I used to dread vacations when Dad was in charge. His idea of taking time off as a family was to pile into the car at the crack of dawn, drive until lunch, eat, and then drive until sunset. And we couldn’t talk. As a teenager I discovored Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous quote “Hell is other…
Spelunking
June 5, 2023
I love the word “spelunking.” It’s far more imaginative than the prosaic “caving.” I was a spelunker until 2012. Instead of crawling around in caves, I did it under my house. Never once was it my idea to go under my house, except for today. There were photos that had to be taken. The reason…
Down the Orinoco with my father
June 4, 2023
My father Edward Wictor was a complete stranger. Since his death on February 23, 2013, he’s become even more of a mystery. Dad wrote three unpublished memoirs that are nearly impossible to read. Like the film Pulp Fiction, they don’t follow a chronological narrative. Instead, they jump around in time and place, they contain almost…
The son of a certified eccentric
May 29, 2023
My mother CeeCee was brilliant. As I discovered today, she was also a certified eccentric. Sometime in the late nineties, I got a traffic ticket from a sheriff’s deputy working for the second-most corrupt city in the United States. It was ticket for a “rolling stop,” meaning I didn’t come to a complete stop at…
Your fate is to have free will
May 17, 2023
Today I found an artifact that had gone missing. I’d heard about it for years, but I’d never laid eyes on it. Now I’ve examined and touched it. Part of me had wondered if it really existed. Does it prove anything? Yes. It proves that our fate is to have free will. I broach the…
Count me out of your brave new world
May 12, 2023
A happy British oncologist says that expensive cancer drugs should be withheld from the elderly and given to the young. Dr. Karol Sikora (pronounced “sick aura”) is worried about the costs. Well, count me out of the you-live, you-die lottery. If it comes down to “justifying expenses,” as the doctor says, then I’ll cheerfully give…
Dad’s deathmobile
May 9, 2023
When my nephew Hunter James Gonzales turned three, my father gave him the most dangerous birthday present I’ve ever seen. Dad’s deathmobile was used only once, almost twenty years ago, but I remember it as though it were yesterday. A hot needle would would burn out the memory. Free e-books to anyone who does the…
Things I never considered, part 80 trillion
April 24, 2024
I just got an e-mail that prompts me to post about something I never considered. It was a long message full of instructions on how I should change the way I write and live. I’ll address just one point because in our current culture, the classes are pitted against each other, and I don’t want…
Have we turned a corner?
April 12, 2024
My father was a complex man. He had an astonishing intellect, a streak of brutality, great artistic skill, indestructible narcissism, bursts of amazing compassion, the total inability to admit when he was wrong, an urge to do the right thing, an adamant refusal to do the right thing, and secrets buried so deeply inside that…