The Blindboy Podcast - 57 minutes of me talking about a wasp on a plane

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

57 minutes of me talking about a wasp on a plane  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Crunch the bus conductors ulcer you busty gubnets. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. The chill of winter traverses the air. Trees are taking on the colour of camouflage. Jarts. The wind is whispering to the hairs on your shins and saying stop wearing jarts. Jart season is over. It's September next week.

Embrace the waning, peach-tinged, seven o'clock sunset. Get acquainted with corduroy. There's nothing wrong with corduroy. As comfortable as a pair of tracksuit pants. You don't see corduroy anymore. No one's talking about corduroy. I'm talking about corduroy. Because I bought a pair of corduroy trousers in Edinburgh the other day.

And I bought corduroy trousers because I'd been trying out my jarts in Edinburgh. This was going to be a jart summer for me. I was going to wear jarts all summer but I couldn't bring myself to do it. If you're a regular listener to this podcast you'll know that I tried out jarts when I visited Glasgow in May. It worked out okay because I was in a new city and nobody knew me But as soon as I got back to Limerick, I hadn't the courage to continue wearing jarts. So when I went to Edinburgh At the weekend, I was like fucking I'm gonna wear I'm gonna wear my jarts again. And that was a foolish move Because it was fucking freezing in Edinburgh and I'd forgotten because I used to gig the Edinburgh fringe festival like ten years ago I'd forgotten, because I used to gig the Edinburgh Fringe Festival like 10 years ago. I'd forgotten. When you visit Edinburgh in August, you're essentially

downloading yourself into the middle of October. So I went trouser shopping and I saw a set of corduroy's. I said fuck it. Now as far as I know, corduroy's are desperately out of fashion at the moment. I could be wrong, what the fuck do I know, Carterize are desperately out of fashion at the moment. I could be wrong. What the fuck do I know? But I haven't seen anyone wearing Carterize. Well, I have. But these people were literally toddlers. Like, three years of age. And I don't think I can use toddlers as a rubric for middle-aged man fashion.

But I bought a set of Carterize. They're just wonderful when the weather gets a little bit colder. One of the comfiest trousers you can wear. It feels like tipsy silk. The light tender folds of silk and that cuddly fuzziness you feel after drinking two pints of beer. Tipsy silk. That's what Carter eye feels like on my legs. So I bought loose fitting beige corduroy's because they look like beige chinos from a distance, which are socially acceptable at the moment I believe, but you have to get really up close to understand that you're

dealing with a man who's wearing corduroy's. And I loved it. I loved swishing around Edinburgh, swishing around Edinburgh in my warm tipsy silk and it made me think back to the last time I wore corduroy's. I was about 14, they were fashionable then, amongst skateboarders and accounted their flexibility and I remember I'd once said a corduroy's. I bought them in a shop called Hobo. There used to be an alternative clothes brand in Cork in Limerick called Hobo, but I had these fucking corduroy pants when I was about 14 and I loved them.

And I wore them too much until one day the crotch ripped. The crotch ripped on the corduroy's, but I wasn't ready to give these trousers up. They were too comfortable. I liked the fit. I just fucking loved these trousers. Now I'd have called them pants. We don't really say trousers in Ireland, we call trousers pants. But I don't want to confuse the poor old Brits who are listening, because I know

that pants means underpants over there. So I had this hole in the crotch, this giant fucking hole in the crotch of my, my corduraise. And I went to my mother, and I said, Ma, everybody can see my underpants. everybody can see my underpants. Everybody can see my underpants because the rip in these corduroy's is so large and I don't want to replace them. I just love these these trousers. I adore them. So my Ma said, I'm gonna put a patch. I'll put a patch on your corduroy trousers and I'll solve your problem. So I gave her my corduroy's. She went off and patched them and she came back. She'd patched,

she'd patched my corduroy's around the crotch with an old set of underpants. So she'd cut the fabric from all jocks and then stitched it into the crotch of my fucking corduroy's. So I took them because I didn't want to lose the trousers, I loved them too much. I didn't think about the situation critically. So I went out into the streets with these fucking patched up corduroy's, and now the situation was infinitely worse.

Because the initial problem was, ma, everybody can see my underpants because there's a hole in my corduroy's. Now I had the same problem, except everyone thought I was wearing the exact same fucking pair of underpants every single day because she'd patched the trousers with underpants and I was the subject of much teasing. I'd forgotten all about it. But the memory came back. The memory came back with the feeling of corduroy on the hairs

of my legs this weekend in Edinburgh. So I was at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I had the most wonderful time. I did two events. On both events I was being interviewed by a poet by the name of Michael Peterson. He's the writer in residence at Edinburgh University and he's the current, he's the poet laureate of Edinburgh. So Michael Peterson was interviewing me at this Edinburgh book festival. I got massive doses of imposter syndrome because people

were taking me seriously. I was at a big fancy literary festival Surrounded by like academics and writers and poets and I was being taken seriously as a writer Nobody even mentioned that I was wearing a plastic bag on my head They were literally just speaking about books that I've written and you have to realize back in Ireland Like I'm not I'm not asked to speak at any literary festivals in. The literary scene in Ireland doesn't know what to do with me because I'm that fella with a plastic bag on his head who sang the song about the horse. I don't have that issue when I'm in the likes of Edinburgh or when I was at the Hay Festival down in Wales. Over there I'm allowed to just be someone who writes books and writes this podcast.

