#236 Let me bore you to sleep - Jason Newland (12th October 2019)

Hello, welcome to jasonnewland.com, the most amazing website that exists in my mind. My name is Jason Newland, this is art may bore you to sleep. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes.

At the moment, Andre is asleep in his bag, his favourite little bag that he sleeps in a lot of the time. I'm hoping he's going to stay there, not forever, but you know, for the duration of this recording. But I can already hear him stirring.

And he's got a thing, I don't know, it's almost like he can hear me press the record button and suddenly his eyes open and his ears prick up. It's like, oh, I can now annoy my daddy. That'll get him back for giving me that bath.

I can hear him moving already and he hasn't, I haven't seen him for at least an hour. So what was I going to say? So yeah, only listen when you can safely close your eyes. If you would like to support me, my PayPal is paypal.me forward slash jasonnuland.

And I'd like to thank the person that sent me some money yesterday. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

And every little bit helps because I'm on benefits, benefits, unemployment, or whatever, due to illness. And I don't make any money from these recordings. Don't have any advertising.

I don't, I don't ask for donations because I'm not a charity. So I try and, you know, I'm not a business either. So I don't, I don't sell any products.

But I do have an outlay for running this free service. You know, podcast hosts and website costs and stuff like that. So yesterday, I was going to talk about the National Enquirer that I bought.

And I can't be bothered to talk about it today. It's the other side of the room and me getting up and walking over there and which is what one, two, three, four, probably four steps. It's not exactly what it's a fair distance.

Oh, because my feet or my legs rather are 22 foot long. So that's big elephant steps, or giraffe steps really, wouldn't it be? How long are giraffes legs are? 22 foot, do you think? Should be 22 legs, shouldn't they? Not feet. You should only measure feet in feet.

Then it would just be one foot, wouldn't it? What size are your feet? They're a foot. Each, each one's a foot. One foot.

Because I'm not an ant. I'm not sure what that means. I'm very tired, very tired.

It's quite strange. Well, it's not enough. Everything's strange.

But I started updating the stats on my website for the daily podcasts. So put on how many podcasts, downloads I get a day. And I've got it pretty much every day listed on there since last November, in 2018, November.

I also, at the very top of the page, the first page on my website, I update the total downloads. And also the total mp3s are available. That's quite weird, because it's only like three, three days ago, I put on Facebook that I'd reached 500,000, half a million downloads since last November.

So it's like 11 months. And now I've, I've updated it and it's now 509,242 downloads. It's just, it's gone up by nearly 10,000 just in a few days.

It's like, wow. So I'm quite pleased with that. It's one of the, one of my little happy little moments when I update the stats, when I update, because it's probably there more for me just because I like to look at them.

But I find it motivating. I think it's almost like when I used to work in sales. So I used to sell car insurance in a previous existence.

And the stats were very important to the companies. So I worked for three different insurance companies, as well as I sold mobile phone contracts as well. So I had four full-time sales jobs.

And stats were important. Conversions, you know, how many quotes I did per call, how many sales I did per call, how many sales I did per quote, blah, blah, blah. And my stats, I'll use the first job I had, the first insurance job.

And well, actually, I'll talk about, I don't know if I've ever talked about my sales jobs before, but if this doesn't send you to sleep, nothing will, nothing. So, and I think I'm not going to put a description of this recording, because I don't know if a description could put people off. I think maybe it's just nice to have the surprise, not know what's coming, even though you know it's going to be boring.

You don't know what's coming enough. The last couple of days, I've put in a description, and I don't know if that was going to be a good idea. I don't know, I'm not sure.

I'll also, I'm going off topic. This is sometimes the only conversation I have in a day. This is, so me talking here, it's almost seemed like it's my journal, it's like my online diary, I'll be writing.

Dear diary, I've been to the toilet again. It still feels nice. I just, just, just continuously, I can't, I used to write stuff down.

I kept journals from 19, what year was it? I think it was 1989 until 2011. Yeah, I think that's how long I kept journals for, so it's quite a while. Now I wasn't full on the whole time.

I went through periods. Sometimes, you know, I've filled a whole 200 pad and writing pad, you know, A4 size. I've done one of those in a week once, and other times it could take months to do a 200 page pad.

So it's sometimes a year, you know, just depended on my, what I was doing in life, my moods, what the reason why I was writing. Because, and I destroyed them all in 2011, and I had the pads from the floor upwards, probably, yeah, went up to my waist. So there's quite a few, thousands and thousands of pages of my writing, and I got rid of them all, destroyed, ripped them all up in 2011.

