Of course, the news of the massacre in Uvalde upset me a great deal.  But my grief comes with the understanding that anger and sadness alone won't do anything about incidents such as the massacre in Uvalde as long as people keep electing (primarily) Republican leaders who do nothing to make assault weapons, large magazines, etc. harder to get..  I see no point in carrying any outrage around for an extended period of time unless I do something constructive with it.  I endorse Beto O'Rourke for governor, because his long shot chances of beating an entrenched incumbent in Gregg Abbott at least give me SOMEWHERE I can direct all  I want to direct in the way of enacting change to this ridiculous situation we've found ourselves in since the days of Charles Whitman.

Right now, I don't stand willing to do anything personally other than blog about this topic on a platform that registers about twenty-five page views a week, so I have no incentive to carry around huge amounts of anger and outrage in light of my (supposedly) tiny audience.  I'll see if I'm willing to do more than write about this stuff in the time leading up to the midterm election.  Until then, I just urge readers to know where the people that supposedly represent them stand on this issue of easy gun access for disturbed people and make up their minds on whether or not they want those politicians to continue to represent them.

My last post brought up the notion that, once again, I managed to fall in love with the wrong person these past several years.  Of course, I still have some thoughts of getting with this person someway, somehow in the foreseeable future, but my prevailing thoughts involve the realization that these past several years really saw me manage what amounts to a key element of my mental illness.  So, on the one hand I cared for this person a great deal and wanted more than anything a resolution we could both live with, whether that outcome involved getting together with this person or not, but on the other hand, I've been down this same road so many times by now, I saw the whole process with a detached, almost clinical eye.  So yeah, on the one hand, I experienced the stuff of poems and songs and whatnot, but on the other hand, I tried to manage this situation much in the same way as someone would manage their diabetes or high blood pressure.   For me that mainly involved questioning automatic, long held assumptions about what a good person would do in such a situation, and whether or not efforts to create a manageable distance between myself and this person would make me into some bad person I could no longer recognize.  I think my one big try at reaching out to her put all of those apprehensions I and others might have had about whether my efforts to achieve a separation of identity between myself and this girl...I think I did alright by her and by me both, and I'm satisfied that I did all I could.   So yeah, for me, I see situations that arise of this nature more along the lines of managing a chronic illness such as diabetes or high blood pressure than as some great opportunity to, at long last, find true, everlasting love. 

I heard a youngish mother say that to her son as she played with her kids in the yard while I went on my walk this evening.  She smiled at me when I looked over at her with her kids as I walked by.  So yeah, I'll take that out of context and apply it to my situation.  I'd say "game over" to the situation that developed between myself and that young woman over these three-plus years.

Playing her the same way I played it with Sara in 1988 emotionally prepared me for the realities she presented to me.  All she managed to get away with consisted of having several boyfriends in succession -boyfriends who weren't me- during the time she remained on my docket.  Ho-hum.

I'll say it again: I played to the idea, right up front, that I could totally accept an outcome where we don't become boyfriend and girlfriend.  I didn't just have that acceptance in my back pocket while in reality I tried to come off as some great guy who really, really tried first to make things work out for us, either.  Nope, I stood willing to let any opportunity I saw to get with her slip through my fingers, for shits and grins if nothing else.  Just to see what happened.  Yep, "turning my back on love."  I could write a how-to book on how a guy with a major mental illness can handle a tendency to fall in love with the wrong person.  A tendency that greatly contributes to his mental and emotional instability should he be twenty years old, undiagnosed, and experiencing all of that for the first time.  For the first time in all its psychotic intensity, that is.

Yeah, I called it "falling in love," During  that whole time I dealt with her I took care to say things such as, "I care for her," or "I'm fond of her," but a lot of people would call what I experienced, one-sided though I now could label it; a lot of people would call my experience falling in love.  Well, alright then.  That might best describe the whole state of feeling utterly consumed by thoughts and feelings for someone who just...was never there, for all I can tell.

