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 have mentioned this on Twitter, but then I remembered that the thing that puts my Twitter posts on my site hasn’t worked for like three years, and the site is supposed to be my actual repository of PDR knowledge, so I should be mentioning it here. So now I will.

I am, as always, going through financial difficulties. The solution is that I will be going through bankruptcy. While the process hasn’t officially begun yet, I’ve been working toward it for a couple months now. At some point I decided I would start a “bankruptcy beard” which I will not shave until I am through. It has been about a month so far and this is what it looks like.

This is about the longest I’ve been with facial hair in my life, and I will soon be entering uncharted waters. I’ve got about ten months left to go, so lets see how far I can go. And maybe having a beard will probably make the wizards who control the universe like me.

Hey, it’s PDR! The PDR from now, in 2017, not the PDR from 2016 who scheduled all those posts this month. 2016 PDR left November 30th blank with a note that told me-now-PDR to put a PDR Update here.

Well, the main thing on my plate right now is some seemingly expensive car repairs. It seems my shift motor has corroded. That’s punching my wallet right in the nuts, that’s for sure. Apart from that, things are as they have been all year for me. 2017 has not been a great year for me, but neither has it been for the world at large, so at least I’m not alone in that.

Haiku!

Twenty-Seventeen.
My finances remain poor.
Not been a great year.

It’s not all been a bad year, though. I’ve been listening to the Superman radio show from the 40s as I drive, and during the serial “Is There Another Superman” there was a scene in which Batman and Robin were investigating and Robin got kinda bored, noticed it was snowing out, and sung a few bars of “White Christmas” only for Batman to reply: “I’ll Christmas you unless you pipe down” so now I know the best Batman line that has ever been written.

So anyway, we now go back to not having a new Super Sunday post every day. The site will probably feel pretty empty. I do still miss my Twitter posts manifesting here. That was nice.

Yesterday, I got out of jury selection because I am too poor. That kinda counts as a victory, right?

I got the summons to appear for selection for jury duty. I did that. I had to wake up to be at the place for 8:15 in the morning, at time when I am usually beginning my day’s sleep. The place was crowded with a few hundred other such potential jurors. There was a roll call done by verbally calling out names and responding with “here” that seems like an outdated method of dealing with this in this, the age of computers. Anyway, that took half an hour or so and then we had to wait another long while before the crowd was ushered into two courtrooms (because we couldn’t fit into one). The judge was introduced. Then we got the chance to ask to get out of it for “Medical, Employment, or Personal Hardship” reasons.

I overheard the judge tell one of the people asking to get let go that the trial was estimated to run about twenty days. Though jurors do get paid about forty dollars a day, that would leave me pretty darn broke. I got into line and presented my reasoning to the judge, that being on the jury is something I can’t afford. It seemed to me (or maybe I was just projecting my own guilt onto him) that the judge thought I was just being whiny, but he did accept it and allow me to go. That’s what really matters. And it isn’t like I was lying. I spent half of this year in shoes that were a size too small because I couldn’t afford new ones. Maybe I’m not going to die if I have to be on a jury, but it could seriously make me unable to pay bills and such.

And I didn’t even get into the fact that being awake in the daytime is a hassle. I would have been a real risk for falling asleep during the trial.

Anyway, it’s kind of a shame, because if I was in a financially stable situation, I’d actually be pretty interested in serving on a jury. Maybe someday down the line.

Probably time for an update. As I believe I mentioned last time, I have had to deal with various things of a monetary nature. The current status is that, for the first time in my life, I own a car and I own a flat screen television. The latter was free, so that was nice, but it turns out that cars are expensive and owning it is not immediately improving my economic situation. Hopefully this is one of those “in the long run” deals. Still, I’ve acquired two of the material goods that capitalism tells me should make me happy, right? (Side note: Do televisions get channels without cable, or is this thing just going to work with my laptop?)

If the site had an audience, they’d be noticing that SecGov has been stuck for a while. It’s just that with all the things I’ve had on the go, it has been the lowest priority. Hopefully once I get back into the swing of it, I’ll be able to push through and end it once and for all, because then I’ll have one less thing on the go and that’ll be nice.