The Blindboy Podcast - The Tanners Enamel

Episode Date: January 10, 2018

How to be happy. Meeting metaphorical dogs. Homers Odyssey Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh hello you paltry salty garibaldis. Welcome to week number 12 of the Blind Boy podcast. We are still number one in the podcast charts because of the actions of you glorious cunts. Because of your actions, Because of you. Liking the podcast. And leaving some delicious. Delectable reviews. Reviews so mouthwatering. That I want to fry them in batter. And eat them with a yard of cod.

Thank you for those lovely delicious reviews. Mmm. My tummy is full from all of those reviews. I am satiated. But I'll be hungry again. So please leave more reviews. On the podcast. And.

Rate it highly. And like it. And tell a friend. Tell a postman about it. Tell an undertaker. Tell us a steeplechaser. Tell a wagon driver. That he needs to subscribe to this podcast.

For it will fill holes in his soul. That he did not know existed. Tell the postman. About your podcast hug. And see if he doesn't get creeped out. Tell him about the man from Limerick that talks into your ear about love and life and then stare him straight into the eye

as you receive your parcel or your BART if you live in the Gwaeltacht shout out to all the boys in Connemara the recipients of BART non-stop BART over there parcels, parcels, parcels all day

what did we talk about last week? last week I didn't give you a full proper podcast because I was under the weather I was ill I had em a little hint of a sore throat and a runny nose and a small bit of a chest. Fairly standard flu situation, which was grand. But a flu is not conducive to recording pleasurable podcasts. So I gave you a short story instead. And this short story was called.

Hugged Up Studded Blood Puppet. Which is one of my favourite short stories. From the book that I wrote. Because. It's the most cinematic. When I was writing it. I fully felt like I was watching a film in my head I could see how it was lit

and I could see how it was going to be filmed and all this stuff and I really enjoyed writing that story and I quite liked the plot and I would love to turn that story into a screenplay of some description and it ironically

it ended up half predicting that mad film that came out there on Netflix, The Foreigner where Pierce Brosnan plays Jerry Adams and Jackie Chan is a Kung Fu man from China who has to fight

the IRA and has to fight Jerry Adams and I ended up ironically predicting that film in that story. Hugged Up Studded Blood Puppet. With a fictional film in the story called Black 47 Triad Paddy. But I liked writing it. And I hope you enjoyed listening to it.

Um. Oh yes. An award was won during the week um Eason's had a poll of the the readers favorite books of 2017 and the gospel according to blind boy was voted Eason's readers favorite book of 2017 so if you are an Eason's Reader and you voted in that thank you very much I mean it's nice to get an award the other thing as well you know

a couple of podcasts ago I spoke about you know when it comes to maintaining my creative vigour it's very important for me to not take positive criticism or negative criticism on board not positive criticism not to take praise on board and not to take negative criticism on board that's what i find in my experience you gotta you gotta deflect both you got to deflect praise and you got to deflect criticism you must

only create for you and for your own personal aesthetics and when you start thinking about what other people like or what other people don't like you lose your creative heart so that's quite challenging because i'm happy to win that award and I'm proud of it but at the same time I have to kind of just very mindfully just kind of walk past it I just have to I have to treat that award like a friendly dog that you know I imagine I'm walking along on a path and it's a lovely day and across the way there's some begrudgers throwing shit at me i have to just peacefully avoid their shit and walk on and ignore the shit that's been thrown but also this beautiful friendly golden retriever comes up the pathway and his tail is wagging and his eyes have a sparkle

in him and he comes up with his lovely wet nose and places it in my palm and it feels exhilarating and he wags his tail and looks at me and then jumps up and places and places it in my palm and it feels exhilarating and he wags his tail and looks at me and then jumps up and places his two paws on my chest and I give him a little hug and that golden retriever ladies and gentlemen is that award and I must give that golden retriever a gentle hug a little pat on the head but I can't feed him I have to walk on and and that golden retriever will try and follow me but I have to say no go home and I carry on in my journey and acknowledge that I've seen the golden retriever but I must carry on forward so that's how I treat positive praise it's great golden retrievers are wonderful meeting a nice dog is a great experience.

But, you know, you start throwing them treats, you start being too nice, then you're after kidnapping someone's dog and that brings a whole load of shit on top of your life. In the same way that taking positive praise on board too much will destroy your creativity. Because, like I mentioned, that would mean that my locus of evaluation moves from being internal to external and if you have an external locus of evaluation

if you value yourself your value as a person by an aspect of your behavior you will find yourself in a position of low self-esteem and this period of low self-esteem will destabilise my mental health and I'm sure you've heard me say that many a time you'll probably notice from my voice that I'm still a little bit sick and

I'm not sick, I'm fully functional, I feel great it's just it feels like Serena Williams drove a tennis ball down my nose and it's politely lodged in the back of my throat and I'm just kind of waiting for it to jettison during the night so my voice is a little bit off but it's grand small bit nasal but being sick was you know it was nice I don't get sick often, but sometimes getting sick can be, I don't know, it can be, it can give you a nice contemplative space, I'm a very,

I'm quite driven all the time, you know, I like to keep myself busy, and I don't, I don't relax a lot, I'm always doing something, but when you're struck down with an illness, I don't I don't relax a lot I'm always doing something but when you're struck down with an illness you don't really have a choice that's when you have to go well fuck it I'm getting nothing done so I'll watch a bit of Netflix or play a video game that's what I did I haven't played video games in about a year because my xbox got the what's known as the red ring of death about a year and a half ago where it just stops working and i didn't replace it and this i think this is a fantastic thing because i think if i had an xbox over the past year a functional one i don't know how much

of that book i would have written and i found this the past week now I went and downloaded an absolutely beautiful game called Ori and the Blind Forest which is it's kind of a it's a platform game in the way that Super Mario is with a little bit of Echo the Dolphin but it's a it's a wonderful game it's has a one unreal soundtrack and the story is is beautiful the design of it the feel of it is is very calming you know and the storyline it rewards compassion there's no such thing as a baddie in orion the blind forest which i loved in the storyline who you believe to be your enemies it always gives the backstory of the enemy and the pain behind why your enemy is acting like a dickhead and i loved the game i really i enjoyed it i played it for about four four days i cleared it. Cleared it fully. And had a lovely experience.

