An in depth thesis about Earwigs

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Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast.

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I'm going to begin this week's podcast with a poem that was submitted by Hollywood actor Kiefer Sutherland.

The poem is called The Earwig.

I want to be an earwig so I can climb inside your ear.

I'm going to wipe my big earwigs arse on your eardrum with my pincers and my thorax.

I'm going to eat chips inside in your ear or whatever it is that earwigs eat, the equivalent of earwig chips.

I'm gonna stay inside in your ear for so long that I die.

And then you're gonna have to go to the doctor, complaining of a full feeling in your ear, and the doctor is going to remove my dead body from your ear.

The doctor will say, oh wow, an earwig.

They really do climb into ears.

But it's not an earwig, it's Kiefer Sutherland.

Thank you, Kiefer Sutherland, for sending in that

piece of poetry.

Technically more of a piece of prose.

or even a short story.

Why am I thinking about earwigs this week?

Earwigs were a large feature of my childhood.

Before I'd go to sleep, I'd be genuinely afraid that an earwig would climb into my ear and lay eggs in my brain.

And it wasn't like being afraid of monsters under your bed.

If I was a little kid and I had difficulty sleeping, and I'd say to my ma, I'm afraid of an earwig climbing into my ear.

She wouldn't say to me, oh there's no such thing as earwigs.

She'd check under my bed to make sure there was no earwigs there.

and then my dad would tell me about when he was a child they used to sleep with cotton wool in their ears to prevent earwigs from climbing into their ears.

I don't see earwigs anymore.

I can't tell is it because I'm not looking for them or because of biodiversity collapse.

There's a hell of a lot less insects now than there was when I was a child.

But seeing an earwig

that would really cause me to recoil.

They're not very friendly looking.

They're frightening, especially because of those big long pincers on their arse.

And you'd imagine, my god, what if those pincers were in my ear?

They're called earwigs.

Of course they go into ears.

It was just accepted by everybody that earwigs climb into your ear and lay eggs inside there.

And no one had ever seen it happen, but everybody knew somebody who it had happened to.

A bit like someone who's seen a ghost or a UFO.

I've never seen a UFO or a ghost, but I've met people who've said they have.

The closest I ever came to

an ear we'd gone inside in someone's ear.

I was very very young

and out my back garden there was a hedge, there was a hedge out my back garden, I was like three.

And for some reason we had an old hoover in this hedge.

A hoover that that should have been thrown out and it just ended up inside in the hedge.

It was green.

I used to actually ride this hover like a Thai car.

I used to straddle the broken hover and push it along by its wheels using my feet.

And for some reason it was being stored in the hedge.

I'm talking about a vacuum cleaner if you're American.

I don't know if you have hovers in America.

And one day,

like a bargler, I don't know what you even call him a bargler.

A man came into my back garden when I was a child.

And my ma looked out the kitchen window, and all you saw was half this torso under the hedge.

Two legs sticking out with very dirty shoes.

A wino, my ma called him affectionately.

And I remember seeing his dirty shoes and his dirty legs sticking out of the hedge.

And my brothers, who were older, and my ma being quite frightened and shocked at what the fuck is happening out of the back garden?

Who is this man?

And he was trying to steal the broken, the broken hoover in the hedge.

And my ma went out to him very frightened, asking him to stop.

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

But when she did that,

he started crying out in pain.

From inside in the hedge, just at this noise coming from the hedge.

Ouch!

Ouch!

Ouch!

I remember the hard consonants from his teeth rising up almost with a cork twang and now the man wasn't stealing the fucking stealing the hoover anymore.

He's he's just this dirty set of legs hanging out of a hedge talking to my mother and claiming that an earwig in the hedge is now inside his ear

and biting and that he's in extreme pain and he needs help.

So then my ma

my ma offered to drive him into the hospital in town barrington's hospital she offered to drive him in there this this stranger who was stealing a hoover out of the hedge now my ma's giving him a lift to fucking hospital it was the 80s i suppose that's just how things were it's a fairly innocent crime i'm stealing an old hoover out of your hedge if he'd asked for it my ma probably would have given it to him

But when when he's eat when he started screaming in pain, oh there's an earwig in my ear.

He stopped being a robber and instead just became someone in pain.

So my ma drove him to the hospital and along the way, you know, she was asking him his life story and he said, he said he used to be a successful locksmith and he owned his own locksmith business.

But then he grew too fond of the drink and found himself in a very bad way where he didn't have a lot of money.

and he's stealing a hoover out of a hedge.

So they get to the hospital and by this time my mother's invested now.

So it's like, alright I'm after dropping this man to the hospital well I might as well wait to see if he's okay.

So she does like was there an earwig in his ear?

Did the earwig lay its eggs in his ear?

Is his brain going to be safe?

Will he die?

And then he came out of the hospital and he told my ma, yeah, they found an earwig in my ear.

It was in two pieces and they took it out.

Thank you so much for helping me.