And I think it was November 2011, what happened, I just, doesn't matter, but yeah, I destroyed them anyway. And partly a side effect of the medication that I just started taking, and just my behavior really just, it happened. And in 1989, I was sitting in a chair.

And at that time, we're talking probably, summer, or summer, maybe May, April. I don't know who's, I can't remember. But it was anyway, it was in 1989.

It was beginning of the summer, I think, maybe, you know, spring time. So my job, would you believe this, my job was looking after a little kid, while her parents did the night shift at a factory that I used to work at. Now, I was working there during the day when I met these two.

And I left that job to go and live in Spain. And I went to Spain, and I was there for an afternoon, and then I came back. And I had nowhere to live.

And the, these two friends, they offered me a deal, I could stay with them. But I would look after, yeah, because I don't think they were on night shift, they were on, I think they were on day shifts, but night shift paid more. So they went on to night shift, I stayed there and babysat the child at night.

And then I could live there for free. And they'd give me a little bit of money and let me eat. And I'd eat and stuff.

I always found that I needed to eat. One of those things, quite a continuous thing that is. And I, I basically, yeah, yeah, I was sleeping in the living room.

So I didn't have a bedroom, sleeping in the living room. And then I would get up at, well, I'd take the little girl to school. So her mum would come home, you know, get her out of bed and get her all ready for school.

And I would walk her to school. Because then her parents would go to bed, go to sleep. And I can't remember if I would pick her up from school or not, I don't recall.

And probably not. I don't know. But it didn't really work out very well.

Because I had I didn't have enough money to live on. I basically just didn't have any cash to do anything with. So I got a part-time job as a cleaner in a supermarket, which was literally just across the road, which was handy.

And I used to do that from six to eight or something for two hours. I'd come home and then I'd take the little girl to school. And it was a half six, I don't know, hardcore.

It fitted in with when they got back and when I went out. Yeah, so it kind of fitted together. And what they did, and I didn't know they were going to be doing, is they would come home during their lunch break at two o'clock in the morning and watch television for an hour.

Or, you know, come home and have something to eat. So I'd be woken up. So I didn't really get any sleep, proper sleep for the period that I lived there.

So it wasn't really ideal, but at least it gave me somewhere to sleep, kind of, for a little while. But while I was there, I had this little niggle, little niggle in my head, little tiny little niggle, like a little voice. It wasn't really a voice, but an idea.

I should write something. Because it didn't feel like I had any identity. Didn't really know who I was, but I did want to find out.

And I was never really a big fan of other people trying to push their opinions and belief systems onto me. And the way that it seemed that pretty much everybody, especially older people, which most people were at that time, because I was 18, and most of the people I was around rather, they seemed to be very definite in their opinions, as if it wasn't an opinion, but it was a fact. Very factual, very, this is how it is, this is what I say.

And I never felt comfortable with that. And I still don't feel comfortable with that. I like the flexibility of new knowledge, being able to change the way that we think about a particular thing.

Instead of just sticking to an old idea, because that is, I guess it feels comfortable. I don't know. Yeah, probably.

And I'm in no doubt that I do it loads myself. So I'm very much, I guess, stuck in my ways in a lot of different avenues. But on the same side, I do like to try and reduce as many of my opinions and beliefs, those limiting things, those definite ideas, try to loosen them if I can.

If I can't eliminate them, at least loosen the nuts and bolts a little bit. So there's a bit of give, you know, a bit of stretch. And I try to introduce that a little bit with some of my work that I do online.

Maybe not with these recordings, but with some of the other stuff I do, to create maybe a different way of thinking, or to introduce or offer or give a few ideas, you know, a few suggestions, a few ideas to maybe look at things differently. Try it on if you want, without the telling people, this is this, this is this. So I'm kind of like, it's the only way it can be.

So yeah. So at that time, I thought, I want to write stuff. I want to, I want to write down my thoughts, because I was having some thoughts.

And I was wondering, kind of wondered, are they my thoughts, or are they just, am I just repeating what other people have said to me in my mind, you know? Is it just other people's prejudices and opinions and stuff like that, and limited thinking? And so I went, I got myself a pad, and I put it off for a few weeks. I thought, I'm going to do that, but I was just going to be bothered. And one day, I went to the stationery shop.

I can't remember the name of it, but I bought this pad, and it had, I think it had an orange cover. Pretty sure that orange color. And I bought a, I think it was a blue pen or black pen, but it wasn't a Bic.

It was, I don't think it was, it might have been. I think it was more of a felt pen. One of the nice ones that you can write with really nicely.

