Thomas Wictor

I can’t think right now. All I can do is sit and stare blankly. Caffeine withdrawal makes you stupid. Throw in stress and rotational vertigo attacks, and you have complete mental disability.

Writing is beyond my capabilities right now, so we’ll go audio-visual. I took this photo a few hours ago, as I wandered aimlessly on our three properties.

Did you know eucalyptus leaves could turn bright red? I didn’t. And how’d it get lodged in the fence? If someone can figure it out, send me an e-mail.

Then I slowly craned my head skyward and saw this.

It looks like a scene from the movie The Right Stuff. I saw it recently and didn’t like it anymore. It’s a combination of all the actors having shot off their mouths about politics, the writing being really heavy handed, and the self-consciousness of the whole venture. It’s a very ham-fisted, hammy film. With ham actors.

Still, that’s quite a cloud, isn’t it?

Did I ever post this photo? I can’t remember.

It’s the biggest spider I’ve ever seen. That bastard was the size of a silver dollar. It spun its web across my driveway. How the hell do they do that? My driveway is, what, eight feet wide? How does a spider span that gap? Does it anchor the first thread, crawl down the bush onto the driveway, scuttle across, anchor it on the opposite bush, and then reel the thread up its spinnerets to tighten it? And then it can go across as many times as it wants, like a tightrope walker?

Sometimes I forget about spiders the size of silver dollars using my driveway as a larder, and I walk face first right into the web. It sticks to my glasses and my lips. Once I felt the giant spider running across my forehead and into my hair. I headbanged like Angus Young to get it out.

All of the Middle East is going up in flames. What isn’t helpful is transparently false propaganda.

The “soldier” has an AK-47. The Isreali Defense Forces don’t use that weapon. A quick search with Google Images showed that this photo was taken in Bahrain in 2009.

Here’s an interesting question: If people consistently don’t do the things you accuse them of doing, shouldn’t you re-evaluate your viewpoint?

No, I’m just kidding. I know that almost nobody re-evaluates. They stick with their viewpoint regardless of facts. If they re-evaluated, this is what would happen to their heads.

While I was looking up the source of that propaganda photo, I came across a tweet from Doc Ladies Call Me H. He said that Zionism would soon be eliminated. So I asked him a question.

Doc Ladies Call Me H didn’t actually answer my question. Instead, he began his response with “yawn”—which is so original that I began spinning at five thousand rpm—and then he blocked me because he’s afraid that I might ask him other questions for which he has no answer. But he had to tell me I’m blocked, as though it would be a massive disappointment for me that I could no longer communicate with him.

“OH PLEASE DON’T BLOCK ME, DOC! I BEG OF THEE!”

He’s from San Francisco. My brother Tim recently visited San Francisco to meet up with our brother Eric. I was last there in 2002. Tim said it was absolute hell, a churning morass of screaming, vomiting, defecating, and urinating homeless maniacs demanding money.

Tim and I were born in Venezuela, which two classes: the wealthy and the poor. Tim said San Francisco is now a Third World city, the rich living one street over from the homeless mental patients leaving their spoor on the sidewalks. At night the power washers are brought out to spray away the day’s accumulation of human waste and regurgitated alcohol. The buildings in the Financial District have apartments in them, so you see young couples with strollers going into bank lobbies and taking the elevator home.

“Don’t ever go there,” Tim said.

I won’t. The Bay Area is a ghost town. Everybody I knew there is now on the other side of a barrier that we can never cross.

Still, people write good songs about San Francisco.

I go walking with my baby down by the San Francisco Bay
Ocean liner took her so far away
I didn’t mean to treat her so bad, she was the best girl I ever have had
She made me cry, I said goodbye
I’m gonna sit right down and die

I ain’t got a nickel, ain’t got a lousy dime.
She don’t come back, I swear I’m gonna lose my mind.
So if she ever comes back to stay, it’s going to be a brand-new day
And I’ll be walking with my baby by the San Francisco Bay