And I remember my max explaining this to me and my brothers.

I remember her explaining it to me and then explaining it again to my da when he got home from work later that day.

Because we were all like, Ma's driving a wino into town after he tried to rob a hoover out of her hedge.

What's going on?

So you know, she came back and explained the whole story of what had happened.

And then my older brother, who was about 12, I reckon he was very frightened by the whole situation.

That night, he had a dream.

which became an anxious recurring dream, which he would recite frequently to my ma, to my da,

begging them for an interpretation.

What does it mean?

Like pure frightened.

And I'm a toddler, three, maybe four, just listening to it all, trying to make sense of the world.

He would have this dream that that

that

Jesus Christ had fallen off the cross, right?

He started to have a recurring dream that Jesus Christ had fallen off the cross and was crawling through our hedge out the back garden to try and pick snooker balls out of the hedge.

And my brother kept having that dream after the incident with the man trying to steal the hoover out of the hedge.

And then my da, who was fucking nuts, like my

dad was possibly Nora DeVergent, I don't know.

Lovely man, but deeply eccentric.

So my older brother's having this recurring, frightening dream about Jesus Christ out the back garden picking snooker balls out of the hedge.

Instead of like saying, oh, it's just a dream, don't worry about it.

You see, because my da was at work, my da was at work when the man came to steal the hoover out of the out of the hedge.

So, he just heard the story about the earwig as well.

So, when my brother would say, I've had this dream that Jesus Christ was crawling through our hedge picking snooker balls out of it, my da would be like,

Maybe the child has a point.

So, my da starts to make the argument in front of the whole family.

What if the man who had come to steal the hoover out of the hedge was in fact, as promised in the Bible, the return of Jesus Christ in the form of a destitute, untouchable individual and that that

by trying to steal the hoover that this was a test to see if somebody would show him compassion and help him, and that my mother, by actually helping him, had passed the test of compassion.

She didn't condemn him as a criminal, she drove him to the hospital.

And further proof of this thesis is being revealed currently in the dream of a little child.

To which my ma would reply,

ah, shut the fuck up

because it was not helping my brother's anxiety.

Because he was clearly frightened and traumatised by this man out the back garden looking for a hoover and he was afraid for his mother's safety.

So he was frightened by this this is why he was having the recurring dream about Christ and the snooker balls like what he doesn't need there is an adult going you could be on to something with that yeah I reckon your nightmare is a correct appraisal of what's happening in reality at the moment and and then my dad would he would quiz my brother and he'd keep asking him what color were the snooker balls what color are the snooker balls in your dream and my brother couldn't remember and my dad would be like are they white is it the white ball was it the white ball that he was picking out of the hedge?

And then my brother's like, Maybe, I don't know.

And then my dad's like, Are you sure it was a white ball?

Or was it a communion wafer?

I think it was a communion wafer.

And then it's like,

we had a shitty little snooker table, and there were balls missing.

I was probably responsible for the missing balls because I'm a toddler, and everyone's, you can't play snooker in the house now, because there's balls missing.

It's a clear-cut case.

A, he's 12, he's in school, he's making his confirmation.

They won't shut the fuck up about Christ in school.

B.

There was a man out the back garden trying to steal a hoover out of a hedge.

C, there's missing snooker balls.

Case closed.

It's not supernatural.

Dah.

And then I'm like three or four having to listen to it all.

So what my dad was supposed to do in that situation was say, it's just a dream.

It's just a dream.

You didn't have an actual religious revelation.

My dad didn't even believe in religion.

Didn't give a fuck about it.

I think he just, he liked the connection between the two things and wanted it to be true.

So I've no idea why he stood with the theory that Christ actually came to our back garden to steal a Hoover.

I hadn't thought of that story in a long time.

And it's about it just popped into my head this week and as an adult being able to look at it critically I think I know what happened.

I don't think there was any fucking earwig.

I think that robber the man in the hedge, he wasn't like a career criminal.

If his story about at one point being a locksmith and owning a locksmith shop was true, he was a person at Rock Bottom who was quite embarrassed about stealing an old hoover from a family's hedge.

And he'd been caught in the middle of a crime.

He was caught in the middle of the crime of being on someone's property and trying to steal an old hoover out of their hedge.

It's not a great crime, but it's still illegal.

And I reckon when my mat caught him, his way of avoiding responsibility was to pretend in that moment that an earwig had fallen into his ear and he needed immediate medical attention and my ma fell for it and then he went oh fuck now I'm being driven to the hospital and he just had to go along with the lie so that she didn't ring the police.

I developed an irrational fear of hedges after that incident.

I was never comfortable around hedges and

throughout my childhood if I found myself with my head inside a hedge or close to a hedge I'd experience an imaginary phantom pain inside my ears.

Such was the certainty that an earwig was going to go into my ear and break in too.

And you know why was he stealing an old hoover?

People used to repair things back then.

