Well, this site is meant to be a monument to my life or whatever, so I really ought to mention that I got robbed at gunpoint for the first time yesterday.

I was, as usual, working my restaurant job and it went like this: Someone orders two large pizzas and a two-litre of pop for delivery, so I drive to the location. Pretty normal so far. There were no lights on in the place, so I call the number I’d been given and, after a few failed attempts, get through to the guy. He says something like “Oh, it’s actually 61-B, around back” so I go around back and there are still no lights on. But there are woods behind the place, and a man steps out of them. I’ve seen weirder on the job, so I just assume maybe he’d been over there smoking or something. He approaches and asked if I have change for a hundred dollar bill. I have a little bag with the money I use as a float, but I had taken in no cash that night, so all I had in there was what I bring at the start of the shift, which would have been just enough to give him his change if I used a bunch of coin. I ask him if he minds getting the coin, he says he did not, so I put the food and drink down on a patio chair in that back yard and I start counting coins to make the change.

As I’m trying to count the cash in the dark, he says “Hey” and I look up and he’s got a gun pointed in my face. I’m obviously flustered, so he I give him the money and leave the food (the pizzas still in the warmer bag I brought them in), and he starts yelling at me “Now get away from my house!” so I start leaving, but he notices I have a phone in my hand, and he makes me give him that as well. I remember giving an exasperated sigh when he asked for the phone. In fact, I don’t think I was at any point as scared as he hoped. Taking the phone, he again starts saying “Get away from my house!” and maybe “You have two seconds!” or something to that effect and there was something in his voice that made me assume he was trying to frighten me. I figure a man in that situation is probably himself scared, so I feel like he was maybe trying to get me more visibly scared as a power trip.

In any case, there’s no way that was actually that guy’s house. If it wasn’t just some sort of weird rambling, I feel like his repeated insistence that it was may have been some sort of “criminal mastermind” plan to make me assume he actually lived there to, I guess, throw us off the scent or something? In any case, this guy was an idiot and bad at robbing me. He got about forty or fifty dollars (largely in coin), sure. And I’m assuming he took the food, even if I didn’t see him do it. And, of course, my phone. But you know what he didn’t get? My effing wallet, which had at least twice that amount of money in it plus credit cards and whatnot, was in my pocket untouched. I don’t know what his transportation situation looked like, but if he’d taken both my phone and my car, he’d have left me stranded on that street and would have had a lot more of a lead for a getaway (not that he’d know I’d refuse to awaken the occupants of the home and would instead have walked to a gas station or whatever to get help). What I’m saying is he’s bad at his job.

I’ve got to say, I’m also kind of annoyed because I aim to live my life as a very boring person, and being able to honestly say “I’ve looked down the barrel of a gun being aimed at me with ill intent” is not as boring as I’d like. It’s probably more common in this world than I’d prefer, but it’s not boring.

But you know what I can say now that I actually have looked down that barrel and thought I might die in a moment and not even have time to mentally register that it happened? I can say this: I miss my phone! I have not gone five waking minutes since this happened without reaching for my phone. I am addicted to my phone and I don’t regret it. But what’s worse is the loss of photos and notes and text messages that were on there. I’ve been stubborn for too long about figuring out how “cloud storage” or whatever it is works. I’ll definitely bother to figure it out on the next phone, because the amount of stuff I’ve lost hurts.

For posterity, I did have that Google “Find My Device” thing on that phone, but I got my laptop even before I gave my statement to the police, so within a half hour of the robbery, and it could not detect the phone. I can only assume he destroyed the phone or something. I miss it so much.

I feel it would be appropriate to note on this site that my grandmother, Gladys Ryall, died earlier this week. She was 92 and was quite ready to go, but of course it is still sad to lose the last of my grandparents.

Here’s a story she told me one time: After she’d had fourteen children, she went to her priest to ask if it would be alright if she got her tubes tied. The priest, a Catholic priest, told her she had probably done her part for being fruitful and multiplying, so it would not be immoral. Then she went to her doctor and he told her that she was getting up in age and she probably shouldn’t bother because she was unlikely to have many more. She had four more children after that.

My robot character Gladys Blue, arguably the protagonist of Secret Government Robots, was of course named after her.

Since this site is meant to be a full chronicle of my life and times, even though I fail most of the time, it should be noted that on February 20th my father died suddenly. The following weeks has been a bit stressful and felt very long. And it was bookended by some hilariously-timed car troubles and apartment issues that just compounded things. I’m told that my father had expressed wishes that if he had to die, it would be sudden. He got that wish, though I’m sure he would have preferred it happen a decade or two down the line.

I have never liked the idea of sudden deaths. I mean, I’m not fond of death as a concept at all, but sudden death has always bugged me the most. It’s something I think about when I hear about car crashes or house fires or, in this case, unexpected cardiac arrest. I always think that the deceased had plans that they expected to get around to. And the more mundane the plans, the more it gets to me. The person in the car crash probably had a movie they were looking forward to seeing when it came out, for example. In the case of my father, he and my step-mother were planning a trip, which I’m sure would have been great, but what really got me was when I was at his place and I saw a book he’d taken out, presumably to read, and he never got the chance. I hate that kind of thing. I’ve seen people who argue that death gives life meaning, but I don’t agree. I’d be perfectly happy if we all got to live eternally and it was our own damn responsibility to inject meaning without external forces that ruin it for us and tell us that that makes it better.

Haiku!

This dumb universe.
It could be so much better.
Entropy is bad.

I feel like I much have mentioned this somewhere else on this site, but I went through my existential crisis of pondering my mortality at a very young age. I remember the changeover from nine-year-old PDR to ten-year-old PDR being particularly rough. I became aware that once I was out of single digit age, there would be no going back. I could tell then that I was just marching inexorably toward the grave and nothing could stop it. I lost a lot of sleep over it. I have distinct memories of lying awake in bed, picturing time as a flowing river and just trying to stop or slow the water. It never worked, and it never has since.

Time as a kid went by relatively slowly, but it was too fast for me. And now I’m at an age where every week flies by as if it were a day. I don’t lose as much sleep over it as I did, but it still bugs me.

It sure would be nice if there’s an afterlife where time doesn’t matter anymore, wouldn’t it? We could all read all the books we want.