Thomas Wictor

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 to give the wrong impression. If people get the wrong impression, they might not buy my books. I’m not worried if people get the wrong impression about me personally. I’m sure they do anyway, since I’m not capable of communicating effectively with most of my fellow humans.

Here’s the instruction to which I’ll respond.

Remove all references to being set up for life with money from your father/mother.

Well, you need to understand that I’m talking about ME being set up for life by my parents, and I mentioned it in the context of telling Mike Albee and Lura Dold that the money they stole from me wouldn’t ruin my life, and that people shouldn’t worry about me even though my writing career has been destroyed for the third time. A huge number of messages ask me how I survive. I’ve mentioned my parents’ legacy as an explanation.

But there are qualifiers.

I can’t travel. I can’t eat out. I have no social interaction whatsoever. I drive a fifteen-year-old car. I buy all my clothes at Target. I live in a one-bedroom house built in 1913.

When I say I’m set up for life, it’s that life, a life with no expenses. A completely internal life in all senses of the word.

Do you want to trade places with me? I couldn’t attend my mother’s funeral or burial because the stress of it would’ve made me vomit uncontrollably. This is what I have to take every night.

I’ll be swallowing these for the rest of my life, which statistically won’t last much longer. Both my parents died of cancer and heart disease, so I have a 100 percent chance of contracting one or the other. Or both.

If you want a peek inside my head, send me an e-mail, and I’ll give you a free e-book copy of Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian. For Christ’s sake, don’t envy me. Would any amount of money compensate you for the loss of absolutely everything you ever loved? Everything.

The main reasons I mentioned my parents’ legacies is to assure concerned people that I won’t starve; to fully credit my flawed but ultimately generous parents; and to say, “Fuck you!” to Mike Albee, Lura Dold, and Becca Pilkington. Con artists have orgasms over the idea that they screwed someone. I want these vacuous, greedy, amoral muroids to know that despite their considerable predation, they didn’t break me.

Okay, now I’m pissed. I was going to address only one of the instructions sent to me, but here’s another.

You’re not a loser. Never disparage yourself.

Sorry. All I have left is the truth, and the truth is that I do everything wrong. I thought that revealing the dollar figure that Mike Albee, Lura Dold, and Becca Pilkington stole would underscore the seriousness of their crime, but—and I’ve been told this twice now—all it did was make people jealous that I had that amount of money to “blow.”

That was most of my life’s savings. If my parents hadn’t died when they did, I’d be living in my car. The majority of my adult life was spent at or below the poverty line. But the journalists and bloggers I contacted thought I was a high roller, so nobody cared. Our culture has sunk so far into this moronic class warfare crap that people figured I got what I deserved, since I was an evil one percenter.

It’s amazing how out of touch I am with the Zeitgeist. My sympathies are always with the person who got raped, regardless of their station in life. And on top of it all, Mike Albee, Lura Dold, and Becca Pilkington cleaned me out. It took the deaths of my parents to save me. Do you still envy me? You know what was required of me before I received that money? I chased and caught my screaming father to put diapers on him, since he apparently thought he’d could outrun death more easily if he were naked from the waist down.

Then Tim and I had to chose which parent to save, since we couldn’t save them both. Then we had to agree to the withholding of Dad’s medication that would prolong his life. We had to sit with a hospice nurse and take on the legal and moral responsibility of killing him, essentially.

I put my proof copy of Chasing the Last Whale into my mother’s hands three days before she died. That was the last time I saw her. Tim told me that I shouldn’t go back to the hospital because she’d become a living corpse, unconscious but crying and screaming.

And none of this touches on what Tim and I discovered after our parents died. I can’t ever discuss that because it’ll just blow up in my face the way it did when I described how Mike Albee, Lura Dold, and Becca Pilkington fucked me.

The irony is that I wrote books on how to overcome horrendous abuse and trauma, I got utterly reamed when trying to market them, and when it was over, some people were happy that I lost my shirt.

It’s not a mindset that I understand. But I’m not interested in understanding it. Anyone who’s glad that someone got victimized is not precisely human. I’m better than those…things.

Now, get this straight: I’m a LOSER. You need to understand that I’M ALLOWED TO SAY THIS ABOUT MYSELF. If you don’t want to hear it, then don’t read my blog or books. When I say I’m a loser, I’m not talking about you. There’s no need to be threatened. There are losers in life, and I’m one of them.

One of my great pleasures is writing utterly without inhibition or fear of repercussions. I will continue to do that. You have to decide whether or not you’re strong enough to take what I dish out. If it upsets you, go away. My feelings won’t be hurt.

Nobody can say or do anything that’ll hurt me. I am utterly immune. But it came at such a cost that if you envy me, you’re out of your mind. Seriously. Read Hallucinabulia and then tell me if you have even the slightest dollop of envy.

And that’s a bowdlerized version of my reality. None of you could take what’s really inside my head. Count yourself lucky that you’ll never know.