But still for me, even sitting up on stage, it feels strange for me to be spoken about seriously as a writer. The moments before I walked on stage, I was backstage and Michael Peterson was announcing me on stage and in my head I was thinking, hell who's this fella they're talking about? I'd like to read one of his books He sounds interesting and they were talking about me So heavy doses of imposter syndrome now a certain amount of imposter syndrome is a good thing But I think I experienced a little bit too much in Edinburgh So a lovely time was had and I met many wonderful people What I'd really like to speak about though was the plane journey home from Edinburgh.

So it flown from Edinburgh to Dublin with Aer Lingus. And it was a propeller aircraft. Now I have a shaky relationship with this particular plane journey. If you're a seasoned listener to this podcast you'll remember about about six years ago I was on this fucking propeller flight from Edinburgh to Dublin and I nearly died on a plane with Jedward. Well I didn't we got mild turbulence but there was a moment where I was like fuck's sake. Can't die on a plane with Jedward. Nothing against Jedward. I love Jedward. Very authentic

people. But you can't be...you can't be...the fella with a plastic bag in his head who had a novelty song about a horse who died on a plane with Jedward. Nothing against Jedward. I just don't want to die on a plane with Jedward. So this weekend I took that flight, again. Edinburgh to Dublin, on the fucking propeller aircraft. I'm not scared of flying, but we all know that feeling. We know the feeling of queuing up for your plane, you look out the window, and you see that you're going on a propeller aircraft. You don't have a rational response.

Propeller aircraft just seem a little bit less safe. So when you get onto the propeller aircraft, there's a heightened hum of anxiety in the air. There's a culture of anxiety on the propeller aircraft. Every fucking time, you look out the window and you see the giant propellers that look like swords. You see them spinning. You think, what if one of them just comes off and comes through the plane and impales me? Also, there's something too honest about

the propellers. You watch them spinning and then your brain has to go. Alright, so those things spin really fast and now I can fly up into the clouds, is that how that works? Cause that just feels wrong. I can't make sense of this. At least with a jet. You're like, I can't really see what's going on here, but something big and powerful is happening inside that thing and this is gonna take me into the air. But with a propeller? It feels like my mask stitching the fucking underpants into the crotch of my quarter-ice. There's something ramshackle about it. You don't feel protected. It's the motorbike of the airplane world. So we all sit down onto this fucking propeller aircraft.

It's shaky. Everyone's staring at the spinning blades. And we make our ascent into the clouds and as things chill out a bit and we're at a steady pace I'm relaxing just gonna go over the floor I'm ready to take out my book to begin reading I notice that the the man in front of me seems kind of agitated he's bothered by something something in his immediate vicinity he's ducking and diving his head as if someone's trying to hit him. Then he does this big aggressive swoop. He swoops his hand as if he's trying to hit somebody. And I feel this gust of air come between our seats towards me. Such strange behavior and I make a note in my

head and I say to myself, oh this man's insane. Okay, I'm sitting behind the insane man. I hope this isn't gonna be a difficult flight. And then I tilt my head down to look at the page of my book and in the corner of my eye I see something on the collar of my black t-shirt and now I'm violently swooping my hand without thinking it was a fucking wasp. Conte in front of me had been trying to hit a wasp, and he swooped his palm at it and hit the wasp towards me and it landed on my collar.

There's a wasp on the plane. There's a wasp on the plane. On the tiny little propeller plane. There's a live wasp. Not just any wasp. It's a late August. Bowsie wasp. A bowsie wasp is a wasp that's acting the bowsie. It's belligerent. It's annoying. It's aggressive. It's a wasp that has a great interest in your face and in your hair. It's a wasp that's not content with minding its own fucking business and doing waspy things. It's a bousy wasp.

It's the type of wasp that you get as winter approaches. The worst wasps. And now we're all trapped on a plane with a bousy wasp. We're sitting on a plane. We're sitting on a plane. You don't have much fucking mobility on a plane. The seatbelt sign is on. You've all encountered bousy wasps in the past two weeks.

Maybe you were at a festival. Maybe you were at a barbecue at someone's back garden. Maybe you were enjoying a pint. A bousy wasp has come up to you, hovered around your drink, hovered around your face. They won't leave you alone, they're following you. What do you do? You leave.

You get the fuck away from that wasp. What do you do when you're on a plane? Nothing. You can do nothing, you're trapped. So I'm just sitting there frozen in silence. I batted the wasp off my chest and I'd sent it flying some way up the corridor of the fucking airplane. In my head I'm thinking, maybe I killed it, maybe I killed it, I didn't. I look up and now there's the wasp and it's about three seats up. It's flying around a woman's hair. She notices

the wasp now she's flicking it away, she's trying to do what she can. Everybody's noticing the wasp. she's flicking it away, she's trying to do what she can. Everybody's noticing the wasp. Social decorum is at play. You have to be careful how you swap that wasp away. You're tied down in your small little airplane seat. You don't have that arc of movement with your hand. You do a full swing at a wasp on a fucking airplane, and you're slapping someone into the face.

