The Blindboy Podcast - The Cat Piss Astronaut

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

A short story about being an autistic child  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Crush your knuckle off the Jesuit's buckle, you seaside Vincents. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first Blind Boy Podcast, maybe go back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. I'm a busy boy this week. I've got three gigs this week. I'm up in Derry, Galway and Killarney

in the space of four days. So I'm literally, I'm travelling the Derry, Galway and Killarney in the space of four days. So I'm literally, I'm travelling the length of the country. Not the length and the breadth but I'm travelling from the southernmost part of Ireland up to the northernmost part. Now I'm really looking forward to the gigs because I've got cracking guests lined up. And I love gigging. I love chatting to people at the live podcast. I love coming to your towns and meeting all of ye but gigs are unbelievably time consuming because of travel and waiting and

preparation so that's why I'm so busy. It's four and a half hours to get from Limerick to Derry and that's using a car. That's using private roads. If I was to get to Derry using public transport, which I have done in the past, it's nine hours. It's nine hours to get to Derry via public transport, which should not be the case. But that's what you get when

successive governments ignore the west of Ireland. But fuck that. I can't wait to get up to Derry, because it's a wonderful city, and I'm going to have a fantastic guest fantastic guest I'm gonna be interviewing a neuroscientist so I'm tremendously excited about that but I'm a busy boy this week as a result of all the travel I'm gonna be doing I'm gonna be reading you a short story this week from my book Topography Hibernica and this short story was it was difficult to write it was quite emotionally cathartic but it was also a painful experience to write it it's a short story called The Cat Piss Astronaut as you know nearly two years ago now I found out that I was neurodivergent, that I was diagnosed autistic.

And that's very challenging information to receive as an adult, because it forces me to confront my sense of identity and my sense of who I am, and my sense of who I was before I got to who I am. I was before I got to who I am. The autism diagnosis caused me to look back on my childhood, an early childhood, from a new perspective. I carry a lot of shame around because of how disruptive I was in school, how disruptive I was, how much I misbehaved. I was labelled bad at a very young age, a bad disruptive student who's bald. And by the time I was a teenager, I just fully identified with that. I identified with being bald and bad and disruptive and a messer. And it became my identity to the point that I just gave up and eventually failed

my leave insert. And when I failed my leave insert, I lost a fuckload of opportunities. I lost the opportunity to explore my curiosities in third level. I'd have loved to have studied science. I'd have loved to have studied history, English literature. I would have loved to have had that opportunity in my twenties to do that shit in college I'd kind of squared that with myself and said well that's a shame but you're an adult now you were a little shit when you were a child and a teenager

you're an adult now what can you do with the resources you have and I did alright, I became an artist but when I received my autism diagnosis it forced me to reappraise my childhood and the narrative of well you were just a bold little shit who loved messing and who loved disrupting things that narrative that sense of identity that I had internalized because that's what the adults, especially teachers, were saying to me consistently, that narrative doesn't work anymore when I receive my autism diagnosis.

Because now I realise I went through the entire school system as an undiagnosed autistic kid. So now I realise I didn't fail school. School failed me. I was in a system that was not set up for neurodivergent people. It's that simple. It's hard not to be angry about that because it feels very, very unfair.

That does feel unfair. You see, you're a bald little shit. You were a little shithead who loved messing and couldn't sit still. That's actually easier to accept responsibility for because I can blame myself. Self-blame, shame, self-flagellation. That's kind of a path of least resistance. And it's not very pleasant pleasant but it worked for me

now I have to reappraise that through self-compassion and that's actually a tough journey it's a difficult journey because I have to try and learn to hug myself as a child which is quite difficult when my default is to blame myself as a child so I wrote this story this short, The Cat Pace Astronaut, as a piece of auto-fiction,

