The Words You Read

I have very little natural intelligence left at this stage in my life, so I find the ongoing conversations about Artificial Intelligence to be particularly interesting, insofar as I can follow the discussions (which is to the end of this sentence, to be honest).  

As is so often the case in the times in which we live, the amount of bogusness and volume of falsehoods, on all sides of the issue, are mind-numbing. I think all I know about AI is that it's not only coming; it's also already here. 

I'm thinking if you're as befuddled as I am, this may help.

And yes, I'm hoping I've successfully curried favor with our soon-to-be-Overlords.
-bill kenny 

Remembering the Power of Us

It happens on a regular basis, so there's no reason to be surprised. Usually within a fortnight (plus/minus a week) of Labor Day we have a shift in the weather, and the heat and humidity depart, not before dumping a large amount of rain in a short amount of time on the just and the unjust, and the leaves start to turn, and the lawn signs start to spring up.

National elections, where we choose a President, consume oceans of ink. This time our race for Governor is draining barrelfuls, but it's where the road and the sky collide; here at the local level the real issues in search of answers get decided. And the only history that gets written is what we choose to write. We can wound with words.

We look at politicians in D.C. or in Hartford as an abstraction, and more often than not we're right, but those who seek office inside the city limits are our neighbors and acquaintances, if not friends. We can put names to faces and faces to positions on issues that affect us immediately. Our families see one another in the market, at a local community event, or just out for a walk on the weekend.

It's pretty easy for most of us politically to tell a Gavin Newsom from a Donald Trump even from a distance, but when we're looking for leadership in Mr. Rogers ' Neighborhood, the nuances and differences are more subtle.

It's more a question of degree than dogma, and that's as it should be because this is where we all live, emphasis on the all, and decisions made 'for the common good' really mean for everyone on both sides of the street up and down the block. But when less than a quarter of all registered voters turn out to cast a ballot, leading starts to resemble shepherding cats.

A lot of us thought this time last year was pretty tough and hoped by now we’d be seeing some daylight. Cheer up, the pundits said; things could get worse. So we did, and they did as well.

I don't pretend to know what has gone wrong or how to fix it, but I doubt demonizing the other guys in DC, belittling your Governor, or polluting the blogosphere with innuendo and insults is helping.

It most certainly is NOT who we have been since the founding of the Republic. High times on Wall Street and hard times on Main Street. Maybe we don’t need new solutions so much as we need a return to our oldest and truest values.

-bill kenny

Not the Happiest of Reads

Some days, like Dr. Swain in Slapstick, I feel Earth's gravity is much stronger than on other days. I don't really believe this, but I like to say it, and I am not surprised to discover I also like to type it.

Maybe it's the weather, the changing of the seasons, the loss of reasons to be cheerful, or just plain old age, but I'm weary to the bone. And I'm not alone.

At one time we told ourselves that to get a good job, you needed to get a good education. We learned that from our parents who themselves had learned it from theirs, and we passed it along to our kids who ate it up with a spoon. 

What we forgot, as it turned out, was that the good job would be in a country other than the one they were raised in and that the term itself, 'good job,' was a relative concept, based on the standard of living being practiced wherever the offshore job express happened to drop anchor.

We reached sundown on the union a lot faster than anyone ever thought. The last couple of decades have just gotten weirder and weirder. Since 9/11 and all that followed it, we are scared of silence. We've basically outlawed it in our social discourse. 

The 24/7 news folks have been around for most of the lives of many of us, but it's only in the last two and a half decades that they are so ubiquitous. Remember when you'd be waiting for an airline flight and the CNN Talking Head would be on, and his mouth was moving on one of those TV's suspended someplace in the departure lounge? You couldn't hear squat, but there he was-like God himself watching over us. We, his flock, couldn't hear him, but no one minded.

I tell myself that I was the last person on earth to get a Facebook account because it would confirm what I already feared-I have no friends, not even virtual ones. But all of us now are members of the lonely crowd. I realized as I'm heading into the clubhouse turn here on the Big Blue Marble that we used to do all kinds of shit before there was anything like Facebook and all social media mutations, and we told no one about it. Think tree in a forest. Now add sound. What? Exactly.

And now, we have 'friends' who tell us when they change their picture or whose status update is that they have no update. Say anything-no matter how foolish, how venal, how incredibly self-serving- don't dare leave us alone with our own thoughts because we stopped thinking a while back and forgot how to start again. 

Thank goodness for the autonomic nervous system, or we'd be dead. Sorry. What? Oh, you needed change for a buck-I won't even tell you what I thought I heard.
-bill kenny

Tired of Being Nice

I came across a terrific quote that I hope improves when shared: "(s)ome dream of great accomplishments while others remain awake and do them." 