The wasp lands on a window. One man tries to subtly pull the fucking plane window down to crush the wasp. It doesn't work. Now more and more people are suddenly becoming aware. There's a wasp on the plane. There is a wasp on the plane. I can't run away from the wasp. I can't get out of my seat. There is a wasp on the plane. The wasp returns to the woman with the hair. Has another buzz around her hair. What does she do? She screams. She gives out a big yelp. Now the people at the front of the plane who are unaware of a wasp are now aware of a woman who screamed at the back of the plane. Emotions are high already because we're on a propeller aircraft. So now the people at the front

of the plane are wondering, has one of the engines fallen off? Is there a terrorist on the plane? I don't know, because I'm at the front of the plane and I can't really get up and check. There's no communication. Now to the back of the plane, where I am, the wasp is still present, the wasp is still being a bousy. And when that woman screamed that turned up the collective anxiety, the collective anxiety of everybody, it turned up, turned up by several notches. Now there's a man, there's a man going, ha ha ha, dodging his head side to side like

fucking Muhammad Ali. Can't move his wrists, can't do do anything the wasp is buzzing around him being demonstrating festival levels of bousiness do you know do you know when a do you know when a when a fucking September wasp can't we've all seen this when the wasp when the wasp is is buzzing around your body around your face then you suddenly jolt in response to the wasp and then the wasp starts moving faster in a flurry. The wasp was doing that around his head and he's just honking like a ghost with croak. And then what happens? The wasp starts getting drowsy. The wasp starts disappearing underneath people's seats and crawling around the carpet.

Some people are searching, looking at the floor. Other people are trying to stamp. We hadn't collectively named the problem. No one had said out loud, there's a wasp, there's a wasp everybody. How terrible, there's a wasp on the airplane and we're all trapped. Ho ho, watch out, you don't get stung. At least it's not ISIS someone says. Ho ho, good one. Maybe it's an ISIS wasp. Ha ha ha ha. We've all collectively named the issue.

It's still not great but we could have responded to it rationally. That didn't happen. Nobody vocally took ownership of the situation. The elephant in the room, the elephant in the room, the wasp in the room, nobody named it. All of us privately, internally battled our fears and anxieties about the wasp. And that created an environment of shame, the shame of potential public embarrassment.

If we'd have all communicated and acknowledged the wasp on the plane, it would have made it better. But no one was ready for that. Everyone was terrified. I felt an intense, an intense urge to address the plan and start giving people wasp facts. I wanted to point out, I wanted to point out how interesting it was that the wasp was getting drowsy, that the wasp was getting drowsy because there's reduced oxygen levels. When you're high up in a plane,

there's reduced oxygen levels. Now we're able to handle that, but maybe the wasp isn't. Also, it's incredibly cold. It's very cold up in the plane. This can have an impact on the wasps metabolism There's a massive change in air pressure, too. And all of these these very significant Atmospheric changes that are happening because we're in an airplane and we're up high in the sky

Our bodies can withstand that but the poor little wasp the wasp is drowsy now that the wasp can't handle Being up here in this plane. I wanted to say to everybody, you know what, there's a good chance that the wasp might just die or possibly go unconscious and we'll have nothing to worry about. I didn't do that. The reason I didn't do it, it's a plane from Edinburgh to Dublin. Someone on that plane definitely listens to my podcast. I've been on planes and buses, I've sat beside people, I've watched them listen to my podcast on their phone. I'm not wearing a plastic bag on my head, I'm in civilian mode. So if I start addressing

the plane with a fucking, a fact-space thesis on radical wasp empathy. Someone's gonna go, oh, there's Blind By without his bag. Some cunt once recognized me on a plane because he was sitting behind me and he could see the books that were on my Kindle. The books that I was reading on my Kindle were too similar to things that I've been talking about on the podcast.

And he tapped me on the shoulder and said, are you Blind By? Now he was a nice fella in fairness to him, but I wasn't gonna use this flight. I wasn't gonna out myself publicly on this fucking flight, because now I have a bigger problem on my hands. So I just shut the fuck up. About five or six minutes had passed and there'd been no disturbance from the wasp. And I'm thinking in my head, yeah Maybe the wasp passed out Maybe the severity of the atmospheric changes in this plane the wasp couldn't handle it. It's dead or passed out

Maybe everything's gonna be okay And I was pretty pleased with myself too. I was pleased at myself for Remaining calm not just externally in my behaviour, but remaining calm internally. I'm not a big fan of wasps. I really am not a big fan of wasps. I've never been stung by a wasp, so I don't know how painful that is. So the uncertainty of that, not knowing how painful a wasp sting is, that makes them quite frightening to me.

