Be an Ass; Or, the Masks We All Wear

Transcript

Nobody give me sin for thee That’s reason why I try both If all is gold I can see a thousand times of it Ask against mental illness Once upon a time there was an ass, or you could also call him a donkey, it makes no difference. The ass found a lion skin left in the forest by a hunter. He dressed himself in it and amused himself by hiding in a thicket and rushing out suddenly at the animals who passed that way. It all took to the hills the moment they saw him. The ass was so pleased to see the animals running away from him, just as if he were King Lion himself, that he could not keep from expressing his delight by a loud, harsh bray. A fox who ran with the rest stopped short as soon as he heard the voice. Approaching the ass, he said with a laugh, If you’d kept your mouth shut you might have frightened me too, but you gave yourself away with that silly bray. Silly old ass. So what’s the moral of this story? Well, the moral usually associated with this is a form made deceived by his dress and appearance, but his words will soon show what he really is. Yep, seems pretty straightforward. That fable, the ass and the lion skin, or the donkey and the lion skin, is generally associated with the legendary Greek orator and storyteller Aesop. To save on the non-euphemistic keystrokes and for the sake of brevity, I will mostly be using the ass variant from here on, rather than the donkey one. Why that one? So I get to say a little baby swear lots, obviously. There’s a variant on this fable, also attributed to Aesop, sometimes known as the farmer or farmers, the ass and the lion skin. Here’s how that one goes. An ass wanted to appear to be a lion. Since he could not change his nature, he tried to realise his dreams by a change of costume. And like a lion, he rigged havoc on the fruits of the farmer’s labour. But when the gust of wind blew up, it stripped the lion bare of its disguise. As soon as the farmers, whose crops he had eaten, saw that he was just a donkey, they came and clubbed him to death. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. What have we learned from this pleasant little bedtime ditty, pretending to be something you’re not can be dangerous? Maybe. There’s a similar moralising thread that runs through both of these cheerful tales. We have plenty of other aphorisms and maxims to state these and various other lessons that can be derived from these stories. For example, appearances can be deceiving, or don’t get ideas above your station. Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away. Don’t judge a book by its cover. It’s all about authenticity, right? It’s about not trying to deceive, to know your place. Don’t be a liar and a fraud. These tales are judgemental by their nature. These are solid stories with a serious message, no matter which interpretation you run with. Simples. Or is it? I’m not so sure. Aesop was a geezer whose real life reputation saw him taking on many guises to get his point across, not to mention the fact that he almost certainly never actually existed. I’ll come back to this point. So am I saying that there’s an alternative interpretation of the ass lion skin saga? I think so. Here’s some off the bat. Taxidermy is a serious business. Wearing animal skins is dodgy and potentially life-threatening. People are not nearly as scared of lions as they should be. People seem to be confused about what lions eat. Oh, and here’s another good one. Donkeys are fucking smart. Another? People are really shitty to asses. Let’s break this one down, shall we? Let’s look at the main players in this sordid little psychodrama. The ass. Traditionally and canonically a symbol of the slow, stupid, insipid, smelly, the contemptible. A figure of fast and derision with big ears to boot. The butt or maybe the ass of jokes. The lion. Well, not strictly a player here since poor bugger met his demise at some point in the appetizer to this main course. That’s a story I’d like to hear. Anyway, he or she is there in spirit. Since for the most part in both tales are convinced of his or her existence. The lion is the king of the animals. The apex predator. Regal, beautiful, fearsome, admirable and enviable. Oh, and fucking terrifying. Lions are giant cats and if anyone has spent any time watching house cats prowling their lawn, knows to the core of their bones that they never want to meet a big one. Lions are a symbol of the pinnacle. The goat. Oh, no, wait. Finally, the two heroes of the day. The fox. A universal symbol of cunning, smarts, fleet of foot and mind. Slippery, lithe, fast, clever and also very charming. Too smart for the silly old ass. And the farmer or farmers. Salt of the earth, resilient, essential and stern. You have to be a hard bastard to be a farmer. You really do. Even today with those gigantic AI powered John Deere tractors, farming is a tough existence. I wouldn’t do it. Farmers are providers and patrons. A pillar of society, able, dependable and respected. Unless we forget the legions of erstwhile animals who, in the first version, were subjected to that horrible, deceitful, spiteful ass. Innocent and unsuspecting. Your every animal. The upstanding citizens. So everyone in their right place. Where the hell could we go wrong in interpretation? The silly, vain donkey pretends to be the boss of bosses and get slapped