Rant

How do you waste the most time every day?

Daily writing prompt
How do you waste the most time every day?
View all responses

How do you waste the most time every day?

Answering stupid questions like these – now that would be a great response. But there are other ways to waste time – like mousing around on the computer – some call it surfing, which sounds like fun – but acting like a mouse that’s chasing its own tail / tale, well, that is most surely a waste of time. Playing verbal cat and mouse games is a good way to go too.

Most devilish of all, sitting in a car, beside a lollipop person, who has just stepped out and stopped you from joining the car, ten yards ahead of you, that is now the last car in the latest convoy to be held up, while you are now the first car waiting to go next time. You sit, and sit, and wait.

Then – INSPIRATION – I turn my disc player on and lo and behold – Pete Seeger sings The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, from the Spanish Civil War. What’s special about that, you ask? Well, how about the chorus? – “No pasara’n! No pasara’n!” / “They shall not pass! They shall not pass!” sang the Abe Lincoln Brigade as the battle for Madrid thundered on. I open the car window, turn up the volume, bellowing it out loud while waiting to count the cars coming from the opposite direction.

It was a very long wait. And then the first of 109 cars, trucks, and various other vehicles appeared. Bored now with The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, I changed quickly to Viva la Quinta Brigada, kept the volume up high and “No Pasara’n! The pledge that made them fight” rang out as the official truck with its magic sign “Follow me!” crept up in front of me, turned, and started to crawl, snail mail style, down almost two kilometres of highway at 10 KPH.

When we got to the end of the road works, he turned into someone’s driveway, and I, and the next two cars behind me, followed him. I learned a few choice words to add to my vocabulary – “Like WTF do you think you are doing?” “It says follow me! on your truck.” I replied. ” I just did.” And off he went again on a long, four letter rant. Then, on foot, he stood in front of the convoy that had stalled anyway, now having nobody to follow, and guided his three black sheep out onto the road that led to freedom.

Well, that was an adventure and an absolutely total waste of time. As the court case will be, when I appear before the magistrate next week. Believe you me, if you believe all this, you would believe anything. And, congratulations, you have just successfully wasted another five minutes of your precious time and I have wasted ten of mine writing this piece.

If humans had taglines, what would yours be?

Daily writing prompt
If humans had taglines, what would yours be?
View all responses

If humans had taglines, what would yours be?

I really only want a one word tag – poet, and that’s the name of my blog – rogermoorepoet.com.

An award-winning teacher, researcher, poet, and short-story writer, I was born in Swansea, the same town as Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, whom I emulated in my youth. I wrote poetry throughout my childhood, but I never took lessons, nor was I known as a poet.

Early in 1962, I sent a sonnet to the poetry competition of the Stroud Festival of Religion and the Arts. I left school and was studying in Paris, when the results came out and I discovered that I had won first place in that competition. In my absence, a deserving boy from my school was sent to pick up the award, a book of poetry, signed by Ursula Vaughan Williams. The poem was published in Trydan and I have a copy of it somewhere.

Throughout my undergraduate career (1963-1966), I wrote poetry. Much of my early work appeared in my university’s student arts review, The Nonesuch Magazine – the Flower of Bristol that giveth great light. Alas, I was not studying English, and only the English students seemed capable of being called poets, so I was always called something else. I wrote a lot about nature, back then. One day, when I hand delivered my poetry submission, the editor of Nonesuch, an English student, asked me if I was a pantheist. “Good heavens, no,” I told him. “I’ve got a girl friend.” This answer did nothing in university circles to affirm my wanna be status as a poet.

Some of these poems survived and a couple appeared in Stars at Elbow and Foot. Here is one from Last Year in Paradise.

St. Mary Redcliffe

Time and Temple Meads
have begrimed your wand-thin spire,
the tallest in England.

You waved goodbye
to the Cabot boys,
Nova Scotia bound,
as they set sail.

Starlings lime your belfry,
gift and inspiration
of Merchant Adventurers,
that gentlemen’s company.

Worms wriggle and gnaw
at your ship’s figure-head,
harbored now, bare-breasted,
sturdy in your oak-beam nave.