But I was real happy that I hadn't freaked out, that I hadn't screamed. I considered getting out of my seat. I was going to get out of my seat and run down the corridor to the top of the airplane away from the wasp. I didn't do it because I said no that would be socially unacceptable. You can't do that. So I was patting myself on the back for remaining calm, and we hadn't heard from the wasp in maybe five or six minutes. And then this prick in front of me,

the fella who had initially swiped the wasp onto my chest, he looked like Liza Minnelli. If you could imagine Liza Minnelli as a 48 year old man that's what this man looked like. By this time that the air hostesses, they're up asking us if we want drinks. This fucking prick decides, I'll have a Bulmer's. I'll have a Bulmer's cider. He could have had any drink. Could have had coke, Pepsi, could have had fucking even a beer. This man decides, no, no, I want an incredibly sugary drink that's made from, from apples that rot at this time of year. Can I have the one drink please that will wake up a sleeping wasp? Can I have that drink please?" So this prick orders his fucking Bulmers, pours it into

his tiny little airplane plastic glass and who shows up? The fucking wasp. The wasp wakes up and now the wasp, the wasp is flying around his glass of fucking cider. The wasp was basically on Mars. The atmosphere of the airplane was such that it caused the wasp to go unconscious on the fucking ground and the smell of cider woke it up, gave it second wings. So the wasp is flying all around him now. Real pissed off, buzzing like a mad bastard. And Liza Minnelli's there with his pinky finger in the air, trying to balance his cider in his hand with T-Rex hands on him,

because he doesn't have the full swing of his arm because he's in a fucking airplane. So Liza Minnelli's doing that with a stupid look on his face, like he doesn't understand what just happened. I wanted to murder him. I wanted to kill this man on the airplane. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to choke him and explain to him that the oxygen levels, the temperature and the atmospheric pressure

had caused the wasp to go unconscious and he had woken him up with a fucking drink made from rotting apples. Like, anyone who's been at a festival, anyone who's been at a pub will tell you, a pint of cider, it's like a giant bag of tits to a wasp. If you want to get a wasp deeply passionate about ruining your day, then drink cider in front of it. So now, right in front of me, seat right in front of me, the wasp is orbiting fucking Liza Minnelli's head, doing that aggressive shit, and now the wasp is interested in me. Now here we have it. Now it's happening.

Now it's happening. The wasp is now interested in me. I can't get out of my seat. I'm in a window seat. There's a woman beside me. I can't go into the aisle and go to the toilet because the air hostesses are two seats back. I can't swipe my hands with T-Rex arms hand swiping because it'll enrage the wasp, and I might risk hitting the woman to my side. As I close my eyes, I start to feel phantom tingles. My fear of this wasp is so great

that I'm imagining multiple wasps. Like, he's buzzing around my face. The wasp is buzzing around my face. I can feel him hitting my forehead. I can feel, he can feel him hitting my forehead. He's drowsy as well. He could land. My biggest fear is that the wasp would get drowsy above my head, land down my neck and go down my t-shirt. He's already landed on my t-shirt like five minutes previously. So he's buzzing around my head.'s drowsy there's nothing that I can do so I decide I'm gonna meditate I'm gonna start meditating so I close my eyes I breathe in through my nose

I feel my my stomach expanding so that I can regulate my emotions what I can't have here I cannot have the anxiety and the anger that I feel towards Liza Minnelli I can't have here, I cannot have the anxiety and the anger that I feel towards Liza Minnelli. I can't have these things come up in me and inform my behavior and actions. I have to use slow, calm meditation, deep diaphragmatic breathing so that my brain has all of the oxygen that it can get. I'm noticing this. I do start thinking there's less oxygen on a plane and then I squash that thought I keep with it and I use the mindful sense of calm To notice the feelings that come up to notice the sudden desire to jump out of my seat

To notice the sudden desire to jump out of my seat. To notice the desire to swat at the wasp as I hear its wings buzz around my ear. To notice that these feelings are not facts, and I can choose to observe them and to not react. To notice that the wasp is just curious and I can choose not to react. I begin to have empathy for the wasp. I begin to say to myself, this poor wasp is from Edinburgh and if it's lucky enough it's going to wake up in Dublin. How do you explain that to a wasp? What if he gets attacked by Dublin wasps as soon as he arrived? Will he be lonely? I start to allow feelings of compassion emerge

towards this wasp that's buzzing around my head. And with that feeling of compassion and empathy comes genuine acceptance. I can't control this situation. I can only control how I react to it. And I accept that I might be stung on the face by a wasp. And I accept that it might be painful. And I accept that I might be painful and I accept that I don't know whether I'm allergic to wasps things or not and I accept that I might die and I accept that getting stung by a wasp and dying on a plane, that's not a bad way

to go. It's better than dying on a plane with Jedward. I accept all these things. I accept that even if the wasp has a crack at me. Most of my body is covered in clothes. Maybe it'll try and have a crack at my knees. I don't think a wasp can penetrate corduroy. And through that acceptance and empathy, I got to that wonderful, I got to that wonderful, the Nirvana-like place in meditation, the pure centre of calm, where my breathing becomes so shallow that it feels like I'm not breathing at all. And there's a subtle endorphin hit that's akin to an orgasm where everything becomes incredibly clear. I'm just observing all of my thoughts, all of my emotions. I'm reacting to nothing. And I begin to appreciate the absurdity

that I'm hurtling through the clouds at several hundred miles an hour over the Irish Sea while being bothered by a wasp and I submit myself entirely to that experience and I achieved a real a real sense of communion with the plight of the wasps. If it was a bee on that plane we all wouldn't be reacting like this. I mean bees are incredibly important, they're pollinators, they're also dying at the moment. But we project a lot of nobility into bees. Because see if a bee stings you, then the bee is going to die, and the bee is just protecting its queen.