I suppose you'd call it. Auto-fiction is, it's not pure biography. Auto-fiction is a piece of fiction that is heavily informed by events in the writer's life. You could argue that all fiction contains elements of autofiction. I would argue that. No writer can write fiction without bringing some elements of their own experience into the story. But this short story, The Cat Piss Astronaut, it's about an autistic child and their experience

of being in school and it's heavily based on my my earliest memories of school at about five years of age and a lot of the things that happen in this story are real things that happened to me when I was a child with certain details changed to service storytelling. What the story really for me is it's about retracing the very painful shocks and traumas that you learn from school or society as a neurodivergent child. These shocks that you learn very quickly that force you to behave normally when what's considered normal is a little bit confusing for you. So I wrote this short story as a form of therapy to get into a deep state of flow and trying to to re-see my childhood from a child's eye view to revisit the emotions I was feeling back then and the anxiety of trying to

interpret my environment but the level of emotional maturity that a three or four year old has I wrote this story using second person singular in literature that means I'm writing you instead of I you don't see second person singular a lot in literature because

it's a very strong flavour, it's a very strong flavour to write a story and it's a very strong flavour. It's a very strong flavour to write a story and it's you instead of I. Second person singular is very useful if you're trying to persuade somebody. That's why you'll mostly see it being used in advertising. Like recently when I was buying outdoor gear

like rain jackets and hiking boots. If you look at the advertising blurbs beside these products, they're often written in second person singular. You find yourself on a mountain overlooking the vista. You are prepared because you are wearing these boots. That's second person singular. It's used in advertising a lot 90s postmodern literature used second-person singular quite a bit Chuck Palahniuk used it in Fight Club as a kind of a satire of advertising language fella called Jay McInerney wrote a book called bright lights big city I think it's called in 1991 which used second person singular.

But I've always adored second person singular as a very effective way to guide the reader towards empathy, to truly put yourself into the shoes of the narrator. Guided meditation uses second person singular. So because this story is about the autistic experience the neurodivergent experience of being a child in school i'm aware that most of the people listening to this are going to be neurotypical so by writing this in second person singular it will allow the neurotypical listener or reader to step into the experience and worldview of a person who interprets their environment and social environment quite differently. This is what's going on on the inside of a kid that you might just called disruptive or eccentric or mad or giddy or distracted or stupid

or whatever labels get thrown at neurodivergent people from a very very young age that we internalise and take on as our fucking identities so this is the

cat piss astronaut and I hope you enjoy it the cat piss astronaut you'd been asking your mother to read the big encyclopedias to you, even though she says that these are not the books that are supposed to be read to small children. These are the books for mommies and daddies to read. She says it in her high-pitched voice, but you tell her that your big brother said that the encyclopedias have all the big answers about the planets in the sky. You need the big answers and not the small answers.

So she reads them to you. You get a flutter in your soul when you hear about the likes of Jupiter, a big spinning fella made out of hard gas with a surface that would turn you into a pebble if you ever put your feet on it. You paint Jupiter and Mars and Neptune on your blank pages with crayons and the paint that comes from the washing up liquid bottles. Your da asks why you won't sit still and have your bacon and cabbage. It will grow hairs on your chest, he says, and you've checked your chest for hairs after eating bacon and cabbage before,

and none ever grow. There must be something wrong with you. You can't tell him the answer that he wants to hear about the reason you won't eat. Your mother gives in and makes you burgers and chips. It's your favorite meal. But what use is burgers and chips? You're not hungry. You need to think about Jupiter. In school, they tell you to stop flapping your hands and pacing when you talk about Jupiter. The teacher does sudden shouts at you. Sit down at your desk and shut up. Why can't you do as you're told? When she says this, she ruins Jupiter. So the planet has to live only in your head again for a while. You first start to become aware that you exist at about the age of five.

You become aware that there's this shimmering confusion called reality, and you can't remember where you were before reality began. On Jupiter, there's reality too, but nothing like the reality here. You memorize the planets in the solar system by their distance to the sun. My vest eats my jumper so useless new pull over. Your mother reads the encyclopedia to you at bedtime and says that Jupiter is full of ammonia. You ask your mother what ammonia is. She gets annoyed and says that it's the smell of Tomcat's piss.

The reality on Jupiter is so harsh that you're not even allowed to experience it. The blood in your veins would boil, your head would pop, and your brains would turn to pasta in a wind made out of cat's piss that you can't hear because nature made your ears

to hear sounds in oxygen not in the windy piss of cats. Your bones would be crushed. You find that funny. It makes the reality on Earth seem less serious but you're glad that you live in the reality on Earth

and not the reality on Jupiter where the wind is made of smelly tomcat's piss. You ask if you're allowed to have the light on tonight. In school, your teacher asks you to step outside of the classroom. You hear the unsupervised laughter behind you because she leaves the door half open. Follow me quietly, she says. You both walk down the tiled corridor that has the big white statue of the man who was crying with his hands nailed. He's scary because adults don't cry. He's bigger than any adult you

