DR MICHAEL J. MAGUIRE
Teacher, Writer, and Consultant in Ireland
"I am a Director of Development, Senior Lecturer, Writer, and Business Consultant currently living in Ireland and working where I'm needed.
I am a proud, Irishman, European and Global citizen.
My interests range from art, to innovation, digital creativity, creative technologies applied to business, business practices and broader society.
I am specifically interested in writing, business, code, games, art, general technological evolution, and academia"
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Consider (Waiting for) the commuter bus…
Nothing ever happens on the commuter bus. Although maybe in a kind of Beckettian sense a whole lot might have had happened if only humanity knew how to deeply consider and invoke some existential framing of such phenomena. If a soon arriving commuter bus could be considered as a living suffering organism then perhaps the philosophical and physical import could have automatically been greater. There remained only latent potential resting heard and unheard like a fallen log, log fallen. And while there were no actual forests en route this specific bus route, much and myriad non forest based scenery and non-forest based humans came and went, all of which the vast majority of bus based commuters failed to register at any level because they too autonomically came, stood, shuffled on, sat, fidgeted, sat some more, shuffled off and also finally went….. somewhere.. elsewhere… where else. Human beings got onto the bus, travelled, got off the bus, only to later get back on the bus again, all without irony. Although ironically some students on the bus attended the same university as Beckett himself, perhaps in the hope that one day, they themselves might, despite not knowing one end of a stretcher from another, or battle, write about the insignificance and futility of many mundane aspects of human existence, suffering literature, contemplating crustate while waiting for, and then travelling on, a commuter bus that went near to but not actually into any forests and therefore never realised latent post existential potential that humans might have become aware of with even the slightest smidgen of medical training or some fallen logs. When privately postulated as potential literary endeavour, contemplating the commuter bus, as commiserating creative material initially appearing, if only fleetingly, feasible until they sat down to compose and craft from a committed pessimistic perspective, an epiphany of understood there on a bus that had actually got them to where they wanted to be, just being, on a bus thus, a thus bus as maybe metaphor for a journey back and forth might be interpreted as not essentially that bleakishly Beckettish but just bus bleak, and it was heard to be said that it certainly wasn’t entirely pointless, just as a small wet blue orb whizzing across the universe may be considered insignificant but due to its helical rotations of various significant degrees, like the wheels on the bus themselves, the blue dot had in fact travelled round and round from A to B. perhaps even onwards to C ? The commuter bus got others away from where they originally were and they were actually grateful for the bus, even when it returned them to their original point of origin, thus engendered a complete obliviousness of any psudoaesthetic postmodernism, comported instead scribbling screen based narratives of prescient postapocalyptic extinction events, actually out bleaking Beckett with ginger tinted black burned out rusted buses appearing strewn across much of their fictional efforts, layering such landscapes with unexcavated potential post-profundity, yet none ever lamented nor considered the substantive issue of the rusted bus itself, a creative composite, alone, lining the pre extinction evidenced existential environmental imperative, that using such transport incites thoughts of inaction on the literary front while we continue to suffer the war on the planet.