down for it. Ambiguity there. But hold on. Hold on. Let’s take another look at those protagonists. The ass. A dependable worker. An equine literally bred to be dependable, long suffering and loyal. Donkeys are like the most endearing farm animals. Except, of course, for baby pigs. They are, or at least back in the day, were essential. They have a reputation for being beaten, abused, overworked and then discarded. Either sent to the knackers to be made into dog food or whatever. Or banished to the British seaside to have ice cream melted on them by ungrateful 1960s brats. Yay for the ass. The lion. Cats, especially the big ones, are lazy. Lions lounge around for literally 90% of their time. They wake up once a day and go and murder something and eat it. They fear no one. They are arrogant and preternaturally self-assured. And so they should be. Their mouths are full of lethal weapons. The lion is not the apex predator because it earned it, but because it murders anyone who disagrees with it. And anyone else for that matter. You are not safe around the lion because it doesn’t care about you. You are either food, a distraction or an irritation. Basically a metaphor for the indolent, inbred, arrogant, entitled monarchies that centuries of Europeans have had inflicted upon them and that the French were smart enough to overthrow and the Americans just didn’t bother with. Fuck the lions. Fuck the dead lion. The fox. Now, given that I live in the UK, I’m not going to be too hard on the fox. What with the treatment they get from the great British upper crust. But let’s be clear here. Foxes aren’t your friend. At least if you’re any way a similar size or smaller and look tasty. The fox is rightfully and righteously opportunistic. Looking after number one, turning a trick and vanishing before you even notice it had been turned. Perhaps a fox is not the villain in this story if there even is one, but he is not yours or anyone else’s friends. At least of all the chickens. Will somebody please think about the chickens? Ditto for the farmer. It truly is a hard life. But the farmer makes his living on the backs of and via the lives of lowlier animals. The farmer is on the side of the many because he has to be. I get it. But legions of animals spend their short, sometimes extremely unpleasant lives taught that the farmer is their benevolent god, their carer and their protector, only to find their lives cut brutally short by the same human. And for those animals that are allowed to live, the dairy cows, the workhorse, the ass, a life of slavery, drudgery, penury and abuse awaits, robbed of agency, freedom and basic common decency. Fuck the farmer. The farmer murders the ass. What a dick. And finally the masses. Blameless, eh? Where were they when the ass was being kicked around? Who intervened? And if you hear her worship the bloody king of the jungle so fucking much, why do your cow room run? No, you have scruples when it suits you and you damn well join the fox in mocking the ass once his charade was revealed. You’ve probably laughed and jeered as the farmer murdered the ass. Fuck the masses, fuck you. So let’s look at this so-called cautionary tale, shall we? The erstwhile ass stumbles across a lion’s skin. We’ll gloss over how ominous this is because it doesn’t help me spin this yarn. I have to assume that the ass wasn’t the first to come across it and to spot the inherent value here. The clever bastard. Now, the ass has a hard life taken for granted, mocked, ridiculed, beaten, underfed, treated like shit. What the ass almost certainly neither wants nor needs at this point is to suddenly be elevated to the position of grandeur and responsibility. More likely he just wants a rest, a decent feed and a bit of peace. Respect? He’d take just being ignored. So what was the ass thinking? Well, no doubt, if he discovered a mid-level animal’s skin, like a nice horse or perhaps a zebra, he’d not have thought twice about slapping it on and chancing it. A lion, though? Risky. But here’s the thing. If you truly want a bit of peace and quiet, what better animal to masquerade as than the king of the beasts? If you want people to stop hassling you and beating you, love to see them try with a lion. And most desirable of all, if you want to just be left alone given a wide berth, what better beast skin to slap on? Not least because one assumes that close up a donkey dressed as a big cat is quite an easy ruse to spot. Ass, you clever, clever, brave bastard. And this brings me on to the reports in the first tale that the ass lion was deliberately jumping out and terrifying people. Well, of course you would say that, wouldn’t you? Having strumbled across a lion minding its own business, you embarrassingly sold yourself. When you get back home and your better half wants to know what the stink is, you’ve got to say something, right? This is what you say. A bloody lion came pouncing out at you and you heroically and lightly evaded it. You failed to mention that said lion was loping surreptitiously at the other side of the road, trying desperately to look inconspicuous. But not the fox. Oh, no. So here’s a smart cookie if ever you saw one. Ass lion is slinking around trying to look invisible and clearly foxy has spotted the seams in the costume. He knows full well that it’s not a lion under all that fur. Otherwise, why would an animal