know. He stands at the end of the corridor. You always run past that statue when you need to go to the toilet even though you're not allowed to run in the corridor. Some days you hold your pee in instead. You decided the first time you saw the statue that you would never, ever, ever look up at him again. People are very frightening when they are as still as the man with the nails in his hands. You've never met an adult or a child who could hold themselves that still before. The air around him smells like the smell from the back of your television at home. You think about his frozen marble face when you close your eyes at night time, and you wish your mother would still let you sleep in her bed. But you're too old for that. It's not normal, she said. This thought has made you walk slower,

and you are flapping your fingers again, and your head is somewhere different to the corridor. White sun is coming through the glass ceiling of the corridor that feels like when you put your face over the toaster to watch the bread turn into toast. Walk this way, your teacher says to you, and she is louder now. Her left hand swings faster than her right hand. Her hip moves to one side. Sometimes she just coughs. You follow your teacher farther down the tunnel. Each cough from her is the exact same as the one before it, and she brings her fist up to her mouth when it happens. You copy all of this behind her because she told you to walk this way.

Behave yourself, she says when you do coughs like her. You should be proud of this, she says. You don't know what that means and you don't know why she has asked you to follow her or where you are going. When you get to the statue of the

crying man, you really don't want to walk past him. Your heart is beating in a way that feels like it is in your neck. You are worried that your heart will fall out of your mouth onto the floor and that a dog will run away with it. You want to drink some water. The tears are burning behind your eyes and your forehead is like the nettles in the garden. You've been told that you are too old for crying, even though crying feels nice. I'm afraid of him and I don't want to walk underneath him, you say. He loves you. He died for you, she says.

Come on, this way. You think about how you didn't ask the man to die and it feels like you have killed him but can't remember when. You close your eyes so hard that the darkness becomes white and full of stars. This reminds you of Jupiter and you feel safe when you think of it. You use your ears to follow the sound of her steps and walk past the statue of the man with the nails in his hands and the frozen eyes when you open your eyes

you don't know where you are anymore your teacher leads you into a new classroom that smells like varnish and inside the new classroom is a new teacher who you've never seen before a man teacher with metal hair like your father's who smiles in a way that feels safer than the way your teacher smiles.

They both lead you to the top part of the class where you're not allowed to go unless you're asked to go there. You can see the teacher's desk up close. It has grown-up looking papers and a big chair. You stand underneath the blackboard. The class is full of older children. They look nine or even ten years old. They have pencils on their desks and not crayons. There are drawings and images of planets and the solar system all over the walls of their classroom. Turquoise Neptune, RNG Mars with the surface powdery like your dad's snuff, a gigantic map of the Milky Way with all the foamy purples and whites. You cannot believe that the other children are doing planets for school when your class are only doing numbers from one to 10. Usually, you would start to cry

if everybody stared directly at you like this. You don't mind the staring this time because the pictures of the planets make you feel incredibly happy and flappy. Your teacher mentions your name. She is using the voice where she is both talking to you and talking to everybody at the same time. You is using the voice where she is both talking to you and talking to everybody at the same time. You've memorized this voice because it's a voice you only ever hear teachers use at school. Mr. Cadigan is going to ask you some questions and we'd like you to answer to the

class. The man, who must be Mr. Cadigan, holds up a drawing of Jupiter. What is this planet? he asks. His voice is kind. That's Jupiter, you say. He speaks your name in a soft way and asks, will you please tell the class everything that you love about Jupiter? You immediately turn to all the bigger children. You feel intense joy and your fingers and feet are doing the things they do when you imagine Jupiter. The older children don't feel like faces of people now. They feel like a big blank page for you to paint. You say that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. It's a gas giant, primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, similar to the Sun. Jupiter has a very strong magnetic field and the largest magnetosphere in the solar system. The planet is

known for its great red spot, a storm that has been ongoing for at least 300 years. Jupiter has 79 known moons, the four largest being Ganymede, Europa, Io and Callisto. Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, is even bigger than the planet Mercury. The planet has a faint ring system composed of tiny dust particles. Jupiter's day is only about 9.9 Earth hours long, the shortest of all the planets. Jupiter's strong gravitational influence has been used to slingshot spacecraft on their long journeys. Jupiter is visible from Earth with the naked eye and was known to ancient astronomers. The wind is made from the piss of cats and we would all die if. Thank you, says Mr. Cadigan. Your teacher does the face. Some children have

their mouths open and others are laughing but Mr Cadigan starts clapping and then all of the children start clapping because he is clapping. You start clapping too because everybody is clapping and this is the first time that you ever liked anything that happened in school.

