I've developed a tendinitis issue in my playing hand.  That's my right hand.  My teacher says it's because I grip the pick too hard.  I've decided to switch over to a thumb pick and see how that goes.  So far so good.  The Astros are still in the post season, so I will concentrate on getting the change in strumming down and not do any open mikes until the Astros are out of it.

These past several years, I've had three pain in the ass women to deal with as bogus love interests.  One was that virgin girl, starting in September of 2014 to January 2015, who worked at that one business I talk about, the next was her friend, from May 2015 to August 2015, and again from early to mid-2016, and then there was the Invisible Woman, from the first of this year until last Summer.  All three represented major-shit ordeals that I had to see my way through, each one as bad as the other.  

But, you know what? I look around now, and there are no more love interests out there!  Not one.  I can go around to places in my day to day routine and know that NOT ONE woman in my world can level the accusation about me that I am trying to make them over into a love interest.  That used to be the thing for me to do, and I think that I am right in my assertion that the endless quest for a love interest led to the crash and burn dramas that I've somehow survived without death, serious maiming, or incarceration in a penal institution for the criminally insane or, alternately, a civilian state psychiatric facility.

These past several years, it's all been on these women who vie for this love interest status in my heart, but who seemed to have a much darker agenda that I managed to root out.  As for the Invisible Woman, and whether that was all in my head, all I have to say is that she is well on her way to being the total non-entity in my inner life that the two before her are at this point.  I'm better at smelling a rat.  That's all I have to say.  

I started having lunches at a club for people with mental illnesses last Winter.  Frequently there will be really attractive young social workers and students and interns of various kinds that will have some sort of doings at the place.  Anyway, there was this one very attractive female student who volunteered there one day a week as part of her studies.  She was twenty-seven years old, and she mentioned right off that she had a boyfriend in another large Texas city that she would see every weekend.

At any rate, she seemed to like me in spite of this fact.  Her time to volunteer ended, and I was not at all inclined to pursue some angle, real or imagined, with someone who had a serious boyfriend.  I just derived a bit of satisfaction from the notion that she might possibly have been somewhat attracted to me.

In the two books by Dr. David Burns that I've mentioned, Feeling Good and ​Intimate Connections, he emphasizes that when one discovers that one desirable person has an attraction to the reader, chances are that the reader might want to look around, because there might be others attracted to him or her as well.  It's a mojo thing: once a person gets their mojo workin', it can work its magic juju on more than one person.

That means that if one person has a logistical barrier such as a boyfriend, or a huge age difference as another example, it's not exactly as if some great tragedy is unfolding such as the story of Romeo and Juliet.  A person who is fortunate enough to at least maybe have more than one person with something of an interest in them can just say, "Well I like some of the qualities this person over here has, but some other qualities this person over here has don't make a very good fit, so I'll not really pursue that angle."

For me, that means that there is no one in my world who has any obligation whatsoever to follow through with me.  I understand all about how the realities of an attraction can put too much of a constraint on one person in regards to another, and the notion that love conquers all, while romantic, can just hit a wall.  

I get the sense that certain young women in my environment think I'm conceited.  Now, if I were to choose between having these young women think I was full of myself or that I am some marginalized person who would hurt them out of feelings of alienation or disenfranchisement from the mainstream of society, which would I choose?  I whole heartedly choose the former.  Yes, ladies, I think I am so great and all.

It reminds me of a Zatoichi where some Yakuza go after Ichi for no other reason than because he swaggers around, and they can't let him get away with that, can they?  They can't let this blind masseuse/ grifter/ drifter/ swordsman go around thinking he's better than the other Yakuza (Ichi identifies himself as a Yakuza).    So this instigator punk talks the crime bosses into going after Ichi for no other reason than to get a reputation for the lot of them.  Suffice to say, Ichi winds up going on a bit of a rampage at the end, but HE ONLY KILLS THE MEN, and they are all Yakuza punks, and it's only a movie.  Okay?