Like

probably the reason that my mother had the hoover been stored in the fucking hedge is she probably intended to bring it into a repair shop in town and and she would trade the broken hoover in for money because the repair shop wanted it for parts.

That's why that man was trying to steal an old broken hoover.

Things were different back then.

If your appliances broke down, you didn't throw them away, you got them repaired and you got them repaired locally by

Just some fella who was handy with a soldering iron and had a repair shop.

That's kinda gone.

That doesn't really exist.

The closest equivalent is a mobile phone repair shop.

But when you go in with your mobile phone to get it repaired by the local lads in town, you know you're doing something wrong.

You know that once you make that decision to get your phone repaired cheaply by the lads in the local mobile phone repair shop, your warranty is gone.

It wasn't always like that.

Like my washing machine broke down about six months ago.

I wasn't able to just get it repaired.

It was like a Hyundai or

or one of those ones.

It had to be repaired by an official repair person.

And the call-out charge was like 200 quid.

Unless I subscribed to their yearly repair charge of like 100 quid, and then it was 60 quid to call out, which feels like a type of extortion.

And then I thought, sure, it's nearly cheaper to buy a new fucking washing machine altogether.

So repairing household items and earwigs are two things that have disappeared since my childhood.

But I don't think I don't think an earwig got into that man's ear.

I think he was bullshitting.

Earwigs earwigs don't climb into people's ear.

They certainly don't lay their eggs in people's ears or in people's brains.

I mean sometimes in an isolated incident, an earwig might get into a human ear, but so does a spider or a woodlouse or any other insect.

So how did we get to this how did we get to this ubiquitous experience where it was perfectly rational as children to be afraid that an earwig was going to climb into our ears and that this would be substantiated by our parents?

I didn't mean to do a fucking earwig podcast this week.

I wanted to do a mental health podcast, but I'm talking about earwigs now.

So the word earwig.

It's an old Anglo-Saxon word, old English.

So there's a chance it starts with the Anglo-Saxons, a very paranoid people.

The Anglo-Saxons were just these waves of Western European forest people that started to arrive in Britain at the time that the the Roman Empire was collapsing.

We're talking about the year 400 onwards, 1600 years ago.

The Roman Empire was a very advanced civilization for the time.

Cities, towns, roads, sewage systems, writing.

And then it fell apart.

And a lot of that knowledge was lost over generations.

And this happened in the area that is now the island of Britain.

So you get these waves of people from Northern Europe arriving on the coast of England, seeing the ruins of cities and towns and going, what the fuck is this?

So they found themselves

discovering the ruins.

the old ruins of a much more advanced civilization and not fully being able to comprehend how it was built.

But this environment of uncertainty, it bred a type of paranoia into Anglo-Saxon mythology.

Imagine like just arriving on a planet and discovering the ruins of a much more advanced civilization.

It'd be kind of frightening and humbling.

There's an Anglo-Saxon poem.

that illustrates this.

It's from about the year 500.

And the poem is called The Ruin.

And it's these walled stones are wondrous, calamities crumpled them, these city states crashed, the work of giants corrupted, the roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins, ice at the giants has unroofed the barred gates, sheared, the scarred storm walls have disappeared.

The poem is much longer than that, and it's not written in English, it's written in old English, which you can barely understand.

But it's an Anglo-Saxon poem.

It's a poem about

stumbling across an abandoned Roman town or city.

Could be part of London.

And it's clearly abandoned for maybe a hundred, two hundred years.

And the person who's writing that poem is so astonished and terrified of these ruins that they simply assume they were built by giants, a magical race, because they can't understand the technology.

and these people fucking name the earwig.

Earwig is an old English Anglo-Saxon word.

It means ear beetle.

This is a beetle that's interested in human ears.

The thing is with earwigs they love dark damp shelter rotting wood twigs and they come out at night time.

So one theory as to why the Anglo-Saxons began to call these insects earwigs is if you're living in a dark damp hut in England that's made out of sticks and twigs and then you lie down at night time

there's going to be a lot of earwigs around you

and earwigs aren't very pretty looking they're quite menacing looking and they have those pincers and this is old English Anglo-Saxon so you're talking like I said around the year 400 onwards people didn't understand medicine.

So one theory is that

if you had an ear infection, a headache, mental health issues, depression, schizophrenia, there were all these scary looking insects crawling around your head at night time and the Anglo-Saxons called them earwicca,

ear beetle.

So it's assumed that

people back then believed that earwigs crawled into your ears, laid their eggs.

and created all sorts of ailments.

So people would start to protect themselves from these these ear beetles, these earwigs.

And another theory is earwigs actually have wings.

You don't see them very often, but earwigs do have wings.

And when they're outstretched, they look a little bit like human ears.

So the Anglo-Saxons are living in these shitty dark huts made out of twigs.

Earwigs love it.

They only come out at night time.

And then when the Anglo-Saxon people are sleeping, earwigs are crawling all over them.

Coupled with the fact that the earwigs themselves don't look very friendly, and then they just blame a lot of ailments on them and call them earwigs.