Mr Cadigan stops speaking in a way that is kind and then he is being loud and talking to his class and he says he's only five years old and he knows more about the planets than all of ye put together and Mrs Flaherty here hasn't even taught his class about planets

they're in junior infants he learned all this himself if a five year old can stand up at the top of this class and make fools out of you like this, then you already need to pull up your socks. The older children look sad or angry or something in the middle of sad and angry. None of them even touch their socks. Everything about being alive feels frightening,

like you have done a bad thing by liking Jupiter so much. Back home you can't sleep with the light off again. Your da says that you are too old to sleep with the light on. He puts glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars on the ceiling, but they don't look like real stars. They are stars for babies. He says the stars absorb sunlight in the daytime and emit it at night time when they glow. So it is real starlight on the ceiling.

Starlight that waits all day for you to sleep with the light off. This makes it okay. You've stopped asking your mother what would my jacket look like if the wind was made of Tomcat's piss that travelled at several hundred miles per hour. Where do I need to breathe? Does the oxygen make my blood move? So when I breathe out the carbon dioxide goes from my lungs into that nettle over there. But then that nettle breathes out oxygen at me and I breathe that in and it makes my blood move inside my body. Can I breathe the oxygen

directly off a nettle? Why do nettles want to sting me? And what is breathing like on Jupiter, where there's helium and cat's piss wind instead of oxygen? Helium travels faster than oxygen. So would my blood move faster? Would my life be shorter because I'd be breathing a faster gas? What sound would the wind under the kitchen door make if it was helium? What would a nettle look like if instead of carbon dioxide, it breathed in a wind of cat's piss and then breathed out oxygen? What would my da's chest look like if it breathed out cat's piss wind to feed the nettles? Would a nettle on Jupiter be green? Would it matter if it stung me when my body was exploding from the pressure?

If I chose to stop breathing, would the nettles in the garden die? When you flap your hands and pull your hair and pace around the kitchen, your mother asks you why you are so upset, and will you please stop doing these things? But you know that flapping and pacing are the best ways to visit Jupiter and feel safe. When you are six your older brothers and your ma and da run out of answers and they don't have time to read the encyclopedias to you. They tell you that you are exhausting and that you should just look at the encyclopedias

yourself. You don't know how to read them at first. You pick them by the letters. Your favourite is P because the planets are in there. When the need for answers is so important, the words come to you. You figure it out yourself. A pattern emerges and you can trace its smell with your mind nostrils. Bits of words become the smell of a tomcat in your garage.

Full stops are paw prints. Sentences have a song in them that you can learn like a tune. You can read now. You can read better than everybody else in your classroom. Your mother and your brothers tell you that you are brilliant. You've been eating encyclopedias. You are good. Instead of flapping and pacing, you've started to keep your hands by your side, still, like the statue in the corridor, and you curl your toes inside your shoes. It doesn't feel the same,

but other people are happier that way. Your head is full of planets as you move towards the playground. The sky is the same colour as the long fluorescent lightbulb on the kitchen ceiling. When you were five, you would never go to the playground without your mother. That would have felt like dying,

even though the playground is right in front of your house and you can see it from your bedroom window, except in the night time, when you won't look out at the playground is right in front of your house and you can see it from your bedroom window, except in the night time, when you won't look out at the playground in case the statue man with the nails in his hands is there. But now you are six, and all summer,

you and your mother had practiced being on your own in the playground. She would stand a little bit further back each day and wave at you when you look up from the swing in her blue coat. The blue coat would be smaller every time until eventually it became a tiny blue dot. And this felt okay because that's what the earth would look like if you saw it from Jupiter. Then on the last days of the practice, she just hung her coat on the front door of your house and went inside.

Little blue earth in the distance and you were on your own in the playground. Now, your mother doesn't even have to hang her blue coat on the door anymore because you like being in the playground by yourself. You pull the zip up on your jacket because the playground is on the hill and is colder and the breeze travels down your neck. It feels good to do this for yourself. Your winter boots have brown coloured fur inside and it feels thrilling to curl your toes back and forth. There are two people in the playground today. A grown up woman.

