Bitchin’ Chicken Memes: 13

I am of the generation, not so long ago, when folks had smaller houses and fewer gadgets. The family television and stereo were firmly ensconced in the communal living room and we had to make  compromises over their use. In junior high I got to watch an hour of TV a day. Later, that morphed into two: one chosen by me, and one by my single-parent mum.

My friends and I spent hours outdoors, reading or listening to music. I got my first albums in my early teens and the thrill was to rip off the wrapping, put the record on and sit on the floor with the liner notes following along with the lyrics. When I got to the end of side one, I flipped it over and then repeated the whole process until I’d memorized the words and knew everything there was to know about the artists. Good thing my mother shared my tastes so I wasn’t limited to what I played.

In those days language was important. There were no tweets, emojis and short-hand texts. We wanted our words to convey something about us, what we thought and felt.

I started reading and writing poetry in my later teens and collected ‘meaningful’ quotations in scribbler note books. I took two years of high school Latin and courses in Canadian and English Literature. In university, I took a number of humanities courses that required reading from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and from Indigenous communities.

I’m an avid reader of fiction, lots of it mysteries, by authors from around the world. In the last 10 years I’ve read books representing 34 different countries. My Honours B.A. degree is in Cultural Anthropology so I was always curious about the myriad ways in which people live, especially when there is something new for me to learn.

When I started making memes a year ago my long time interest in poetry and literature crept into my work. Chickens, of course, are the mainstay, but my memes are often peppered with positive messages that serve as a counterpoint to some of the trials of chicken keeping. I’ve featured work from philosophers Aesop and Aristotle, poets Pablo Neruda, Rumi and William Blake, self-help guru Brene Brown; writers Shakespeare, Kurt Vonnegut and Lewis Carroll, and even some words of wisdom from Winnie-The-Pooh and Sonny & Cher. I’ve also quoted other sources with no attribution as that’s the way I’ve found them on the internet – people share stuff and forget to credit the author.

I know those works aren’t as popular as the ones strictly pertaining to chickens, but I hope you enjoy them as they embody hope, empathy, compassion and inclusion.

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If you know the source of material I’ve used without credit, please let me know. And if you’ve got some text or a photo you’d like me to make into a meme I’ve love to give it a shot. Get in touch via the ‘contact’ button on the home page.

Please leave a like, comment and/or rate this, and any of my posts. Enjoy.