Yep, I acted in both of our best interests the whole time, just as I said I would.   That definitely put me one up on her, in my opinion.  I never considered it in her best interest for her to get some seriously wounding licks in on me, and that never happened.  And I never considered it in my best interest, and I still don't, to try and "reciprocate" with hateful or hurtful attitudes and behaviors towards her.  That never happened either, and won't happen, if I have anything to say about it, and I do.  Game over.  I am the winner.  Nice try, punk.  Now hit the showers.   

In my last post I pointed out that I never once tried to retaliate against "Jenna" in the aftermath of that whole time around her in 1991/'92.  I want to emphasize too: she acted so snottily and condescendingly towards me at times in the wake of my attempts to resolve the situation during the Summer of 1992.  She was not an easy one to deal with at any point.

In the wake of my successful effort to make things right with Jenna in June of 1992, the notion entered my head that Jenna had been sexually abused by her dad when she was a very young child.   To be sure, Jenna acted so cruelly towards me on more than one occasion, but the fact that she still held herself together to the extent that she did when I knew her, and tried to make a go of it in life given the history I guessed at about her lent some honor to her struggles.  After I had those notions of her history, the thought of ever trying to mete out some proportional notion of retribution towards her never, ever, at any one time, ever crossed my mind.

This young woman who, I guess, still resides on my docket as an issue might have some kind of history, or maybe she's just a brat with a supreme sense of entitlement that makes her feel as if God is on her side whenever she does what ever she tried to do to me up until about six months ago.  Wherever she came from with her shit towards me, something I read in David Burns' Feeling Good pops into my head every time the notion of proportional retaliation on my part towards her crosses my mind: people never feel as if they deserve retaliation.  The FACT that she simply would NEVER feel as if she deserved my attempts at retribution nullifies any desire on my part to get back at her.  People simply don't think that way.

I look at my last post as an attempt to zero in on what all transpires behind the scenes in my world.  I now stand prepared to say that I don't believe that young woman will show up anywhere, anytime soon in my world.  I doubt she will come to my comic book sale this Saturday, I don't actually know where she works, I don't know of any way to get in touch with her, and in the interest of keeping the peace, I have no desire to track her down in any way.

My experiences of these kinds of deals tells me that people in my world may worry about me now.  That means they may worry on my behalf about my overall well being and state of mind, and many may worry about whether or not I will retaliate or act out in any way in light of how I saw things going on and where the place I perceived that young woman as coming from in regards to how she did actually interact and engage with me.

Some people seemed to have those kinds of concerns in the aftermath of my transcendent moment with "Linda" back in December of 1988.  I had a similarly transcendent moment with that young woman last October, and people may think that now some pendulum swing in the other direction may come.  The problem with that line of thinking resides in the fact that things don't really work that way.  I'm fully capable of learning from my past mistakes, and that includes whatever mistakes I made in regards to my deal with Linda.

I never acted out in the wake of my transcendent moment with "Jenna" in 1992. Instead, I merely had a gran mal meltdown that led to two hospitalizations and a mental illness diagnosis, but acting out, nope.  What I did do "in retaliation" to what all went down in those days concerning Jenna can be found in my production of fourteen eighty page comic books and some songs i wrote over the years that wholly deal with that time or refer to that time in part. 

Man, it would be nice if my perception of the other day that some attractive women seemed to give me more love than usual contained some truth, and that this love could go on and on and blossom, but I don't know about that. In the aftermath of my transcendent moment with Linda in 1988, it seemed as if some people didn't at all see me as the cast off, discarded person I often saw myself as during that time.  I'll try to keep that in mind.

For some reason I'm feeling more loved than usual from some women I incidentally encounter in my world.  I wonder if that young woman I used to go and on about on this blog has anything to do with it?  As long as I feel this way, I want that young woman to come to my comic book sale at Bat City Comics from 12 to 6 PM this Saturday, May 7th.  I went to that business where I thought I saw her last, and no luck there.  She may not work there at all.  I'll go in there for a few times more, but I might come up empty.  Oh well, if some women in my world want to continue to act nice towards me, I've got no problem with that.

