Turn It Up to Eleven

It's not necessarily alchemy, but at times it can feel a lot like magic. At its purest, I'll admit, it's simplicity itself: add two or more guitars, some bass, and drums.

Later, rinse, repeat. 
-bill kenny

Feels More than the 30th

Just me or does January 2021 feel like an extension of December 2020? Sort of like having an extra day in February like we did last year, under that new 'have 24 more hours of suck on us' program from the same people who come up with great ideas they never need to live with. 

So here we are, and here we'll stay.  Until we move forward because if we don't in a year's time, we'll have wished we'd started today. So...

Together we stand, divided we fall.
-bill kenny

Now and Zen

I see commercials on television for meditation apps for your smartphone which is kind of funny (to me) since I suspect smartphones are the #1 contributor to the creation of stress in most of our lives. 

But that said, I like the idea of an in-place time-out, a moment of sanctuary from the rush and crush before re-engaging. 

I do a lot of walking and to the disappointment, I suspect, of some of my neighbors, that includes returning home after walks but one of the places I love to go, and it's convenient to my house, no matter the season, is the Lower Falls of the Yantic River usually called Uncas Leap. 

This is from a little more than a week ago, but I hope it does the trick for you in terms of respite and recharge.
-billkenny

They Married for Peace and Were Gone

As we were driving back from the Willimantic Department of Motor Vehicles Tuesday afternoon, my wife, Sigrid, looking out the passenger window at the grey landscape blending seamlessly into a grey horizon where, somewhere overhead, it met an equally grey sky, and offered a word in her native tongue, German, that too perfectly described it, trostlos-hopeless.

This is the toughest time of year for a lot of us, including folks like me who stare out the window in My Situation Room ("Fortress of Ineptitude" finished a close second in the name-the-spare-room contest we had when our daughter, Michelle, moved out) hoping to catch a glimpse of what's next. A number of years ago someone took me on a short helicopter flyover of some of the woodlands and farmlands in this area of Connecticut in the late fall, early winter, and the view from the top seemed to be of another world.

I can recall everywhere we went (and you can see a lot of them from the roadways, but there are many, many more as it turns out), seeing rock walls through the forests and brook beds, intersecting at angles, and wondering how odd that must have seemed to the indigenous peoples here when European settlers first arrived. In comparison, the European landmass was the smallest of the continents, and maybe that's where the assertiveness (if not out and out aggressiveness of its natives) developed as they went out into the big world and marked their territory not only to use but, at times, to use up.

I drive through lands demarcated by ancient stone walls every day as I travel across the Real World, and none of the creatures I pass in my travels or travails regard them as immutable boundaries or barriers. They are there and nothing more. I would imagine for a Mohegan or a Pequot, thinking of the tribes in this region of Connecticut, watching an early settler struggle to subjugate the earth to farm crops, engaged in back-breaking labor to maneuver the giant stones they unearthed while tilling, to serve as property markers was too amusing to not smile.

And it's taken us centuries to learn lessons of harmonious, not rapacious, living within a natural order and I'm not sure we're learning enough and fast enough. Reuse and recycle instead of plunder and leave. We have to work very hard to not spend too much time calculating what has been lost from the lessons left unlearned for too long and too long ago. Broken Arrow.
-bill kenny

#NeverAgain

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 76th anniversary of the Red Army liberating Auschwitz, Poland in the last winter of World War II.

You and I might like to believe that in our world today it is impossible that this fact could ever be forgotten but, looking across the globe, and the country not only is that not so but we encounter deniers who lie to themselves and others by insisting that none of the nightmare that was the Nazi's Final Solution ever even happened.

I almost understand, except because we don't all seem to have time for the truth, the lie gets another chance to spread some more and oozes its way into more lives as we sink a little deeper into the muck of our own perdition. To be clear: Holocaust deniers are not misinformed. They are evil for believing, for persisting, and for insisting that the horrors that happened, didn't occur.