that smart, wily and enduring approach something that he genuinely thought was a lion? Even after hearing the eeyore? No, I don’t think so. He saw an opportunity to make himself look good at the expense of a lowly ass. He could have left well alone knowing how the ass would be mocked and ridiculed and put in his place. But this is who the fox is. Never miss an opportunity to get the upper hand. What a dick. And the farmer. In some tellings of this version, it’s actually a gang, nay, a pack of farmers that murder the poor ass. Ass knows that the farmer and his vicious compatriots won’t approach a lion so he can munch on some half ripe Swedes in peace with a half decent feed so he can actually pull the farmer’s plough of minimal whipping. These farmers are so smart that it seems to have taken them a while to clock the fact that the lion is eating a fucking turnip. This, the monarch of all animals, apex of apexes, munches on the livers of gazelles, not a bloody tuber. We have to assume that the farmers decided to murder their valuable work animal because the dent to their ego is just too much. Rather bludge in the poor beast of death than risk it whispering to the other animals of the farmer’s stupidity and weakness. So the ass took a big risk with a clever but peril-filled plan and it didn’t work out. He did it out of desperation, despair. Things no doubt got much worse for the version of the ass that only received ridicule. So, two timelines, two shitty endings for an ass who just wanted some peace. So what’s the lesson now? Well, dear foxes, farmers and general animal popular, the lesson is one for you. There are several, in fact. Sometimes when someone is suffering they have to take risky actions just to catch a breather. Shitting on someone for being smarter than you is not a good look. Sometimes people have to seem to be someone who they are not just for the privilege of not being shat upon by supposed upstanding citizens like yourself. Lions and foxes are not your friends, they hate you. But if you’d been nicer to the ass, I’d wager he’d be your friend for life. Can you guess which interpretation I prefer? I remembered the ass donkey all the way. I hate this story, though. I hate it because all outcomes end in tragedy and or humiliation for the poor donkey. I hate it because if you take the generally accepted interpretations of the story, it’s still ugly. It’s small and begrudging, petty and snide. I suspect that many of you will agree with me here. It’s not the only fable that suffers from such flaws. I strongly urge you to listen to the episodes on ESOP’s fables on the brilliant and inspiring podcast Alex Andrea’s policy. It turns out, you see, that many of those fables have taken on newer meanings that are divergent and in some cases antithetical to their original intended meaning. It also turns out, as Andrea explains, that ESOP himself is a convenient fable, a creation, a construct and one that has been mutated and manipulated through the years to serve whatever agenda the teller or society of the time has required of him and his stories. I am indebted to Alex’s inspiring take on these tales for this reinterpretation. But what was the point of all this revisionist storytelling? Well, partly because it’s fun to do so, but more importantly, it helps illustrate some things I want to say about the nature of identity and disguises and the masks that we all wear. Did I mention that I’m autistic? It’s a trick question since I know full well that I have many times in past episodes of this podcast. It’s just to tell a phrase that people use to gently introduce something that they want to talk about. We humans, and particularly for some reason the British, dislike coming at subjects head on. It’s considered a no-no, a bit uncouth, even aggressive and base. No, you must find a way to subtly and abstractly signpost your way to the thing that you wish to talk about. Stepping stones, if you will. Yes, sir. Step here. Avoid all that troublesome water. And here, now here. Now let’s talk about the etymology of the word pleonasm. Autistic people are not very good at this. This is not an observation or a helpful generalisation. It’s one of the basic diagnostic criteria for autism. If, seven words into a conversation with someone, you find yourself on the receiving end of a meandering story about sesame seeds, you might well be talking to an autistic person. It’s just how we communicate. We dispense with the pointless small talk and confusing and superfluous social dances and get to the point. Who wouldn’t wish for that? Who wouldn’t want to cut out the useless extra accoutrements and get right to the juicy meat, the main course? Well, it turns out that most of the other people, you know, the non-autistic ones, would rather dispense with the meaty bits and the pre- and post-ambles. They get quite insistent about this and often very offended when the social bloat is not proffered and trained with zeal and appreciation. Autistics learn at a young age that when you jump right to the point with the wrong person, you can be punished. Usually not with a punch in the face or a lecture, but with a blanks there and an awkward shuffling. Subsequently, the informing of the wider social group can avoid the weird though, which leads exactly to the sort of ostracization that autistics fear since, as should have been