Rust rustles and creaks
at the Edney Gates,
wrought to last centuries
by Bristol ironmasters,
themselves apprenticed
to learn time’s laws.

I call myself a poet. I think of myself as a poet. In Santander, Spain, I was known as the mad Welsh poet! What an honour it would be to have Roger Moore Poet as my tagline. I’d rather leave the ‘mad Welsh’ out.

But why stop at one tagline? I am also an award winning teacher and researcher. And a long-term rugby coach. How would they be as tags? Roger Moore Coach? Roger Moore Teacher? Roger Moore Researcher? Not quite the same thing. No resonance and I can produce no links to attach to those names. They are much more run of the mill. Anyone can be a coach, a teacher, a researcher. Not everyone can be a poet, let alone a famous poet, like Dylan Thomas. Besides which, I live in Idlewood, not Milkwood.

There is one other alternative, however. Roger Moore 007. Alas, that one belongs to someone much more famous than me, even though we share the same name. But I might go one step further. How about 3M-007? That would do at a pinch – pretty unique – there aren’t many of them about! I love it. So there we go – a choice of two taglines, either of which fit – Roger Moore Poet and Roger Moore 3M-007.

Which one would you choose for me? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But remember, I ain’t no rose. So please don’t tread on the tails of my all-disguising, multi-colored 3M-007 poetry coat.

We’ll Rant and We’ll Rage …

We’ll Rant and We’ll Rage …

Spring is here. An election is near. Road repair season has started.

1. Spring potholes – they are terrible and they are everywhere.

It was so bad in one area of town that people filled them with water and put out little plastic yellow ducks to float on them.

That way they could be seen, which saved the loud clunk of them being heard and felt.

In one place, some street artist used the potholes as the centerpiece for porno pictures.

Success –  early next morning, the potholes had been filled in.

2. Spring road repairs – horrific – and all too abundant.

We have a sign at the bottom of road saying “Caution – Construction  – drive carefully for the next 6 kms.”

At the 1 km mark, a lollipop person with a STOP sign. 

Ahead of us, 24 cars – behind us, the traffic line up is building. 

We wait 15 minutes.

A white half ton appears, followed by a line of cars. 

The half ton pulls into a drive ahead of us.

We count the cars as they drive past.

99 of them. Then a pause.

The white half ton reverses out of the drive and pulls up in front of us.

On his tail gate a sign that says “FOLLOW ME”.

He pulls away, and the first car follows him, as do we all.

He drives at 10-15 kph.

After 1.4 kms, we see the road works – the actual working space is less than 200 meters long.

We keep driving. 

At the 3 km mark, the white half ton turns off, into someone’s drive.

Alas, the driver of the first car has no sense of humor and doesn’t follow the leader into the drive but sets off at speed down the road.

I count the cars that are waiting to return – 59 of them and more arriving.

It has taken us close to 25 minutes to negotiate 200 meters of road repair.

3. Bridge closures – there are three bridge crossings from the south side to the north side of the river.

One is at Mactaquac, over the dam, about 15 kms up stream from the Westmoreland Bridge, the central crossing point. 

The Mactaquac crossing has been reduced to ‘one way at a time’ traffic for the last two or three years, and will stay like that for most of the summer. 

Don’t ask, they won’t tell and I can’t tell, because I don’t understand.

The third bridge is the Princess Margaret. 

It is closed to all traffic for the next five weeks and this is the third year that someone has been working on it.

So, for the next five weeks, we are all reduced to crossing the river by one bridge, the Westmoreland, unless we drive 15 kms to a ‘one way at a time’ crossing or 20 kms down river to the Burton Bridge at the Town of Oromocto.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!
My thanks to my good friend, Dana Webster who inspired me to write this by sending me a rant of her own. NB Click here to link Dana’s Creative World.

What public figure do you disagree with the most?

Daily writing prompt
What public figure do you disagree with the most?
View all responses

What public figure do you disagree with the most?