And it's a good story.

It's a good story.

Here's this little beetle called an earwig.

It's scary looking, it has those pincers, it wants to climb into your ears and lay eggs.

My god, that's terrible.

You mean while I'm asleep and I can't defend myself?

Yes, that's what they do.

Fuck it, plug up my ears before I go to sleep then.

So it really survived through folklore and stories and as Christianity took a hold in medieval times the ear was seen as an entry point for demons a lot of mental illness in particular anything involving psychosis or auditory hallucinations was explained away by a demon whispering into your ear during the night time but earwigs climbing into your ears

It's a wonderful example of a completely unchallenged superstition that we all grew up with.

And I think now we're at the end of the earwig era for two reasons.

Number one, biodiversity collapse.

The likelihood of us having an earwig in our bedroom at night time, it's a lot less likely.

And then the internet.

As a child, I often wondered...

Do earwigs really go into your fucking ear?

Does that really happen?

And my ma would say, yes.

Do you not remember the man out the back garden with the Hoover?

The earwig went into his ear and it split up and he had to go to hospital.

And that was used as earwig confirmation in my house growing up.

And if I wanted to challenge that information, the only resource I had was that there was a set of world book encyclopedias from 1979.

They were already years old.

And the earwig entry was tiny and it made no mention of ears.

So I would have had to go to the public library, find some botany books, trawl through them and find evidence about whether or not earwigs climbed into people's ears.

A huge amount of effort and it would have taken hours.

So I didn't and other people didn't and we just continued our lives believing that earwigs climb into our ears and lay eggs inside in our brains.

Now what do you do?

What do most people do?

You ask Google and Google says, no, earwigs aren't interested in that at all, despite their names.

They could potentially go into your ear, but they don't want to do it.

They've other stuff going on.

I don't know why this has turned into an earwig podcast.

What I'm marveling at, here's what I'm marveling at.

I've traced the roots of the myth of earwigs crawling into your ear.

to the fucking Anglo-Saxons in England 1600 years ago.

It was such a paranoid fear for them that they named these insects earwigs.

And this superstition has survived and been retold as fact for 1600 years

and we've witnessed the end of it because of biodiversity collapse and the internet.

And I find that fascinating and a little bit sad.

I find it sad because

I think it's useful when there's folklore and folk beliefs that give power

to nature and biodiversity, I've said it a million times, but I reckon that the

evolutionary purpose of mythology and folklore in the human animal is to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity.

And when you have this little insect called an earwig, and there's stories and beliefs that this earwig can burrow into your brain, or that this earwig might cause mental illness or an ailment.

You give that insect power.

That insect is now feared and treated with a certain degree of respect via caution.

You're not gonna fuck with earwigs.

You might put cotton buds in your ears, you'll be afraid of them, you don't want them in your bedroom, but you're not gonna fuck with earwigs because you might be afraid of revenge.

And earwigs

They're part of biodiversity, they're part of the ecosystem, they're very important.

They're not a keystone species, but

like what do earwigs do?

Earwigs are predators.

They eat the insects that eat plants, such as aphids.

Earwigs eat aphids, so they keep the population of aphids in control.

Earwigs are also decomposers.

Like, okay, what would happen if all the earwigs disappeared tomorrow?

Insects that eat plants, that eat crops, their behavior would be unfettered, their population numbers would be unfettered.

So plants and crops that we eat would begin to disappear.

Earwigs are also decomposers.

Now I spoke about wasps a few weeks back.

You know, wasps are very important as scavengers.

Wasps will eat dead animals.

Earwigs eat dead organic material.

They'll eat dead trees, dead plants, dead leaves.

Earwigs will munch away on twigs and sticks and leaves and bark and whatever you want, break it down to return some nutrients to the soil and then the worms have a go at it and then microbes have a go at it.

But that's essential for soil fertility, for the natural regeneration of soil fertility.

Fungus, mushrooms depends on earwigs breaking down organic matter.

So now, like earwigs disappear, so now you have have soil that's no longer fertile and the plants that even try to grow from that infertile soil they're fucked now as well because they're getting eaten by pests and then food sources get impacted and now larger animals are dying because they can't get food earwigs are very important birds will eat them rats will eat them mice will eat them but humans can eradicate them en masse exterminate them all just for the crack or just by existing as humans like why are all the insects disappearing?

Why was there way more earwigs around when I was a kid than there is now?

Pesticides destroying habitats.

Humans just being humans.

Our ancestors didn't behave that way.

They thought that earwigs could climb into your brain and cause you to go mad and that type of superstition it breeds a non-interventionist respect.

Get them the fuck away from me, but if I come across an entire nest of earwigs in the wild I'm just gonna let it be just in case because I don't fully understand these things they sneakily use the subterfuge of night time to get into people's heads and in some cases demons can arise so I'm just gonna leave them be and that there that's the benefit that's the benefit of folklore and superstitions about nature within the human animal that type of paranite fearful storytelling about nature keeps us in line with systems of biodiversity And I'm sad to

have grown up with earwig superstition and to now live as an adult.