And I allowed myself this because I was sick. There was nothing else I was going to do. So it was like drink a lot of tea. You know take a bit of soda fed. Have a lot of oranges. And play a video game for four days. And I did it. And it was enjoyable.

But however. Now I downloaded this onto my pc that's what i did i downloaded steam and i downloaded it from steam i didn't get my xbox working but i was gonna buy a new playstation or a new xbox or something and i'm not going to now because what i realized is because i have another book to write this year, you know, I have a few other projects, quite demanding projects, and what I found with myself in video games, and I've realized that now having been away from them for a year, even if I allow myself one hour a day, you know, because I'd be able to discipline myself around that, you know, one hour a day of video games i personally think

for me right now i'm just speaking for myself i think video games they tick certain boxes in my mind that creatively usually tick i found after playing a video game it was kind of exciting the reward centers and pleasure centers of my brain so that's what my mind kind of fixated on it fixated on clearing this game and it was like i i downloaded my imagination into somebody else's imagination so i don't think that I would have a creative incentive to be making short stories or coming up with ideas if I'm actively playing a video game even if it's for an hour a day so I'm not going to be buying a playstation anytime soon not what I've got books to write so that's a nice little observation I made as a result of that short bout of sore-throatedness i had whatever the fuck it was or still is hurt and that process there that i

described is you know you might have heard me before talking about emotional intelligence and i use that as my part of my regime for my own mental hygiene, my mental health. That there is emotional intelligence in action. That's me mindfully and actively checking in with my emotions to see how I'm getting on. And to treat my life like I'm a scientist. So that's kind of what it is if I'm I'm generally I'm generally very happy a lot of the time you know I said my if I had to rate my happiness um I'm usually around an 8 out of 10 and a 10 would be when you receive some incredibly good news so I'm pretty much very happy all the time because I actively look after my mental health.

When I feel myself getting irritated, angry with other people, angry with myself, then this takes me away from my happiness slightly. So when that happens, I bring in my emotional intelligence. I start asking myself, what changes in my life recently? What am I doing differently that might cause this very slight irritation and for me it was playing video games it's like well okay I'm feeling a bit irritated and I'm playing video games okay maybe that's one of the reasons why is that and I looked at it and it's like yeah it's um giving me a sense of accomplishment when nothing real was actually accomplished and that's for me as a creative person that's not great for you it could be fine everybody's different you know not everybody is into writing or into painting or making music what it boils down to is is personal meaning me what gives me personal meaning is creating something

i know people and they get personal meaning from doing maths you know i've got buddies who would be would absolutely hate writing they hate the written word but the idea of balancing their own accounts we'll say even though even though they don't have to would bring them an intense sense of calm and joy so that's their personal meaning and if i'm to you know we're after getting into 2018 people make new year's resolutions i would suggest to you a good new year's resolution would be to find your sense of personal meaning find what what is it in your own life that gives you um that you really enjoy doing that's that thing that allows you to achieve what I've referred to as the state of flow,

the state of intense and absolute concentration and happiness, whereby no worries are allowed in, no stress is allowed in, in very intense flow, even things like sexual desire and hunger aren't allowed in because you exist as a pure level of concentration. Try and find that thing in your life. It could be sports. It could be colouring in. Do you know? In my book I actually included a colouring in section.

For that reason. Because some people might like to colour in. Doing the dishes. Cleaning the garden. Anything. You know? Counting kinds. Playing with a Japanese sand garden. Anything, you know. Counting kinds. Playing with a Japanese sand garden.

I don't know. But importantly, you have to realize is that it definitely exists for you. If you don't know what it is yet, it is there, it is out there for you. And it depends on, you know, people who are introverted like myself, we kind of have it easier because we

like to spend a lot of time by ourselves and to do little activities but some people are extroverted so extroverted people can find their flow in other people in social situations in a game of fucking cards i don't know what extroverted people do because I'm so unbelievably introverted but for flow to occur the thing you must kind of look for you have to seek out an activity that's voluntary you know

no one's forcing you to do it and it's enjoyable it's motivational for the very sake of doing it you know a certain level of skill should be required in what you're doing and there should be a bit of a challenge too with goals towards success in it but you should feel as though you have control and receive immediate feedback with some room for growth. And flow is characterized by, strangely, the complete lack of emotion when you're doing it. You have no sense of consciousness whatsoever. It just happens.

We all experienced it when we were kids, whether we were playing with Lego or playing with crayons and we tend to kind of drift out of it a bit as we get older for me I experience flow as a waking state of dreaming it's like dreaming it's like controlling daydreams but I'm autonomously controlling it like I'm floating outside of myself

it's just a pure beam of energy sound like a lunatic now but you might be asking blind by why are you talking about flow again you've spoken about flow in many podcasts um well the reason is to be honest is the field of positive psychology has found that flow is there's a very definite link between contact with a flow state and continual levels of happiness and it's not just modern psychology that found this the ancient chinese knew about this podcast a few weeks ago spoke about collectivism versus individualism and the holistic nature of collectivist thinking well there was a chinese philosopher oh god i'm gonna try and pronounce his name

zuang zi and he referred to flow as the ultimate happiness now this fella was knocking around fucking years ago and he used to observe he called it a stage of letting go where when flow happens you let go and you transcend your ego to become a kind of a pure energy you know but he saw flow in artisans not necessarily in artists in craftsmen and butchers. And I'm going to read a few excerpts now of this Zhuangzi and how he was observing a butcher in flow. And what he said was, at every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee, zip zoop, he slithered the knife along with a zing and all was in perfect rhythm as though he were performing the dance of the mulberry grove