The first time I had a significantly younger female employee at a business I patronize attempt to, and in her case, succeed in shooting me down was with a girl named Kate at a coffee shop in 2005.  The last time anyone succeeded in really putting that kind of hurt on me was in 2007 at the same coffee shop.  I decided to go to another coffee shop.  The new coffee shop featured a female employee who succeeded in shooting me down in 2010.  I'd just kind of gotten fed up by that, so I really didn't care that much either way.

This problem has only gotten worse since I quit drinking and drugs in a concerted effort to improve my relationship with women in 2009.  It has gotten even significantly worse since I decided to revive the "turn my back on love" experiment in 2012.  The better I get at hitting the curve, the more they throw the curve.  I'm pretty satisfied with how I field this stuff these days, even though it's a pretty constant presence in my day to day life.

So when any young or youngish woman fires a shot across my bow, how do I regard it these days?  I admit, I get my hopes up for a while.  I thought about this tonight.  Now, when a young or youngish woman who works at a business I regularly patronize fires a perceived shot across my bow, what is the nature of the interaction that follows?   

Well, since Kate in 2005, I have been on zero dates with young or youngish female employees of businesses I patronize, shot across the bow or not.  I have had zero young or youngish female employees show up at a music show I was performing at a club.  One time I had a single young female show up with a group from the coffee shop at an art show at my house down the street.  She acted like she was there to get her teeth pulled.  I still like her to this day, though, she was pretty cool.  I showed up at a music show of a female employee from a cafe I used to go to.  I followed the usual rules of etiquette and didn't try to monopolize her time, and I just watched her perform, had nice things to say about her set, and left.

So what, if any, is the nature of any significant interaction between myself and a young or youngish female employee of a business I patronize after they have, as I put it, fired a shot across my bow?  These days that's about all that really happens, what is most significant is all that does not occur.  I do not come into said place of business with a raging hard-on the next occasion after said shot is fired across my bow in the hopes that I have at last found the love of my life.  I don't ask them on dates.  I don't invite them to any open mikes I might play that week.  I gave a comic book to a young woman who asked for one some time back, but I don't think I ever regarded her as a love interest.  If she reads this, I hope to dear god she doesn't take offense, I just mean to say that I don't regard such gestures either by myself or someone such as her as the start of something big.

So, zero dates, and with no dates, not much else.  What if someone of this category actually took an interest in me?  What would be my advice to them as to how to proceed?  I haven't the slightest idea, because that has never occurred.  I could only advise them to explore other options, such as someone closer to their age, in their social circle, who shares common interests that would all combine to make getting to know that guy better a lot easier than getting to know me better.  I mean, I guess I'm congenial enough, but other than that, I don't know.

I've both read the articles and looked at the naked ladies in Playboy for many years, off and on.  A few months ago I debated whether to get another subscription, put it off primarily for budgetary reasons, and what do you know, old Hef dies this past week or so.

Playboy and Penthouse had the most attractive models of all the jerk mags when I was a kid.  Penthouse won out as masturbation fodder by a mile because of the far more explicit pictorials with, again, usually very attractive models.  If you think I'm being a bit raw about all of this, you should read National Lampoon from the mid-to-late seventies up to the early eighties, because what I'm saying is nothing to how eloquently they could rhapsodize about the models in Penthouse and what all they would do while gazing upon yon lovely visages.

Penthouse's value as masturbation fodder greatly waned with the advent of, first the home video, and then the internet, to the point where, as explicit as Penthouse may be now,  it is even more of an obsolete anachronism than the mac daddy of the mens' mags that started it all: Hef's Playboy.  Playboy still has the interviews and the articles.  Right?  All Penthouse had even in its heyday was articles about alien abductions and whatnot.

