Thomas Wictor

Terrible migraine all day. I can’t think, so I’m going to post something from September 22, 2013. I wrote it before the 2014 Gaza war, which was when the death threats became a daily thing. Wouldn’t it be funny if it weren’t a migraine but actually a cerebral hemorrhage? I’ll know in the morning.

Detox

I did it. Through sheer willpower, I’ve broken the last of my really bad habits. This was one of the most corrosive. It’s been several days now, and I’m still clean. The detox worked.

After changing so much about myself, I still couldn’t stop going on a particular Website and fighting with strangers. I have several lists of facts on my computer desktop, which I no longer need to access because I’ve memorized them. What I’d do is impeach people who repeated popular memes.

“If what you’re saying is true, then why—?” And I’d reel off a fact that would demolish the meme and leave the repeater looking like an idiot.

I have an account on that Website. People leave comments on your page or send you private messages. Here’s one of the messages I got:

jew pig

—————where do you live in socal you dirty kike……i actually am living out in compton right now with my cousins and we got lots of toys for your jew ass…….ak/47s, mac 10s and 11s, and a street sweeper…….give me your address and I’ll come thru you little jew bitch……actually you’re probably too scared to let me know where you live…so how bout this..i’ll tell you EXACTLY where i stay……you can find me on comptons eastside…right across from (redacted) off (redacted) and (redacted)……i’m on the (redacted) block housing projects and my unit is (redacted)…..we be out front all day and night so if you got the balls 2 roll thru….come see me jew…put your money where your mouth is and i guarentee i’ll put you in an oven…ha hahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Lets do this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You’re asking yourself, “Why in the world would you engage people like that?”

Migraine not helped

Hate. I hate them. So I took great pleasure in mocking them, taunting them, and making them grind their teeth in impotent rage. When they were reduced to sending me death threats or blocking me, I counted that as a victory.

Utterly pointless and unhealthy. I hated them so much that my confrontations induced rotational vertigo attacks from the Meniere’s disease. There was no question that I had to stop, but it was impossible. I’d fight about the same things every day, over and over. It was more than a habit; it was an addiction.

And then one evening, I just said, “Enough.” I stopped cold turkey. As of right now, I have no urge to go back. It’d reached a crescendo of negativity. I could easily admit to myself that I did it only to be destructive, to assault those who I consider despicable and repulsive and who assault others. The challenge was to be even more toxic than they were. So I had to stop.

Online fights served no purpose whatsoever. I didn’t get involved in them for any reason other than to mock and insult people who I hate. Mocking and insulting them didn’t change anything. All it did was give me a migraine and make me dizzy and nauseated. I’ve been aware for a long, long time that I had to stop, and now I finally have. It’s a great relief.

I hate people like that because they’re brainless, they refuse to change, and they’re robots. But what’s more brainless than fighting with people who you know you can never reach and for whom you feel nothing but disgust? My own need to have these fights was itself a refusal to change. I knew that. I knew that. But I did it anyway. I may as well have been a robot myself, going through preprogrammed actions.

King migraine

In the last year of his life, my father made a lot of out-of-the-blue admissions. It was his way of acknowledging his terminal illness, even though he also denied it to the end. I didn’t know he was terminally ill, but I suspected that something was very wrong with him, since he changed in appearance so radically. He became hairless and feminine, and he developed red apple cheeks. Tim and I thought it was an endocrinological collapse due to his completely out-of-control diabetes. In retrospect it was his Stage IV metastasized bone cancer.

Dad always made his admissions in the car. He was a monologist anyway, but in a car, his monologues turned into stream-of-consciousness performance art. When we were children, he insisted on perfect silence in the car, so it’s clear to me that his own parents did the same to him. All his life he slammed doors hard enough to break them. I therefore assume he was told to not slam doors.

His mother slammed me on the back with her open palm a few times. It was amazingly painful, as though she’d burned me with an iron. Dad’s automotive performance art had to be rebellion against his long-dead, child-slamming mother.

One day in the car, about eight months before he died, Dad told me something that I won’t repeat. It surprised the hell out of me because it goes against everything I thought I knew about him, so repeating it would shock and horrify other members of my family and Dad’s family. He finished this admission by saying, “I knew I shoulda kept my mouth shut, but I didn’t.”

Not keeping his mouth shut cost him quite a lot. But this wasn’t really an admission of bad judgment. If I’d said anything in response to Dad’s monologue, he would’ve gotten defensive and then truculent. He was a master of mind-boggling truculence. Someday I’ll tell the story of how his truculence almost made me hit him in the face with a shovel.

This one.

My brother Tim loves to imitate how I came over to his house to demand that he help me so that I wouldn’t murder our father. I was the color of a plum.

None of this is relevant.

Migraine receding

My point is that I’m my father’s son. He knew that he should’ve kept his mouth shut, but he didn’t. I’ve known for a long time that I needed to stop having online fights with insane strangers about things neither of us can change.

Refraining from online fights is a small step, but since I’m my father’s son, it’s the equivalent of fifty thousand miles for a normal human. I can go to bed tonight slightly improved from where I was when I got up this morning.

Progress.