or keeping time with the ching shao music i don't know what the fuck he's talking about there but he's describing a a butcher that he was watching who was in this intense uh intense land of skill and happiness and when this chinese philosopher went and actually spoke to the butcher and asked him you know what's the crack what's going on what what's up with your your technique why are you so focused when you're slicing up an animal and the butcher said what i care about is the way which goes beyond skill when I first began cutting up oxen all I could see was the ox itself after three years I no longer saw the whole ox and now now I go at it by spirit and don't look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. However, when I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself

to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I'm doing, work very slowly and move the knife with the greatest subtlety until flap, the whole thing comes apart like a cloud of earth crumbling to the ground i stand there holding the knife and look all around me completely satisfied and reluctant to move on and then i wipe off the knife and put it away so that's a chinese butcher from a few hundred years ago describing to a philosopher his state of flow when he is practicing that thing that gives him a sense of meaning and when i when i read that it's like yeah that is identical to my own sense of flow when i'm writing a short story or writing a song or anything it's it's a it's a sense of doing something when i write a story it reveals itself to me it happens in front of the page and a huge story 12 000 words 16 000 words an entire plot

fucking subplot structure i don't plan it out it happens it reveals itself like I'm watching a film in this intense state of concentration where I'm not even aware I'm writing a story it's like I'm in a dream and it's just coming out and like that butcher described you know when he comes to a difficult part in the meat maybe a dodgy bone and this challenge might engage the kind of the critical part of his brain that would take him out of flow it doesn't happen it's like he autonomously sizes up the difficulty and autonomously without being aware of it is cautious of it and manages to solve the problem while still in a state of flow and that's the same with me when I'm writing that's how I feel if I'm in a state of flow when I'm painting and now I haven't painted in 10

years I used to get a good decent state of flow when I was painting and then like I said before rare more rare in music musical flow for me is uh is quite rare when it does happen I fucking nail it but when it doesn't I'm just kind of going through the motions but if I sit down with a keyboard and write I'm pretty much guaranteed flow 90% of the time so for you

in 2018 have a lash every day at finding that thing that gives you that sense of flow that sense of happiness and search through your childhood because chances are you had it when you were a kid and you just because of school or because of responsibilities or whatever you stopped doing that thing that gave you flow probably because society said that it was silly and foolish and messy you know it could have been playing with play though

like i mentioned carl jung a few weeks ago carl jung used to go to the bottom of his garden and get you know get his fucking knees muddy and play with sticks every day of his life until he was dead an old man because he understood for the importance of mental health in his own consciousness to be involved in play and that's all he did he just fucked around with mud and sticks because that's what he did when he was three years of age and it helped him to daydream but if we take it to more modern times modern psychology um The psychologist who is, I suppose, coined the term flow and who is the leader of the field of positive psychology is a lad called Csikszentmihalyi. Mad looking name. I think he's Croatian or Russian or something. But Csikszentmihalyi, but Chicks and Mehi in a bizarre case of

synchronicity one day he attended a lecture in Switzerland at this speaker he didn't know who the speaker was and this speech that he heard was so inspirational that he went off and founded

the field of positive psychology and started to research into flow the speaker of course psychology and started to research into flow. The speaker, of course, was Carl Jung himself and Chicks and Mehi didn't know. But Chicks and Mehi and positive psychology holds that happiness depends upon flow and how much flow that you can experience in your day-to-day life depending on what it is depending on your activity of personal meaning

and what chicks and mehi identified as you know when you're looking at a candidate an activity that could be a candidate for you to achieve flow he has a diagram and you must look for something that's both challenging and requires skill now it can't be too challenging because if it's too challenging then you start to experience anxiety and this anxiety will lead to self-criticism and frustration and it will not get you the state of flow. It also has to require a certain level of skill but not so much skill that you can't do it because that too will lead to boredom and more anxiety. So it's about finding that happy ground where it's something that you're definitely handy at, definitely something that comes natural to you and the more intensely

that you kind of challenge yourself and use your skill and let the skill and challenge feed off each other this gradually like you're falling asleep lulls you into what he calls the flow channel and when you're in the flow channel you're not aware of it but you eventually move towards intense ecstasy and happiness and this you know like meditation as well if this is present in your life every single day you will be a happy person, you know, independent of external circumstances in a lot of cases. Csikszentmihalyi is highly critical of watching television and using social media. He believes that these practices lead to

boredom and apathy and stemming from that frustration and anger and me personally you know let's have some hot takes why not you know i often wonder i often use the field of positive psychology and flow psychology to wonder is is this apathy that social media can bring is is this why social media can be so toxic sometimes when you're flying through your facebook feed or your twitter feed and when all of us when any of us are doing it we're very very easily triggered into a extreme emotional response when you see something that we disagree with you know when you look at the comments under an article and you see someone and they're saying something you don't like and you just get angry and want to call them a goal

whereas this wouldn't happen if you were enjoying yourself this would this would not happen in a state of flow and i often wonder is the the apathy which is produced from these passive activities does this feed into the the toxicity of the social media environment i wonder i sound a bit like a minions meme that your grandmother would share at that moment. But it is worth noting that social media is a toxic place where lovely nice people can all of a sudden be transformed into quite hateful people who express very black and white rigid and aggressive views. Because I refuse to believe that every horrible comment I read online I know people who write horrible comments I know them in real life and I have pints with them

and they're just like me and you they have their moments where they're angry they have their moments where they're not angry but I've seen people who write horrible things spoken to them about it and they're not filled with hate they're just worrying that one moment in time and that does give me a lot of hope because the internet is a sewer

and comment sections are a sewer on the other side of the coin i have spoken about the podcast hug which is what i attempt to achieve with this podcast. I don't think podcasts produce apathy in the listener. I know from the responses that I get, I know myself from listening to podcasts, because I think podcasts require, they engage your ears only, and they require you to visualize with your mind. Reading does the same thing.