The models were always very attractive in Playboy, what was a drag for me was the insistence on featuring large-breasted women.  As breast augmentation became more commonplace in the culture, one would see slender models in Playboy with large breast implants.  It got so bad that it seemed as if the art directors, Hefner being chief among them, seemed to prefer the models with breast implants over all the others.  It was as if Hef had to compromise in the sixties and early seventies, in that he had to feature women with some curves to have his large breasts, and with the coming of the Reagan Era eighties, the old mummy felt like he had the best of both worlds with slender, primarily blond models with large breast implants.  The most famous of these were Anna Nicole Smith, Jenny McCarthy, and Pam Anderson.  I think they were all Playmates of the Year, too.  For variety Hef would toss out a token Black model with large breast implants (Rene Tennyson), or a  token Latina with large breast implants (Stacy Sanchez), and make them Playmates of the Year.  Whoop-dee-doo!  It got so bad during the eighties and nineties that I remember reading a letter from a male reader that went out of its way to praise Playboy for featuring a very attractive model with small ​breasts.

Another beef I had with the pictorials centered around the use of primarily artificial indoor lighting.  This made the pictorial seem, as a raunchier skin mag my brother had in the seventies put it, "antiseptic."  The models had virtually no definition of shadow to their forms.  It's as if they were laid out like particularly appealing confections in a box rather than a real human with a real body occupying a definite space.  A Brazilian edition of Playboy I bought in 1988 had "Sonia Cumbia" in sunlight, and the difference in showing the beauty of that woman was amazing compared to what one would typically get in the American version.

In recent years it seemed as if Hef loosened his grip on the choice of models, if not the choice of Playmate of the Year, and the general art direction of the pictorials, and one saw a noticeable improvement.  Also gone was  the "Girl Next Door" ideal, for the most part, and the models seemed to be LA based professionals who were willing to do the lucrative nude pictorials, so no complaints from me.  These models would typically be really slender, but as often as not have proportionally sized breasts, and hey, let's get a few shots of her out by the pool or on the beach in the sunlight- this ain't fuckin' rocket science guys.

A couple of years ago, the new management at Playboy, one of his son's (Probably the genius behind the Playboy Energy Drink. Remember that one?  Anyone drink that?), anyway, Cooper Hefner decided to do away with the nudity in the pictorials.  I still got the mag, and each month the pictorials would show more and more skin without quite showing ALL of it.  Pretty funny.  The models were all young, slender, beautiful, small breasted pros, so I had no real complaints, but I let the subscription run out anyway.  Earlier this year I got a card in the mail saying the nudity in Playboy was back, and to prove it they showed a little picture of a young woman with huge, natural-looking gazongas.  I don't know if I'll subscribe, though.

All the articles that excoriate his personal life are out there to see, but I'l just say this: Hugh Hefner cites his first wife's confession in 1949(?) that she'd been unfaithful to him as a hugely formative episode that shaped his future direction in life; meaning his founding of Playboy and the pains he took to his dying day to project the fantasy image of himself that attempted to reflect what was portrayed in the magazine.  Maybe he could have come to more meaningful terms with this one episode, his wife's confession of infidelity, if he hadn't forged his own key to the proverbial candy store that was previously accessible only to the Frank Sinatras and the John F Kennedys of the world.  I mean, as traumatic as that one episode must have been, it was only one episode.  Maybe the rest of his life and his relationship with women consisted of making damn sure nothing like that would ever happened to him again.

Maybe Hefner and I think along these lines more than I'm willing to admit.  There's  a lot of painful stuff from my relationship with women that I don't care to repeat.  Maybe the only difference between Hugh Hefner and myself in this regard is that I have long ago admitted to myself this: if I'm attracted enough to someone, and I like them, and I trust them enough to let my guard down, and they've decided it's their mission in life to do some vicious takedown of me, AND they are really good at doing that sort of thing, then hell yeah, someone could totally take me for a ride, just like in the old days.  No question.