Some definitions please. What is a public figure? There are several statues in my local park. Are these public figures? If they are, how do you, or I, disagree with them when they can’t reply to our questions? Their mere presence, is that enough? Their historical past? Their figures now cast in bronze or stone? The crimes they committed (in our current opinion) from a time in which they did good (their society’s position)? “Judge not lest ye be judged!” We are all walking on thin ice and I do not wish to be the one who casts the first stone.

What is a public figure? A politician – provincial, regional, national, international? A TV personality? A film star? A rapper? A musician? A teacher? A preacher? A newscaster? A hockey player? A baseball star?

And how do you define disagreement? How do you disagree, and in what ways, with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Song of Joy, even if you are a Beatle and can sing “Roll over Beethoven” or mimic it on a Tuesday night in the local bar at a Karaoke show?

How do you define the most without defining the category and nature of disagreement? Mozart vs Bach vs Beethoven vs Vaughan Williams? Wordsworth vs Byron vs Donne vs Dylan Thomas? So let us go back to the beginning, and ask again “What is a public figure?” “How do you define disagreement? And how do you categorize “the most”?

Goya vs Velasquez vs Turner vs Dali vs Picasso?

“What’s the definition of Baroque?” “When you’re out of Monet.” Come on, you’re joking, aren’t you. “You’re having me on, aren’t you? You’re having me on.” “Pull the other leg. It’s got bells on.”

And I offer a nod of gratitude to The Two Ronnies and my good friend, Moo, who painted the painting that leads into this blog. He called it “In search of enlightenment.”

And no, I don’t disagree with him. But is he a public figure? Or just a figment of my imagination? And if he is a figment of my imagination, what, dear reader, are you?

What is your career plan?

Daily writing prompt
What is your career plan?
View all responses

What is your career plan?

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” as the comedian said on our old black and white TV back in the late fifties when the television shows first started. My grandfather bought that TV in 1953 in order for us to watch the Coronation of Elizabeth II. I was nine years old at the time. Now I am – hold on – “How old am I? Let me count the days” – as Shakespeare might have written, if he had actually written his own plays and poems. Or were all those glorious words written by a conspiracy of authors who then had their work claimed by some else aka Willy the Shake? Snake oil, all of it, or as they say in some parts of Wales – blydi hel.

I wonder how many of my readers know how to play Tute, a Spanish card game, slightly akin to whist? Well, in it you score by singing – Canto las veinte – o canto las cuarenta – well, I am well on my way to winning my game of Tute because Canto las ochenta!

So, at eighty years of age, after fifteen years in retirement, what sort of career plan can anyone have? Plan – is it a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something? Or might it be – an intention or decision about what one is going to do? As for career – is it an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress?

So, in my retirement, what opportunities are there for progress when I seem to be regressing most of the time? And what plans can I make when the unplanned knocks on my door at irregular, uncomfortable intervals?

And that’s the problem with prompts and life in general – one size designed to fit all and I do not fit in. Never have. I no longer have a career. I no longer have any plans. I drift with the winds and the waves “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

I guess my only plan is to stay afloat for as long as possible and to avoid, if I can, that deadly dive down, down, down, into Admiral Brown, and down to Davey’s Locker.

What makes you laugh?

Daily writing prompt
What makes you laugh?
View all responses

What makes you laugh?

The current state that the world is in. Seems like a strange answer, doesn’t it? Wars, famine, plagues, diseases, fire, flood, earthquakes, drought, what is there to laugh at? All of it, of course. Because if I didn’t laugh at it, I would cry. And crying – well, there just aren’t enough tears, are there? Anyway, as the Reader’s Digest used to say “Laughter is the best medicine.” So, if we want to heal the world, we must first learn to laugh at it.

In fact, there are many things we should be laughing at – politics and politicians, for one. Or is that two? Chuckling away – it’s hard to tell them apart nowadays. In fact, if we laughed right out loud at the folies bergeres who masquerade as wise men, can-can dancers who actually can’t-can’t, and decision makers who really can’t decide, then that laughter would be the last straw that would break the camel’s back and dump them all on their backsides in the desert where they belong. There, they would be voices ‘crying in the wilderness’, crying indeed, for deprived of their privileges, none of them would be laughing. But we would. And we’d probably be a great deal better off.

