Thomas Wictor

I don’t have a post tonight. My Website was hacked about five hundred times, and then I had to catch six almost newborn kittens and take them to the pound. I’m exhausted. But I have an announcement.

First, a clarification. In “Withdraw, but don’t be upset,” I wrote the following.

This is the secret about social media: You don’t know any of these people. The inventors of Twitter and Facebook and everything else deliberately used terms such as “friends” and “like,” but these aren’t your friends. How can they be? If you’ve never met someone, you’re not friends with them.

It’s not that I’m indifferent to the interactions I have with people on social media. All I meant was that if these people turn on me, it’s not painful. Many have turned on me. This is the nature of social media and attaining even a minuscule level of public notice.

The movie The King of Comedy is a very flawed film, but it has a perfect scene in it. Jerry Lewis is a late-night talk-show host in New York. He’s walking down the street, and there’s a woman at a payphone.

“Oh, Jerry, I love you!” she calls out to him.

“Thank you,” he says.

“My husband loves you too! He’s on the phone here. Could you please say hello to him? It would make him so happy!”

“I’m really sorry. I just don’t have time,” Lewis says. “I really have to be somewhere.”

“YOU SHOULD ONLY GET CANCER!” the woman screams.

I’ve had several turn-on-a-dime experiences with people on social media. My point is that you can’t let this sort of thing get to you. Social media encourages people to behave badly or at the very least, not recognize boundaries. People send me books they’ve written and want me to critique. They send me music they’ve composed. They tell me how I need to live my life. They tell me I’ve let them down by not writing what they want me to write.

The former love of my life is now a social-media weirdo who scooped out her head and replaced her individuality with a made-for-TV caricature. The person in these photos no longer exists.

If I took the 1988 “Carmen” forward into time and showed her what she’d become, she wouldn’t believe it. She laugh her horse laugh and accuse me of slipping her some LSD. Alas, it’s all real. What happens is you make a bunch of incremental decisions, and then one day you wake up dead. Your body lives on, but your soul is gone.

Yesterday, after two days of having my Website hacked by an entire team of Jew-haters, I went next door to feed Lyle Cat and discovered that his mother was in the bushes with six kittens whose eyes had just opened. Lyle had been acting very strange for days, hissing and pacing. This is the third litter that she’s had in my back yard. Of the first, I adopted two of them and the third died. The second litter of three all died, even though I began feeding them because they were getting comatose from starvation.

So this time I realized that the humane thing to do was take them to the pound. I tried to catch the mother with one of these traps.

She’s too smart. Brother Cat figured out that it was a trap; I watched him sit there and examine it, his head following all the bars and hinges, and then he just walked away. His mother did the same thing, but she moved all six of her kittens. I figured that was the end, because if we caught her without knowing where the kittens were they’d starve to death.

After Tim and I went over all our properties with flashlights, on a hunch we went back to the bushes, and there was the cat and her brood. The kittens had just opened their eyes, so they were attracted to the flashlights. All we had to do was wave the flashlights at them, and all six came right to us. We put them in a box and took them to the pound. They’re very cute, so I hope someone will adopt them.

The mother growled, and the kittens screeched as we caught them, so both my own cats became hysterical and then afraid of me after I came back from the pound. This is all the fault of the Peruvian who lives behind me. He collects ferals and refuses to have them spayed or neutered. Because of him, I had to take six kittens to their deaths, maybe, and now my own cats are afraid of me.

I’m pretty sick of people.

But I’ve been talked into something that initially I refused.

There’s going to be a short film made specifically about Operation Four Little Martyrs. It’ll be only fifteen to twenty minutes long, but since the director will be anonymous, we won’t pull any punches. This was Pierre Rehov’s idea. He wasn’t able to cover the whole story in his movie, so he suggested I have someone make a film only about this one deception.

I finally agreed, since it’s actually a pretty impressive piece of detective work. Tomorrow I’ll finish the script. No idea when it’ll come out, but it’ll be sooner rather than later.

It’s important that people see what Israel is up against.

And spay and neuter your cats if you let them run around outside. There are too many heartless pricks in this world, so stop being one.