I get to order another Rush CD this morning, because it's the 15th, and I haven't mentioned that young woman I can go on at length about on this blog since the 1st of July.  The last time I saw her, in the middle of June, she seemed really cheerful at her job.  That surprised me, because my blog post prior to this encounter, and I pretty much do think she and others read these; my last blog post prior to this encounter had me writing about how the thought of her joining in on some effort to stalk and harass me made me not feel so much warmth and affection for her, even though I still cared for her a great deal.  I said in that post that I stood willing to walk away from the entire deal.  Her upbeat, cheerful demeanor when I saw her next made me think all kinds of things.  Did she like the idea of me bailing on her?  Did her cheerful demeanor at her job when I saw her last signal a willingness to dare me to bail on our deal?  Did she ever like me or want me in the first place?

I've talked often about how I've ascertained over the years that, to a lot of young, attractive women out there, the mentally ill guy with a tendency towards romantic obsession represents a bad guy type to them.  I've said that many of them would rather take their chances with a charming, player type with a reputation for treating women shabbily than take a chance on a type that will often declare, through his actions mainly, his undying love for them and then proceed to chase them to the ends of the Earth and back.  I imagine the stories they tell each other about romantically obsessive, mentally ill guys amount to a kind of folklore, and I imagine they may all have personal stories of their own to back up this view.

So, when I declared my willingness to walk away from this whole deal, this young woman I can go on and on about knows me well enough to know that I can and will back such statements up by doing just that.  The first time I avoided going to her place of employment at times I knew her to work there occurred during the Summer of 2019.  I did stay away from her that way for six weeks, if I remember correctly.  I've done pretty much the same thing several more times, and I'm doing this same thing now.  I haven't seem her since mid-June, and I might stay away from her place of employment at the times I've known her to work there for, possibly, the rest of the Summer, because I feel this break from our deal has done me a lot of good.

One thing I think I might have a handle on these past few days has to do with the idea that she DOES know enough about me to take me seriously.  She realizes by now, possibly, that I'm not some silly-ass, obsessive pest/menace who will just not leave her alone if she shows the slightest bit of favor towards me.  I've talked in the past about Veronica Ortega and how, in 1985, Veronica threw me a few bones of attention with the belief that I would give her tenfold the amount of attention back.  Veronica seemed to do this to help her get over a painful breakup with a live-in boyfriend.  She wanted male attention from someone she didn't have to take seriously, and she saw me and at least one other guy as her guys for that. 

I have no idea about whom, if anyone, this young woman at this business is dating now, or whom she'll wind up with in the foreseeable future, but if SHE takes me seriously regarding my ability to master my obsessive impulses, other women-women I might not even know about at this time-may already take me seriously as well, and that may explain why this young woman came off as cheerful and friendly as she did the last time I saw her.  In other words, regardless of how things shake out between us, she doesn't feel the need to write me off as a liability in her world or that liking me in SOME way doesn't amount to some big mistake on her part. 

 In my last post I talked about that virgin girl from 2014/15.  I busted her pretty good in January of 2015, and by February of that year she showed visible signs of pregnancy.  I figured that she wanted to lose her virginity to the guy who impregnated her, and to top it all off, she tried to play some cruel kiss off game with me.  Now that's some game going on there!  Like I said in my last post, I never did anything to sabotage my deal with her, she was just never there for me.

I think about someone such as that virgin girl whenever I find myself embroiled in a situation that feels very similar.  Since I never did anything to sabotage our deal, could I conceivably catch one such as her on the b-side?  What if her relationship with the father of her child didn't work out?  Maybe then.  I've never had anything like that happen for me, but I guess something like that conceivably could happen.

I've had instances where someone demonstrated interest long after I'd let them go, and that's the closest I've come.  In every instance, the women I felt compelled to let go of stayed let go of, period.  In the instance of Gwen at SVA in 1991, she clearly desired that I let her go the previous semester, and when she showed interest the following Spring, I had moved onto another fruitless fixation.  In a couple of instances in later years, inertia and the passage of lots of time just compelled me to blow off a couple of women who seemed to want me to make some sort of move on them when they stopped me in a grocery store and a video store, respectively.

So, someone such as that virgin girl or other turd who wanted to try to get something going with me looong after the fact would probably have to take the initiative in the initial loooong-after-the-fact encounter (Getting me to jump through hoops? Guess again), get some sort of contact info, perhaps even persist in their course of action for quite some time, and even then, they may just make a pest of themselves.  It may come off as if they are a whole different person than the one I had the fixation on, and that person may or may not interest me.