And earwig superstition is gone, and half the earwigs are gone as well.

A mythology that's 1600 years old ended in my lifetime.

Let's have a brief ocarina pause.

I don't think I'm finished about earwigs, to be honest.

Let's have a brief ocarina pause here.

You'll hear an adverb for something.

I'm using the big stone ocarina in in my office.

This is.

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Let's plug a couple of gigs.

What have I got coming up?

November.

I have a gig in Mayo that's sold out.

Looking forward to Mayo.

Then Vicker Street on the 19th of November, come along to that, not a lot of tickets left for that gig.

I love my Vicker Street gigs, I believe that one's a Tuesday.

It's like going to the cinema or going to the theatre.

I love doing my live podcasts in Vicker Street and I can't wait to be back there in fucking November, so get yourself a ticket for that, there's only a few left.

I don't think I've any gigs in December.

I generally leave December quiet and I tell you why, I'm terrified of office parties like utterly terrified.

Like in the past, I think before the pandemic, I'd done one or two live podcasts where a fucking entire office is having their Christmas party at my live podcast and there might just be one person in that group who likes my podcast and then another 10 people who want to go out and have crack.

So a drunk merry Christmas party, office Christmas party is not what you want at a live podcast.

So I tend to just keep December quiet.

So February 2025, the 9th of February, I'm in Leisureland in Galway.

Might get a few people flying over for that.

Galway's a handy place for the old tourists.

I'm in Drada in February.

I'm in Belfast at the waterfront theatre.

on the 28th of February and then

fucking Australia.

That's nearly sold out.

Australia and New Zealand is I'm pretty sure it's sold out.

Quiet enough, I don't want to go ape shit with the gigs.

I don't want to do gigs just for the sake of doing gigs.

If people are mailing me, begging me to come to a certain place, then I'll go and do a gig there for my podcast listeners that are in that area.

So back to the earwigs.

Genuinely,

this podcast wasn't supposed to be about earwigs at all.

When I was deciding a few days ago, you know, what is this week's podcast going to be about?

about, I wanted to do a mental health podcast, explore a bit of psychotherapeutic theory, speak about emotions.

That was my intent because I'm aware that it's getting colder, it's getting darker, and those are triggers.

Those are triggers for me and for a lot of people.

So I like to proactively...

proactively check in with my emotions and how I'm feeling and my sense of resilience and when I do that I like I like to do it here I like to be publicly vulnerable and honest as a form of journaling here.

And I know that's very helpful for ye too.

So that was my intention for this week.

That's what I was going to do.

My mind was made up.

So how did I end up only talking about earwigs for 30 minutes?

I'll let you into my creative process a little bit.

It's because of Kiefer Sutherland's poem.

at the beginning of this podcast.

At the start of this podcast, I opened with a poem by Kiefer Sutherland about how he wanted to be an earwig that was living in someone's ear and he wanted to die in that person's ear.

We're all adults here.

We all know that when I open a podcast with a poem that's written by a famous celebrity, that it's not really written by a famous celebrity.

It's me making the poem up and pretending it's a famous celebrity.

There are some people who genuinely believe that Kiefer Sutherland or Helen Mirren are actually sending me poems, but most people know.

I'm just making it up for a bit of crack.

The reason I sometimes open podcasts with a surreal poem by a celebrity is it's a writing exercise.

I do it as a writing exercise, as a form of automatic writing, I suppose you could call it, which is a technique from the surrealists.

Anyone who creates something will tell you that the biggest hurdle is getting over the fear of the blank page.

Every creative project starts off with a blank page.

If you stare at that blank page and think about what it could be or what it might be, that can be very intimidating, that can be very frightening.

And also, that way of thinking, that way of thinking is it's...

Your creative self doesn't exist in that way of thinking.

The best way to get beyond the blank page.

Instead of writing something good, writing something bad, you just simply start writing.

So I write poems.

I write poems that have no rules whatsoever.

I enter a

type of trance-like state where the words that I write have no criticality whatsoever.

I'm automatically writing the first thing that comes into my head and I'm driven by a playful mischievousness and when I do that my brain enters a state of creative flow.

I get to the part of my brain where my unconscious memories are, where my dreams are.

I've been doing this for 20 years, so I'm quite practiced at this, so I can enter creative flow a hell of a lot quicker than I could have 10 years ago or 15 years ago, we say.

Just through practice.

So when you hear a surreal poem at the start of this podcast, it's me trying to unlock parts of my unconscious mind to shift my thinking from closed mode to open mode.

What I mean by that is, as humans, we spend most of our day with our minds in closed mode.

Closed mode is it's very self-conscious, very solution-focused, task-oriented.

I gotta work today, I gotta go to the shop, I gotta figure out what my grocery list is gonna be.

Oh, I better text that person back.

Fuck it, I've got a bill to pay.