Every year, there are fewer and fewer survivors of Auschwitz who observe the anniversary of its liberation and in the not-too-distant future there will be no one alive with first-hand recollections. That's why today, in a world of darkness and death driven by deep-seated, irrational hatreds of all kinds, we, each of us, need to be a witness for the truth of the Holocaust and of injustice and murder anywhere and everywhere we find it on this earth.

As a child on the rare occasions when I’d hear grown-ups tell stories about "The War" in which they’d fought they never mentioned the death camps-at least I don’t remember hearing anything. Perhaps their stories focused on a Europe that was an ocean away and even then, there was a reticence and reluctance to revisit a tortured time and a tendency to let the past remain the past. And what did that get us?

I'm the grown-up now and the cautionary tale the Ha-Shoah should have been, does not seem to be a lesson we have even started to learn. There are mindless murders every day in every corner of the globe because of the color of skin, the choice of a God, the shape of an eyelid, always some variation of our fear of The Other.

Here at home. we are NOT much better especially after a Presidential campaign whose vitriol-fueled falsehoods were so ubiquitous, they seemed endless as we denigrated and dehumanized those with whom we disagreed, rendering them abstractions and easier to hate and then hating them deeply and completely.

And then topping that, we had the spectacle of an attempted insurrection just three weeks ago with hours of imagery of angry and armed mobs in sweatshirts many with hateful and hate-filled anti-Semitic/racist/sexist slogans and imagery on sweatshirts and banners, despicable renunciations of everything our country claims to stand for.

Years ago, I came across Paul Chernofsky’s book, “And EveryoneWas Someone.” I think it’s still in print, or should be; you should read it. It's important someone can always bear witness to who we were and how easily all of that hatred happened and how it can happen again. Everyone's shadow is the same color but far too often we choose to forget that.

#NeverAgain.
-bill kenny

Vanilla Twilight

This new year, 2021, which arrived with such hopes and high expectations is already almost a month old or will be by the time we reach next Monday morning. How did that happen and when? Perhaps the good news is, if you've been holding off buying a calendar, you should start to see some great prices on them as the deep discounts kick in. That's an economic stimulus we can all get behind.

If all government is the result of social contracts we make with one another then I'd suggest municipal government works only as hard and as well as we, the people who live in our millions of towns and cities across the country, help make it work.

Everything from picking up trash as you go for a walk around the block, testifying at a public hearing on a zoning change, or offering yourself as a candidate for an office, each a small step by itself, adds up to a larger way forward. And yeah, as I've pointed out before, democracy is a contact sport, so when you decide to get off the bench make sure you're wearing a cup. 

I fear we've spent too many years in this Experiment Called the United States getting too comfortable referring to others as 'them' so that 'we' will have someone (else) to blame. The danger of finger-pointing is that three of the fingers point back at yourself. Perhaps if instead of balling our fingers into fists we offer them as a hand up to someone else in need, together we can make where we live better for all of us. 

If we don't at least try, we'll automatically fail and we've long since passed the point where failure can be allowed to remain an option.
-bill kenny

Aged though Not to Perfection

This is from so long ago our alphabet had two more letters in it than it does now. That's not technically, a lie anymore, but rather, an alternative fact. When I first offered this a previous decade was just beginning and we know how that turned out. I called it:  

Greetings from I. G. Farben

It's not called that anymore-it wasn't even called that when I worked in it decades ago. Then it was called the Creighton W. Abrams Building and was known as the US Army's V Corps Headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, FRG. The FRG, Federal Republic of Germany, was diplo-speak for West Germany; East Germany, the bad guys, were called the DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

It was a massive building and rumor had it that frightening chemical weapons had been developed in the annex behind the main building during the war. Another rumor had it that Frankfurt am Main was nearly totally destroyed during World War II except for the area where I. G. Farben had their massive corporate headquarters which is why Ike set up shop there. 

He and Mamie were gone by the time I got there, as was Checkers and his owner, too, though I once wore a cloth coat to a cat rodeo. I do know there was a great place around the corner to get kiwi and strawberry ice cream, so delicious it practically ate itself while you watched.