Whereas wasps are just dirty rotten pricks who have nothing better to be doing than acting the bousy and being aggressive and starting fights. But that's not the truth when it comes to the bousy September wasp. The bousy September wasp is responding to trauma, so wasps are useful. They don't fly into flowers like bees and come out of the flower covered in pollen like they have little fluffy mohawks. They don't give life the way that bees do. I mean bees, bees tell us the story of reproduction. Bees help flowers the fuck. That's what they do.

They help flowers the fuck. They's what they do. They help flowers to fuck. They're the reason we have crops. You can see bees doing their thing and you know that their activity is responsible for food that ends up on our table. But wasps, wasps, they're not necess- they do occasionally pollinate, but wasps aren't useful for life, they're useful for decay. When an animal dies, wasps will show up and feed on the flesh. The wasps will help that animal to decompose and fertilize the soil. Wasps are hunters, they're essential to systems of biodiversity, because they'll help to keep populations of insects in control. But the thing is about how a wasp

behaves all summer. So wasps have nests. They don't make honey like bees do. They have nests that are made out of paper. Bits of wood that they chew. You've seen a wasps nest. They have a social structure similar to bees. So wasps, they have a queen and this queen lays eggs in the nest and she stays in that nest with her eggs. But what all the wasps do, are the worker wasps in the summertime. So they leave the nest and they fly around and they look for protein.

This is why wasps will scavenge on a dead animal. This is why they kill insects. Worker wasps all through the summer, they look for protein. But the wasp isn't that interested in the protein. The wasp itself does not want for protein. But the wasp isn't that interested in the protein. The wasp itself does not want that protein. Instead, the wasp will eat the meat, kill the insect, then it flies back to the nest. And those little eggs that the queen has laid, they become larvae. Little baby wasps, little maggots.

they become larvae, little baby wasps, little maggots. The wasp returns to the nest with its mouth full of meat and protein and then it feeds the meat and protein to the larvae and an exchange occurs which is known as trophallaxis. When the worker wasp, when the adult wasp feeds the meat to the larvae, the larvae then excretes sugar and that's what the wasp is after. Imagine you had a baby and every time you give the baby a piece of steak, the baby hands you a Mars bar. That's what the wasps are doing. They don't give a shit about meat. They fly out into the world. They fly into a piece of shit. They fly up the arse of a dead dog. They'll kill a beetle. They might not be fertilizing flowers, but they're very important to the process of decay that fertilizes the soil where flowers grow.

They take that protein, they give it to the baby wasp, and then the baby wasp goes, here's some sugar. That's all that wasp wants. But then, as it gets to around August, the baby wasps, the larvae, start to mature. It puts a silk cap around itself and it enters the pupae stage so that it can eventually hatch. And now you've got all these fucking wasps who no longer have a source of sugar. They've spent the entire fucking summer giving meat to the baby wasps and getting delicious sugar in return and the message they're given is fuck off and die. There's no need for you anymore. The kids are raised, fuck off and die. So as these wasps leave the colony in and around late August, all they want his sugar. Give me fucking sugar. I want sugar. The behavior of a bousy August Wasp is very similar to how addiction presents itself in humans and the trauma that informs it. So first and foremost, August Wasps experience societal breakdown. They no longer have a job, they no longer have a purpose.

Their societal order collapses. The wasps have a dependency on sugar. They used to have jobs, turn up with a piece of meat, and a baby's gonna give you a bit of sugar. That used to be their jobs, now that's gone. But they still want that sugar. The desire for the sugar causes them to engage in disordered and risk-taking behavior. This is what has the bousy September wasp interested in your pint of cider are attracted to the floral perfume that you wear, or the mango and coconut in the shower gel you just used. Humans have sugar. Humans have the sugar that the wasps need. And just like a human, like a human who's in the throes of addiction,

the wasp will engage in risk-taking behavior that might end its life in order to obtain that sugar. They're willing to buzz around the head of a giant that wants to kill it with its fists just to get that sugar. They're deeply unhappy and confused because they're starving. Their regular source of sugar is gone and they're kind of aimless. They don't have social structure anymore, they don't have economy, they don't have purpose, so they're aggressive.