So we deal with all these things in convergent thinking.

We evaluate, we refine, we narrow down

ideas into these actionable steps.

and we evaluate these steps this is right this is wrong you need to think that way that's a very useful way of thinking to exist in society but it's not a very useful way to think when you're being creative so when my mind is in closed mode because i've just paid a bill earlier today and i sit down with my blank of my sheet of blank fucking paper to go right there's a podcast to do and i'm going to do a podcast about about fucking psychology when i sit down with my blank page and my mind is stuck in closed mode, now it's terrifying.

Fuck, it's a blank page.

These ideas better be good.

I wonder what podcast other people would like to hear.

I've forgotten how to make podcasts.

Oh no, this is frightening.

What I need instead is the open mode of thinking.

The open mode is...

It's where daydreaming occurs.

You know, if you daydream, you're in the open mode of thinking.

The open mode of thinking is...

It's playful.

It's when your brain is at play.

It's relaxed.

It's about curiosity, exploring.

There's no rules.

There's no rules such as this is good or this is bad.

This is right or this is wrong.

Your thinking isn't convergent.

Like to think convergently, it means to converge.

Solution focused, break things down, be efficient.

Whereas divergent thinking, that's open-ended.

Anything can happen.

But also, divergent thinking,

that's not very useful to you in the real world because I'm autistic.

I'll think fucking divergently all day long, not a bother.

But I can't pay my electricity bill.

I can't go to the steps of paying my electricity bill or visiting the bank if my brain is on a free-flow tangent about earwigs.

And most of us are like that.

Daydreaming at work.

If you're at work and you spend a lot of time daydreaming, it's a lot of fun.

But you'll get in trouble.

Same with school.

So I use automatic writing.

I use.

I'll begin a podcast sometimes by writing a very surreal poem where I'm not guided by whether the poem is good or bad.

Instead, I'm chasing a feeling of mischief and humor.

And that's how I end up with a poem about Kiefer Sutherland wanting to be an earwig that dies in someone's ear.

But

that exercise, because I ended up, you know, going into the open mode of thinking, where now I'm Kiefer Sutherland and I want to be an earwig,

because I've gotten to my unconscious mind to bring this imagery up, that then triggered more thoughts that I ran with.

And then I had that early childhood memory of the man out in my back garden and the earwig splitting inside in his ear.

I'm accessing a different part of my brain.

I'm accessing my unconscious mind where my memories are stored, where stories come from.

And I'm remembering.

I'm right back there as a child, remembering my brother with the fucking dream about Christ and the snooker balls.

But at no point in that process am I saying to myself, You're supposed to be doing a psychology podcast this week.

Stop thinking about earwigs.

What the fuck do earwigs have to do with psychology?

Stay on point.

Stay.

I don't allow that.

I don't allow that.

I go with the earwig.

If my feeling of curiosity is pushing me towards earwigs, then that's where I follow.

I know the story is going to be in there.

Follow that.

Because that's the open mode of thinking.

That's divergent thinking.

It's open-ended.

I don't know what's going to happen with this.

But usually when I follow that feeling, as opposed to doing what I think I should be doing, That's when I end up with a piece of work that I'm really, really happy with.

If I'd have forced myself to do the psychology podcast this week, I don't know if I'd have been happy with that piece of work because my heart wouldn't have been in it even though I thought I wanted to do a psychology podcast.

No, the earwig popped up and I followed the earwig and that's why this week's podcast is about earwigs.

The Kiefer Sutherland poem unlocked my unconscious mind and then revealed deep feelings that I have about the the collapse of earwig mythology and what it means for biodiversity collapse.

But if you're a creative person, if you're a writer, a painter, a fucking musician, whatever it is, practice automatic writing, automatic improvisation.

Anything that takes you away from the blank page.

If you're writing, you start writing for the sake of writing.

You just write.

You don't have to show it to anybody.

Just write and follow a feeling.

If it's music, same crack.

If it's painting or drawing, just start fucking drawing and don't be thinking about right or don't be thinking about wrong or good or bad you're searching for a childhood feeling of playfulness that transcends all that and somewhere within that experience you're going to unlock the feeling of flow and now you're skillfully swimming in your unconscious mind in the part of your mind that you can really only access when you're when you're dreaming and you can do it when you're awake skillfully as a creative person And I'm not pulling that out of my arse.

That process, it's from the findings of flow psychology.

Oh, fuck it, the podcast is a bit about psychology, isn't it?

It's from flow psychology, which I've mentioned many times.

There was a psychologist whose name I just can never pronounce.

Mihali, Chicksen Mihaly, just look up flow psychology.

He was a psychologist who dedicated his life to trying to study the condition of flow and how creative people are able to enter flow.

Flow state, it's a feeling of intense focus and concentration that's simultaneously effortless.

And I write and make art, not necessarily to create, but to chase that feeling, the process of that feeling, because that's where I find meaning and ultimately happiness.