I've gone on dates  with women for the first time who first showed interest in me years before those first dates, but in the case of that virgin girl and her ilk, not really.  The premise in play with that virgin girl and her ilk resided in the notion that the attraction had a clear one-sided direction, from me towards them.  

I guess I can't totally rule out the notion that one of these girls at this one business who all seemed so intent on making me look like an asshole COULD, MAYBE get something going with me loooong after the fact.  I usually come off as pretty nice, and I can't think of anyone from that era whom I would refuse to talk to, but yeah, I'm not holding my breath on that.

In my last post I talked about how I mention that time with Sara in 1988 and one of the main reasons I bring it up so much. I came across much more sympathetically in my dealings with Sara than I did in every previous incarnation of that particular situation.  I guess I really gave those people who observed the unfolding situation the impression that I no longer had the willingness to settle for business as usual, but rather that my stance reflected an attempt to face the realities of Sara and the realities of the dynamic between us.   My willingness to let the whole deal with Sara go at any time seemed to emotionally prepare me for the actual realities of that situation.  Mind you, when I cut her loose that following Summer, I still didn't even know her name, much less the ambiguities surrounding her actual sexual orientation coupled with her, I'm guessing, lack of sexual experience at the time.  The whole deal just seemed to stink, so I cut her loose.

My whole, "What if I turn my back on love?," experiment represented an adaptation to three things: 1) My tendency to fall in love with the wrong person, and 2) What I think about this tendency, and 3) What I do about it when it happens yet again.  I still can't seem to help myself as to the types of women I still readily fall for, but the experiment I first tried in the Spring of 1988 allows me to forgive myself when it does happen, and to make the correct, intelligent decisions moving forward.

I don't believe I've ever sabotaged a deal with any of the young women on my docket since I decided to revive the experiment in 2012. I think of the crude sexual proposition I made to Wanda in1987 as a sabotage move. I never did anything like that to Sara, and I never did anything like that to that virgin girl in 2014/15 or anyone like her ever since.  I think I allowed for things to develop, should that virgin girl or anyone like her had come from a better place than they did, but since they did not come from a good place in regards to their intentions with me, nothing noteworthy ever developed.

The main reason I refer so frequently back to my time with Sara in the Spring of 1988 has to do with how I came across to others in our art history class.  Although Sara started in on me in an adversarial manner, the new approach I tried, to "turn my back on love," allowed me to come across much more sympathetically to the observers of the unfolding situation that in any previous adversarial situation I'd ever found myself in.  When Sara busted her move where she loudly exclaimed, "What a weirdo! God, what a weirdo!," as a male classmate told a story of a guy's obsessive pursuit of a girl, and how at the end of the class I wheeled around, stared at her, and blurted out a question about the papers we had turned in, and how Sara then dashed out of the classroom in an apparently alarmed state, and how, in the day or two that followed, I felt as if I'd done something wrong at first, then thought, "Oh, come on!," and how she acted mad at the beginning of the next class in an effort to play on my supposed feelings of guilt and self-blame, and how I let her and everyone else in the class know I didn't buy it, and then....At the end of the class, the teacher in the auditorium-seating classroom instructed the students to come up and get their papers as she read each student's name out, she read Sara's name out before mine, Sara walked to the front, got her paper, walked out, I waited for the teacher to call my name, she called my name, I got my paper, proceeded to walk out and then...As I walked out, I noticed that at least four young women stood in front of me as I exited the class as they waited for the teacher to call their names.

I took this gesture as an effort by these other young women to nonverbally tell me that they supported me in this conflict with Sara.   Moreover, that in addition to their sympathy for my plight, that any one of them stood willing to offer themselves as someone to approach for social reasons over Sara.  Mind you, I think word may have gone round about my crude sexual proposition to Wanda from the previous year, so to gain such a sympathetic ear with so many young women meant a lot to me.  Well, the next class, Sara nonverbally let me know she was sorry, and I gave her another chance.

I get along as well as I do with those young, female baristas at that one coffee shop I patronize in large part because, I think, I don't try to approach them for dates, or contact info, or try to connect with them through social media.  I don't want to approach that young woman at that business I patronize, that young woman whom I go on and on about on this blog; I don't want to initiate an approach towards her for a date or for contact info.  I don't want to give her my comics or my CD's without her first asking me for such things.  I don't want to invite her to the Posse East open mike to hear me perform that song I wrote about her in any kind of out of the blue way.  Such inaction on my part may result in me forsaking the love of my life, for all I know.  But, consider these two points: 1) She may NOT in fact be the love of my life, and 2) Who's to say that by refusing to put myself out there and absolutely refusing to initiate the whole going-on-a-date process all by my lonesome, and instead insisting that she has to broach that subject in some clever way, that such an approach might actually stand a better chance of WORKING much, much better than me marching into her place of employment one day and asking her out in front of God and everyone. 