New words also make me laugh. Homicide, femicide, domicide, ecocide, countrycide – tell me, who makes up these names? Who keeps popping them into the dictionary? And if they mean what I think they mean, we should all be on our knees, praying and weeping. It’s like fake suicide. That happens when push comes to shove, and the subsequent defenestration is deemed a suicide.

Look at Moo’s painting, Burning Birbi. Now that is something to really make you cry. Moo tells me he was going to call it Burning Bush, but then he remembered all the poor birbis who were burned to death in the Australian Bush Fires. They ascended the eucalyptus trees for safety, and there, of course, they met their sad and tragic fate, while trying to escape the conflagration. I can laugh many things off. But not the fate of those cuddly little Koalas, brought to the edge of destruction by our treatment of their natural habitat.

Welsh proverb – “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.” So, I am laughing at it all. I have to – or else I will suffer a break down. So, laugh with me, and let the real losers cry in the wilderness, hermits all, abandoned to their lonesome own-somes.

How has technology changed your job?

Daily writing prompt
How has technology changed your job?
View all responses

How has technology changed your job?

I suppose I must begin by saying that, having retired fifteen years ago, I no longer have a job. So, Technology has not changed my job at all. However, when I was actually working full time, technology made an enormous impact on my work.

Keeping up with the Jones’s! I travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico, on a faculty exchange program in 1995 and was astonished to find that the Escuela de Idiomas of UABJO, had better computer and technology features than I did in my home university. I was way behind the Oaxacans in what I taught and how to deliver it. How to catch up, that was the question!

In 1996, I started a Multi-Media Certificate at the University of New Brunswick, completing it in 1999. As a result of this certificate, my beloved and I built our first web pages and produced our first Quevedo Online Bibliography. This also enabled me to start teaching a course entitled Mexico Online. This course took place in the university’s computer laboratory and, instead of requiring written papers, it asked the students to create their own web pages and to do their own online research.

This was the first step into the brave new world of WebCT, Blackboard, and the many other web platforms that rapidly became available, often at great cost to the student. Student costs – well, they skyrocketed. So, I did my best to cut them down. Texts, especially literary texts, in online format, for free. A formal course outline, online, discussed with the students each term, and changed in accordance with each class’s particular needs. This guaranteed that teaching and learning were both flexible, and did not become bogged down by the trap of the one course, set “in electronic stone” for all eternity. This is a trap into which far too many teachers fall. The everlasting course, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, taught without further changes and with no end, amen. No thought, no development, and knowledge a static state.

But technology also changed the teaching environment. We began with the static classroom with rows and rows of desks looking down on the stage where the professors, at the podium, performed their annual circus acts of passing knowledge from their notes to the students’ notes, without it passing through anybody’s head, as my first prof in my first university once told the class.

Then we moved to the chairs and tables classroom, where the professors could, if they chose, wander among the students, get to know them by their names, and create a dynamic small group teaching environment in which each individual received increased professorial attention if and when needed.

Enter Technology. The Computer screen replaced the black, green, white board (I have scrawled with chalk and marker pens on all of them). Classrooms became fixed spaces again. And the computer program doubled with, or replaced, the formal lecture. Static knowledge delivered to stationary students sitting and passively watching.

They were called smart classrooms. My favorite moment of the day? When I stood up and asked the class if this was indeed a smart classroom. Yes sir, they always replied. I would tap on the wall and ask the wall – “What’s two plus two?” The class would wait and wait. No answer. I would ask again. No answer. “Not such a smart classroom, then,” I would tell them.

Technology is great, as a tool for genuine teaching and learning. But it brings problems with it, as we are beginning to find out. Brainwashing, false information, erroneous material that misleads, quite often deliberately … Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall police the police? Who shall program the programmers? Perhaps the Romans, all that time ago, had it right. Caveat emptor – buyer beware.

Spirits

Spirits

Neon Orange, the tube said. I tried it out last night and this is what emerged. I call it Spirits, but that is really short for “We are spirits in the material world.” I have always loved that idea. So, how many spirits can you count in this painting? “Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head” – whatever that means. This is certainly a very different palette for me and the start of another set of experiments.