If you look at the trauma-informed model of addiction, and how that intersects with poverty, low unemployment, breakdown of community, and then the emergence of addiction as a way of medicating the trauma of all that. You see all those parallels, you see those fucking parallels in bousy September wasps. Also there's a legitimate chance that that wasp was drunk. The wasp could actually have been drunk and that's why he was falling around the plane. I know that sounds ridiculous. But yes, these autumn wasps, sometimes they eat fruit or apples that are rotting, and

they get natural alcohol from this rotting fruit. Or they drink cider, they drink Bulmers, and they get drunk, they can get drunk. And the connection between those two things, this emerged to me while I was meditating, meditating as that wasp flew around my head on the airplane by humanizing the wasp and empathizing with its plight, I didn't judge its behavior. I wasn't calling it a bousy cunt anymore. I took a trauma-informed perspective and noticed its erratic behavior as a response to pain. It's not trying to hurt me, it's not trying to sting me, it's trying to find out if I have any sugar But if I start flicking my hands and batting it away in its state of desperation and pain

It may attack me and in that moment too I decided From now on I'm gonna leave piles of jelly babies out for wasps My neighbors can go fuck themselves but I'm gonna get sugary babies, little jelly bit sugary babies as almost like a safe injection center for unemployed wasps who are navigating the trauma of colony collapse. I'm gonna give them their sugary babies the health-informed response to trauma and addiction that we really should have in our society. We should have this in our society. We criminalize the wasps the way that we

criminalize people who are experiencing the trauma of addiction. And you can even apply a class analysis to this, like the parallels between wasps and humans. The communities that are most likely to experience mass unemployment, collapse of societal roles, poverty, and then the trauma that leads to addiction. It's most likely going to be working-class communities that are impacted by this. Like, you look at America. The Appalachian areas, where there was once thriving mining communities. Then under Reagan and neoliberalism, all these jobs disappeared, they're shipped overseas. Now these same communities are hugely impacted by opiate addiction. Under neoliberalism, it's the jobs in the

working class communities that get sacrificed first. These are also the jobs that as a society we don't value. We consider these jobs to be low skilled, not requiring education, to have no value at all, even though they're essential to our society. Jobs were if there was once strong unions, a strong sense of collective bargaining, rubbish collection, truckers unions. From the 1980s onwards, it was all these industries

that were torn apart and deregulated and had the unions busted in this race to the bottom. The place profit over the lives of people. Wherever that was eradicated you now have community trauma. We view wasps the same way. We don't value the work of wasps. They're the waste disposal insects that do jobs that we consider to be ugly or smelly, but their role is fucking essential If wasps disappeared tomorrow, we'd be all fucked. Wasps are what are known as a keystone species So these were the curious

playful thoughts that emerged When I'd achieved the sense of emotional regulation through meditation with a wasp hitting off my forehead on an airplane. Let's have a small ocarina pause right now. I don't have the ocarina, I've got my Puerto Rican, my Puerto Rican guairo which I'm gonna play and you'll hear some fucking ads. I've nothing to play the guairo with, hold on. lectures all day or binging TV shows all night. Save up to $20 per month on Rogers Internet. Visit Rogers.com for details.

We got you, Rogers. That was the Puerto Rican Guayaropas. My voice is, my voice is all crackly because I was smoking cigarettes in Edinburgh like a silly boy. It's also quite late in my studio. I've been locked out of my office for three days. The lock fucking broke. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash the Blind By Podcast. If you enjoy listening to this podcast, if it brings you distraction, entertainment, If you enjoy listening to this podcast, if it brings you distraction, entertainment, marth, merriment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, if you enjoy it,

please consider paying me for the work that I do. Because this podcast is my full-time job. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I get all the equipment to make this podcast. It's how I have the time to write this podcast. It's how I earn a living. This is my full-time job. So please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing if you are listening to this podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it. But if you can't afford that, if you don't have that money, if you're out of work, whatever the fuck, you can listen for free. You can listen for free, because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast, I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com forward slash the Blind By Podcast. Upcoming gigs? I'm in the Opera House in Cork for the Cork Podcast Festival.

And the 15th of September coming up, I've got a wonderful guest. I love gigging in Cork. I love Cork. Um, also check out the Cork Podcast Festival. Just look it up on Google. The lads who run it are pure fucking sound and there's a bunch of other events if you're coming down to see myself. So check out the Cork Podcast Festival. In November, I'm in Mayo in Clare Morris. That should be good crack. I think there's a Vicar Street somewhere. Not sure if those tickets are on sale yet.

I'll let you know when there's other gigs. Fucking Australian tour in 2025 at the start of it somewhere. I don't want to be listing out all of it. Fucking New Zealand, Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth. The whole thing is mostly sold out now. But I'm sure if you go onto Google, there might be a few tickets left for... I'm shit at promoting gigs this week. Fucking hell. Blind by Australia and New Zealand tour. You'll see it on my Instagram. You'll see it on my fucking Instagram.

Blind by Boat Club on Instagram. There's only a few tickets left if you're living over there. There's loads of time, we'll be grand. It's like more than six months away. So back to the airplane and the wasp. So I was at the back of the airplane. The wasp was flying around me. I don't know how long it was because I was in the throes of meditation.

