My First Ever TED Talk

Talk about 'ideas worth spreading...'

Now go and have whatever kind of day you'd like.
-bill kenny

I Would Love to Stand Here and Talk with You

I recently endured a birthday (I would only use 'celebrated' if there'd been a pony ride (inside joke) but there wasn't. Again.) and I've taken to seeing repetitions and patterns in many instances and situations where perhaps they've actually visible only to me. 

Looking at where we are in the City of Norwich Budget Adoption Process (I'm working on a line of commemorative tee-shirts and coffee cups with a booth at the foot of the stairs at City Hall but capital letters is a good first step), all I can keep thinking about is how (much more) often we're going to continue in the same cycle of propose, react with alarm, scale back a little, grudgingly adopt while vowing next year will be different and then starting again the following year as if this one had never happened. Sort of like lather, rinse, repeat while watching Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (and now you where today's title is from). 

If Captain Yossarian in Heller's Catch-22 received a medal for going around the bridge twice, what time do you think our awards parade will start and who, among us, won't be marching in it? People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not, and that's why we keep having the same dangling conversations with one another on the same aspects of our municipal budget every year. 

And then we're surprised, no, that's not the right word, shocked is the word I should use, just shocked that the same challenges we failed to rise up and address last year, and the year before, and the year before that, are still here and still unresolved. 

Talk about tradition. Which is what we do, talk. Mom used to say we had two ears and one mouth for a reason and we should use them in the same ratio, but too often we use public meetings and social media platforms to make sure we keep the No in Norwich. And then we make passion personal and become disagreeable while disagreeing (or am I the only one in this whole city like that?).

Monday night's City Council meeting with its tentative adoption of a preliminary budget for the next fiscal year should be an invitation, an incitement if you wish, to step up and speak out at this coming Monday's Second Public Hearing to tell the City Council on what and where you want your tax dollars invested. 

And yet, as so often happens, not enough of us will make a good-faith effort to offer realistic, reasonable, and reasoned proposals and counter-proposals to those on the City Council attempting to do what's best for as many of us as they can (even those of us who yell at them).    

The trouble isn't our words, however, it's the absence of willingness to transform words into actions. There's never a shortage of nay-sayers with a litany of 'coulda, would, and shoulda' because hindsight is always 20/20. 

Any success we hope to have in continuing to create the city we believe we deserve lies in bringing together pragmatists, visionaries, discouraged experts, enthusiastic beginners, and everyone in between because Norwich needs (just about) all of us and all the talents we can offer.  

Break the cycle. Otherwise, we'll do this all over again, next year.
-bill kenny

You Say 'How High?'

I happened across something the other day that one of my training instructors, Air Force Staff Sergeant G-----y, would have really enjoyed. 

Not sure if it would have pleased him as much as fucking with me while we were both in Air Force Basic Training at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, the largest US airbase in the world without a runway (he as a leader and I as part of the led), but I took solace in the realization that none of it was personal and all of it was designed to build character. 

Well, that's what I told myself, but I am a notorious liar. Cannot adequately express, forty-six years after it kept happening, how much I enjoyed him sticking the brim of his Smokey the Bear TI hat under the bill of my fatigue cap while staring into my eyes and yelling into my face, "Air MAN! When I say jump, you say 'how high?' Are we clear, college boy?" 

We were. And yet, there's this. 

Proving yet again, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Indeed.
-bill kenny

Alice Kramden Says Hello

As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Never mind that I get weak-kneed on the top step of a ladder (a short ladder, truth to tell), I fell in love with the adventure part of the job. 

As an adult and now whatever we call people who are beyond being an adult which is what I am, I concede the idea of my being an astronaut is even more far-fetched than my being a professional baseball player and President of the United States (I was raised to believe you should have impossible dreams, and after enduring the Orange Shitstain's ineptitude of four years I don't think I'd have been as bad in the Oval Office).   

Still, my heart did skip a beat when I saw this on CNN.  

Hey Mother Earth, Won't you bring me back down? I've taken 'bout as much as I can....
-bill kenny 

The Circle Game

Depending on when you read this, our daughter will have already marked another anniversary observance of the hour of her birth. Be of good cheer, she's a night owl now, so the chances that she was still up at a little past four this morning when it was exactly the moment to sing a rousing chorus of 'Happy Birthday to Me' are pretty good.

If I'd not retired already, in theory, I'd be up and might have been tempted to serenade her using my Yakky Doodle voice to sing Happy Birthday, except she has her mother's enthusiasm for abrupt starts to the day and would have been in the foulest of moods for hours.

And that won't do, least of all on her birthday. I have a head full of memories and don't always sort wisely or well between what is real and what I remember as real (which causes me trouble and earns me stern looks). My wife has shoeboxes full of pictures of both of our children and in nearly all of them, Michelle is looking directly into the lens, into the eye of the person taking the picture. She has or shows, no fear of the world, another attribute she has from her mother.

Michelle and the love of her life, Kyle, are working on the next chapter of their lives, a chapter that will take them farther away physically than at least one father's heart would like as they, and she, continue to become a part of the bigger world.

She will always be our child-she knows this, we've told her this and she believes us. I'm not sure she's always comfortable with how often one of us (me) sees a four-year-old when she's saying something, though you'd think by now, I'd have abandoned that 'she's my four old' point of view as technically untenable. She should have such luck. Instead, I know that no matter how far or fast she grows and goes, she will always be our little girl. Happy Birthday, itty-bit!

You didn't think I still had this shot

-dad

We're Talking Serious Pony Rides

Today is the "Fastest Two Minutes in the Whole Dam World or Something Like It." It's Kentucky Derby Day, the Race for the Roses, and a hundred cliches that those who follow the Sport of Kings (and I wasn't sure what they meant for quite some time about that growing up) take as seriously as those who follow the World Series, the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup take their sports.

The difference being you don't get to ride a teammate around a track in anything resembling a counter-clockwise direction (I think; and do they change directions in Australia for the obvious reason) which is too bad because I imagine a placekicker riding around on a linebacker would be quite a striking visual.

All I know about the event today is what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 when I was barely eighteen years old. It tore my mind in two; your turn. And, you're welcome.

-bill kenny

Don't Worry Your Life Away

"Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they?"
- Matthew 6:25

All things considered, he does make a fair point. 
-bill kenny