Thomas Wictor

I must apologize for not keeping up on the e-mail correspondence and Facebook postings. This is a very difficult time for me, and it’s all because of a cat! Actually, Brother Cat is just symbolic of the leitmotifs that have defined me. A lot more is going on, but the damn cat is at the center of it all. He’s causing dissociation from PTSD. Some days I can’t remember my own… Crap. Forgot what I was going to say.

Here’s Brother a few minutes ago, right out of reach.

He decided to not come in my house to be fed, so I’m deliberately starving him. Tonight he finally came in and almost went into the living room, but then he turned around and ran out as fast as he could. He follows me outside and meows pitifully, but he won’t come inside. I can’t use a trap on him because he’s too smart, and today he figured out what the net was.

As soon as he saw it in Tim’s hands, he took off.

My only hope is to lure him inside and shut the door before he can rocket outside.

Leitmotifs

This cat episode is illustrative of my entire life.

1. The implacable, remorseless predator that will not give up, under any circumstances. That’s Lyle and Brother’s mother.

She abandoned them when they were six weeks old, forcing me to choose to ignore them (let them die), take them to the pound (kill them), or help them. So I began feeding them, despite not wanting any more pets.

When they were within days of being socialized, the mother showed up again with three new kittens in tow, and she began attacking Lyle and Brother. They regressed into wild animals. All she does is breed and destroy. If silencers weren’t illegal in California, I’d shoot her.

Today Brother almost came into my house twice, and his goddam mother suddenly appeared behind the garbage cans, glaring. So he ran over to her. She dominates him, like Angela Lansbury dominates Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, the saddest film ever made.

Did you know that my Website gets hacked once a week? My Web designer finally figured out a way to make sure that the hackers will almost certainly never take down my site again. It’s ingenious. Jason Davis is his name. Even if the site you see is taken down, the actual site is not even online. It’s protected and will remain available as long as there’s an Internet.

Twitter is full of predators who try to inflict damage on me for defending Israel and Jews.

This one is an adult man named “Pooblocks.” That must mean he makes blocks from poo and plays with them.

What these Jew-hating hominids do is attack you in every way possible EXCEPT with facts. And they’ll never stop. Today I was asked to repost my tally of Palestinians killed in Operation Protective Edge.

Someone told me that the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center—which accepts Palestinian casualty figures as gospel—can’t call the Palestinians liars because the global press would then accuse the Center of bias.

The global press is already portraying Israel as a lawless, genocidal, fascist state. No amount of caution exercised by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center will change the minds of Jew-haters. My approach is to tell the truth and let the cards fall where they may. When dealing with unstoppable predators, I fight without rules of engagement.

2. The suffering, miserable, desperate creature that continually makes terrible decisions that cause itself more pain, is completely unreachable, and forces me to witness its demise.

This has happened more times than I can count. My parents are only the most recent example. Their deaths were horrible and unnecessary, but I’ve had countless relationships with slow suicides who dragged me along for the ride. I’m oriented to search out such people; that’s just reality. We recreate formative experiences in the hopes that this time everything will go differently.

After decades I learned to avoid entanglements with the suicidal, but they have a kind of radar. While I no longer seek them out, they seek out and find me.

Even if they’re only cats.

Brother Cat is making me relive my relationships with every catastrophically self-destructive person I’ve ever known. I wish I could have a selective lobotomy to eradicate memories that serve no function.

3. Being forced to inflict suffering on someone in order to spare them worse suffering.

None of the doomed I’ve known have ever gone quietly. They’ve fought me every inch of the way. I’ll tell a story that I would’ve have a few years ago, but now I don’t care.

I once helped take care of a nasty, vicious woman. She lost her mind and told me that people were coming into her house at night, wearing her false teeth, and taking joyrides in her electric wheelchair. Her daughter lived closer to her than I did, but she couldn’t be bothered. I had to impose my will on this angry, insane woman to try and keep her safe. It was terribly unpleasant.

Eventually the woman died, and at the graveside the daughter read a totally bogus eulogy about what a wonderful person her mother was, and how they were as close as two testicles in a scrotum. The daughter wept theatrically. The second that the ceremony was over, a front-end loader drove up.

The gravediggers hooked the casket to the bucket with chains, the vehicle operator raised the lift arms, the gravediggers removed the plastic grass and boards covering the hole in the ground, and then KABOOM! The front-end loader simply dropped the casket into the grave. Right in front of all the mourners. A mushroom cloud of dust came out of the ground, so it looked like the coffin had exploded.

Tim, my mother, and I almost died trying not to laugh. My father was ashen.

“That’s the most appallingly insensitive thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” he snarled.

Mom let herself go in the car and laughed until the tears streamed down her face.

When she’d taper off, Tim or I would go, “KABOOM!” and she’d start snorting and crying again.

“We got twenty more to plant today!” Tim would say in my father’s voice (which my father never noticed). “We’re burnin’ daylight! Outta the way!”

I don’t care what anyone thinks: It was easily one of the funniest, most fitting things I’ve ever witnessed. Thinking about it has cheered me up. The woman was already dead, and nobody there believed that gloppy eulogy, so the front-end loader and mushroom cloud were refreshing touches of reality.

Tim is optimistic that I can save Brother Cat. I realize what saving Brother represents. I’ve decided to keep both cats, because there’s no guarantee that whomever adopts them will cut them enough slack. They’re impaired, just like I am. Most people demand perfection, but there’s no such thing here on earth.

Except for Poppin Joo Min-Jeong.