Author: White Whale

“1. To those who support cities shutting down businesses or even ordering residents to shelter in place, as San Francisco has done, do you acknowledge just how much pain this will create in many people’s lives? At what point of economic pain would you say we are going too far? You agree there is a point at which the government is going too far to save one life, or even a thousand lives.

After all, you don’t think all speed limits should be 10 MPH, except for emergency vehicles.

Where is that point for you in this situation? How bad will the economy – and thus people’s lives – have to get?

2. As I understand it, the worst-case scenario, at least in the West, is something like what Italy is experiencing: too many elderly people getting the virus in a compact period of time, stretching the medical system past its breaking point. In the U.S., then, why isn’t the top priority to specifically protect older Americans? Why isn’t the loudest message from government officials for seniors to self-quarantine, as it appears to be in the United Kingdom? Wouldn’t a measure like this better address the “bend the curve” challenge than telling the entire population to stay inside, thus shutting down the economy?

3. Is there a plan? If there is, what is it? How and when will we know if the plan is working? If the plan is to manage COVID-19’s spread in order to protect the medical system, how will shutting down cities for a few weeks or months meaningfully help? What will happen when life returns towards normalcy? Won’t the virus return with a vengeance when life begins to return to normal? Then, won’t we be in the same position we are now, only poorer and thus less equipped to handle a medical crisis?

4. I know you are not allowed to use the word “flu” in this discussion, but: The H1N1 swine flu originated and broke out in the United States in spring 2009. By the end of that pandemic, about a year later, the CDC says the swine flu “caused 60.8 million illnesses, 273,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in the U.S.” Those numbers marked the end of that pandemic. We are still at the beginning of COVID-19, so the numbers are not apples to apples. But in the beginning of H1N1, did we react nearly as severely as we are reacting now to COVID-19? Why not? I suspect one reason is because we have seen Italy’s medical system become overwhelmed by COVID-19. If that is the main reason, is shutting down our economy the right way to try to avoid that situation? Why is our reaction to COVID-19, seven weeks since the first U.S. case, so disproportionately severe compared to our reaction to the swine flu seven weeks in? Or is it not disproportionate? It’s a fair question.”

This is an argument I developed a couple days ago.  Close all the businesses in the even zip codes, and leave all those in odd zip codes open.  If it is a bar or restaurant, only serve people who live first in the even zip codes, then the odd.  A three stage would be 1-3, 4-6, 7-0, if that makes sense in any given city.

Or do it alphabetically.  It doesn’t matter.  You keep some segment of the economy going, and are able to give an end date to the people you are asking to stay home, which is vital. If you know when an ordeal is going to end–running 26.2 miles–it is vastly easier than “run until we say stop.”

Yes, I get that there are unknowns.  There are ALWAYS fucking unknowns. What is NOT an unknown is that our ECONOMY IS GOING TO HIT THE CRAPPER HARD if we stay on this idiotic path.

And I would suggest that never in human history has there been so much panic over a disease which is over quickly for most people, and in many of whom it doesn’t even have symptoms.  In every culture around the world for all of history, the old have periodically died in larger numbers from illnesses of various sorts.  But even there, we can protect our elderly.  We just ask them to stay home.

This whole thing will be seen as madness soon.  But the Trump era has been filled with madness.  Not from him–he is one of the few sane men in public politics.  But from people like Chuck Schumer, who in the space of a week accused Trump of doing too much and then too little.  WHILE they were criticizing his response for being insufficient he and Nancy were trying to undo his travel ban.  This shit is UNBELIEVABLE. 

I ask again: how fucking stupid are most Americans?  I don’t think we know yet.

Could he fire everyone he suspects of working to undermine his administration and the well being of the American people?

Can he do radical bureaucratic reorganizations to unsettle and disrupt the Deep State?

Can we not offer very attractive enticements to bring substantially all medical manufacturing back to our shores, at least, and our country itself, ideally?  I would even be OK with Mexico, since the best long term solution to illegal immigration is better economic conditions south of the border.  Hell people may even go home voluntarily.  I wonder, actually, if some are going home to avoid the coronavirus here.

