Thomas Wictor

Someone told me today that another big political writer thinks I’m crazy because I wrote a post about photographing the ghost of my dead cat Syd the Second on my front porch. This all stems from a post I wrote about Pallywood, which some bigwig political writer picked up, and then some other political writer interviewed me and told me straight out that he was going to portray me as insane, and after he did, the political bigwig writer recanted, and now a second political writer is making fun of him for…believing his own eyes? I don’t know. But I’m some kind of a nut!

I didn’t read the second article calling me crazy because it’s in Reason magazine. The title always struck me as smug, like people who choose user names such a “Truth Teller” or “Seeker.” What it comes down to is these people are all choosing to be suffocated by peer pressure. We’re back in elementary school. During the Bush years, people basically chanted, “You like Dick Chey-nee! You like Dick Chey-nee!”

And we were supposed to go, “I do not! Stop saying that!” Because the cool kids despised him, and we all want to be cool.

Well, I do like Dick Cheney. I find him warm, reassuring, trustworthy, and funny. This whole Darth Vader thing completely escaped me. But I’m crazy!

Here are the two photos I took of Syd the Second when he visited me recently.

And the other.

After the camera shutter clicked the second time, he was gone. I used no flash, and it was afternoon, but his little eyes glowed with the inner fire that I saw when he was alive. Ever seen a cat’s eyes glow in a photo taken during the daytime? Me either.

He was special. I don’t expect people who care only about politics to understand. But the political obsessives with whom I recently interacted are so desperate to prop up their idées fixe that they seized on my own beliefs in order to discredit me. They had to, because after all, my posts have the power to change the course of Operation Protective Edge! I talk to Bibi every night. He asks me for advice on how to run the war.

“Me you’re asking?” I ask.

My father couldn’t talk about anything unless it was utterly mundane: politics, breakfast, yard work, lunch, the oil industry, dinner, and the latest problem with his car or his health. That was it.

What’s fun about being crazy is that I can stun people into silence. I do it all the time. But you know what? There isn’t a single thing anyone could say or do to me that would make me lose my moorings. But others? The fear of being taunted for liking Dick Cheney makes people sell their souls. They compromise their very beings.

Tonight I’ll do my best to convince you that I’m much crazier than you ever thought.

I found this on my hat.

No idea what it is, but it dropped onto my hat when I said, “Mom? Are you there?” I was slumped at my desk, I called out to her, and I heard that whatever-it-is fall onto my hat with a little click. My hat was sitting on my scanner.

So I take that thing to mean that she is here. I scanned it and put it in a safe place. Mom and I didn’t get along in life, but after she died, she learned about everything and became the person she should’ve been. Yes, that’s what I think. Because I am not well. Two important political writers have deemed me so.

Mom could tell the future. This is a costume she made for me when I was five.

In the afternoons I go out and take pictures of the clouds. I believe that someday I’ll be able to walk on them. This was a really odd one that stayed over my house for hours.

There’s something…oceanic about it. I see a prehistoric fish in there.

See the two eyes and the smiling, fanged mouth? No? That’s all right. Today I got this e-mail.

Who are you, Lee? And it’s my last chance to do what? Want to hear about how I see my ghost cat? It’ll freak you out, and you’ll have to run to your political buddies and say, “I just had a conversation with some kind of a nut! I need a drink!”

You what I did one night? I kept seeing a chimp in my spoon, but only when the spoon was in a bowl of water and the overhead light was on. He drove me…nuts. I spent over an hour experimenting with my camera until I was able to capture him. Since I couldn’t use the flash, I had to squat and brace my arms on the sink. The exposure time was over a second. But I did it.

I consider it one of the greatest photos I’ve ever taken.

Recently I got a sign from God that everything’s going to be okay. Here it is.

How could I interpret it any other way? Yes, yes, I know: I’m supposed to be a sad doorknob because you think I’m nuts.

“Awwwwwwwwwwwww…”

Let me give you something that’ll really make you think I’m nuts.

When I went to my senior prom, the after party was held at in a house at the apex of a cul-de-sac. I didn’t drink or get high. Since I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life, and since my gorgeous Colombian date just wanted to be friends, I went out and aimlessly wandered the woods behind the house, where I came a cross a guy named Mouse. I asked him for a cigarette, and he gave ten Rothmans King Size.

I thanked him, even though I didn’t like Rothmans. They had a chemical taste, I thought. For the twenty years I smoked, I was a Marlboro man. But it was ten free cigarettes, so I put them in my jacket pocket and smoked them one at a time.

My date’s parents picked us up and took me home, and after graduation I went to work on a shore-support base, loading supply ships that serviced the oil platforms in the north sea. It made me incredibly skinny and strong, and it made my brother Tim’s hair curly.

One day I called a guy to buy some hash. Pot and hash dealers are really sociable, in a smarmy, insufferable way, so he had to come pick me up and drive me to his house to make the sale.

As we passed a house in the middle of a block, he told me something really scandalous about the girl who lived there, the one who’d thrown the senior-prom party.

“When did they move to that house?” I asked.

He frowned at me. “Six years ago. They’ve been in that house ever since they came to Norway.”

So I stewed about it for a while, and then the next time I ran into Mouse, I asked him if he remembered giving me ten Rothmans cigarettes at the senior-prom party.

“Sure.”

“Well, this is a weird question, but was the house in a cul-de-sac or in the middle of a block?”

I got the same frown again. “In the middle of a block. Of course.”

Guess what? I asked eight people, and they all told me the same thing: The senior-prom party was held in a house in the middle of a block, not in a cul-de-sac. But I remember it as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I can still picture the trees, where my date’s parents stopped when they let us out, and the curvy flagstone walkway that went to the front door.

Maybe I switched places with another me from another dimension. If so, that means this was supposed to be his life, not mine. Bastard.

I’ll end with a message for everyone who thinks I’m crazy.