I personally don't have any problem with looking at naked ladies in magazines in principal.  If anyone wants to say bad things about me for this, go ahead.  I think the condemnation of that practice in any form is just Puritanism, whether from the Left or the Right.  If I were art director of Playboy, I would go with whatever types of models shot in whatever way I thought was most erotic and beautiful, while adhering to the Playboy ethos of not going nearly as far as Penthouse.  Yeah, someone would probably have a problem with what they would consider my ideal in beauty, but I don't think it would be as narrow a definition as the ideal models of Hugh Hefner's imaginings seemed to embody.   

In January 1986 I broke up with Jeannette.  I was tired of her and the sex wasn't good.  I caught hell from so many of my friends, because they thought I made a big mistake.  Friends would basically look over my shoulder and say what a mistake I made when I broke up with her.

Of course, I felt guilty for many years, because I didn't exactly have a raging string of successes with women after I broke up with Jeannette.  Actually, that's an understatement.  I had a string of disastrous attempts to connect with women until my breakdown six years after I broke up with her.  I haven't exactly had rip-roaring success since then, either, but I think I've made progress.

Naturally, I second guessed my decision to break up with Jeannette for many years.  We went out on a couple of dates a few years after I broke up with her.  That ended when I basically told her I didn't love her.  After that we were finally on the same page about it, but that didn't stop others from chiming in on their opinion that I'd made a big mistake when I broke up with her.

For years after my recovery, my diagnosis and treatment with medication and then when I quit drugs and alcohol, I still second guessed my decision about her.  Should I have loved her more?  I seemed to pick the wrong women to love.

Then, in 2012, I realized that all my second guessing became really pronounced as more time passed.  That's because the actual nightmare of dating her for a month receded, and all that remained was some imagined world of what could have been.  In September of 2012 I realized how crazy she made me and how I couldn't stand it any more back in 1986.

Then I realized why she made me so crazy.  When I went out with Jeannette for those couple of times in an attempt to reconcile, she told me something that, looking back, brought it all into perspective.  She told me- this was at Christmastime- that her dad had put divorce papers under the tree for her mother to find on Christmas morning.

I asked her about it a week or two later, and she said, "Oh he's manic-depressive, he's always pulling stunts like that.  It's blown over."  I had not known that her dad was mentally and emotionally unstable when I first dated her in 1986.  In 1989, when we had that exchange, I didn't realize that my own instability was due to a mental illness.

So in 2012 I put it together that I must have hit some neurotic nerve in Jeannette that gave her a particular weakness for me.  She herself didn't seem to have any acute bipolar issues, but her dad and others in her family did.   To her credit, she didn't just wind up with some string of versions of me after I broke up with her.  She dated stable guys,  I think that was because she really valued men who were nice to her and treated her well, whether or not they did the exact same thing for her that I might have. She had a sister who allowed herself to be mistreated by a boyfriend, and he was probably on a years-long manic jag that manifested itself in legendary, copious womanizing.  

Jeannette professed a profound dislike for most women, because at that age she saw so many of them who allowed themselves to be treated shabbily by men.  I think that valuing how men treated her so much saved her a lot of grief.  Two men I met whom she dated after me seemed fine, and she was a very intelligent, nice woman who was very beautiful as well. so she had a lot to bring to the table for the right person.  Maybe she took a wrong turn later on the mental and emotional stability issue in her partners, after I lost touch with her I mean, I don't know.  I kind of doubt it, actually.

My point is, I was right to break up with her, but many of my peers didn't see me as capable of making that decision.  I have found myself in a similar position at times over the years when I make the decision to reject this or that woman.  People look over my shoulder and attempt to second guess me in a very manipulative way, and I don't like it much.

Why am I not allowed to reject anyone I choose to reject, for whatever reason?  Whether or not I am right or wrong?  What is it that doesn't afford me the same dignity and sovereignty in making such a decision that others are granted?  What is it about me that so many others think that they are able to make such a decision about my own life better than I am?