evident, many of us really like talking. It’s shitty to have to go through that. Small talk is confusing and bizarre to autistics and physically and or psychologically painful to some of us. It’s a hard lesson to learn that in such apparently run-of-the-mill and innocuous situations, failing to adhere to a social norm can lead to ridicule and sometimes desperately shitty outcomes. It sucks. We have to change the way that we wish to communicate to make ourselves uncomfortable, just so that everyone else can have their comfort and lots of useless extra bits in their conversation. So we tend to learn early in life just to toe the line, give them what they want. It’s just not worth the risk. Sound like them, dance there, dance and you’ll get by and maybe even treated like an equal, like a normal human being. This behavior is generally known as masking. We mask the spicier edges of our personalities for the comfort and peace of mind of others and ultimately ourselves. Normal people don’t like weirdos, so don’t behave like one. There are whole branches of pseudocytes that exist too and in some cases literally beat these apparently aberrant behaviors out of autistic kids and adults alike. It’s sick and sadistic. You see, just because we go along with whatever bizarre and apparently pointless thing that society at large has decided is essential to its functioning doesn’t mean to say that we’re comfortable doing so. It doesn’t mean that we simply switched modes and now we can do normal effortlessly like everyone else. Maintaining the mask always takes extra effort. Every time we end up constantly running at 200% CPU, trying to keep up with the stuff everyone else seems to just keep up with naturally and effortlessly. Periodically autistic people experience highly unpleasant psychological fugues known as autistic burnout. This is literally our brain and body’s malfunctioning and going on strike through sheer mental and emotional exhaustion. This can of course happen at times of stress or crisis but often seems to come out of nowhere. We simply run out of juice. We have to stop. A marathon runner, no matter how fit and experienced, always has to take a few days break after a competition. They must recuperate. For those of us who don’t discover their autism until later in life, or not at all, this feels very like failing at being normal. The episodes of burnout seem random and confusing and are assumed to be depression and we post-rationalize the reasons for it to have happened. And this is just everyday interactions. Add to it the rider effect of co-mulbid afflictions autistics have to contend with. ADHD, anxiety, digestive issues, sensory over a sensitivity etc. Life can get pretty uncomfortable. A ridiculous number of autistics also experience a punishing degree of bullying at the hands of so-called normal people that happens before we learn that we need to disguise our true selves, something that we do, like our friendly ass, just to find a bit of bloody peace. It fucking sucks. Masking is a particularly common behavior in autistics but everyone else does it to one degree or another. Being polite to your dick of a boss, pretending to be okay so a friend doesn’t worry about you, telling your enthusiastic but ultimately inept kid that their violin screeching was beautiful and that you want to hear more. Most people turn up to their day job wearing a mask of enthusiasm but how many of them would rather be on a rock face or bouncing their baby on their knee or indulging their partner in some clandestine BDSM action? However, our masks are never perfect no matter how much we preen and polish them. Something of our true selves always leaks out, often imperceptibly, sometimes very noticeably. In the latter case it’s often written off as a slip-up, sometimes a faux pas, a gaff, nothing to see here. It didn’t blurt out something too loopy or illegal. It’s this discrepancy between social norms and the leakage or gushing torrent in some cases of our true selves that defines us as individuals. Social norms are actually quite permissive, well in western societies in any case. It allows people who naturally surf close to the societal wave to surf well and not fall off pretty much perpetually. This is most people really, the center of the bell curve. The rest of us are being tossed around beneath the surface quite a bit and sometimes washed up ashore to be nipped up by crabs while we try and eject the water from our lungs and catch a breath. To extend the analogy, the bit between one rideable wave and the next, where we all get to bob up and down serenely sitting on our boards, this is where the untidy bits of our personality can be exposed a bit more freely. These calm interludes are essential to all of us since even the most adept surfer needs a rest once in a while. What’s essential is that when you find yourself on calm seas, even if only temporarily, you let your freak flag fly regardless of what colors and motifs adorn it. For reasons I’m not quite ready to talk about, I recently came to the conclusion that I was adorning my mask far more frequently and I had realized that it is healthy. I felt forced to wear my mask in exactly the sort of place where I should feel free to maximum Alex. In fact, I concluded that I had no idea where I end and my mask begins. I’m not going to dissect the reasons why this might