Judging by the times I've tried to just ask these employees of businesses I patronize out, versus the times I've refused to do any of that "for" anyone, I've come across much more sympathetically with the latter approach.  Furthermore, I seem to break through very significant barriers with the latter approach that I didn't even realize existed whenever I would try the former approach exclusively, and that includes many instances with Miss Missy Miss her own bad self. 

It took me less than a month to outline the illustrations of issue number 24 with ball point pen. It typically takes three/ three and a half weeks for me to do this stage. I think I will finish the book in the first week in August.

I see the number of visits to my site on a weekly basis is down.  I have no idea what a "unique visitor" means since they changed the way they tabulate all of that.  Oh well, none of the members of my audience seems to ever buy my books or music from this site, but others do at least buy books sometimes, so I guess my site really exists for people who engage with me on the level of buying something, at the very least.

Well, speaking of members of my audience, I guess they read this blog to see what I say about women in my world.  Okay.  I will start by talking about two girls I went on dates with in high school. I talked about one a couple of posts ago whom I gathered wanted to initiate me into the pleasures of the flesh. In 2005, a mutual friend of ours who also took art classes with us back then said that he had put in a good word for me to this girl back then, and that's how all of that started way back when.  Two posts ago I talked about how this girl gave me a half-assed opportunity to have sex with her one night at her house.  I really kicked myself for missing out on that chance, and only the fullness of my years and more experience with women since then let me know that this opportunity didn't amount to much. I'd never even made out with a girl before that night she propositioned me to spend the night with her, for one, and she never really adjusted and tried to bring things to that moment at a later date with some kind of make out session, for another.  One might surmise that she wanted to just pay lip service to this notion of giving me some kind of opportunity to placate our mutual male friend from our art class.

Well, I obsessed on this girl pretty hard after that.  While she attended college in another part of the state during my junior year in high school, and I still obsessed on her, another girl flirted with me pretty hard one time in a science class.  I asked this girl on a date.  The highlight of the date for me came with the heavy snog I put on her as I dropped her off at her house.  That really sent me over the top on my drive home.  Within a week of our date, I saw her walking the halls of our school arm in arm with her real boyfriend, whom I had no clue existed before then.  Well, I obsessed on that girl hard as well after that.  Her boyfriend graduated and joined the Army, but I never had as passionate a snog session with her on later dates.  It just wasn't the same.

I don't think either of those girls would have done me the way they did if they had known how hard I would have took it.  I really felt quite bitter and disillusioned with them in the years that followed.  Eventually losing my virginity and getting more experiences of all kinds with women made both of my deals with them seem like no big deal in hindsight.

In 2014 that virgin girl at that one business I patronize tried to start in on me with her shit. I beat her like a gong on that deal. I count seven or eight women at this one business, including that virgin girl, who all thought in their own dumbass ways that they would be the one to best me at their game, make me crazy, get my goat, call it what you will, they all got beat.  Mind, these games they play are games of their own choosing, playing by their own set of rules, with their own definition of what constitutes a win for them, but I beat them all.  Weird.  Why is that?  Could it have to do with the fact that I've had dozens of women play pretty much this same game with me since college?  Should I take the blame for making their collective losses smart so much?  Sure, blame me, assholes.

The fact that I could become so easily bummed out by and obsessed with those girls in high school meant that those girls I encountered first in college and ever thereafter had an extremely easy mark for whatever game they wanted to play. If they merely wanted to beat me at some kiss off game, okay they could.  If they wanted to go on some crusade and punish me for some offence I committed, by all means.  If they wanted to represent themselves as a girlfriend or love interest to play to some mutual friend's expectations of them, go ahead.  They all had in common, and still have in common, the belief that 1) I'm still vulnerable to this stuff, and 2) that they can get away with it.  Forget about their bullshit morality as the motivation for what drives this urge they all have to go there with me, the real motivators for their behavior towards me lie in only those two listed beliefs.  As time went on, and this same stuff kept occurring between myself and these women over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, it eventually became advantage Rich.  So much so that I now seem to encounter women who truly find themselves in over their heads in regards to me.  Tough titty, I say.     