Podcasts, to consume a podcast is quite participatory. Scrolling through social media isn't really that participatory or watching television it's being fed to you and you can sit back and you know you're like a goose that's having its liver fattened for foie gras foie gras foie gras don't know how to pronounce it i've never eaten it but podcasts don't do that if when when you're listening to this podcast you know i'd love to see someone's brain under a scanner listening to a podcast versus scrolling through Instagram. I think the podcast does ask more of you, the listener, and it's a more intense participatory experience where I won't say you experience flow while listening to a podcast, but it's not far off it. It's meditative and calming. And it's most certainly focused. And it's rejuvenating.

And that's why people love podcasts. That's why I love podcasts when I listen to them. You feel good. You feel like you've done something good. You don't come away. You never come away sluggish from a podcast. You will come away sluggish from an hour of Facebook. Or an hour of video games, unfortunately.

Maybe it's because of what it does to your eyes. It can be tiring on the eyes. But with a podcast, you can just lash in the earphones, go out for a nice walk. It'll reduce your breathing and there is a slight a little element of flow to a podcast to appreciate

and when I think maybe that's a hot hot take but you know what lads this is the place for hot takes when I was describing that flow there you know I want to be cautious of when I say that something revealed itself on the page there's a lot of writers, not a lot of writers

but a few writers believe that the universe has handed the story to them which is bullshit, it's not the fucking universe it's the product of your own unconscious mind in the same way that where dreams come from you never wake up from a dream marvelling going where did that come from? It's your own unconscious mind just figuring shit out. Interestingly, last week when I was playing video games for those few days, I had dreams. I don't get dreams. I never get dreams. Now, the reason, I think the reason I don't get dreams, well I don't recall them.

I probably do dream when I'm sleeping, but I never wake up with them. I think it's because I write too much during the day, and I create too much during the day, and I think that tires out that part of my brain, so when I go to sleep, my brain doesn't need to remember dreams. But last week, I was getting dreams during the night because i was playing video games and i think it's because i wasn't creating that i was getting these dreams but i dreamt that there's this rapper from dublin called reggie snow

he's a buddy of mine and i dreamt that me and reggie were outside my house and we found a spider web and the spider web had lights on it. And we discovered that this spider web was connected to nature's internet and it was sending light signals to all the plants and they were interconnected with these lights because of this spider web. because of this spider web and then we got chased by someone who may have been Kiefer Sutherland I'm not sure because we couldn't tell anyone about the secret

about the internet spider web and I woke up from it first thing I did was I mailed Reggie to tell him but I woke up from it and

I was kind of self-flagellating because I thought it was like an arrogant dream. I was going, for fuck's sake, man. You think that you and Reggie now, you're great artists and you understand the internet of the world and no one can see you. Pretentious cunt. Cop on yourself. And I gave it a bit of analysis because, you know, I don't get dreams, so I'll have a think about it. And I was searching for depth. Going, what does this mean?

What is the spider web internet and then I realised it's the fucking plot of the video game you've been playing all week you stupid cunt Ori and the Blind Forest the whole plot of the game is it's like Super Mario but you're in this forest and there's like this

internet of interconnected light that gives the whole forest life and that light is stolen by an angry crow and you have to reconnect the light of the forest so that was my deep dream i had rehashed the plot of a video game and claimed it for myself and somehow written reggie snow and Kiefer Sutherland into it so that's why I won't be playing video games in 2018 because it'll fuck up my creativity usually around this point of the podcast

we have a little pause for an advert known as the Ocarina Pause where I play my little clay Spanish ocarina and depending on the algorithm you will either hear an advert or an ocarina well this week I've misplaced my ocarina I don't know where it is it's somewhere in that pile of jocks over there but instead what I'll do is I'm going to play a little bit of slide guitar

because the ocarina is misplaced. So you're either going to hear a small phrase of slide guitar or the ocarina. An advert I mean. Sorry. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl.

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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?. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It'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 Center 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. CA. There you go. So what I'm kind of realising this week, based on the past 35 minutes of ranting,

is that a theme is emerging for this week's podcast. And the theme so far is that everything I've spoken about today I've already spoken about in a previous podcast. Now I don't want you thinking Blind Boy's gone mad, he's talking about shit he's spoken about before because I don't want to turn into Joe Rogan. You know, I like Joe Rogan but you listen to his podcast and fucking you know Joe Rogan he'll go on a rant about DMT whenever he hears a church bell. He talks about DMT every single

podcast and we've heard it before Joe and I fear that Flo is turning into my DMT which is ironic because they both do similar things except one of them is internally generated but no I'm fully aware that I'm talking about topics from previous podcasts but this week I was

speaking about flow from a different angle with a different level of interrogation because it's something that's on my mind all the time in keeping with this theme there's somewhat something else that i'd like to revisit and re-interrogate and expand upon and this is the color blue a few podcasts back i spoke about caravaggio and the economics of renaissance painting and how you know i had a hot take that the reason caravaggio's paintings are mostly back black is because he was trying to

save money because the most expensive color was blue because blue came from the semi precious stone lapis lazuli which was came from one mine in afghanistan and was more expensive than gold and this blue this lapis lazuli color ultramarine is the reason that holy mary was painted blue in paintings because that's the most expensive colour paint are the most expensive colour but there's something I wanted to speak about with blue that I didn't go into

in the last podcast because I just I didn't have time but out of all the colours blue for me is by far the most fucking interesting because there is a hot hot take there is a very very interesting theory about the color blue and that theory is that blue is a very recent invention

i don't mean the ability to paint it, but I mean the actual colour blue itself. The ability of the human brain to recognise the colour blue is only a couple of thousand years old. Do you remember back a few years ago in 2015, a photograph of a dress went massively viral online. And some bjorn was buying a dress on fucking eBay or somewhere whatever and it divided the internet the dress was blue and black it was a blue dress with black lines but some people saw it myself included as a white dress with gold lines and when i showed this to i showed it to my buddy and i said what color is this dress and they go it's blue and black and i thought they were trolling me i thought that there was like because to me this dress was fucking it was white and gold it was white and gold to me and my buddy saw it as black and blue

and I thought they were trolling I thought there was some secret on the internet where everyone had spoken to each other and it's like if someone says that this is white and gold just tell them it's black and blue but no two people with sets of eyes in their heads. Were seeing the exact same thing. In two very very different ways. And it was flabbergasting. To see that you know. And. To know that another person. Is seeing something completely different.