She is wearing a blue coat just like your mother's except it is bigger and warmer looking than your mother's coat because of the winter She is pushing a small girl on a swing The girl must be her daughter They are both laughing And the girl does happy sounding screams when she goes high up on the swing It feels fun and safe when you watch them doing this It doesn't feel like Jupiter

But it feels like when you think about Jupiter. This thought makes you think about Jupiter. The daughter is the same age as you. But you prefer talking to adults or older children because they know what planets are. Like when Mr. Cadigan asked you to speak to the classroom last year and it was the only time you ever liked anything that happened in school. You tell the woman that Jupiter is several times larger than the Earth. With a wind made from the piss of cats,

her face has a new way of squinting that you haven't seen before. She pushes her daughter on the swing more slowly now. The swing stops and the girl gets off. The girl looks at you but doesn't talk to you. Instead she looks up at her mother. Her mother looks back at her like she is talking to her daughter using only her face. You've seen your parents do this to each other before but you don't know what it is and don't know how to ask what it is or why they do it. The woman and the daughter move away from where you are. They walk towards the slide. You follow the woman. To tell her that if this playground existed on Jupiter,

the helium in the air would make the swing move several hundred times faster. This would propel her daughter into the air. She'd be torn apart by a metallic cat piss wind and crushed to the size of a pebble by the gravity. But there's no need to worry because we're on Earth. And the swing set has been designed to accommodate our gravity and our atmosphere. The woman does a smile when she hears this. It's the same smile your teacher did last year when you said fuck out loud. The woman says, aren't you clever?

Where is your mother at all? She asks your name and you tell her that you are the cat piss astronaut. She doesn't like this answer. It makes her do a quick breathing in noise and she looks towards her daughter who wasn't even paying attention anyway. They walk away from you, towards the nettles at the edge of the playground where the tarmac path is. But you follow them both so you can paint their blank pages with planets. You talk to the girl who is the same age as you. You tell her that we are very lucky to live on Earth,

where everything in our reality is fine-tuned to the laws of this reality. Our jackets, our knees, the blood in our brains, the relationship between our breathing and the nettles that grow on the edge of the playground the more words you say the faster the girl walks away from you you don't understand why she and her mother aren't clapping this feels very frightening

you want to flap your hands but that isn't allowed so you stuff them hard into your pockets everything works together like the inside of an alarm clock. You continued to say to the daughter as you follow her. Reality here on Earth, in this playground, is safe. Except in five billion years when the sun will expand and our Earth will become like Jupiter. Then everything will end.

There won't be any more reality. We will all explode. The girl isn't happy now and says that she would like to go home. She asks, Mummy, will the sun expand? Her mother says no. The mother tells her that you are lying and are just making these things up to frighten her. She isn't talking like a grown up anymore. She is worried and angry at the same time and is talking to you like she is also a child. Why are you trying to frighten me? Tell us that you are lying, she says. Tell us now that you are making all this up. You are not making

this up. You feel very angry because you read in the encyclopedia that the sun is a star, the same as any other star, and that stars expand. And when stars expand, they consume all the planets around them. Our sun is no exception. There will be an end to all of this. Reality will die. This is a fact.

You say all of this out loud at the woman and her daughter. There is a sharp and shocking pain in your head. You feel like your brains are exploding. You think that you are on Jupiter. Your eyes are looking up towards the sky but you didn't do this. Something else is making you look up at the sky. The woman with the blue coat like your mother's is pulling your hair. She is doing it as hard as she can. She is pulling your hair and making you walk away from her daughter. You can only see in front of you because she controls how you move your head with her hand. You can hear that her teeth are closed tight when she is talking.

She is calling you a little knacker and a gurrier. She says shit and fucking bastard in a way that's quiet. Like she wants to shout it really loud but won't because those are adult words and her daughter is only six and might hear them. You are only six too. You forget how to make sounds with your mouth and you truly believe that you are going to be killed by the woman and that this is the end of your life. You don't want to die because you love your mother and your father and your brothers. And you want more than anything in the entire world to be with them right now in your living room where it is warm and smells like dinners.