Because I've refrained from mentioning that young woman I can go on and on about at length these past fifteen days plus, I get to order Rush's 2112 album.  I would never normally order a Rush CD, but this album is pretty cool and I've set up a token reward system where I get to order an easy to acquire, classic rock CD in exchange for refraining from mentioning that young woman until the 1st and/or 15th of the month.  I didn't want to undermine our deal by spewing out every little thought that comes to mind, because I thought it might inhibit any chance for us to interact in the real world.

The problem I have now concerns thoughts i have that I first posted in November of 2018.  The thoughts center around the idea that someone stalks me on the internet, and I that I might have a presence on the internet that I do not consent to.  Today I ate lunch somewhere, and a young woman I'd just met, who sat across from me, said something out of the blue.  She said, "You're in."  Then a little later she talked about a guy who lives in her apartment complex who uses her laundry room, and how he pulled his dick out and wanted her to blow him one time.  These two things made me believe that she knows stuff about me that I've never talked to her about.  I thought that when she said, "You're in," that she might have meant I was "in" with this young woman I go on about at length sometimes on this blog, and when this young woman I talked to at lunch today brought up this guy at her complex doing this crude sexual proposition to her, that she referred to the time I often write about in 1987 where I did something similar to Wanda.

These thoughts I had today about these two remarks this young woman made whom I ate lunch with today disturb me a great deal.  I think maybe that post in 2018 might actually contain truth.  This is not good for me in my prospects of interacting with this young woman who works at this business whom I write about a lot on this blog.  I care for this person a great deal, still, but the idea that she is in on something like that, along with a lot of other women in my world, turns off whatever affection I have for this young woman right now.  I don't think it's always possible to care for anyone in a warm, affectionate way all the time, even under better circumstances than the ones I've outlined above, so I don't feel bad about feeling turned off towards her right now.  I don't know how to move forward from this kind of an impasse, and I'm prepared to walk away from the whole deal at this point.

I slept pretty late today. Last night I had to get a hotel room near Austin rather than try to brave the storm and drive back. I didn't have my medicine and I had no other things such as a change of clothes or toiletries to prepare me to spend the night in a hotel room. When I returned home this morning I caught up on my sleep.

So I found myself at loose ends tonight on my book. I worked a little on the lettering and then took a break from all of that and took the rest of the night off. I remembered back when I was sixteen and how the girls of the day had me vexed, and I never seemed to know what to do with myself in general. There was this girl from my art class in tenth grade who seemed to want to help me with the virgin dilemma, but she wasn't much help. On one date we sat and watched TV in her family's living room after a night at a club. I sat in a big puffy chair while she sat on the floor beside me. At one point, it was at about three in the morning, she offered to take me to the bedroom and spend the night. I didn't go for it and went home.

I thought the rest of the Summer about that opportunity, and got pretty obsessed with her. When she went away to college in the Fall, I obsessed on her more. I saw her invitation as some great, missed opportunity that I felt bad about. I'd never even made out with a girl when she made the offer to spend the night with her, but I've only thought about that point these past several years. She had two other real boyfriends that Summer, and she showed up at my house for a short visit with a new girlfriend sometime later that year. She never again gave me that kind of opportunity that she gave me that night at her house, but I tell you, I really found myself beside myself with regret over the not scoring with her for a long time afterwards, and I could not just let it go. I didn't really try to find more constructive things to do with myself but turn over my whole deal with her in my head in the year or so after she left for college.

Nowadays, of course, all that stuff I found myself so vexed with about my deal with her at the time seems like no big deal at all. Beginning in the Fall of 2001, I made a concerted effort to find more constructive things to do with my time alone than drink beer, smoke dope, and smoke cigarettes. I became so confident in my ability to spend time in my little efficiency apartment by myself and not get loaded that I made a serious effort in December to quit smoking. I haven't had a cigarette in nineteen years as of this year. I committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol in late 2008, a commitment that continues to this day.

I made the commitment to abstain from drugs and alcohol, specifically, to improve my relationship with women. How am I doing on that front? Well, tonight I realized that, in some ways, I find myself in the same position I found myself with girls like the one I mentioned in the above paragraphs. Sometimes I just don't know how to spend time by myself constructively, and I can get caught up in things I don't need to get caught up in. But, when I think about it, I often times find myself in situations with women that I might very well look back on one day and say, "You know, that really was no big deal," in much the same way I now say the about that girl I went on dates with in high school that one Summer.