To how I'm seeing it. And it got people talking about the colour blue. And researching into the colour blue more. And this conversation. Goes all the way back to 1858 with a boy called William Gladstone. The same William Gladstone who went on to become Prime Minister of Great Britain.

He was a Prime Minister in 1858 while Ireland was a colony of Britain so therefore he's automatically a cunt but this is an interesting observation so gladstone was a bit of a scholar and he went looking back into the famous book the odyssey it's a greek book by homer and i think it's about I'm not sure it's about 3,000 years old 3-4,000 years old it was written 800 years BCE so that's almost 3,000 years old so Gladstone started flicking through the Odyssey written by Homer um worth noting as well Ulysses by James Joyce was very much based upon the Odyssey which ironically should make Ulysses a work of post-modernism and not modernism in my opinion because it was a pastiche or something that previously existed but that's for another podcast

but anyway while Gladstone was looking through the Odyssey he started listing out all the colours that Homer was talking about, for whatever reason, I don't know, but Gladstone noticed that Homer did not use the colour blue at any point, do you know what I mean, like he described the sea as a wine-dark sea. Why not, you know, the blue sea? He was describing... Homer described honey as green. He described sheep as violet. It's like, what the fuck are you on, Homer? And it's very, very strange.

Black is mentioned 200 times, white is mentioned around 100 times, and there's not that many mentions of other colours. There's a couple of reds, 15 times for reds, and then there's less than 10 mentions of yellow and green, but zero mention of blue whatsoever so gladstone fair play then because that's you know 1858 that is some observation to be making so he goes what the fuck is going on where's the blue in the odyssey so he starts looking into

other greek texts and it's the exact same thing. Nobody mentioned blue at all. The word blue didn't exist in Greek times. So then another lad called Lazarus Geiger, he started looking at what Gladstone was investigating and was like, Fuck in hell, Gladstone, what's the story, man? You're onto something. So, Geiger starts looking at the Quran, ancient Hebrew versions of the Bible, Vedic hymns. And he says, These hymns of more than 10,000 lines are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawns, play of colour. Day and night. Cloud and lightning.

The air and ether. All these are unfolded before us. Again and again. But there is one thing. No one could ever learn. From these ancient songs. And that is that the sky is blue. There was no blue.

No. Book. Of ancient times. Mentioned the colour fucking blue. Ever. So when Geiger started looking more at, you know, texts, historical texts from all around the world,

ancient texts, and every language seemed to first have a word for black and then a word for white, for like dark and light. And then those were the only words for a while and then red came about to describe the color of blood or the color of wine but still no fucking blue then yellow and green started to appear but the last color that eventually started to become

mentioned as an actual color was blue and like the other thing too is blue eyes human human blue eyes they're actually quite rare they're only first off the gene for blue eyes i think it's only about five or six thousand years old and there wasn't a lot of it hopping around the place in ancient greece the first culture to develop a word for blue were the Egyptians and surprisingly they were the only culture at the time that had a way to produce dye that was blue. They made it out of fucking, I don't know what they made it out of, but the Egyptians had blue dye and then lo and behold they had a word for blue. Now to us, we're thinking, what the fuck? Sure, look, the sky is blue.

The sea is blue. This is evident. We can see this. But the theory is, is that if only the sky is blue and only the sea is blue, then you have no need for a word for it. If no other blue exists in your actual world then why would you say something is as blue as? The other thing they think too is that

people didn't actually see the sky as blue they saw it as a form of white. And as mad as that sounds take it back to that fucking dress that went viral on the internet. It's the same crack. I saw a white and gold dress. My buddy saw a black and blue dress.

So it's... Human culture needed to have a referent. It needed to have a label for this color before our brains could actually fucking see it. Which is insanity. But it's quite interesting then that, you know, in reference to the previous podcast, that blue then goes on to become such an important colour through the discovery of lapis lazuli that, you know, this semi-precious stone that creates the color ultramarine which is a very pure blue becomes the most important and most expensive color in the history of art that's a

color that defined the career of certain artists it defined the color of the virgin mary she was blue because that was expensive and my hot takey mind cannot help but drift towards jungian synchronicity and whether this is a the significance of blue and it's you know it's place in human perception whether is this a jungian synchronistic event that it became so important then in our consciousness maybe that's just me talking out of my hope probably is but on the subject of you know human perception and paintings another one in the history of painting and art that's quite interesting i can't give you any reference to this because i didn't find this story online this was the bones of this story were told to me a good few years ago by my Leaving Cert Art teacher, Christy McGrath.

But it's an interesting story nonetheless. So, this would have been around the Neoclassical period, which I think is the late 17th century. And Neoclassical art would have been dominated by a painter called Jacques-Louis David. You'd know David's paintings. He famously painted Napoleon. I'm probably off on the 17th century. Could be 18th century as well. Not sure.