I've got one here, actually, not in my hand, or in my pocket, or in my backpack that I'm wearing. It's not even tacked, you know, it's not even tucked into the hat, above the hat that I'm wearing, but it's somewhere. I wonder if it's, no, it's not balanced on my hiking shoes.

I think it's over on the bookcase near the tortoise. So I bought this book, this pad. It was, it's basically a refill pad, you know, one of those with holes in the side.

You could put into one of those refill folder things, you know, the ones that click when you close them. And like the metal ring, ring binders, that's it. I knew there was a name, it'll get to me eventually.

Ring, ring, that's it, ring binders. And I, I'm not sure what I wrote on the front of it, but I just, I think I wrote the date, which would be, I'd say May, not 2000, May 1989, the 14th of May, Tuesday, or whatever it was. How weird would that be if the 14th of May was actually a Tuesday? I feel I want to check now.

Oh, I wonder how strange would that be? Because I generally don't have that memory in my memory. So, by the way, I'm not recording this inside my recording studio. I'm recording it in my living room.

I might continue to make the Let Me Bore You To Sleep recordings out here. And maybe use the recording studio for the, the ones that need to be really quiet, background wise. I know these do as well, but I quite like sitting in my chair, and this chair wouldn't even fit inside the shed, the garden shed that's in my bedroom, which is being converted into a recording studio.

And it will be, it's going to look good. It doesn't really matter what it looks like, I suppose, but it's going to, I know what I want to do. I know what I want it to be like.

And it's going to be, I think once it's done, because my friend has got a light to put in it, which will attach through the top of the shed, and which will brighten it up. And then I'll look at possibly making videos, but I don't know if I want to make videos anymore. I prefer to be able to just, like, it doesn't matter what I look like, doesn't matter what I'm wearing, doesn't matter what my hair is like when I'm making an audio recording.

But when I'm making a video, for some reason that stuff is kind of important that I put a little bit of effort into personal appearance, which I haven't done today, because my beard is now growing back. Like, you know, the proper beard that I have fairly often, I haven't had that for a few months, because I've been trimming it and making it nice and neat. Well, since last week, I kind of gave up on it and just decided, well, I just haven't bothered trimming my neck or trimming around the beard.

So it's just basically growing into a big, bushy mound again. And in a way, I quite prefer it. When I look at myself in the mirror, I prefer myself with a beard than without a beard, or with a big, big, juicy beard rather than just a little tiny... I don't know, it's like a little landing pad, you know.

I want it to be... I don't want a Brazilian wax on my face. I want it to... I like it just being natural. And I'm naturally... I think I'm naturally a beardy person.

I'm naturally going to have a big beard. And I suppose for a little while I was thinking, for a few weeks, that maybe I was going to be possibly in a relationship and I should perhaps keep the beard trimmed down. So, because I've heard that a lot of ladies don't like beards because they're like kissing men with beards.

And I'm just generalizing on every single woman I've ever met that's told me that. But, you know, now that I'm... I'm kind of thinking, ah, I'm just going to have a beard. Because Andre likes it when I've got a beard because he... it's almost like it's another little ferret for him to rub himself against.

He does, he loves rubbing his head and his face against my chin when I've got a beard. Doesn't do it so much when it's short, but when it's bushy, he loves it. He's... I don't know, he just likes it.

So I think I'm going to let it grow, really grow. And I might let my hair really grow long. Just over the winter period, see what happens.

Because I do look different when I go wild. But my hair is so curly, when it gets past a certain level, it goes really curly. Because I've got thick, curly hair, which it doesn't show when it's short.

But when it starts growing, wow, and my hair grows quickly as well. I'm more, I like one of those little dolls, you know those dolls that you push down on the head and the hair just pushes up out. I think it's like make a plasticine or something, or play-doh.

And I thought Andre was going to come out there. So I've got kind of hair like that, it doesn't, it's not made of plasticine or play-doh. Although how good would that be? Imagine if our hair was made of play-doh.

You could literally have a different style every day. And you could just peel it off your head, push it back in the back of your head, and then squeeze it out into a different style. I think I'll have braids today.

This lady that I used to be in love with, she came in, I think she worked in this place. And I was just besotted with her. It's really weird.

It's almost, I just, you know, it can't help who you fall for, can you? But anyway, she had her hair braided, very much like, not normally, but on this particular day. I think it was Halloween. So I think she must have been going to a Halloween party or something.

And she looked amazing. She wasn't dressed up as a monster. But even if she was dressed up as a monster, she'd still be, still would have been the most attractive monster.

And that's weird, weird sentence. But do you remember Bo Derek in, is it 10? The film 10. Bo Derek.