Let's see, I've rejected someone because they lied to our community of peers as well as me about the nature of a consensual sexual encounter with someone we all knew.   I'm not talking about "he said, she said," either.  She fessed up soon enough to mutual friends, and later to me, that she lied, but for some reason, even given my history with "he said, she said, " I guess that I was just supposed to be a good guy about being bald-faced lied to right to my face by her.  This was in  early 1995, when I was having so much trouble with my medication.  The voices in my head exclaimed, "She lied!  She lied!" one afternoon in while I was in my apartment, and that's was when I made my decision to  not call her anymore.  She called me like a month later and asked me why I wasn't calling her, and I was still sick, but I think my reason to blow her off was strong, no matter my state of mind. 

Another time, in early 2009, soon after I quit drinking and drugs, a girl represented herself to me as available and interested when she was neither.  A friend of mine, who had her as a side piece, had lied to me about the nature of he and this girl's relationship, and he basically put her up to lying to me about having my friend as a boyfriend, plus another boyfriend as well.  He expected me to "take her off his hands."  He also didn't believe me when I concluded that this other boyfriend was her other boyfriend. My friend would go on and on about how hurt she was that I had stopped calling her, and he called me a "piece of shit" for blowing her off.  All the time this was going on, he was still seeing her, of course. 

When I go around in my world and interact with these flirtatious twenty-two year old women at these businesses, no one questions their right to reject me if I were to ask them out.  As a matter of fact, even nice, good-looking guys their own age that these types reject for whatever reason are considered acceptable for these young women to reject by others around them for no other reason than that these women see these men as somehow unworthy.   That can mean things like; they don't kiss good enough, they don't have a car, they like the wrong kind of music, they are not ambitious enough, they smoke too much pot; whatever reason, it's okay for them to reject any guy they want to reject.  I would at least like these kinds of women to give me a chance from time to time, but I don't at all presume to question their judgement.

I think every time I've made a major decision to reject someone, I wasn't one hundred percent sure that I was doing the right thing.  It would only shake out later that I absolutely did the right thing.  That's why it's so important that people afford me the same right to be wrong about someone as anyone else has.  

Why are people so quick to question my judgement on the occasions I do reject women who, granted, might not be a total mess, but why can't I have my own reasons, and everyone just leave it at that?  Now, why don't you all, you know, go effing eff yourselves?

My teacher, Chuck Pinnell, thought that "See What Fuckface Is Up to Today" should be in waltz time.  I gave it a chance, but I found that I couldn't crowbar a waltz time into a song that wasn't originally written in one.  So for Chuck, I wrote this sequel in waltz time:

Fuckface on Monday and Fuckface on Friday

D, G, A
B∇∇ B∇∇ (waltz time)

Chorus:
A
Fuckface on Monday
A 
And Fuckface on Friday
A
Every day other is
A 
No Fuckface my day.

A
Fuckface on Monday
A 
And Fuckface on Friday
A
Every day other is
              G           D         A 
No Fuckface my day.

Verse:
D
What is it about her
D 
That makes her so neat?
             G
Her million-watt smile
              G
Or her stinky feet?

D
What is it about her
D
That makes her a drag?
    G
Does her petty heart
        G
Belong in a bag?

A
Transplant a homeless
A
Person’s in her
         G
And maybe less meanness 
               G
Will naturally occur.

    A
A spiteful birdy
A
With her talons out
       G
Maybe a declawing
        G
Is what it’s about.

Chorus:
Fuckface on Monday 
And Fuckface on Friday
Every day other is 
No Fuckface my day.

Fuckface on Monday 
And Fuckface on Friday
Every day other is 
No Fuckface my day.

Verse:
What do we do 
With that attitude? 
Such a nice package
Wraps someone so rude!

An outside so pretty
An inside so hate
Send her home in a cab
When we’re on a date.

What do we do
With that attitude?
When the inside so ugly
It looks when nude.

Here’s an idea
That might help a ton
I hear Richy Vegas 
Has a magic johnson. 

Chorus:
Fuckface on Monday 
And Fuckface on Friday
Every day other is 
No Fuckface my day.