We are a culture of often difficult and diffident people who wait for someone else to do something-not so much because then we'll join in, but because it then allows us to shake our heads and wag our tongues should they NOT succeed. And yet, we continue to progress despite the disparagement of those around us who not only know everything, but who know everything better.

Funny how the harder some people work, the luckier they are. You'd think the rest of us might start doing the math and figuring out it's more worthwhile to grab up all the 'doing right things right' instances we have around these parts and attempt to duplicate them so that we all have more, instead of kicking one another in the shins as if that took some kind of special skill.

If you don't have any idea what tomorrow should/could look like, how will you recognize it when it finally gets here? Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, once offered, "Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." Because I wear glasses doesn't mean you should have to squint. 

How did we get here, in this place and space? By sitting quietly and doing nothing? Why not try to be an exclamation, not an explanation.
-bill kenny

Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws

I spend about ten hours a day (actually, every night) on a dialysis machine as I have end-stage renal disease and my kidneys do little more than take up space across my lower back. When I turn the machine on, it takes about seven seconds to display its welcome screen: "Hello, William Kenny." 

I always pause at that screen, pondering how many other people before me it has said hello to (and how many after me it will greet). I don't wonder about what happened to them; I already know. I lie to myself and imagine they went out for a coffee and just never came back. 

Every year, for many years, usually starting in late July, my brother, Adam, offers a daily profile on one of the thousands who lost their lives on 9/11. The research is meticulous, and the writing is achingly beautiful. This is from this year's entry on the day of darkness itself. 

So many people in the same device, and yet we, in all likelihood, didn't know one another. We are here for a moment, and then the moment is gone, never to be duplicated or repeated. Now multiply that by one hundred billion, which is a guesstimate of how many humans have existed so far, here on the Big Blue Marble. 

 

And each story is different, as you'll see when you click any human ever and go on your own journey. If each life is a story, turning the page can be the most courageous act any of us ever do.

Fair winds and following seas.
-bill kenny

There's a Time for Meditation in Cathedrals of Our Own

I know several people purse their lips when I tell them I watch/listen to PBS/NPR for my evening national news fix, when I feel brave enough to even watch the news (which I usually don't). 

I can't help it-I grew up in a large household where everything, no matter where in the house it started, spilled over to everything else to the point that I'm not sure how my mom and dad or any of my brothers and sisters could hear one another think. Television news in our house as kids was like going to church.

That's why I enjoy being able to put the noise on pause and simply sit and listen to a grown-up report the day's events with straightforward words and unadorned visuals in reports that last a lot longer than those who've grown up on US commercial broadcasters are used to seeing and trying to follow.

No one shouts at me or yells at anyone else elsewhere in the video frame. It's not peaceful or bordering on soporific, just calm and reasoned. I can hear and listen (the former a physical function and the latter a cognitive process) and make up my own mind in my own time.

You and I have lived for over two decades in the shadow of the Great Nothing, the War without End, the Same As It Ever Was and The Plague, but we can remember another time, a different one-one that was better or one we believed (in hindsight) to be so. 

Those exulting in the efforts to dismantle and defund our Public Broadcasting System still haven't shown, in their explanation of why, what they'd replace it with. For people with so much to say so loudly and so often, they are strangely and sadly silent. Perhaps out of shame? I suspect I shall never know.

"And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own... For we are always what our situations hand us- it's either sadness or euphoria." And on some days, perhaps an equal mixture of both.

-bill kenny

Just Below the Police Calls

A lifetime ago, I was part of a group of young Turks (we called ourselves 'the Marconi Mafia'; no one else ever did, though) who took it upon themselves to inflict their version of radio on an unsuspecting military audience across Europe who had done nothing to deserve our undivided attention, and yet there we were.  

We, or at least I, thought we were right (and righteous). With the benefit of over forty years of hindsight, it's entirely possible I was less than correct, not that you will ever get me to admit that now. 

I've spent much of the three-plus decades since returning to the USA trying to find radio I could listen to without throwing up. It hasn't been easy. Where we live in Southeastern Connecticut, it's slim pickings, with talk radio on the AM and FM bands being the market leader. Some folks enjoy it; not me, not now, not ever.  

I spend most of my time on Sirius or, as it's known now, Sirius XM, happy for the most part without ever being delirious. But as of this morning, I found 'human-curated radio,' no algorithms, no consultants, no paid blocks, just non-stop, "I wonder what they'll play next?"

It's not coincidental that it's called Radio Paradise.

Enjoy! 
-bill kenny