So that whole closed mode of thinking and trying to unlock open mode,

that's from flow psychology and automatic writing.

That's from the surrealists.

Andre Breton specifically, I think, started started automatic writing, but I could be wrong.

So that's why this week's podcast is about earwigs.

The Old Irish word for earwig

has nothing to do with ears.

An earwig in Old Irish is called a gal shog.

It just means like an annoying thing.

I don't know why the ancient Irish considered earwigs to be annoying, but that was the name that they gave them.

Annoying thing.

Something that makes earwigs unique and beautiful is

they care for their young children.

Insects in general just lay their eggs and then fuck off.

But earwig mothers

will let their little babies hatch and then they care for their tiny little earwig babies and that's quite unique amongst the insect world.

Also male earwigs literally have a spare prick.

Literally, male earwigs have two penises and one of them is a backup in case the first one breaks.

I find that very interesting because a spare prick, that's an Irish phrase, ah, he's a spare prick.

A spare prick is someone who's annoying.

Ah, like a tarred wheel, a spare prick.

So I find it interesting that the Irish word galshog means annoying little thing, annoying thing.

It means spare prick.

and earwigs actually have a spare prick they have two cocks in case one breaks i don't know why.

While I was researching this podcast, I went looking for earwig folklore, like Irish folklore about earwigs.

And the way that I do this is I use the website ducas.ie d-u-c-h-as-dotie,

which is the national folklore collection.

I've mentioned it many times, but it's this wonderful public resource where in the 1950s every schoolchild in Ireland was given the task of going to the old people in their village and recording their stories, and all of this is available online.

So, I'd go to ducas.ae and I'd type in earwig, and then all this local folklore and cures and mythology comes up about earwigs, and some of it is fascinating.

There was a story recorded in Kilkenny, sometime around the 1930s, from a woman who was in her 70s, and they asked her about earwigs, and she said, a farmer was asleep in a field after a hard morning's work and an earwig got into his ear unknown to him and sometime after this he began to have terrible headaches he tried all the doctors in the country but they couldn't cure him he tried all sorts of remedies that he was told but no good and he was nearly distracted he was going around the place asking everybody to cut his head off begging people please cut my head off and one day he was so so desperate he took a hatchet to a neighbor and begged his neighbor who was his friend, please cut my head off, cut my head off.

So he put his head down on the chopping block and his friend raised the hatchet into the air.

And just when the hatchet was about to come down and the man thought that death was upon him, an earwig started to crawl out of his ear.

And then suddenly the man's face began to open up.

And all inside of his head were were hundreds and hundreds of earwigs that all crawled out at once and just like that his head went back to normal and the man never had a headache again for the rest of his life.

He was healthy.

So that there is a local Irish, a piece of Irish folklore about earwigs.

There's probably a grain of truth to that story but what's being described there is a man with severe mental health issues.

He's got a headache, he's convinced there's an earwig in his ear, but also he wants to die.

He wants to try and either chop his own head off, or he's begging other people to chop his head off.

This is someone who's really struggling, but what you see there, too, in Ireland, is the earwig being represented as as a demon of sorts, or even a fairy.

That yes, the earwig got into his ear and it was causing all this trouble.

But in order to get the earwigs to leave the man's body, you had to trick it.

You needed to make the earwig think that its host, that the man was about to die.

So that's how you get an earwig out of your body.

You perform a death ritual, you perform a mock execution and then the earwig will leave.

So that tells you about that that's a pishogue.

That tells you about the fear and respect that the people of Kilkenny had for fucking earwigs a hundred years ago.

I found another Irish folktale that mentions an earwig.

Now these are folktales.

It's not mythology that's thousands of years old.

it's the stories of the people, just regular people that lived maybe a hundred years ago or 200 years ago and

these were pishogues.

So to these people who didn't have maybe who couldn't write or have access to education, to these people these stories really meant something.

These were cautionary tales.

pishogues that would

inspire fear and superstition.

So this story here was told by a man in his 80s and it was recorded in the 1930s.

There's another treasure hidden in Mr.

Fryer's field at Ard Carn.

It's hidden at the bottom of a well.

It's a quarter of a mile from the main road to Boyle.

But there's an earwig guarding the treasure.

And attempts have been made to unearth it, but they all proved fruitless.

And about 40 years ago, an earwig entered a man's ear in his sleep and the man dreamt of this treasure and he dreamt of it three nights in succession and he was shown how to treat the earwig in his ear.

Now the story isn't very well recorded right so like a child would have written this down while listening to an older person right but the vibe I'm getting so far is that there's a hidden treasure somewhere in Bile, up in Ross Common.

There's a hidden treasure somewhere at the bottom of a well and it's guarded by an earwig, okay?

And one night an earwig got into a man's ear and when the earwig was in his ear, it started to tell him how to get to the treasure.

And and the vibe I'm getting is that

once this man could rid the earwig from his ear, then the earwig that's guarding the treasure would no longer be there and he could go and dig it up.