Fuckface on Monday 
And Fuckface on Friday
Every day other is 
No Fuckface my day.

Verse:
I think Richy Vegas
Can straighten her out
One slip of the meat
What it’s all about.

One minute inside her
Is all it’ll take
Even with rubbers 
Such magic I’ll make.

Psych meds make orgasm
Drag and it drags
But she must have learned something 
From all those douchebags.

‘til then I’ll keep busy 
in all sorts of ways
and take out my phone  
on only two days.

Chorus:
A
Fuckface on Monday
A 
And Fuckface on Friday
A
Every day other is
A 
No Fuckface my day.

A
Fuckface on Monday
A 
And Fuckface on Friday
A
Every day other is
                            B∇∇   𝜁 
       G                   D         
No Fuckface my day.


 Richy Vegas  9/21/2017

I saw a Facebook post in the last several days that featured a forty-five year old man with Cerebral Palsy who wanted a girlfriend.  He didn't have any substantive experience with women.  He seemed on good health, not bad looking, but he considered his disability to be the main obstacle to women giving him a chance.  He stated more than once that finding a girlfriend took top spot in his list of priorities.  I haven't been able to find the post tonight, so I thought I'd take up the topic here.   While I am no expert in dating, he did, with that statement- that finding a girlfriend is his number one priority- he did touch upon something I will go into as follows.

When I was around thirty-seven years old, I took stock in my set of priorities, and consciously or unconsciously, a viable romantic love partner took a spot near the top for me if not the very top.  I took stock in this notion in the midst of a major campaign to quit smoking cigarettes.

The problem for me with making a love relationship partner a top priority for almost all of my adult life up to that point is that, at thirty-seven years old, I still did not have what I wanted.  I concluded that making such a goal a top priority was not getting me anywhere.

I must give this caveat to the following list: I still have not found a viable romantic love partner, but, and this is important, I have accomplished pretty much everything that comes before what once took the top spot.  So here goes.

List of Priorities 

1)  Overall health and well-being- I quit smoking two packs of cigarettes a day fifteen years ago. I committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol eight years ago.  I still struggle with diet and exercise and weight, but I've bought myself some time by quitting the cigarettes and drugs and alcohol.  My psych med helps with mood, but I give myself a lot of credit for self diagnosing Love Addiction as the cause of my depressive episodes and addressing that issue in a meaningful way.  Medications can provide one with the longterm stability to find the causes of my depression, but I had one really bad experience in my relationship with women that demonstrated that even with medication, therapy, an understanding of my illness, and the support of friends and family, it was still possible to totally crash and burn in the romantic love department, and so I did.

2) Relations with friends a family- In lieu of a  life partner, these are the people who have been there for me.  Not always all of them in all cases, but overall pretty reliable.  Getting along with these people is more important than going out and finding a girlfriend. 

3) Employment and other means of support- I've struggled with employment a good deal of my adult life.  I get paid support from my family for services to family members and I get government disability.  Without a viable source of income, not much else is possible.

4)  My art and music.  Notice that this is not priority one either.  Without the above three things, these activities would not be possible.  I don't do these activities because I just love doing them so much; I LOVE smoking both cigarettes and dope and drinking heavily and watching rented movies at home, but I had to give that up.  I do art and music, and stay at it this long without substantive recognition from the market, because my massive ego tells me that these are worthwhile uses for my time and energy.

5) Managing money and finances in general-  I've gotten pretty good at this since I quit drugs and alcohol.  So good that the credit card company has not raised my credit limit on my card since I've committed to abstinence, because I have just not flown close enough to the Sun to warrant raising my limit.

6)  How I relate to women I am attracted to in my world- Oh dear God.  This is so much more important to me that finding a girlfriend.   What I mean by this is that there are all kinds of realities about both myself and the attractive women in my world that more or less prevent an easy take of a girlfriend from this source.  Those realities include: my disability, their relationship status, what my disability represents to them, the fact that so many of them have no interest in dating me, our age differences ( a BIG one), and that I seem to have to deal with so many dead end flirtations.. Those are ones I can think of right now.  Nevertheless, my ability to get along with these women within all these sets of limitations colors my day to day existence to a profound degree.  Absolutely.