Here is a conspiracy theory for you: COVID-19 was created in a US lab, and released in China, Iran, Italy and the United States by members of the Deep State.  China, in blaming us, may have realized they didn’t create the virus.  They have likely been assuming they did, and been working overtime to cover it up.  But perhaps one of their researchers found a fingerprint pointing unmistakably to us, which is why one of their ministers publicly blamed us and Xi threatened to withhold needed medicines.

The end aim was a Hail Mary to stop Trump, in everything.  They wanted to destroy the US economy, but felt first they needed to contain our remaining nation-state enemies, which for the most part are Iran and China.  They weakened them, then brought the thing here.  They consciously undermined Trump’s travel ban by bringing back the cruise ship carriers against Trump’s wishes and intent.  Then the CDC accidentally-on-purpose fucked up the testing long enough for the virus to spread.

Here’s the thing about diseases: an agent can leave them on a counter in a bathroom, or a bar, or on a door handle, or in the back of a cab or Uber, and nobody will ever know.  It is completely untraceable.

But the net effect is not just going to be a wrecked US economy, but all the powers that will be gained by a government in emergency.  Governments in emergencies never behave well, and panicked people often submit to it.  I think there is a good chance someone around him will try and infect Trump with COVID-19, in what can only be described as an effort at assassination.  It would be a clean hit, if they can get away with it.

My view is that the panic is overwrought.  Italy has the second oldest population in the world (after Japan), and most of them live with extended families.  In the US, we are much younger, and our old live in rest homes, or at least in homes of their own, where they more or less self sequester naturally most of the time, just due to reduced mobility. 

We also have much more space, in most of the US.  Rural and suburban areas are not even remotely concentrated the way most of Europe is.

This thing will kill vastly less than the 30-80,000 people who will die from the flu this year.  Our flu numbers, actually, will most likely be down, too, since meetings are being banned, and everyone is scrubbing continuously with soap and hand sanitizer.

But last year at this time there were 250-500,000 people, give or take, who were or had been hospitalized during the course of the annual flu epidemic which strikes most of the country each and every year.

The only thing possibly worse about this epidemic is a shortage of ICU ventilators for double pneumonias.  But as I say, most of the people who would be filling those beds are half quarantined all the time, and fully quarantined now.  The overflow will not happen, in my view.

What WILL happen is we go in three weeks from a record stock market to a recession.  Thousands of businesses will close permanently with as little as two weeks lost revenue.

This panic has been sold to us by the media, in collaboration with people whose names we may never know, if Trump does not get reelected, and not get righteously ANGRY at all the people in our own government who want to see the American Experiment fail, in favor of gray, loveless, rotten and evil authoritarianism, into the murky mists of the foreseeable future.

This breaks my vow, I will call it, but I needed to say this, and Facebook was the wrong place.

Now, this sort of thing is not for everyone–spirit guides, the spiritual generally, past lives, intuition of a non-physical variety–but I personally take it seriously.

I really feel I am on the right track.

If you can find a teacher willing to call you a fucking moron, then that’s a good thing.  Firstly, it is certainly true, but secondly, they would not bother speaking to you if there was no hope.

But I wanted to say, once, and then no more, that if this blog is actually meaningful and important for anyone, speak up.  As far as I know for sure, I have zero readers.  I have no followers at all.  It has long felt like I had readers, but it was just a sense, and I have come to the time in my life where I start telling the truth about everything.  No more bullshit.  No more comforting illusions.  No more little lies.

So I’m actually serious about the May 1 thing.  If I am providing any measure of comfort to anyone, speak now, or I’m going dark for six months or so.

I drew the Devil Tarot by the way.  Perfect.  That is exactly where I want to go: all the darkness, everything hidden, everything which gains power only through fear, rigidity and ignorance.

But the process itself is compulsive.  What I am trying to create in my life is continuity and consistency, and right now I think my computer in general interferes with that.  I’m addicted to it.  I spend hours every day on it.  This is not good.

There was a time before computers.  There was even a time before TV’s.  I can’t say people were saner then.  I don’t know.  Certainly actual and blatant and violent racism, sexism, hatred and fear of homosexuals and many other social ills existed.  But there were not also the high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, despite the standard of living being much lower.  Divorce rates were much lower, no doubt in part driven by economic factors, but also cultural ones.