So it could have been one minute or ten minutes. But I promised myself I was going to stay in a meditative state for the entirety of the plane journey. Plane journey is a wonderful opportunity to meditate. So I was going to stay in that base level of here and now, present moment, calmness, until we landed and the wasp could do whatever it wants. It can land on my shoulder if it wants, because I've accepted that it's outside of my control. What I also found was quite lovely was, because I was empathizing with the Wasp and compassionately putting myself into the

Wasp's shoes, I then began to experience self-compassion. Meditation can be like that when you get deep into it, all these different layers peel back. When you're meditating and you have a silenced mind, and emotions are things that you notice rather than react to, the calmness of that, your mind just starts revealing deeper emotions, deeper emotions or even memories, type of shit that might pop up in dreams.

Meditation can do that. So I started to experience a feeling of self-compassion for a younger version of myself. I think the reason the... I mentioned earlier in the podcast that I'd been flying back from Edinburgh Book Festival and was plagued with feelings of imposter syndrome. Feelings like I didn't deserve to be at Edinburgh Book Festival. Or when I heard writers that I look up to and that I respect people with titles and letters after their names. When I heard these people saying that they enjoyed my writing, I wasn't believing them. I didn't believe them. And I know that that insecurity stems from school. Growing up

autistic in school, differences in my behavior, differences in how I see the world, differences in how I regulate my emotions, these were labeled as disruptive and wrong and stupid. So it can be very difficult for me to, there's a barrier there when it comes to believing that I deserve to be speaking at something like the Edinburgh Book Festival. And the self-compassion came up during my meditation, when I started to think about my first pieces of creative work that I would have been doing when I was in school, when I was in like sixth year, leaving third year, 16, 17 years old, and I used to do prank phone calls and record them.

Now, of course, I wouldn't have considered this writing or creativity or anything like that at the time. I would have considered it just messing, causing trouble, being disruptive, being bold, showing off, making other people laugh, people in my class recording prank phone calls, playing them for people in my class recording prank phone calls, playing them for people in my class just to show off because at the same time I would have been desperately failing in my studies and consistently under the threat of being expelled for disruptive behavior and I did a prank phone call fucking

20 years ago when I was in school about a wasp and when I listen back to it now I do view this prank phone call as a piece of writing a piece of creativity even though I'm 16 or 17 it operates within the same creative universe as this podcast now and the short stories that I write. And I'm going to play this prank phone call for you to hear. And I'd love to have a time machine to go back 20 years and say to fucking 16, 17 year old me, you're not messing, you're not being disruptive, you're not showing off. What you're doing is creativity. This is writing

You just don't know that it's that yet and even though you're failing you're leaving cert You're good at something and this is the thing you're good at and this thing is called writing Even if the teachers tell you you can't write so that this is a prank phone call called the wasp And it's like 20 years old. And I rang up a bookshop and told them I lost my wasp. Hello, this is Patty speaking, how can I help? Patty, how's it going? Patty, I don't mean to alarm you now,

but I was in about a half an hour ago inside there. And my name is Liam Flagg, and I had with me in a bag a very rare Polynesian wasp. And unfortunately I somehow managed to, I left it on a counter or whatever but I've serious reason to believe that the wasp actually is in your shop now. Oh please don't say that, I have a terrible fear of wasps, you're messing with me aren't you? No I'm not, no the thing is about the wasp, it's stinging to an ant.

You're messing, please tell me you're messing with me. I'm not messing at all unfortunately Patti, I'm not. No the thing is about the wasp, it's stinging. You're messing please. I'm not messing at all unfortunately Patty. I'm very serious. I came back from Polynesia about three weeks ago and the thing is that it's actually a very expensive wasp and that's why I wanted it. It won't go outside because of the difference in climate so it'll stay inside because of the heat. What would you put it in? I had it in a kind of a matchbox with a little clip at the front but I mean there's every reason to believe that it's

after getting out because I actually have the matchbox and the wasp isn't in there. The only time I checked it was when I was inside that shop so the wasp is in the shop at the moment. What does it look like? It would look like a traditional wasp except it's face is more like a hat. Right. Do you know? The thing is that it's either very low or very high. You won't catch it flying around the place if you know what I mean. And it's absolutely deadly at hiding.

Oh really? So that's the thing. Oh God. And if you want to look, are you able to whistle in the key of E? What? Have you got a loudspeaker on the phone actually? Have we got a loudspeaker on the phone actually? Have we got a loudspeaker on the phone? There's a thing about this particular Polynesian wasp, it's Latin name is Vespa

Bessaris and if you want to actually get this wasp to come out from where it is, it cannot stand any tone that is exactly in the key of E. If you try that loudspeaker, are you able to whistle in the key of E? No, can you whistle in the key of E? No, I can't. If you'd like to look, will you put it on? If you put this, I'm not joking here. If you put this on loudspeaker and I whistle in the key of E, that wasp will drop to the- I don't know, which one is loudspeaker, this one?