7) Compiling a history with women where I don't get hurt (much)- Again, way more important than finding a girlfriend.  This is something, like everything I've listed so far, that I have managed to accomplish.  Between my initial onset of my mental illness and, eight/ nine years later my diagnosis and treatment, it was all hurt in my relationship with woman.  All hurt, all the time.  Since making this kind of thing a priority, that is, compiling a history with women where I don't get hurt, I gained a modicum of experiences, not the least of which is how to effectively deal with the hurtin' kind of woman.

8) Finding a viable, long-term, romantic love partner.  Here it is, I'm fifty-three, and yes, that is a long time since the age of thirty-seven since I've rearranged priorities.  But I will say this, I've rejected several women who made their interest in me evident because of things like unresolved substance abuse problems, bad personalities, bad attitudes, etc, and not necessarily because they weren't attractive enough.  And since finding love is not priority one, I don't get all racked with guilt over missed opportunities with such women.

So there you have it.  Seven things more important to me than finding love.  Finding love rates higher than travel to far flung lands for example, and maybe quite a few other things, but it is not priority number one anymore. 

 

When I go about my day to day routines in various businesses that will employ attractive young women for me to look at, the temptation exists to make it about individual women in these businesses.  It occurred to me some days ago that the decision to make it about this or that twenty-two year old barista or waitress in my environment is no better that the poor decisions I made about women such as those I depict in my comic books from my youth.  Finding love was a big important thing to me in those days, and I beat myself up to this day for the decisions I made back then.  But really, trying to make it about this or that twenty-two year old nowadays doesn't seem to reflect that I may have learned something between then and now.  Does it?

Several years ago I came the realization that, even today, there's really nothing to stop some woman from totally taking me for a ride.  I mean, if I'm attracted enough to them, and I like them enough, and I trust them enough, then there's really nothing to stop the kind of nightmare crash and burn dramas from happening again.

I heartily recommend a book titled, The Confidence Game, by Maria Konnikova.  It's available through the Austin Public Library, among other places.  The book breaks down the psychology of the Con, the Con Artist, and what makes the Mark so vulnerable to the Con.  One of the main points the author makes towards the end of that book is that someone who gets conned once is actually more likely to get conned again rather than less likely, because the fact that the Mark got conned once means that they are someone who is susceptible to being screwed over again.  Con Artists will swoop down on someone who has already been famously conned in much the same way vultures will pick a carcass clean after a wolf or something has killed its prey and had its fill.

The Confidence Game doesn't talk about cons in the sphere of romantic love, whether the every day flirtations of twenty-two year old waitresses or baristas with lonely middle-aged men or romantic love cons that actually involve criminal behavior, but the discerning reader can recognize all kinds of analogies and parallels between the cons and the tactics used in the stories told in the book and the kinds of things that have happened to ones such as myself and others.

"Well you're lost in the rain in Juarez/ when it's Easter time too/ and your gravity fails/ and negativity don't pull you through/ don't put on any airs when you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue/ they got some hungry women there/ and they'll really make a mess outta you." - from "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" on Highway 61 Revisted.

In my last post I talked about how I had a five week pay cycle this period.  I'm going to have to watch my spending for the next little while until I get paid again, but the next budget cycle is a four week one, and that should be better.  

I went over my expenses for the next cycle.  Initially I put a lot of money in for entertainment expenses, but I chopped that one down quite a bit on second thought.  How many bands can I possibly go see?  I plan on one or two movies and a couple of nights out, and that should be it.

I should be able to pay down on my credit card too.  If I manage to not eat in restaurants very much or go to the coffee shop much less than I usually go, I might even be able to pay for my CD production from the money I get for the next month.