And it is odd to speculate that when you look at a shelf of “literature” that much of it more or less amounts to people with a compulsive need to speak, to be heard, to tell stories, to organize words somewhat or nakedly compulsively.  When you look at the classics, you are perhaps looking at a gallery of neuroticism and personality disorders.  I recently started “The Once and Future King”, because it is a classic in its genre, but T.H. White was a mess.  Look him up.

For me, I need to remember a time before all this, before I lapsed into all these bad (somewhat: although this blog is not a complete waste of time.  Many men my age spend this time on porn or even video games) habits.

This is audacious, and I’m not at all confident I will succeed, but I would like to give up blogging until May 1st of next year.  I need to channel that energy into cooking and cleaning and reading and walking and hobbies and working out and Kum Nye.

I need, most of all, to directly confront all the negative energy in me, without an escape route.  It is time for this work to begin in earnest.  I have put it off long enough.  To be sure, I’ve needed to do a lot of preparatory work.  This was essential.  Timing in life is everything: if you fuck it up a sure thing becomes a failure.  But I think now is the time.   I am going to draw a new Tarot, for new winds, and leave it up until then.

Wish me luck. If you pray, pray for me.  This is, I hope, the final test, at least for a long time.  I’ll be back.

And there is evil out there.  This is the part it has taken me thus far in my life to wrap my brain and emotions around.  It can’t be willed out of existence.  Quite often in this world the bad guys and gals win.

Do you REALLY think human nature has changed since the Nazis made soap out of the fat of slaughtered Jews?  Since Mao reduced nearly a billion people to starvation and cannibalism?

No, it hasn’t, and the latest aggression by evil, in my view, is being undertaken under the banners of compassion and justice and progress, as indeed it was by the Communists and Nazis both (if we remove compassion from the lexicon of the Nazis, who were not hypocritical enough to claim they were trying to save anybody but the people they liked).

But I have, all my life, somehow personalized all this, like it is my fault and my responsibility.  This is a feature of my particular childhood, and my particular sensibilities.

No: you need to get by with cunning, strength, stealth, and skill.  Most days, for most people, the need for these things is not obvious.  This is how we have become so decadent that we BELIEVE what the horrible people in our media are telling us.  The truth is not hidden.  It is not hard to find, or so I believe, in my conceit that I know–or rightly guess–at least a substantial portion of it.

The immediate task of all of us is to save ourselves, and those around us we care about.  If everyone did this, the world would immediately be a better place.

But without losing sight of my idealism–and I am no doubt naive in many ways, my often expressed cynicism notwithstanding–I need to do a better job of mending my own fences, and taking care of myself.

Boundaries, boundaries: this is something which finally seems to be arriving, after much work.  I have never really had them.  My parents took them from me.  I have always been wide open to the world.  I am good at looking and acting fierce, and in a pinch I suppose I could BE fierce, but my actual nature is gentle and overly trusting.  I hated killing bugs when I was little.  I literally didn’t want to hurt flies, from the earliest age.  I have learned to fight it because that nature has been abused more times than I can count.  And of course, too, when you mistrust people, that can itself be the beginning of a bad relationship.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Always in life appropriateness is the aim.  As Aristotle said–and this would apply to any emotion, including fear–anyone can be angry, but being angry at the right things, at the right time, to the right extent: that is the domain of the superior human being.

Put another way, all emotions have their place.  We need all of them, including hatred, greed, lust, and even sloth.  But to the right extent, at the right time, and in response to the right stimuli: that is the task.  All of these really only become vices in excess, and excess is precisely what is being avoided.

But the main villain, I will call him–although he has robust competition–states at one point that his ancestors were slaves. He looks Maori to me, so I looked up Slavery in New Zealand. This is what I got, from Wikipedia:

“Before the arrival of European settlers, each Maori tribe (iwi) considered itself a separate entity equivalent to a nation. In traditional Maori society of Aotearoa, prisoners of war became taurekareka, slaves, unless released, ransomed or eaten.[355] With some exceptions, the child of a slave remained a slave.