be the case here or point any fingers, least of all at myself. Suffice to say that it felt like I had no safe spaces, nowhere I could be myself, except for two. One is those times when I can get away into the open air on my own in a solitary Scottish countryside. The other is in my studio. Worryingly, it became clear that I was even masking there. It has long been clear to me that the studio is where more of my true self leaks out. Those bits of me that I never knew existed kept leaking out onto the canvas. But I always knew somehow that even that was constrained, restrained. I constantly second guessed myself, dialed back on my instincts, suppressed my enthusiasm. I always seemed to have someone else’s voice in my head saying something like, well, that’s a bit much, don’t you think, Alex? Or that’ll never sell. In fact, people are going to hate it. I listened to that voice thinking it was my own. As I say, no safe spaces. That doesn’t mean to say all those instincts were wrong. Sometimes you make something that’s just bad. Sometimes you push an idea too far. Sometimes you hit on a somewhat dubious way of articulating an idea. Gee, sometimes you’re just being offensive and need to wind your neck in. But it felt like I was winding my metaphorical neck in too much and too often and in ways that left me feeling empty and disappointed in myself and in my work. I’m a fairly unusual person by most normal societal standards, although this is probably not apparent to most people most of the time. I definitely do need some tempering, but the line between okay and not okay is subjective, porous and sometimes imperceptible. And for the purposes of actually making art, the only distinction that matters is whether I think it’s okay, whether I think it’s decent. My output for some time now has felt like it was well crafted, but much of it felt flat to me, meaningless and one dimensional. That’s not how I approach art at all. One of the ways that I know a piece of art is finished and worthy is because it seems to mean something, either in its own right or in my own perceptions of it. I put no such constraints on other people’s art. Indeed, much of the art that I love has no deeper meanings at all. Why I expect meaning from my own art is perhaps conversation for another day. It is what it is. Now, if the meaning that I wish to put across is that human, particularly female faces are nice, then my art is packed with meaning. If the meaning was mess can make good art, again, I’m on fire. But these things, despite being vital aspects of my craft, are not alone enough. You see, I have thoughts, lots of them, all of the time. They never stop coming. And I don’t mean, oh, I must remember to go to the shop to buy some milk type thoughts, although I have those too, just much less frequently and usually at the wrong time. I mean big thoughts, angry thoughts, anxious thoughts, thoughts about desire and hatred and philosophy and interpersonal relationships. All of these turned up to number 11 all the time. It’s a common problem with all the HD’ers like me. Life is a cacophony of thoughts, ideas, impulses, emotions, sensory interjections, overload and burnout. I can’t let all of this out all of the time. In fact, I can almost never let this stuff out. When I do, folks around me get a little freaked out. So the mask gets rolled out. I don’t blame folks for freaking out. I can be very intense. But this stuff has to come out somewhere. It’s why I have a podcast. It’s a platform for some, not all, of that psychological melange to come out and sometimes a platform for others to do that too. The other place it comes spewing out is through my art. And it turns out I wasn’t allowing much of it to do so there either. So I took the decision to start ignoring the tempering voices in my head. I resolved to, as far as I currently feel able to, let it all come out. Those around me and who follow my work have already noted this as a marked shift. My work is not radically different from a style and subject perspective. It’s much the same, but the attitude is much more present. The meaning, for the most part, is much more apparent, even if sometimes hard to decipher. Plus, I’m being more open and talkative about the profound personal nature of my work. It might be something cool to adorn your living room wall, but it means something to me. It’s a fragment of me broken off and given to the world to do what it sees fit with. And yes, some of my work does adorn walls, all over the world in fact. Got a lot of it, mind. So not only did it seem like I was wearing a mask all of the time, much of my artwork was too. What concerned me at this realisation was the idea that when you wear a mask, for whatever reason, for this long, the mask itself insinuates itself into your personality, your self-perception, your identity, like a tree growing around and into an iron fence. You and it become melded, intertwined, commingled. Whether the extrication of the mask is possible or even desirable at this point is anyone’s guess. But unlike the tree and the iron fence, it’s unclear which parts are me and which are the mask, and whether indeed that question has any meaning at all. A similar effect occurs, and indeed has done with myself, when you live for many years with a single partner. Your personalities, to one degree or another, seem to merge and converge. You