So the story continues.

In the morning he and his companions started to look for the treasure.

They weren't long digging when a nun appeared and she was dressed all in white.

The nun held up her hand and blood was streaming from it.

And they kept digging and they didn't mind her.

And after a while, they saw a crowd of soldiers coming down the hill.

They ran as quickly as they could because they knew that they would be killed.

So that's a mad story there.

It's got folklore, it's got war trauma, there's war trauma inside there.

You have to realize like people witnessed genocides.

That story is from the 1930s from an elderly man.

He could have heard it from somewhere someone older than him.

The story could be from the 1700s.

This could be folklore that comes from people who are navigating the trauma of Oliver Cromwell coming in and massacring, genociding the entire village.

They can't write this shit down.

The trauma lives on, the stories live on and now you've got this really, really strange horror story.

There's treasure buried, it's guarded by an earwig.

An earwig entered a man's ear, told him how to get rid of the earwig and then when they went to dig up the treasure and none appeared with bloody hands and then a load of deadly soldiers came over the hill to kill them.

It tells us about that tells us about fear.

I mean what that reminds me of as well is the puck fair like you go down to I think it's in fucking Kerry I'm pretty sure it's in Kerry.

There's a little village in Kerry and once a year they get a goat.

It's a tradition this they get a goat and they put a crown on the goat and they hold the goat aloft in the air over the town square and everyone has a party around this goat that's wearing a crown.

That's the puck fair.

It's mad.

It's mad, right?

But

one of the stories about how the puck fair came about, puck is a is a male goat was when Cromwell went when the Cromwellian armies were invading that town in the 1600s

violent death squads that apparently what happened is there were wild goats and the wild goats would never come into town.

They'd stay away from people.

So one day everybody was in town and a wild male goat appeared in the town square and everybody knew if that goat is here then he's afraid of something.

The soldiers must be coming.

So because the goat arrived, everyone in the town fucked off to the woods and they weren't massacred by Cromwell's army.

And then the people from that every year would have a fair on that date where they would get a male goat and put a crown on its head and worship the goat.

Thank you so much for saving our lives and warning us about the Cromwellian soldiers.

And there's a bang of that off that piece of folklore from Ross Common.

What a strange, strange story.

See, it's pish ogues and superstition.

It's not understanding your environment.

There's an earwig and the earwig is guarding the treasure for a reason.

But the earwig went into your ear, another earwig went into your ear and told you some shit.

That's the demon, right?

If you fuck with the earwig, if you go near that earwig that's guarding the treasure,

If you interfere with it by digging with it, then bad things will happen.

Soldiers will come, British soldiers will come and massacre your village.

And within that fanciful story, I hear a great, great sadness.

A great sadness of

someone a long time ago who witnessed a genocide, which was happening all the time in Ireland, someone who witnessed genocide.

trying in some way to make sense of it and not being able to read about it or go to a library or turn on the news.

Just a distant memory memory

of your peep, of people you love and know being massacred.

Fuck with the earwig, remove the earwig that's protecting the treasure and dig it, give in to your desires, and the soldiers

will come and massacre you, and none will show up with bloody hands.

Think of the power the earwig has in that story.

Think of the power that nature has in that story.

Permeating it is that

it's that old Irish paganism, that old Irish paganism, which is the land is a goddess, the land is a goddess, and you treat the land with respect, and you treat the animals with respect, and the insects with respect, or there would be repercussions.

It's a hard thing to argue for because I don't want to argue for the return of irrational folk beliefs.

But a greater fear and respect for insects and for animals would certainly serve us well because the complete dismantling of that belief system through colonialism and the

it being replaced by this scientific rationalism

that's you know and an exploitation of the land that's what's led to the climate catastrophe that we're living through right now

we we tend to fear the unknown

scientists with evidence and data and numbers are able to go here here's the bad thing that's happening and it's going to get worse unless you change your behavior.

The climate is collapsing.

People don't give a fuck about that.

People will figure out a way to call that lies.

Instead, we seem to fear the unknown.

It's the uncertain thing.

The what if, what might happen that chills up our spine.

Superstition's been replaced with conspiracy theory.

And people who don't quote-unquote believe in climate change,

rather than believe in the data and evidence of scientists, they would rather believe in a pishogue or a myth which says that, no, there's no climate change.

What's actually happening is that a very powerful elite who eat babies are able to control the weather, to create more floods, to create more extreme weather conditions, and they're doing this deliberately to control us all.

They prefer that.

That's a more interesting story than a scientist saying, Here's a bunch of evidence.

That's all I have time for this week.

I'll be back next week.

Next week, I'm over in Spain.

I'm taking a little holiday for myself.

As in, I'm trying to have something prepared in advance so that when I do go to Spain, I'm not writing, not preparing a podcast, I'm literally just being in Spain, which is something I haven't done in seven years since I started this podcast.

podcast.

God bless.

Wink at a swan.

Genufleck to an earwig.

Rub a dog.

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