As far as it is possible to tell, slavery seems to have increased in the early 19th century with increased numbers of prisoners being taken by Māori military leaders, such as Hongi Hika and Te Rauparaha to satisfy the need for labor in the Musket Wars, to supply whalers and traders with food, flax and timber in return for western goods. The intertribal Musket Wars lasted 1807 to 1843 when large numbers of slaves were captured by northern tribes who had acquired muskets. About 20,000 Maori died in the wars which were concentrated in the North Island. An unknown number of slaves were captured. Northern tribes used slaves (called mokai) to grow large areas of potatoes for trade with visiting ships. Chiefs started an extensive sex trade in the Bay of Islands in the 1830s using mainly slave girls. By 1835 about 70–80 ships per year called into the port. One French captain described the impossibility of getting rid of the girls who swarmed over his ship outnumbering his crew of 70 by 3 to 1. All payments to the girls were stolen by the chief.[356]

By 1833 Christianity had become established in the north and large numbers of slaves were freed. However two Taranaki tribes, Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga, displaced by the wars carried out a carefully planned invasion of the Chatham Islands, 800 km east of Christchurch, in 1835. About 15% of the Polynesian Moriori natives who had migrated to the islands at about 1500 CE were killed, with many women being tortured to death. The remaining population was enslaved for the purpose of growing food, especially potatoes. The Moriori were treated in an inhumane and degrading manner for many years. Their culture was banned and they were forbidden to marry.[357]

Slavery was outlawed when the British annexed New Zealand in 1840, immediately prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, although it did not end completely until government was effectively extended over the whole of the country with the defeat of the Kingi movement in the Wars of the mid-1860s.

Some Maori took Moriori partners. The state of enslavement of Moriori lasted until the 1860s although it had been banned by British law since 1809 and discouraged by CMS missionaries in North New Zealand from the late 1820s. In 1870 Ngati Mutunga, one of the invading tribes, argued before the Native Land Court in New Zealand that their gross mistreatment of the Moriori was standard Maori practice or tikanga.[358]“

There is so much bullshit about Europeans and slavery that is preached, particularly in our universities, whose JOB it is to figure this stuff out. We presented with these images of peaceful people deprived of their land and rights. Well, in this case–and this applies around the world–the White People were the ones who ENDED slavery. The British Empire was BY FAR the most important weapon against slavery the world over that the planet has ever seen. Slavery has been practiced everywhere, with very few exceptions in any lands or peoples, the world over since the dawn of history.

And it was CHRISTIANITY which was the driving force against slavery. Islam has no issue with it whatever. Getting and keeping slaves was part of the appeal of jihad. Slavery is condoned in the Old Testament. And as I have noted a number of times, the main “product” of the Vikings was slaves. To be clear: WHITE slaves, to be sold most of the time to Arabs. Most of the major cities in Ireland were founded as trading hubs, where the main product was human beings taken in internal conflict.

And when you look at people, their minds are all over the place.  You can be addicted to the past.  You can be addicted to sports.

Here is a metric: what, if taken from you, would give you a nervous tick, would make you anxious, would make you think about it all the time?

What is your blankie, of the sort Linus carried?  I suppose we all have them, and probably are safest emotionally when we have a number of them: hobbies, passions, go-to activities and thoughts.

Most of human civilization represents long efforts to bring order to the world, to make regular and predictable not just food and shelter and peace and social connection, but how you should understand the world and your place in it, which is made easier when everyone around is saying and doing the same things.

In this respect, difference feels like an assault.  You have been given a choice, where there was none.  It is an intrusion of chaos into the sane, normal and known.  You resent the person who is different to the precise extent you lack faith in who you are, as a person, and as the group to which you belong (if any).

I suppose if everyone counts as different–as in the case of extreme social alienation–then all of them are attacking you with their very being.  In the Joker–which I still haven’t seen, but vaguely feel like I ought to see, since it seems to have tapped an important vein in our collective lives, to the extent that as I predicted we are already seeing protesters breaking things in clown-face, as I recently saw in Chile–he could have been made violent without any assault on him at all.  I don’t think most school shooters are physically beaten up, although most are likely verbally mocked, underscoring their alienated status.

The life of mankind has been long, and many, many solutions have been formed.  I read some 86 languages are counted in both Ethiopia and Laos.  Laos in particular is not a very large nation.  Does it not seem obvious that with every different language come differing customs and beliefs, even if they are only slightly different?  And that even within the same linguistic group, the tribe on the other side of the hill may do things differently, and believe slightly different things?

We are at a stage in history where some part of us looks to space.  Relative to space, we are a single planet.  But we all (or most of us: some of us have none) have a home, a bed, specific sheets we put on the bed, a nightime routine, loved or hated or tolerated others, and things specific to us.