But anyway, neoclassical painting, it's very realistic. It's shit hot. It's brilliant. If a neoclassicist painted a man or a dog, it really, really looked like that thing. It's a very impressive technical academic painting. So anyway, it was led by the French. And the French at this time were starting to knock around Saudi Arabia, which would have been, you know know a very sparsely populated

desert land populated by tribes of Bedouins and nomads tribes of people who they used a lot of horses the tribes of Saudi Arabia got around on horseback so the French were

heading back and forth I I don't know, doing some colonial shit. And the French got quite friendly with some of these Saudi Arabian or even around Iran, these nomadic tribes of horsemen. So these horsey lads because of their geographical situation they were Islamic now there is a within Islam there's a thing called an iconism and it's a prescription in Islam

whereby you can't create any image of a sentient being you definitely can't you cannot create any image of a sentient being you definitely can't you cannot create any image of god you definitely can't create an image of muhammad um as evidenced recently by those assholes in isis who shot up charlie hebdo because someone wanted to draw muhammad but this is where it stems from in islam it is forbidden to create or draw or visually represent any creature that is sentient and created by god because it is seen as kind of arrogant it's like god created these things who the fuck are you to draw them so just don't and this is why in islamic art it's geometrical shapes

it's geometric like if you look at there's a place i go to in spain called cordoba which has some wonderful islamic art that's like 1100 years old and there's no images of humans or animals or anything like that it's just very intricate geometrical uh patterns because it's the language of mathematics and islam believes that the language of god is the language of mathematics so the respectful thing to draw are mathematical expressions geometrical expressions so anyway these tribes of islamic lads in saudi arabia around the 17th 18th century whose daily lives revolved around fucking horses on horseback all day simple as that they they know nothing more than horses when the french were coming over they

tried to offer these lads some gifts and one of the gifts that the french bought this tribe was a neoclassical painting of a horse. So like I said, neoclassical paintings are shit hot. If it's a painting of a horse, it's the best painting of a horse you've ever seen. So when they presented this painting to these Islamic lads, whose lives were nothing but horses, they could not see the horse in the painting like literally they tried to show

them this amazing 2d representation of a 3d horse and to their eyes it was simply this mass of brown blurry shit on a flat surface they were like what are you showing me this for what's so great about this and they're like it's a horse it's a horse the french were saying and the islamic lads were going i see nothing sham i can't see any horse it's just a load of brown and the reason is is because of the strict rules that these lads had in their culture about not representing you know not drawing anything on a 2d space not representing an animal or a person on a 2D space. Their brains had not developed the ability to read a 3D image on a 2D plane. They couldn't see it.

They could not visually see the fucking horse. It was just a lump of brown. Isn't that interesting? About human perception and brains. So, just like the Greeks had no word for the colour blue, therefore they did not see blue, the ancient Islamic

cultures who had never seen a 2D representation of a 3D object, simply couldn't see it when it was presented to them. Because that's what the human brain does. Isn't that cool? the album i would like to recommend on this week's podcast is the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars by david bowie now that might seem like a bit of a basic choice but i'm aware that people today... Excuse the cough. People today, well myself included, we don't listen to albums anymore.

And we might listen to David Bowie, but chances are if you're listening to Bowie on Spotify or iTunes, you're merely picking the best of his tracks and listening to them individually. But I would ask you to go and listen to the entire album of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars because as a start-to-finish piece, it is incredible. It's a work of genius and it should only be appreciated, I think, as a start-to-finish piece of work.

It is an entire body of work with a narrative. So give that a crack and see what you think of it. Last week I recommended Swordfish Trombones by Tom Waits, which was met with a mixed response. And I can understand that because it's Tom Waits stuff. It's very challenging music, you know. Some people just want a nice slice of pizza. They don't necessarily want an oyster.

His music is an oyster. This has been a rather ranty podcast so far, which is grand you know, back in form it's 2018, there's nothing long nothing long with a rant, that's what's known as a Freudian slip ladies and gentlemen

there is everything long with one of my fucking rants, 50 minutes long but i would like to answer some of the beautiful questions that you'd ask me this week now usually what i do for the questions is i'll go on to twitter and i will say to you any questions for this week's podcast but twitter was getting so overcrowded with responses that this week I decided I would ask the questions on Patreon. Because there's a smaller audience of patrons on that who could ask it. If you would like to donate a few quid to this podcast on Patreon, please feel free to do so.

You don't have to. Podcast is still going to go ahead. But if you enjoy it and want to give me i don't know a euro or four euro whatever please do you will find it at patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast and what i'm hoping to do because i've got a good few patrons now what i would love to do is use the money that i'm going to get from it and maybe invest in a decent camera and a lighting setup or something like that and have the podcast as it is but maybe try and have a visual one as well you know have it as on YouTube and I think that could be quite cool why not but thank you so much everybody who is contributing on the Patreon um Jesus Christ lads it's it's this is the first time in 17 years of

my career that i'm actually earning money from the internet before that if i was to earn money it had to be going to rte hoping that they'd give me a commission to write a television series or doing a bunch of gigs but in all the time i've time. We've never really earned a lot of money from YouTube. To be honest. Because our highest grossing YouTube videos. Are on RTE's page. And Spotify earns you fuck all. And so does iTunes.

So this is the first time. That I'm actually earning a couple of quid. Where I'm going. That's nice. I can earn a living off this. So thank you so much to everybody who's contributing to the patreon to you it's just like a euro or whatever and you probably think it's no big deal to me like it's it's fucking huge it really really is and thank you thank you so much so anyway I'll get on to the a few questions from patreon

Eric Fitzgerald asks, I'm reading the Gospel according to Blind Boy. A lot of your stories are told from the point of view of a female narrator. Did you conduct any research for this, or did you simply disregard gender when writing these stories? There's three or four stories, I think, that are from the point of view of a female narrator. One story has no gender whatsoever, that was deliberate.

