Shed your helmets, you sweltering Emmits. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast.

If you're a brand new listener, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

At the beginning of last week's podcast, I read out a poem by Daniel DeLewis called Is This a Priest or a Seagull.

And it was ironically prophetic

because I've been tortured all week

by the screams of gulls.

Seagulls are nesting on the roof of my office

just above my head on my tin roof

and it hasn't rained in days

but the fucking seagulls are persistently

walking around, slamming their massive orange feet and screaming. So if at any point throughout

this podcast a Seagull screams, we're just going to have to sit with the anxiety of that

and let it pass. I was allowing the Seagulls to

intrude on my mental well-being during the week. I was catastrophizing a little bit. Every time

they screamed, I was thinking, fuck, how am I going to record next week's podcast with this noise?

It'll be a disaster.

It'll be terrible, impossible. I'm going to have to abandon next week's podcast and put out no podcast because the seagulls will get in my way. And then I identified these thoughts as

irrational and negative and unhelpful.

And then I reminded myself,

I have a choice here.

I can choose to view the seagull's behaviour as something terrible and awful,

or I can identify it as an opportunity, an opportunity to fail, to embrace the seagulls, just like we do

...