Then we wake up and go out in the street, and meet we never know who.  In most large cities, you will see people you don’t know all day long.  You see them at the grocery store–where if you are lucky, or live in a small town, you may sometimes run into people you know.  You see them driving.  You see them at Home Depot.  Always different people, although many employees remain the same.

This is a hard way to live, for most of us at least.  I think most of us would be happiest being born somewhere small, and living there most of our lives.  Yes, perhaps everyone needs to spend a few years roaming around.  Maybe that could become a new normal, in lieu of college.  Roaming around makes you appreciate home more.  You get that restless energy out.  And you always have the internet.  But you return home, where your family is, where you have uncles and aunts and cousins and of course parents and grandparents.  All of them are there, to welcome your own children, who in their turn are made to feel whole, secure, and welcome themselves.

I tend to think the country folks in this country are, by and large, the sane ones.  Many if not most of them are likely small minded, but that is not a bad thing in small places.  They understand the value of place, something which is forgotten on the national scene, in the big cities, in our metropolises.

Aristotle, I think it was, said a polis should be about the amount of land where everyone could hear a single loud voice calling from a tall place.  No more than 10,000 or so, and if you think about it, knowing 10,000 is itself damn near impossible.  People, people, everywhere, even in small places.

But if you lose your family, as I have, voluntarily, since they make me emotionally unwell, then this world is a large place.  Still, I have my physical place, my bed, my kitchen, my habits.

Within Kum Nye practice, your goal is to develop a home in your feelings, to develop an innate calm which you take with you everywhere.  Home, really, IS a feeling.  It is that place where you feel warm, safe, wanted, accepted.  If you can cultivate those feelings towards yourself, with no external validation, then your home is wherever you lay your hat.  And this state, in itself, is a powerful resource against Duhkha.  I personally think Tarthang Tulku has shared, in Kum Nye, some of the most powerful teachings Tibetan Buddhism has to offer.  They are perhaps only introductory–there is, I think, vastly more.  But for most people, and particularly most Americans, that practice alone will get them on the right path.  Nothing else is needed.  The spiritual IS emotional.  This is something I think many of the thrill and high seeking hippies failed then and fail now to grasp.

Be all that as it may, finding your home in your own feelings may sound scary, but only because you (and I) have not yet built that nest of feelings, that warm place where we always feel welcome, and where everything that happens is a source of wonder, growth, and not infrequently delight; where there is nothing to fear, including pain, fear itself, and death.

Few thoughts.  I think I have finally myself reached the depths of my own experience. I am finding that you have to–and this is a Bon Mot, by the way, shared with you free of charge, and with a bit of a giggle at my own nerdiness and strangeness–Stay with what you can’t leave behind, until you CAN leave it behind.

That’s my own, although of course I am aware of the U2 album, which has some great songs on it.

Two nights ago, I got to the bottom of the ocean.  There was a giant, a monster, which I could not beat, which defeated me completely, which subjugated me and made me its bitch.  This feeling is at the root of my own experience.  The monster was certainly in part my mother, but probably the totality of my life and what I was feeling at the time.  My home was cold, and we moved around so I lost my friends.  I could do wrong, but seemingly no right, and from the earliest age.  I was first spanked before I was yet a year old.

I checked out, covered up that layer, and created in effect a fake persona to perpetuate the lie, and protect myself from it, and learn how to protect myself from the predations of others, while some part of me never forgot that I lost the first battle of my life, decisively and finally.

And I realize that that monster is not something I can ever defeat, since now it is in me.  It IS me.  It is the AllFear, the fear without cause, without clear beginning, which never leaves.  You cannot defeat one part of yourself with another.  You are a system, and all parts are needed.  It is all a fabric.

This is the thing, though: the monster represents a wrinkle, a knot, an eddy, a dam, a constriction.  It is not a thing in itself, but a symbol of constricted/restricted energy.  It is “defeated” by going into that energy, and living there until the water begins moving again.

And I see this is the way to heal trauma, deeply.  It is at least a one, and more usually a two stage process.  As I have said before, you have two sets of perceptual nexuses: you have the thought/feeling nexus, and then the redemptive, resolutional sensation/image nexus.