I have often wondered what that spirit world would look like. Perhaps they are all present in our material world? No wonder this planet of ours is so over-crowded! Or maybe they are spread across the universe and that is why the universe is expanding, to make room for them all, and even more of them in the making and on their way.

Is speculation as much fun as peculation? I can certainly do the former, but I’ve never done the latter. So, I guess I’ll never know. Never mind – life long learning – if somebody gifts me with enough of their money, one day I may speculate and peculate, and then I’ll find out, if I’m not found out first.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll stick to being a free spirit in a world that gets more materialistic every day. And this is my slogan – “Free spirits of the world, unite!” If there were enough of us, we could take it over, the world. Freeing it is one thing. Managing it afterwards might not be so much fun. I guess I’ll stick to speculation!

If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?

Daily writing prompt
If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?
View all responses

If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?

My instant response was – I would be a billionaire, names don’t matter, then transfer a couple of million to myself, then back out of the alternate persona for another day, and there I would be – rich and happy, my old self once more. Then I started thinking – ‘billionaires don’t do things like that’ – then I really started thinking. How much of my alternate persona would I take over? Would I be myself in another body? Or would I be that person, privileged, hard, caring only for myself and my fortune, sparing nobody as I strove for my ultimate desire, the Noah’s Ark of a bunker that would protect me from the oncoming disaster that I was myself encouraging to happen? Enough, I said to myself. That’s not for me.

I thought about it during the night, in those elusive moments between waking and sleeping, that half-sleep contained in the Spanish duermivela. And then the light bulb flashed and I knew who I would be.

I have always wanted to visit Australia. The cost, the length of the flight, the rigors of the journey, the fear of DVT, have all prevented me from making that voyage – quite simply a flight too far. But what if I could be my cousin Frances, in Sydney, for a day? I have never met most of her family, and this would be a wonderful chance for me to do so. I would see her husband, George, in close-up. Also her four children, two of whom I have never seen except in photos. I could also meet their partners, and the grand-children, and all of that merely by waking up in another body on another continent. If I timed it right, I might even manage to visit the Sydney Opera House and see the harbour bridge, or catch a test match, or a rugby international – the red lights are flashing – overload – overload – overload -!!! Too much – too greedy – KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid – !!!

Seeing the family, experiencing her daily life, looking at her garden, so beautiful in the photos, maybe even sinking my fingers into that rich earth, that would be more than enough. Ayer’s Rock – Uruburu – Alice Springs, the Fremantle Doctor, my cousins in Perth and Bundaburg, they will have to wait. Sydney and my closest family, that will be more than enough.

But how much will I retain upon my return? How much will I remember? And what will happen to Frances? Will she become me and be forced to suffer our Canadian winter, for a day, while I rejoice in her Australian summer? So many questions.

Too many questions. Maybe I’ll just be myself, after all, as Oscar Wilde says “Be yourself. Everybody else is taken.” I’ll just be myself and to the above offer I will reply: “Thanks, but no thanks. I just want to be me.”

You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

Daily writing prompt
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
View all responses

You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

The End.

Why did I write that? Because I like reading T. S. Eliot – Four Quartets – “In my beginning is my end.” If that statement be true, then, ipso facto, The End must be my first sentence, because that’s my beginning. Eliot converted to Catholicism – and, according to the Jesuits, “The end justifies the means” – so, when we start with the end we are justifying the writing (the means) of all that led us there.

You don’t like my logic, you say? Why not? It is as straight as the corkscrew I hold in my hand when I am threatening to add the contents of a bottle of wine to my autobiography. Is a bottle’s end in it’s beginning? Of course it is. If you don’t open the bottle, you can’t finish it. If you don’t start it, you cannot end it, so in the beginning lies the end.

Oh the mysteries of mysticism, those truths that know no logic and follow no known paths from their beginning (via purgativa), through their middle (via iluminativa), to their end (via unitiva). Or is life and truth a circle that has no end? In which case wherever I begin the circle of my autobiography, there too is my end.

In my end is my beginning and in my beginning is my end.

Mors omnia solvit.
The End.