I was working in a video production facility that everyone liked, as an abstraction, but in terms of manning and funding, no one was too crazy about us. It's not that we weren't nice people or didn't deliver great products-we just cost lots of money. Armored vehicles were going for tens of millions of dollars, this was during the Cold War, remember, (a Gift Store?) and we were squared off against Ivan and his toadies (our toadies were, of course, our friends and allies) and whoever blinked first laughed last. Or something. I forget. It was a long time ago. Anyway, we had LOTS of tanks. Video cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars and we had trouble getting money from the guys with all the tanks to buy us even one.

I thought about that yesterday when a fluorescent bulb in the fixture overhead "burned out". I remembered Ron Hicks, one of our engineers, and his running buddy, George Whose Last Name I Have Forgotten. George was from Samoa and was the most easy-going person I've ever seen, even when provoked by Ron Hicks. Ron was crazy-brilliant but crazy. He and his wife had two very young boys, Brenden and LB. And if you guessed that LB was short for Little Brother, then, perhaps you met and know Ron because that's what the youngest one's name was and that's what the initials stood for.

Ron, as the chief engineer, saw his job as repairing the video field production equipment we took on our travels while accomplishing our jobs and broke. He skipped over almost all of that and cut directly to 'broke'. And he was right. We did inordinate amounts of damage to production equipment as it got run over by any number of tracked vehicles moving at high speeds across unforgiving terrain.

When dropped from helicopters, it did not bounce, it splattered. Rain cases were not, as hoped, waterproof shock-mounted protection and so it went, one disappointment after another. And Ron and George repaired everything, even if we didn't come back with all the parts we started out with. There was a day we compensated by returning with part of a German motion picture camera, a very expensive motion picture camera, that was, alas, utterly worthless to us and anyone else. Ron and George did more with less more often than any two people since Adam & Eve.

But I thought of Ron because of the "burned out" light. Ron used to explain to the most junior of the field cameraman the differences in methods of illumination, a topic not really touched on in the Television Production Handbook by Herbert Zettl, the video equivalent of the Sacred Text of every major, and most of the minor, religions. Something not covered in Zettl? The little ones would lean forward and listen closely, and Uncle Ron didn't disappoint.

Incandescent light, he'd explain as if this were merely a review because (yawn) all of us knew this already (or so his tone of voice would suggest), illuminates by driving darkness out of a defined space. He noted that late at night when you turned the nightstand light on, it always seemed even brighter than during the day because at late night it was much darker. Heads would slowly nod and the sound of young fish flopping on the dock, hooks still in mouths, would begin to be heard.

Fluorescent light, he pointed out, worked in the exact opposite way--it absorbed darkness and left only light. There would an occasional askance look-Ron would continue unperturbed because he was already to his clincher. How many of you, he'd ask, have ever removed a "burned out" (air quotes every time) fluorescent?

All hands went up. And did you notice, he'd ask, how there was what looked like black very close to where the metal gap met the glass fixture on both ends? Again, all heads nodded furiously. That, he explained, is because the florescent is full and can hold no more darkness and the leftovers are seeping out.

He'd allow that to linger for the briefest of moments before adding he could understand how some might be tempted to doubt him but, submitted for their approval, he'd add, have you ever thrown a "burned out" fluorescent light into a metal dumpster? Of course, all of us had done this countless times. 

The next time you do it, he said, open the little door on the side of the dumpster and take a look in there--it's as black as a coal mine. Why? Because (of course!) throwing the glass fluorescent into the metal dumpster broke the glass, releasing all the stored up darkness the bulb had been sucking out of rooms for years, scattering it around the dumpster.

I do not recall Ron ever finding the time, or the opportunity, to correct the information he'd shared with the best and brightest videographers the US Army could send to Western Europe as we avoided, but documented nevertheless for all posterity, the deadly embrace of the Russian Bear.
-bill kenny