Her hair was braided like that. I'm talking about her head. And I was like, wow.

So I do admire women, actually for lots of different reasons, but for the hair, to be able to, very experimental with hair. And I've not been very experimental myself, but I quite would have liked to have been. And even now I've never been manly or macho or any of that stupid stuff.

I still kind of conformed a fair bit. Just because it just makes life a bit easier. But I would have liked to have, I did a few different hairstyles back in 1986, maybe 87.

Flat tops, they were called flat tops, and were really popular. I'm trying to think of who, who had a flat top hairstyle that made it so popular, but possibly some pop stars or something. But for my situation, it was the builder who was dating a lady that worked in a chip shop with me.

And he was really cool. And he, I kind of looked up to him and admired him because he was so confident within himself and with the ladies. He was just which is things that everyone seemed to really like him and found him attractive and that.

And I liked that because I was 17 or 16. 16, 17. Yeah, I probably would have been 16 at that time.

And I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be attractive to my, well, I would have been happy just for one lady. I didn't need a harem.

I wanted a harem, but I didn't need a harem. But I had a flat top. So basically, the hairstyle was, I'll tell you who had a flat top.

And that's no lie. I'll tell you who. Do you remember Rocky 4? And Draco, I think it was Draco, the boxer that fought Rocky.

He had a flat top. So the hair and it's kind of short at the side, short at the back, went up and it was flat on the top. It really was very basically explained.

You know, I want a flat top. Well, what does that involve? Well, it's flat at the top. Okay.

So I had a flat top. And yeah, I was fairly pleased with that. But that's when I realized actually a haircut doesn't make the cut.

You know, you need a little bit more than just a hairstyle. Doesn't make the man or, you know, so I said to him, I said to this bloke, I said, look, I've got me a haircut like you. How come you're more successful? You know, what else could you feel I could do? He said, well, you could try washing.

You know, so you weren't so smelly. I said, why? He said, I'm just kidding. But I did smell, but not of, I smelled of chips.

So I had a bath every single morning. And I was just stunk of working there. It's part of, it's the same as you work in any, probably any takeaway, like fast food place.

You're going to smell like the food that you're cooking. And, or if you're a dustman or dust person, you smell like dustbins. It's, you know, it's just part of the job, isn't it? If you, someone worked at a butcher's or someone worked in a bakery, you're going to kind of smell like the bread or, you know, whatever you're working with.

I suppose if you work on a farm, you're going to smell like farm animals. And if you work with wood, you're going to have that woody smell. And if you work with tables and kitchens, you know, it doesn't work, does it? Yeah.

But you know what I mean? If you work with, if you're a pilot, you're going to smell like a pilot. No. I wonder if bus drivers smell like buses.

So yeah, I did stink a bit, but it wasn't my fault. You know, it's, and I think when I went out, I would have a bath before going out in the evening. If I kind of went out to the pub or whatever, I mean, I'd wear clean clothes and, you know, but it's almost like the smell just followed me around.

Like the grease, it wasn't grease, it was oil, but just the general mixture of all the different lovely aromas. The thing is, I've never once walked past a chip shop and thought, oh, what a horrible smell. I've always walked past a fish and chip shop thinking, now that's got my taste buds excited.

But for some reason, I didn't seem to have that smell. The nice smell, which is weird, I don't know why. And yeah, I wish I'd been, I kind of, this bloke, he was a builder and, because that was my first thing that I wanted to do.

And one of the first things I wanted to do, I wanted to be a policeman. When I was about 11, I decided I wanted to be a policeman. And the, I think, yeah, because the school had, it was almost like a career day.

But kind of, it's for fun, you know, because at 11, it's a long way off, isn't it? Because I didn't, you don't get to do your first proper exams till you're 16. And then maybe go on to A-levels, 17 to 18, and then go to university, you know, so depending on, you know, what process you go down. But I thought, I want to be a, I want to be a police, be a policeman.

And it's really weird, because I was saying I want to be a policeman, and everyone was fine with it. And suddenly, this, it's like this big sparkle, like electric in the corner of the room, and suddenly appeared this little box. And someone walked out of the box, I opened it up, like a little machine thing.

And the person said, excuse me, I said, yeah, he said, sorry to interrupt, but don't you mean police officer? I said, what? He said, don't you mean police officer? It's not policeman, that's sexist. It's police officer. I said, who are you? And he said to me, I'm from the future.

I'm from 2019. We don't use words like policeman anymore, or policewoman anymore. It's police officer.