may ask yourself the question, who am I without this other? Who would I be had we never met? The answer, of course, is that the question is meaningless. We may be born with certain genetic predefined propensities into an environment dictated by our parents, all of which contributes to a distinct, unique starting point, but from that moment on all bets are off. You can make certain predictions, but ultimately we are shaped by circumstances, providence, dumb luck, and the extent to which this intersects and interacts with our genetic material and societal circumstances. That a large chunk of this came from a singular other person is neither here nor there. We are products of our pasts. Perhaps, then, there was no mask at all. Just a set of reactions to my circumstances, a sequence of decisions to let certain parts of my personality show, and others remain concealed, a set of choices regarding with whom to remain unguarded or to clam up. Each decision a product of its own merits, no single action to defining one, no smoking gun, just tiny hardened calluses applied to tender emotional skin, scabs from interpersonal wounds, scars on hardened skin, all just your mind’s immune system. The reality of our emotional journey is not a simple, linear narrative, a sequence of discrete, independent events. Our timeline is an interconnected, interdependent web of circumstances, reactions, repercussions, and temporal resonances. We are our history, if only in a diffuse sense, and from someone outside looking in, this is utterly inscrutable. So what of it, and what of our friend the ass? To his persecutors, the ass’s sin was to pretend to be someone he was not, to get ideas above his station. Yet, if you accept my interpretation of the fable, he was simply wearing a mask that could buy him some peace, if only temporarily. His decision to adorn the lion’s skin was motivated by a need to not be perceived, to shield himself from a world that was only just bearable. But the disguise carried consequences, and the version of the ass that survived surely did so, bearing yet more torment and emotional damage. Was it worth it? The question is irrelevant. He made the decision, and provenance did the rest. One version of the ass continued to exist. Given the same opportunity again, would he make the same decision? Would he do so knowing the risks? Would he do so knowing who to avoid and how to behave to evade detection and consequent torment? After all, they say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Perhaps what doesn’t kill you allows you to live another day, to continue to put one foot in front of the other. There is not then a mask to be removed, no perpetual subterfuge. Just one decision after another, the consequence of each leaving its indelible mark on your future. When you take a decision to let what is supposedly underneath out, you are not exposing anything at all. You are just taking the decision, at that point, to do what is natural to you. To shine, even at the expense of momentarily blinding those who perceive your radiant light. It is an act of bravery and resolution. What spewing out at my easel then isn’t unmasked me at all. It’s just me choosing to pass by the lion’s skin. There is no mask to remove, just me choosing not to shield the world from my light. What emerges isn’t some sort of distilled essence of me, but a projection of every battle, every sky, every decision to hide, every failure to do so. A history of ridicule and judgement, but also of radiance and pride, as well as resilience, resolve and a bloody-minded refusal to give up or to conform. So, I’m not suggesting that masking doesn’t exist, quite the opposite, and every autist knows that it does. But that metaphorical mask is the lion’s skin that we, day in, day out, take the decision to adorn, for better or for worse. And every time we do so, we change ourselves a little. I’m not melded with my mask, there is only me and the consequences of those thousands of individual decisions to hide a little, to shelter. Your mask, your armour, your lion’s skin is there whenever you need it, and it will continue to leave its mark every time it is wielded. But the resulting beasts, the loyal, hardworking, beautiful ass that emerges and wiggles its oversized ears is just you, move slightly further along in time. There is much talk of authenticity in modern discourse, which is only going to get more feverish as AI insinuates its tendrils into our culture. But if that’s what’s truly on display with the modern breed of megastars, it comes from a position of privilege. Is Taylor Swift an ass in lion’s skin, just the ass, or is she the lion? Only she can answer that, and I sincerely doubt she would honestly tell you if she even knows herself. I’m not picking on Taylor here, by the way, I think she’s amazing, the world needs more of her and less of Sam Altman and his wretched partners in global crime and thin-skinned frauds like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. What I’m saying is it’s damn hard to tell the lions from the donkeys, from the foxes and the chickens and the three-toed sloths and the cassowaries. Don’t judge someone for choosing to protect themselves and don’t seek to expose and chastise them should the mask slip. And let’s be clear, asses have a brutal kick and make an unholy noise. Asses are awesome. Be an ass.