Sorry to interrupt the Phone Guys marathon, but I really ought to be posting something here, I suppose.

I am in the midst of a twenty year low, as far as my mental health is concerned. Twenty years exceeds the age of this website, so if we take the Book Of PDR as the record of my adult life, I am at my all-time low.

I feel like anyone who happens to read this can see the many ways our society is being ruined by those with power and whose only concern is remaining powerful. Obviously that is a big part of the problem for me. I wish I could do anything about that, but I don’t see how. People who function in society more successfully than I do would probably say something like “if you’re upset about things you can’t change, just focus on what you can.” And that sounds like solid advice, but I have lost faith that I can change anything.

I don’t have the mental energy to get through my weekly obligations and have energy left for the things I want to do in life. And that only causes a feedback loop because back in 2012 or whenever I quit a job I hated with the intent to go back to school and find my path to a more creative career. Now, thirteen years later, I seem further from that creative career than I was then. My life now consists of trying to pay off a student loan for a degree I did not manage to get and trying to pay for a vehicle I only have because I need it for the job I have to pay off the student loans and the car I have for the job. And, of course, rent for an apartment where I have no choice, but if I go anywhere else I’m paying far more. I’m trapped in a cycle. And, as I get older, that distance from what I want to be doing and what I am doing makes me lose more and more sleep which just makes me more and more tired as I continue the cycle.

And I want it on the record, I have a three day weekend! It may not fall on the days I’ve repeatedly asked for, but it’s still three days off work every week. Most people don’t have that and most people seem to get by just fine, so I’m left assuming that I’m just broken in some important way. I don’t understand how other people get by. At least one friend of mine said it is alcohol that helps those people, but even if I wanted to start drinking (now would be a better time than ever before, I suppose) I also don’t understand how people can afford things like alcohol or cigarettes or the other addictive mollifiers that are so popular. I don’t understand how people manage to be people in general. Whatever training people got to get through life, I did not get. Or, as I said, I’m just broken.

Every week, creative stuff has to be the lowest priority on my schedule. There’s work. There’s fucking sleep. Anything else has to be crammed in the available slots. If I visit my friends or my family, that’s most of an evening gone, so I can’t do my creative projects. Especially when I visit my niblings. They may be the most important people I know, but it is simply exhausting for me to spend an evening with them. As a result my options are to NOT visit my friends and family, which isn’t a real option, or to do that instead of working on my stuff and then have a little resentment that I spent that time with loved ones. And even this was easier when I had my weekends falling on actual weekends…

Or suppose I want to relax by reading a book or watching a movie or, heaven forbid, playing a computer game. These are the things that actually make me feel less exhausted. But they still take time. If I spent a day playing a cool mystery game (like The Roottrees Are Dead, to name one I did during this depressive period) I come out of it feeling great, energized, ready to work on something of my own. I want to take that energy and channel it into something, but before I know it, my time off is over and that energy gets to be channelled into my job instead. So I resent playing games, or watching movies, or reading, because they aren’t what I want to do either.

I come to resent time spent cooking. I resent time spent cleaning. I resent time spent going for a nice walk or catching up on the news (okay, maybe that one I’d resent either way). Anything I have to do that isn’t being creative, I come to resent. And since all of that has to be prioritized above creativity, I wind up resenting everything I do. I have to do all that stuff and maybe by the end of the week I have one new page written, one new page for a colouring book, one more small whatever and then at the end of a few months like that I notice the year is almost over and I have ten pages of writing and three pages of a colouring book, and that isn’t enough. It’s not worth the exhaustion.

So these last few months, I’ve just given up. I don’t even work on that one page a week anymore. All my biggest project ideas are now revealed as pipe dreams. I still idly tinker on things, I don’t think I’d be physically able to stop that, but whatever it will take for me to get back to working on the things I want to work on is something I can not currently fathom.

Maybe I need someone to explain the secret of how humans live or maybe I need an end to fascism. Who can say?

As I’ve noted, this has been a summer of dental work for ol’ PDR. Well, just yesterday I got my final cavity filled. I may not have as many teeth as I did last year, but the ones I do have left are free of holes.

Now, I’m tempted to think “Well, with that taken care of, I can clearly go another 25 years without going to the dentist.” But that would be foolish. I’m going to make an earnest effort next year, when I have money again, to get in there for a checkup.

I’m gonna try.

Here’s a thing about PDR: I hadn’t been to the dentist in the entire time I have had this site. Even if we count Contains2! Basically, I hadn’t been to see a dentist since at some point in my late teens. I’d estimate it as being about twenty-five years since the last time my teeth have been professionally cleaned.

There are plenty of reasons for it. Foremost is the money. Dentists are expensive and most of those twenty-five years were not times I had a lot of money. But even during my brief era of having cash, I didn’t go. I always took pretty good care of my teeth, I though, so was it needed? I’m generally nocturnal, so making dental appointments is annoying. Probably there was some fear of dental pain in play, but I don’t know. In any case, decades pass faster than we want them to.

A couple months ago one of my teeth broke in half. Basically, I couldn’t remain indifferent, it was time to go to a dentist. So last Friday I finally got in there for a checkup. The news wasn’t great. Five cavities and two teeth that need to be removed (including that broken one, of course). Sure, it’s 25 years worth of dental problems all at once, but it still feels like a lot. It definitely made me doubt that I was actually taking good care of my teeth in all that time.

But yesterday I had my first dental cleaning in all that time. This time it felt like I got a better response. The hygienist tells me that my teeth actually did not have as much buildup as would be expected in all that time. Sure, still five cavities and two teeth that need to come out (scheduled for the 31st), but hey, at least those hole-ridden teeth don’t have a lot of buildup.

Let’s just hope that the money lasts for a while…

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.

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.