I’ve received word from my father that Bart has died. Bart is the cockatiel that has been our family pet since a time that none of us can remember. This is him:

We don’t know exactly how old the little guy was, but I expect he was near twenty, possibly just above it. Bart did not have a very exciting life, but that is okay, he hated excitement. Bart was ever terrified of everything around him. The poor guy did not like anything close and would hiss at anything that he didn’t know that got too near (and often things he did know, too). And if anything close to him moved too quickly, it was just straight up panic time! For a bird, he was not a flyer. He almost never ventured further than his own cage (walking on the outside of the cage was his idea of getting out). What did he like? He liked chewing on plastic, being sprayed with water, and chirping. He is my favorite cockatiel.

Thanks for being around, little guy.

Assuming I remain capable of counting correctly, I am currently sporting nearly thirty mosquito bites on my person. I can’t remember having such a mosquito attack ever in my life. As far as my memory goes, most years I average only two or three bites all Summer. What the chunks is with this year?

Haiku!

What’s a ladybird?
That does not look like a bird.
The English are nuts.

Continuing my thoughts on insects, it does seem like when I was a child my experience with insects was more grasshoppers, ladybugs, and butterflies. Now it is more about moths, beg bugs, and fruit flies (thankfully not yet in the form of having bed bugs, but they do affect my life). This is probably simply explained by my moving from suburbs to city and switching from diurnal to nocturnal, but it still creates a sort of dividing wall between my youth and the now that I am finding interesting. I’m sure plenty of other such walls exist that I just haven’t given thoughts to yet.

Anyway, there are constants and they just happen to include my favorites, like ants and bees. Those guys are alright.

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a couple months, but keep forgetting: I found a grey hair on my chin. And not just some loose grey hair that happened to land there, either. It’s totally one I’m growing myself. I’m gonna be a big boy soon!

I tried to take a picture, but my camera doesn’t seem to be good enough to get such a fine image. You’ll all just have to trust me when I say that on the left side of my chin there’s a single white strand.

It’s a good thing for me that I already did my obsession with mortality when I was nine, because now I can experience growing slowly more distinguished without the knowledge of my fleeting youth weighing heavily on me. I pity the many who have been convinced by modern society to fight a battle that is literally impossible to win just because putting such a value on youth is helpful in keeping people unhappy, and thus swaying them to purchase what you’re selling. Or something like that.

After all, why would PDR have any desire to more resemble a generation he has no desire to be a part of? Right?

When I was a young man, I created a superhero. His name was Justice-Man. Click below if you want to read a story about him set exactly sixteen years ago:

It’s hard to read old pencil-on-paper scanned onto the computer (though I’ve had the Space Army up for years), but I just feel like Justice-Man is an important PDR creation who deserves to be on the site. Hopefully someday I’ll get a chance to revisit this character.

I was thinking, it has probably been over a decade since I’ve ridden a bicycle. It feels strange to know this. I had bikes as a kid, like, most of the time, I think. One of my first jobs involved me riding from place to place on bicycles. But then there was this Summer when I was seventeen or so where I had two bikes stolen from my shed, mere months apart, and after that I just didn’t get another one.

I live in the city side of the city now. There are more cars here than there were in Eastern Passage. I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be riding a bike on these streets. I am confident that I would still be physically able to ride a bike though. Remembering how to ride a bike is so easy that there’s an expression about it, after all.

It has also been bizarrely long since I have:

• Been to a dentist
• Eaten cereal
• Seen an episode of any Star Trek

What is the world coming to?