Most “meditation” is to my mind incompetent, because it doesn’t make this fact obvious and explicit.  You sit there and try not to think, and “return to the breath” in most iterations.  Maybe you are feeling the breath, or counting the breaths, or chanting a mantra, or focusing only on the out-breath (which triggers the parasympathetic nervous system) but there is no following.  You have to follow.  When you sit quietly, your inner recesses will SPEAK to you, and if you don’t listen, you will never get much smarter.

In its essence, Kum Nye is evoking–which is what all the exercises do–listening, then following, then dwelling, then eventually expanding and releasing. It is a process of consciously becoming who you already are, but which you don’t know, because what you think is you is a tangle of knots which need to be released.  This could certainly be seen as one meaning of Anatman, although I am quite sure it goes much deeper.

But for many of us, this stage is quite impossible to approach directly.  Where trauma is present–and if we add in Developmental Trauma, I think it is present in at least a numerical majority of Americans, which is what makes us so habitually driven to overwork and then narcotize ourselves, most commonly with TV and binge consumption of all sorts–it triggers the circuit breakers and you say something like “this meditation is making me anxious.  I feel much worse”.

So I think for most people you need some means of dialing down the background fear and noise.  For me, Neurofeedback seems to be doing the trick, although it has taken me a while to figure out a protocol which works for me.  I think that field, which in itself should be seen as emerging and developing, has been tainted by the “need for expertise”.  I think it has been overcomplicated by people with degrees, who want to be seen as working some form of magic.  I think it can be simplified in specific ways I will describe in more detail once 1) I feel like my own work is done; and 2) I have worked successfully with others.  My own view is that any work I might do with others will be strengthened and made vastly more effective if I can offer myself as an example of what is possible.  A large problem most therapists have is that most of them suffer from most of the same problems their patients do.  How can you credibly claim to be able to cure someone else of something you can’t cure yourself of?  This large contradiction is at the heart of nearly all ineffective “mental health” practice.

But Neurofeedback is not the only option.  Yoga might work.  Perhaps swimming or running.  Floating is good. I do that too.  I think I had a moment of Samadhi last week.  I didn’t know I was in it, when I was in it, then I woke up.  And it was a bit disconcerting, but I also felt like something had released, that it was healthy and good for me.  So I’ll keep showing up, and keep doing my best to keep the faith and keep my courage up.

I think learning to accept solitude constitutes accepting learning to live with it.  I am finding that for myself, sometimes literally just sitting there, like a bump on a log, not listening to music, not meditating, not even smoking, just going into the feelings, or really just letting them know I know they are there, and that I’m not running away, seems therapeutic. Sometimes you are doing a lot when you are doing nothing at all.

And I think focusing on all this is important.  I am always running away.  I’ve always been running away.  The feelings are absolutely terrifying.  It is the feeling of being ground into a pulp by an infinitely more powerful being.  But they are getting smaller.

Life expands from the center.  And until you get to the center, you are really just going in circles.  Inner work is the key to outer work.  I want to plant my feet firmly in the middle and learn to live there.  This is my goal.

And I have moments of panic, where I wonder what I am doing with  my life.  I am much too smart to have accomplished as little as I have.  But I started my life more than a little insane.  Becoming sane is really the best use of my time there could be, much better than creating world class art, or becoming a faculty member at an elite university, or anything else I can think of.  Because who you are is what really matters in the end.

To complete U2–and I saw the title as a clear reference to death–who you are is all that you can’t leave behind.  Life is a time to work on that.  This is my belief, in any event.

Edit: thinking about it, the fact that I am writing this means I was not broken.  I have just been hiding until it was safe to come out.  Being truly broken is becoming someone like Hillary or Bill Clinton.  There is nothing left there, no residual capacity for deep introspection, much less empathy.  Their lives are moving objects around for their own personal benefit.

It just hit me today, though, why: they spend so much time not being able to be who they are–if not in their present lives, then at least in their childhoods–that being who they are openly is a huge source of relief and happiness.

Heterosexuals feel this elation too, but usually when in love.  Think Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain.  Gay men, I think, feel this when they are with other gays.  It is a natural home, a natural place, somewhere they finally belong completely.

These are very abstract generalizations, but I think there is something there.  This is my doodle blog. I can guess or say whatever I want.