The Bourneville Chorus, which I read out on a podcast a few weeks ago. Now, because I read that out, you automatically hear it in a male voice, but if you read it on the page, there's no gender in that story at all. I didn't want the gender in it, because it's the only story in the book that deals with a sexual experience and i didn't want to gender that sexual experience i wanted the viewer to place their respective genitals on the character you know and their finger in a banshee and i don't know what genitals a banshee has, so just keep the whole thing no gender, just whatever you want it to be, it can be male, female, or whatever in between, it's up to you, but for the few stories that I do have a female lead, what I kind of do, I mentioned a couple of podcasts back about, you know, at the end of the day lads

I'm a man and I've been raised a man and I'm a straight man and I've grown up with privilege of being a man so I'm sexist do you know I'm not

a nasty misogynistic sexist and I really want to improve and try my best. But at the end of the day, like, do you know, my privilege gets in the way of, I can have some quite, quite sexist views. Like if I'm improving as the years go by through listening to women, but I can make quite a few sexist assumptions that are outside of my awareness because of the world of privilege that I was raised in so because of this I'm quite cautious when I'm writing for another gender so what I do is I try and write with no gender in mind whatsoever and then at the end I will decide whether it's going to be a female character or not. That's what I prefer to do.

If I deliberately write as a female, five minutes in I'm talking about what it feels like to wear a bra. Do you know what I mean? It's just, I'm trying to shake that part of myself off. But it's good to kind of be honest with yourself about it. And then you can change that experience so we said there's a story a 10-foot hen bending with a female lead character um a lot of that is the story is about anxiety and a lot of it is my own experience with anxiety with

a few details changed but at the end i went back and i said okay this is going to be a female character um for shovel duds the story about a murderer i did want that to be a female lead i really did uh i wanted for subversiveness because i wanted the we do associate violent murderous thoughts as being a male thing so I wanted them to be a female thing in this particular story but from the start I said even though this is a female character I'm going to write it without a gender and then change it at the end also as well I had a female editor for this book and that's something I specifically wanted. Her name was Catherine Gough, unbelievable fucking editor, gave me all the freedom in the world. And one of the first conversations I had with her was, if I send you anything and there's a hint of misogynism,

there's a hint of sexism that I'm not aware of please point it the fuck out to me and help me change it because I don't want to produce work like that that's contributing to a fucking problem that already exists so yeah I try not to write gender at all I'll change it at the end because of my own innate sexism that I'm not aware of. Marcus Dalton is asking, I'm some lad for sweet pastries and coffee when I'm hungover, but most people dig a big dirty fry. What's your comfort food after a night on the sauce?

First off, I rarely will get hangovers because I'm a very good boy for preparing the night before. If I have a night of my delicious, beautiful zombie cocktails that I get in Pharmacia in Limerick, which are, they're strong drinks, do you know? The top of a zombie has got a passion fruit full of 100 proof rum, so there's a chance of a hangover there. 100 proof rum so there's a chance of a hangover there what i do is when i get home i'll have two pints of water one pint of diarylite and a banana and then go to sleep so when i wake up in the morning i don't really have that much of a hangover then what i'll do is i'll have a fruit

smoothie and i'll go for a very gentle run. Not an intense run, but a gentle run. And that sorts out my kind of hangover. If I'm foolish and get so drunk that I don't prepare the night before, I don't know, I just roll around in pain and have a coffee and drink as much water as I can and feel very sorry for myself and then probably order chicken balls and curry sauce that thought that happens once a year because I don't like hangovers and I especially don't like the fear people are always asking about the fear what is the fear

it's like oh I'm feeling so depressed well, you took a lot of depressants last night. That's what drink is. I'm doing dry January at the moment. I haven't had any drink in, what is it, 10 days? Not because I feel I need to. Just because I kind of want to. You know, a lot of people do dry January. So I just wanted to see, want to you know a lot of people do dry january so i just wanted to see

just to check in with myself what would it be like if i didn't have because i drink maybe if not every weekend every second weekend but i thought let's do it for a month see what happens because i think it's it's a good way to check in with yourself. And at the end of the month, if I find that it was difficult, then I might have to ask myself a couple of questions about my relationship with drink. But so far, 10 days in, it's grand. I don't really have a craving for it and I don't really miss it.

I also haven't smoked my vape in 10 days either because when I got my little sore throat, I didn't really want this and then i went fuck it i'm not i'm not craving it anymore so i'm off the vape and i'm off the drink for 10 days we'll see how long it goes for james coffee asks you said before you have a great interest in cooking and food is there anyone in particular who you like watching or type of food you really enjoy eating? I love watching food vlogs. There's a guy called Mark Wiens, W-I-E-N-S, and he's on YouTube, and he is a travel and food vlogger.

And I love his videos. He travels all around the world and goes to cafes and diners and restaurants and street food actually a lot of street food and he eats the food and films it and I get a little bit of a podcast hug off watching those videos to be honest and what I love is and his main shtick is that he has this ridiculous fucking face that he pulls when he eats food this intense orgasmic look in his eye that you will either hate or love but it's addictive so i enjoy mark weens the food ranger is another youtube channel he's a canadian lad with fluent chinese and he goes up and down rural china eating mad shit and I love that.

