speaking about my club even though "we" don't have any money tied up in "our" ballclub.

"We" are not a very good team anymore. "We" got old, not just those of us who watch the Yankees on TV and reconstruct the games from the box scores in the newspaper, one of the few skills my father taught me that I actually learned, but those of us taking the field.

The Yankees paid top dollar for star power that for many reasons, but most especially time and tides, has dimmed as the seasons have rolled on and the stars have burned out or darkened. Alex Rodriguez, who will be mentioned and remembered for many different reasons and not all of them positive, is the latest to call it a career announcing as he did yesterday that this Friday is his last game.

There will be a lot of on-line comments, probably mostly caustic and cutting, in the next days as if playing professional baseball was something any of us, much less all of us, could get up in the morning and go out and do.

What was is often not what is and what is to be too often bears little relation to either, but judgments will be pronounced and sentence imposed. And the rest of the team and the league will head to other distant stadia for the next stop of the unwinding season.

And somewhere in a cheap seat because that's all they can afford some youngster will see their first-ever live baseball game and wonder how they lived this long without that magic. And the cycle will start again, the play will continue and the actors will keep changing.
-bill kenny

...when you haven't got your cellphone camera

I was running some errands to our local grocer yesterday after having gone for a sustained walk on a warm and muggy morning, so I was wearing my wick free (? witless more likely) shirt and gym shorts with itty-bitty pockets so I had to leave my cell phone at home.

I mention that because you'll have to take my word for this part because right here, ______, that's where the picture would go, except I don't have one.
Coming out of the market I passed a Jeep Patriot with a bumper sticker on the vehicle's upper left back window, reading: "Save the Constitution. Read www.infowars.com."

If you wonder what happened to a link to the whackjob's actual website, keep wondering because you won't find it here. The site in my opinion (and I am far from alone) makes Fox News look like MSNBC (come to think of it, O'Reilly and Maddow could almost be twins, right?) and the Jeep driver sees it as a mutant New York Times of some kind?

My absolutely oldest friend in this life, Nat Clymer (who may deny our association now and who could blame him?), is a gifted photographer (as you can see for yourself at that link) once observed, 'many people own pianos but don't call themselves pianists, but everyone with a camera calls themselves a photographer." The same is true for other professions.

At one time, newspaper, magazine, radio, and television news reporting was an honorable and honored profession with years of training and an intricate near-apprenticeship arrangement as your craft unfolded and deepened but the convergence of technologies and proliferation of ideologies has allowed anyone, to include yours truly, with a keyboard and an internet connection to call him/herself a "journalist."

We can shop on-line for our truths and news the way we shop for a car or a can of corn. And have a worldview spoon-fed to us that we think we're choosing for ourselves when nothing is farther from the truth. Variety is more than the spice of life, it's the lifeblood of our own intelligence. As this election cycle will make terribly clear long before we get to November, we need to continue to think for ourselves while it is still legal.
-bill kenny