I now have a Patreon page.  Look up Richard Alexander, Jr/Richy Vegas or maybe Richard_Alexander or something like that.  I'm just now coming down off of the high of fantasizing about my Patreon page hitting big.  Now I'm beginning to think it will shake out about as well as my Bandcamp page and my YouTube Channel.  In other words, not so much.  Compared to my Bandcamp and YouTube presence, my store on this website bears witness to my most successful web presence.  I have actually sold books from my store, whereas I seem to register the most hits on my YouTube channel due to my own views of my music videos, and I've never sold a CD on Bandcamp, and I've had a couple of friends and family buy a digital album, and that's about it.  All of this lack of a prominent profile online leads me to label my future updates and behind the scenes posts on Patreon "The Ghost Cathedral."  The name suggest a "build it, and no one will come," realization about my web presence. 

David Bowie and Marc Bolan formed two distinct schools of early '70's Glam Rock.  Bowie very much sought to expand upon the Beatles' approach to rock and pop music as potential avenues to make serious art.  The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars saw Bowie employ serious themes of the Earth's imminent demise due to mankind's depletion of her natural resources bah, blah, blah...  Marc Bolan, founder of T Rex, rejected the notion that all rock and pop music HAD to come off as serious art in the wake of the Beatles' "improvements" to the idiom, and so wrote self-conciously throw-away, idiotic lyrics such as "They call me the jeepster for your love."

Sweet, which came to prominence in the U.K. right around the time of the rise of both Bowie and T Rex, fall into the T Rex category of rock and roll as silly, energetic, teen-oriented music.  I mean, I just tried to load The Best of Sweet into my disc drive to glean the profound lyrical content of "Wig-wam Bam," and my disc drive promptly spat the CD back out at me!  Apparently this Sweet CD is too Stoopid for even my disc drive to want to play.  Oh well, like Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt said, "Good taste is the last refuge of the unimaginative," and no one will ever accuse a disc drive of having an imagination, after all.

So....

"Hiawatha didn't bother too much
About Minnehaha and her tender touch
'Til she took him to the silver stream
Then she whispered words like he'd never heard
That made him all shudder inside when she said
​
Wig-wam bam, gonna make you my man
Wam bam bam, gonna get you if I can
Wig-wam bam, wanna make you understand
Try a little touch, try a little too much
just try a little wig-wam bam."

Save for a couple of dog tracks at the end of the CD, The Best of Sweet has mostly fun tracks that approach and sometimes equal, but never quite top lyrics like the above.  Great drums throughout.

I talked to a barista the other day about my creative process on my comic books.  I told her I  wanted to try to spend my next drawing session sketching out architectural interiors in a sketchbook so that I will have viable reference images for my next series of Richy Vegas Comics.  I told her I didn't usually do that.  She commended me on my willingness to grow, even at this stage of my development.  Well, I tried to sketch out some detailed reference drawings of several interiors, but only came up with hastily drawn, barely sketched out drawings of a few interiors.  I guess I'm just not a sketchbook guy.  I can kind of use some of those drawings, but I'll probably come up with proper reference drawings in the books themselves as I go along from issue to issue illustrating each one.  I think I usually handle a lot of my reference in that manner.  I did good to go out and snap some pictures for my last series of books and use a few of the images in "The Legend of Richy Vegas."

I started taking banjo lessons two months ago.  I want to play banjo on a bunch of songs for my upcoming album, Songs For Schmaylor Schmift.  I especially want to use it on, `'Pardon Me Young Lady (But You've Double Parked Your Broom), "Asshole Woman Lake," "Never Was Her Guy," and maybe some others. I'm going to try rock arrangements on "Punks Three," and "Astride the Well of Hope."  I'm shooting for Songs For Schmaylor Schmift to come in at about sixty-five percent of the quality level of my last album, I Make Country Music Records, Sir. That'll give me room to experiment with banjo and electronic drums, as well as not worry about every song bangin'. I'm also trying to learn on the drum pad right now, with hopes of learning on the electronic drum kit by the Fall.  I'm shooting for Fall, 2023, as my recording date.