Every now and then I remember that this website is supposed to be a record of what goes on in my life. I mentioned some time ago that I grew a beard during my bankruptcy. What I don’t seem to have posted about is that after the bankruptcy was over, I did indeed celebrate by shaving, but then I grew it back. I still have it:

The thing is, I got a lot of compliments on the beard at the time, plus it is actually easier to have a beard than to fully shave. I’m lazy, so that appeals. But what really cemented my role as a beard-haver is that I have two little niblings now who only know me as a bearded person. I want to be the uncle they recognize, so any sudden changes to my style are not welcome. The only time I’ve fully shaved in the last few years was when I knew I had two weeks without work or family commitments, so I shaved it all and let it grew back over that fortnight.

I’m not saying I’ll be bearded forever on. As the kids grow they will be more accepting of varying levels of hirsuteness. And if some weird scenario happened, like the President of Star Trek saying I’d be allowed to play an alien on Star Trek but I had to shave all the hair on my head, obviously I’d do that. But for now, I guess I’m a bearded guy.

While I was outside of my apartment today, I checked my mail. Wacky, right? Mailboxes aren’t really that useful in these Internet Times, but I still check in there out of habit and to throw out flyers. It’s a boring chore. But not today! Today I got something of a surprise. I got something worth doing a post on this website!

Anyway. It’s like this. There’s a thing in the mail saying I had a month-old unpaid parking ticket. So far, this seems possible. I’m a delivery driver, I do a lot of illegal parking over the course of the night, but it was strange that I never got a ticket on my window. Then I notice that it says the ticket was issued at 9:27 am! What kind of PDR would I be if I were out and active at that ungodly hour? Certainly that’s not a time I’d be working. If anything, I’d be in bed, hiding from the sun.

But I can’t remember what I was doing on January 18th. What kind of sicko remembers things that far back? Well, I know that I send 75% of my errant thoughts to young Marq, so I open up our text conversation thread and scroll back a month to see what I was up to. It turns out that that was the very day I went out to get my Covid vaccine booster shot! Ah, so I had a reason to be out! It all makes sense again. BUT WAIT! I got my Booster at the Shoppers across the street from my apartment. I didn’t take the car. And anyway, the thing says the ticket was issued on University Avenue.

Still, I deserve a little comeuppance. And it’s only 35 dollars. My financial situation has been improving, this won’t crush me. I don’t worry about it while I work, though I do wonder if maybe I’d managed to get a ticket in my own parking space because someone didn’t know I lived there? And maybe some rebellious teens took the ticket away as a youthful prank? But that’s not on University Avenue. The contradictions are endless.

I figure that I can finally cease my wonderings when I get home from work and log onto the city’s website to look up the ticket. They have my plate number right there, sure, but the make and model shown are wrong. And to make things even more confusing, they’re showing the make and model and colour of my mother’s car. I wouldn’t have been driving her car a month ago, and even if I had it wouldn’t have had my plates on it.

Then I noticed they’ve got a picture. Obviously, I click that.

Sure enough, it shows a car of the same make and colour as my mother’s. And sure enough, it has a license plate one letter different from mine. Where one finds the letter “S” on my vehicle’s plate, there is, quite clearly, a “G” on this imposter.

Part of me wants to just ignore it. I’d love for them to take me to court when they have provided photographic proof that the car in question has a different make, model, and license plate than mine. But instead I’m probably gonna have to stay awake into normal business hours and talk to someone on the phone or something. Almost makes me want to just pay the $35.

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.