Make sure everybody can hear it now, love. I can't press it. One, two, three. Hello? Whistle Any time? I can't get it on there speaker, hold on one sec. If that wasp hears that it'll drop to the ground like the twin towers.

Hello, did you? I'm trying to put it on. Two seconds now. Bear with me Patty, don't panic. What a very important thing, you're wearing very heavy shoes because that wasp, it cannot sting but it can bite and it will go for fees. If it sees that an exposed toe, then forget about it. You're so lying, who is this? I don't believe it. I'm an expert beekeeper by the name of Liam Flagg and I've been very safe. The wasp is worth about 500 quid I'm hoping to cross it with the Irish honeybee. Oh really? Yeah. But it bites. It'll nibble the toe off you. I might go underneath your toenail. Oh, no. Set off house, it's a solitary wasp.

My shoes are okay. That's fantastic. Press that loudspeaker while I whistle in the KV. It's a matter of life and death for the wasp. It won't work. Can you copy that tone yourself? Hold on, will you do it after me please, Patti? I'm not doing this.

Have you got relative pitch pitch at you play an instrument at all yourself though no Patty very important I want you to weasel after me please sure how come you can't come back into the shop and do it why can't I come in yeah where are you that you left it you can't be too far away if you've only left it I'm after actually managing to get myself trapped inside a very large cake I was eating a ghetto my friend bought me a very large cake. I was eating a gatto, my friend bought me a very large gatto and it was an unfortunate joke but it was hollow on the inside so I'm actually calling you from inside a cake at the moment now looking... Is it nice?

Patty put yourself in my situation. Would you enjoy a cake if you had a wasp that you loved that was missing? No, listen I have to go I have to go I don't know where it is if you can come back then and try find it. If you find a WASP would you ever email it to me, okay? And that'll be fine. What's the email address? I'll write it down. BrendantheWASP at yourwho.co.uk Okay, got it. It's his own, it's actually his email address, he gave me the password, I shouldn't...

Bye bye, Patti! Okay, bye, thanks! So that was me when I was a kid. Legally a child. And I used to record phone calls like that and put them onto CDs to make my friends in school laugh. But I wouldn't have considered it to be creativity or writing. But it is fucking creativity and writing. That's... That's a comedy sketch where I've written a character called Liam Flagg who's a very

eccentric, it was actually, it was me predicting what it was going to be like in my fucking thirties but it's a very simple comedy sketch. I'd have been looking at fucking Reeves and Mortimer, Monty Python, all that type of stuff. It's a comedy sketch about a man who has lost his wasp in a bookshop. And I would have spent a good few hours researching everything about wasps, so that I had wasp facts. And I would have written down specific jokes and gags, and had multiple different potential endings, depending on how the other person responded.

It's a comedy sketch where an unknowing member of the public plays the straight character. It's not really about pranking someone, it's about writing a little surreal creative universe where strange ideas can flourish. And I can say that now because 20 years later I'm still a fucking writer. But teenage me, teenage me could have, could have done with that piece of information. I remember when I used to do those calls. I used to get,

I used to experience what I'd now call the feeling of flow. The feeling of creative flow. But I would not have considered that to be creativity or art. Not back then, it was just messing. Creativity and art was whatever a teacher told you was creativity and art. And in the early 2000s, early internet days, me arriving into a school with a fucking CD and a prank phone call, that would have just, it would have been considered disruptive

and the CD would have been confiscated. I suppose I'd like to end the podcast by thanking that wasp on the plane. I want to thank that wasp on the plane for facilitating me with the environment to have a good 45 minutes of meditation and to explore feelings of self-compassion. And what happened to the wasp? The wasp flew around the plane, then would disappear for like five minutes while it crawled around the carpet.

And then near the end of the flight, the wasp went on one of the windows and a man who had been sleeping through the whole thing just woke up, saw it and killed it with his jumper and then the man beside him got this soft smiley pillowy look in his face, a subservient poppy look as if he wanted to have sex with the man who just killed the wasp with his jumper. He was in awe of this man's strength and masculinity. This sleeping man, he was about 70, this sleeping man who had slept through the entirety of the wasp ordeal. Just woke up.

And the first thing he did when he opened his eyes was kill the wasp with a jumper. So rest in peace to the Edinburgh plane wasp. He never made it to Dublin. Probably better off. Probably better off. Went out with a bang. Ended up on an airplane. Got pissed off Liza Minnelli's cider and then got his head kicked in. I'd take that death. I'd take that death. Did you hear about Blind By? What did he do? He drank Liza Minnelli's cider on a flight from Edinburgh and someone murdered him with their fists. I'd take that over a fucking dying on a plane with Jedward. Alright dog bless, it's nearly four in the fucking morning here, because I was locked

out of my office. Wink at a swan. Rub a dog. Leave a few jelly babies out for the last of the summer wasps. I'll catch you next week. Go back to school with Rogers and get Canada's fastest and most reliable internet. Perfect for streaming lectures all day or binging TV shows all night. Save up to $20 per month on Rogers Internet. Visit Rogers.com for details.

We got you, Rogers. you.. Thank you.