I said, yeah, but you're telling me that you created a time machine, and you chose to use it to come back and pick me up on a faux pas. And he said, what's a faux pas? I said, well, perhaps while you're reading, you know, your future books on time travel, pick up a dictionary. He laughed.

I laughed. We all shared some corned beef sandwiches. When they were finished, he went away, disappeared back to where he came from, wherever that was.

Very strange day. I'm not sure that might be the day that I got home and my dad had bought, he got a billiards table. Is it billiards or pool? No, billiards.

Billiards has got the numbers on. And that was a good day that was. I remember that bit.

I've forgotten about the time traveler, but I remember the billiards. Yeah, that's one of my, one of my happier memories coming home. And me and the other brothers were there, and my dad was in a good mood, and us kids were all getting on with each other.

And suddenly we had this big billiards table, which also had a table tennis table that could fit over the top, which we could take off and on as, as we needed. For, I mean, for example, when we wanted to play billiards, we would need to take the table tennis table off of the billiards table, because it was not a way of reaching the balls. But when we didn't want to play billiards, and we wanted to play table tennis, we'd put the table tennis table and slot it over the top of the billiards table, because it's difficult to play tennis when the table tennis table is just leaning against the wall.

It's highly irregular. So that's what we used to do. And I can't remember if I was able to do it all by myself, because it was a heavy table.

And I think either the table tennis table was pretty heavy and quite big. So I don't know if I was able to carry it myself. I have this mild recollection of something that probably never happened, but I remember standing one side of the table, because there was four sides, because I guess it was rectangular, it wasn't square.

But it was two of the sides were longer than the other two sides, which were shorter. So I would stand on one side of the longer sides, and I'd push up so that the that part of the table tennis table would move up. And I just let it slide slowly, so that eventually, the other side of the table, the long side, slowly reached the floor.

And then I would just push it, so it leant up against the wall. Now I'm pretty sure I still needed to push it along, so it was further along the room. Because otherwise, it might have got in the way of the pool table, or the pool playing.

But we also had snooker as well. So we had snooker balls. And I used to know how to play snooker.

And I used to remember what order the balls went into the pockets. And now, let's see, red's going first. And then I think it's yellow next.

And I might be wrong, but yellow, brown, green, blue. Or it might be yellow, green, brown, blue. Yellow, green, brown, blue.

And then pink, then black, I think. I'm pretty sure that black, pink, blue. I'm pretty sure it's that order.

And it's definitely yellow first. Pretty sure it's brown, then green, then blue, then... Is there an orange? There's no orange, is there? It's a yellow. So all the reds, I forget how many there are.

Nine or ten. And yellow, brown, green, blue, then pink, and black. Black's the last ball to be potted finally.

But if you pocket any of the other balls, once you've pocketed all the reds, you can pocket, if I remember rightly, you can pocket any of the other balls. And any ball that's above the ball that's left, so it's yellow, is the next one to pocket. But you can pocket the black, and that goes back onto the table.

And then you go back to the yellow again, try and get that in. And also with the reds, is that right? You can, you can hit a red in, and then you can go for a coloured ball, and hit that in. And then you hit the coloured ball, so at that point they'll all have to stay on the table.

So whichever one you pocket, it goes back on the table. And then you pocket another red, and go for another colour, and you just do that until the um, all of the reds are um, pocketed. I don't remember the score.

I don't remember the score in of snooker. But is it 180? 180. But I didn't play snooker very often.

I quite liked table tennis. Oh, for those that don't know what table tennis is, it's ping pong. So it uses ping pong balls.

And you can, the rules, um, I don't know really what the rules are. And you just need to keep the ball going. You know, keep hitting the ball back.

And if someone hits the ball, and it touches, it doesn't even have to touch the table, basically. If you, if you miss it, then you'd lose a point. But I don't really remember the pointing system of table tennis.

No, I don't remember the pointing system of table tennis. I might look into it, just out of interest. My brothers always seem to beat me at most games that we played.

So I prefer to play on my own. I've always liked playing with myself, although it's quite difficult with table tennis. Or ping pong, because you really need to hit the ball very slowly and very softly in order to give yourself time to run around to the other side of the table.

So I prefer to return serve very slowly and very softly as you run around to the next, the other side and hit it back. Ironically, even though I play with myself quite often, I still didn't win all the games. I set up a tournament for myself.

I came fifth. It was good times. I like the idea of having something like that, you know, like a playroom.

I probably could have a snooker table in my living room, but it would take up most of the space, which isn't really ideal. I feel myself drifting, so I'm going to go now and I'll speak to you very soon. Please remember to be kind to yourself, because you deserve to be happy.

Lots of love. Bye.