Your ears whistle like they are listening to a cat piss Jupiter wind. Because she is hitting the top part of your head with her fist. You've never felt anything hit your head that hard before. Your scalp notices that she is wearing a metal ring and this spot is where all the pain comes from. Your face is very warm. She throws you on the concrete of the playground like a teddy bear. This has ripped the bit of your trousers where your knee is and you can see your skin peel back and it is all red. One of your boots with the brown fur is on the other side of the playground. You forget where the words are stored in your head. The woman leaves the playground with her daughter.

She is pushing her daughter because the daughter isn't running away fast enough. You look up towards your house and wish you could see the blue earth of your mother's coat. You run towards your house at a speed you didn't think you could achieve. It gets bigger and time doesn't exist. You are pulled in by the gravity of it. You are burning up. You feel a deep, painful sadness

because you've lost one of the new winter boots that your mother picked out for you and this thought is the reason you start to cry. You had eaten the encyclopedias. You had found your own answers to the questions. You thought you had been good. When you tell your mother what had happened in the playground, she asks you what you said to make the woman that angry.

so that was the cat piss astronaut short story there which was very cathartic to write and quite difficult to write because so much of that is my own childhood I taught myself how to read on encyclopedias when I was about three and that led to

teachers bringing me around to other classrooms to shame older students with my knowledge about dinosaurs and the solar system and also an adult woman kicked the living fuck out of me when I was about five because I told her and her daughter that the sun would one day expand I'm going to do the ocarina pause now

I didn't do it before the story. I didn't want to interrupt it. I don't have my ocarina. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to hit myself into the head with a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce. I know that's a bit of a cliche, fucking Ulysses.

You can't flaw Ulysses like it truly is one of the greatest fucking books ever written. There's a reason that people say that.es like, it truly is one of the greatest fucking books ever written. There's a reason that people say that. It's because it fucking is. It's astounding. If you're a writer, you gotta be reading Ulysses. For the sheer experimentation and curiosity and creativity and freedom.

This book is our jazz music. our jazz music. James Joyce took Hiberno English and used it in a playful, flexible way which reminds me of jazz music. And Ulysses is seen as one of these big, impenetrable, impossible intellectual books. Fuck off. No it's not. It can be if you want it to be. It can be that if you like. You can study it. You could do fucking phd on it if you want or you could just pick up ulysses open it up on a fucking random page and enjoy the writing you can do what you want with it it's a wonderful book that explores the human condition from lots of different angles and it predicts cinema before cinema existed. And here's my favourite part.

When I hit myself into the head with Ulysses, you'll know that I'm hitting myself into the head with Ulysses because it's so big. Listen to this. Ow. On April 5th You must be very careful, Margaret It's the girl Witness the birth Bad things will start to happen

Evil things of evil It's all for you, no, don't The first omen I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil.

Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real, it's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The first omen, only in theaters April 5th. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH,

the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca.

Can you fucking hear that? That's like a headbutt in a tree. So that's the hitting myself into the head with Ulysses by James Joyce pause you're gonna hear an advert for something there alright whatever the fuck it was support for this podcast comes

from you the listener via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast if you enjoy this podcast if it brings you mirth merriment entertainment distraction please consider paying me for the work that i put into it because this podcast is my full-time job this is how i earn a living this is how i pay my rent it's how i pay my bills this podcast is my

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No advertisers can tell me what to speak about or change the content in any way. They have to advertise on my terms. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Buy Podcast. Alright, I'm just going to promote a couple of gigs really quickly. I'm busy as fuck this week with gigs i think they're all sold out i'm in kilkenny this friday kilkenny this friday and no not kilkenny what the fuck killarney i'm in killarney i'm in killarney this friday and there's like 10 tickets left for that my next gigs really. I'm doing a massive tour.

Of England, Scotland and Wales. In April. Um. I'm doing Newcastle. Glasgow. Glasgow sold out. Nottingham. Cardiff. Brighton.

Cambridge. Bristol. That's sold out. And then my biggest gig ever that I have ever done, which I'm really looking forward to and it's a bit terrifying. My biggest gig ever is going to be on the 1st of May

in the Hammersmith Apollo. Come along to that. Come along, you cracking tans. Come and listen to me. Like a man or a woman or whatever gender you identify as

I don't give a fuck you will be embraced as a temporary Brendan or a steeplechasing Aoife or a ten foot Declan I'm gonna fuck off now because I have to get to a gig in Derry

I have to get to a gig in Derry because I'm so busy this week. So I must fuck off. I'll catch you next week. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, blow a kiss at a pigeon. Dog bless. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to

guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.