I went on a little binge of Keith Floyd during the week. All his stuff is on YouTube. Keith Floyd was a chef and restaurateur in the 80s and 90s and he kind of revolutionized how food was presented on TV. He was the first television chef to take food out of the kitchen. Food programs at that point were just some asshole in front of a camera in a kitchen cooking food. Keith Floyd was like, fuck that, we're going to Spain, and we're going to make this dish in the back of a boat, and I'm going to get pissed on wine. So if you want some entertaining, free shit to look at on youtube anything by keith floyd the man was a highly entertaining legend regarding cooks um do you know i i can't i can't

i can't flaw jamie oliver i really can't um jamie oliver always brings a little unique twist to any recipe he's doing and when you copy a Jamie Oliver recipe you do notice it when you create it at home you really notice fuck me this is different that little addition of lemon that I didn't think would go into this dish that really fucking works um any type of food I like I personally I prefer to cook Italian, because Italian is very easily to replicate well at home, Indian the same, Asian food, very difficult to replicate properly at home, especially if it's cooked in a wok, woks require an unbelievable amount of heat, so unless you've got a jet wok burner then forget about making decent asian food at home so i tend to stick to uh spanish cooking indian uh fucking italian cooking i'd like to say french cooking but french i don't know french is nothing but a lot of fucking meat floating and butter they

can go fuck themselves Lisa Murphy asks how do you deal with panic attacks and extreme anxiety that interferes with your day to day life and work luckily Lisa I'm 10 years free of severe anxiety attacks you know

through the use of the daily and regular use of cognitive behavioural therapy, transaction and analysis, mindfulness, emotional intelligence. I'm anxiety free. And when I say that, when I talk about my mental health regime, just look at me like some fella who comes in and I've got a ripped body because I go to the gym all the time and eat properly that's that's all it is I have been mentally eating well and

working out every single day for 10 years and that's what's worked for me so I'm free of it but when I was in the throes of severe anxiety and severe depression and I had to try and get on with my life when a full-blown panic attack would happen to me I did have certain techniques that I would use the first thing that I would recommend you do is to address the way that you breathe chances are if you're suffering anxiety you'll find that your breathing is probably it's a lot of it is happening in your mouth when we suffer anxiety we take these shallow breaths in our mouth from our mouth and it goes to the top of our chest and we're not we don't even know we're doing it but your brain isn't and your muscles are not getting enough oxygen so try and focus your breathing as much as possible now i mean change how you breathe to bring the breath in through the nose until you put

your hands on your belly and as you breathe in through the nose slowly feel your actual stomach expanding and that's diaphragm breathing and moving your type of breathing from your mouth to your nose where it goes deep into your belly can very much reduce the levels of anxiety that you experience because you're simply getting more oxygen you're not getting those shallow horrible little gaspy breaths that can go along with an anxiety disorder the other thing you can do when a severe anxiety hits you and you want to if your panic attack is up at 10 and you want to bring it down to a six close your eyes and i want you to imagine um do you remember when you were a kid in school, they had those washing up liquid bottles full of paint?

Well, imagine a washing up liquid bottle full of black paint, two litres, big in your hands. And now imagine an A4 white sheet of paper. Now, visualise you slowly pouring this black paint into the middle of this sheet of paper and the black paint very slowly and velvety it fills from the middle of the page all the way out to cover the entire page in nothing but a thick silky viscous black paint and the complexity of that image, it asks so much of your brain that it can de-escalate a panic attack from a 7 to about a 10. And I used to use that a lot. It won't solve your problems, but it will improve your situation, you know. So that's all I can say in that respect.

Long term, if it's really fucking with your life that much go to go to your therapist go to a counselor access some of the free services the charity services that are available medication might be an option you know i'm not anti-medication it wasn't something for me but everybody is different you know um Give meditation a chance, see if it works for you. It may work, it may not work. I spoke about exercise last week. If you can go for a run, that's not a bad thing. There's many things out there that you can try and do.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, it's... I'm trying my best here, but at the same time as well, there is a sadness and a futility to doing this because of the lack of services that are available in Ireland. But have a crack at those things I just mentioned. The last question, I'm only answering questions

that got likes on Patreon, but I'm going to answer more next week. Dennis Limer, they're fucking great questions as well, thanks very much lads, Dennis Limer asks, what's the best gig you've ever been to, and which band artist do you wish to see,

had seen live, I'm not mad into live gigs, because doing gigs is my job, so, you know, like even festivals, a festival to me is just a big loud field, but,

the best gig I've ever been to, I was about 14 or 15, and I would have had very, very severe anxiety and social anxiety, so leaving the house for me was a fucking, actually two gigs that I've been to were like this, but the first one that I went to, that was, like like this was at the height of me having agoraphobia I couldn't leave my gaff um going around the corner going into school was difficult but the flaming lips were playing uh up in Dublin somewhere and it was before they were massive so it wasn't uh it was a small enough venue can't remember what it was it was about maybe 300 400 so i went up to see the flaming lips with uh my brother drove me up and because i just had to see him i was listening

to their stuff and i had to fucking see him despite my anxiety it was one of the toughest trips i'd ever taken in my life i remember having to stick my head out the window of the of the car up the motorway and and vomit out the side of the car because my anxiety was so intense that I was actually leaving the house that I was full-blown panic attack for the entire journey it was terrifying coupled with the fear that I was suffering from agoraphobia and I had to be in a crowd full of people at a fucking gig but I went to see the flaming lips and they had visuals on screen which I'd never seen at a gig and for that one hour of that gig my anxiety didn't

exist and it gave me great hope it was phenomenal and then I puked all the way home then in the car and had anxiety on the way back but yeah the flaming lips the second one a few years later as you know i'm very very passionate about bob dylan and so when bob dylan he did a gig in galway and i was a teenager and i was like okay i have to i have to be in the same breathing space as bob didn't i have to do this for myself i have to despite my anxiety and I had just a very very horrible time um being in a massive massive crowd while I remember all my clothes just being soaked wet with sweat because my anxiety was so extreme that I was in this crowd full of people terrified that at any moment I'd be crushed to death and it was it wasn't even a good gig because Bob Dylan doesn't really do good live gigs

so that was awful but at least I got to go home that night and go to bed and go I saw Bob Dylan live it's done so I'm going to end the podcast on that note pretty positive note God bless

not literally, metaphorically have a wonderful week enjoy yourselves look after yourselves I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast and

leave comments in the review section on your respective podcast apps have a crack at the Patreon if that's what you feel like and

go in peace have a lovely have a lovely lovely week and look after yourselves. Next week, I'm going to London this week for some business with some tans and I'll be back

and I might have a few London stories. Next week, yart. 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 Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm.

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