Now, I've been in plenty of situations where it seems as if my love interest has some interest in deliberately putting me in bad position. I've talked often about Wanda. I've talked about how she basically pretended to be my girlfriend as she vied for the attention of a guy who had at least one other girlfriend. Wanda really pulled me around by an erect penis with all of her machinations, and I honestly don't know if I'd do much better than I did with her if I found myself in the same position again. After several weeks of heavy makeout sessions that would go nowhere, I gave her a sexual ultimatum in the form of a crude sexual proposition. That created way more problems than it solved.

Between the times when I find myself confronted with my own loneliness, sense of isolation, feelings of no direction to go in, and those times when it seems as if some woman seeks to really prey upon all of those feelings somehow and represent herself as the solution to all of that when she is not, I've done pretty well since the days of Wanda. Right now I feel as if I'm more confronted with my own insecurities than anything else, which I can definitely deal with better than I could when I was fifteen or sixteen years old.

I'm over halfway finished with inking the text of my new book, and I hope to finish the whole "Legend of Richy Vegas" series by this coming December. I've also got my record way more than halfway finished, and I've started playing out a little, and I hope to scare up at least one gig before the year is over.

Right now I'm on the fourth pass with pencils on issue 24 of Richy Vegas Comics.  I have forty-eight pages left of to finish on this fourth pass.  I could finish it today, and finish the fifth pass as well.  The fifth pass almost invariably becomes a quality control check on my finished  work rather than an extensively worked pass itself.  It usually doesn't take much time.  

I could finish both of these passes today, but that's not what I set out to accomplish.  I've already accomplished my productivity goals for today by working on the four plates I've already worked on.  A huge component of my day to day productivity consists of these kinds of tricks to get myself to start working on stuff.  I don't usually set very ambitious productivity goals on music and art.  If I set out to begin work on my book for the day, I usually decide on a very modest goal of work on a page or two, no matter the stage I'm on.  I achieve this modest goal, and that often gets me going on doing more work.  This process often snowballs to the point where the obsessiveness really takes hold at some point and I really do quite a lot of work for a day.  The same goes for music.  I usually set a goal to work on just one song, whether to practice, record, or write, and the same tendency for more work to follow often occurs.  Not all the time, and often times I will just have the wherewithal to stop myself fairly early in the game and just goof off the rest of the day.  But I'm working on my twenty-fourth issue on my comic book series, which run a full eighty pages these days, and I'm working on my fifth solo album, which consists of fifteen original songs.

The latest issue of Richy Vegas Comics recaps my night of craziness in the Summer of 1992 that led to my first hospitalization for mental illness symptoms that next day.  After I do another telling of that crazy night, the book finds me waking up in the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after I've received a large dose of antipsychotic medication the day before.  I depict the very first time I experienced the massive dry mouth these kinds of medications can induce upon one's waking up for the day.  Issue 24 marks the eleventh volume of, "The Legend of Richy Vegas."  "The Legend of Richy Vegas" chronicles the people and events that led up to this initial hospitalization, with part twelve, the concluding volume, going into the second hospitalization during the Fall and Winter of 1992 into the beginning of 1993.  These twelve volumes, plus the two prequel volumes of the previous series, mark my most ambitious creative endeavor to date.

I only have augmenting guitar tracks, percussion, and some other instruments such as musical saw and washboard to track.  I hope to finish tracking by the end of June.  I'm on the third pass of my pencil work for issue 24 of my book.  I hope to finish that by Friday.  I decided to take the rest of the night off after I completed the last two bass tracks today.  I cooked beans.

I was thinking about celebrity Easter Eggs when I thought up that title to a new song.  "Easter Eggs" are like hints or allusions to shit that pop star types supposedly put in their videos or their awards show photos or their tweets.  Allusions to shit like their righteous boyfriend or the title of their next total shit album.  I've yet to even write notes for it, so who knows if I'll actually write it or perform it or record it.  Good title.  Good concept.  It's my answer to the Invisible Woman hiring thugs to steal shit from me like my spatula and my Kinks Face To Face CD.  Yeah, "I Got Your Easter Egg Right Here."  That's the Kinks, ​Face To Face.  Great record.  I ordered a whole new copy for myself I love it so much.  It may just be it my storage space, but I swear it was in my car not last month or the month before.  I bought a new spatula too.  Biden money.

I'm taking a break from my new book.  I worked so damn hard on it the previous two days that I treated myself to drive to Smithville this afternoon.  That was when I had the song idea.  Big laughs on Highway 71.  I extended the break into tonight.  I worked on two whole pages of pencil illustration today, whereas I did thirty and thirty-four pages, respectively, of the second pass at the pencils the previous two days.  I hope to the finish the second pass with pencils tomorrow.  I might have the book ready for inks by the start of June, if not the 1st, maybe the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th.