I had a really good open mike performance tonight.  I'm plugging up the remaining holes in my performance of "Ziggy Stardust."  Performing that song onstage really gives me an opportunity to see what parts of it still need work.  I also did a cover of Tom T Hall's "That's How I Got to Memphis." That one is not as hard to perform, but I could still improve on it for next time.

I'm going to ship a lot of my musical equipment (guitars, banjo, amps, etc.) to my new home in Western Massachusetts.  There's not going to be the music scene there that there is here.  That gives me a lot of incentive to learn as many covers as I'm able to before I head up there next April.  There are open mikes, and I figure that playing them frequently will give me the opportunity to meet people up there.

Nes York, and It's vibrant comics scene, will only be a place can visit two or  three times in any given year, I figure, so I really have to lean into the local music scene, such as it is, if I want to get out and try to meet new people.  I'm pushing myself to practice more frequently nowadays for  that very reason.

I'm shooting for outlining eighteen pages for the month of August on "Songbook" issue number three.  I'm also working on a road book for when I travel and have nothing to do in some hotel room or other.  Fall is a travel season for me.

I should finish outlining this 48 page book sometime around October 15th.  I've finished outlining eighteen pages so far.  Yes, I am moving across the country in April.  Really.

I hope to finish outlining these pages by the 10th r 11th of October.  I should finish this book well before I move out of Austin next April.

The title of this post says it all.  I've been thinking about some of the situations I've found myself in with very attractive, young women  over the years, and how I developed the "what if I turned my back on love?" buddha as a way of coping with these situations.  I wonder about some of the "supposed" opportunities that these women appeared to present me with.  They always seemed to appear to me as dilemmas that I just didn't want to deal with, so I would blow these women off.

Hmmm.  I've put forth the argument for years that these young women presented me with "jump through my hoops" dilemmas in these situations because they weren't really that interested in me.  I figured that they would treat men that they had a genuine interest in with a more accommodating manner. That may very well be true, actually.  To more accurately put my train of thought across, I DO think that there  are men that they are more accommodating to, and that they might not present such dilemmas to such men.

But here's the thing, I may reside in a category of men who they might not like as much, or sometimes not at all, when they first get to know me.  But, over time, when they get to know me better, they will give me the opportunities with them that I get.  These opportunities seem to lean heavily on the side of dilemma, but nonetheless, they are opportunities the way they see them. 

Another way to look at it could be that these opportunities appear so much as dilemmas to me because of the way they would interact with me in the days when they didn't like me much.  So that would mean I'm not giving myself enough credit for turning things around with these women.  With that in mind, maybe men who find more success with such women get the same kind of dilemmas as I get,  but that they just make a different turn at that juncture.

I can think of one example in the form of a barista at Thunderbird Coffee back in 2022.  In 2018, I found her on Facebook and put in a friend request for her.  She responded by not accepting my request.  For some time afterwards, when I would go to Thunderbird, she would mock me with these pseudo goo-goo eyes.  It took a couple or three weeks for her to let up on that.  

But over the years, she seemed to take a liking to me.  Then, all of a sudden, one day as I got some coffee at Thunderbird, a female barista smiled and said, "It's all yours," while another female barista stood next to her and smiled. This kind of thing went on for a bit. I came to  think  that these women were hinting at this one goo-goo eyes barista and how she had an interest in me.

I was on the "what if I turned my back on love?" path, so I decided to question goo-goo eyes and her supposed interest in me on my posts on this blog.  Soon thereafter, she seemed to have  taken up with some other guy.  I just wrote in a following post that I'd never learned to catch a freight train going ninety miles an hour down the railroad tracks in my younger days, either.

There are a couple of things about this story to keep in mind. The competition for the affections of someone such as this very attractive young woman is fierce, but that she did see herself as signaling to me that she had a genuine interest in getting to know me better, and in her mind, she gave me a chance.

So, what do I do about all this now?  Relax, I'd say.  I'd say it is possible that quit a number of young women have taken something of an interest in me over these years, but that my whole "shout at the devil" approach to their somewhat interest could have driven them off.  But that's okay, because they probably wouldn't have taken an interest in me in the first place if I hadn't turned to "on" switch to "off" when I would spend time around them.  

So yeah, relax, just relax.  I may have gained some insight without treading too heavily over these situations with these women, and now I can just look back and observe and make decisions based on those observations.  No crash and burn experiences where I have to pick up the pieces and soldier on blindly.

In my last post I talked about my latest insights about unavailable women.  I concluded  that I've never been happier in relation to an unavailable woman in my world than when I realized that I didn't need them to be my girlfriend to feel fulfilled and satisfied.  I could carry on without their love and find a lot of happiness in my own sense of self-reliance.  Looking back on all of the unavailable women I've had fixations on, going back to high school days, I can't argue against this insight.

Fourteen years ago I took up following my "what if I turned my back on love?" buddha.  Did I finally take it far enough?  Have I attained the enlightenment I've sought for so long?  Is this insight about finding happiness in relation to unavailable women at its fullest when I just moved on and gave up on trying to get with them the culmination of my spiritual journey?  Perhaps.

Did I miss out on any great opportunities to get with desirable women in my world to follow my buddha?  Perhaps.  I don't want to go into detail on that, because I don't want to embarrass anyone, but yeah, I guess, maybe.  A huge component of my journey involved letting opportunities slip through my fingers when I perceived that, yeah, maybe this or that occasion did present an opportunity.

Was it worth it?  Was it worth missing out on opportunities to get with desirable women in my world to attain what looks like enlightenment regarding unavailable women?  Well, it might follow that the more correctly I carried out my journey, that I would attract the attention of desirable women as a consequence.  I think that someone who has it gong on might miss out on an appreciable number of okay, to pretty good, to good opportunities to get  with women as consequence of having it going on.  

Missing out on opportunities might just represent the result of getting onto something from following a beneficial path.  I wouldn't change a thing about how I followed my buddha and how it turned out.  Not if I had a hundred chances to change how it shook out.  Nope.

If opportunities to get with women come up in the following days, weeks, or months, will I be so keen on exercising the option of just letting such opportunities to get with such women slip through my fingers?  Maybe, maybe not.  Maybe it just depends on the opportunity.  

In my last post I said that I consider the material manifestation of my forgiveness of an individual to consist of no acts of retaliation against such a person.  I said that I often don't want to be best buddies with those I forgive, but that not retaliating against them is good enough.

I then said that, on the other hand, I have to forgive TONS of attractive women whom I would definitely like to be best buddies with, but that forgiving such women in hopes of being best buddies with them is not real forgiveness.  Forgiveness, the way I see it, involves letting go of the pain someone's emotional injury caused me and leaving it by the side of the road and going on down that road.  Hoping that a beautiful woman would desire to be best buddies with me in exchange for my forgiveness of them doesn't fit into what I consider forgiveness, therefore.  All sorts of ugly things like feelings of entitlement on one's part can come up if one hopes for or expects something material in exchange for such forgiveness.

Yesterday I came to the realization that the happiest I've ever been in relation to beautiful women who've been mean to me came when I realized that I could carry on by myself and be quite happy WITHOUT them in my life in a positive way.  That would really make sense then, if I hoped for nothing material in return for my forgiveness of such a woman, that being happy without them is a real place that I started working to get to in my twenties, a real place I've experienced many times since to the point where I can offer the most stunningly beautiful of mean girls a forgiveness that requires NOTHING in return from them.

Back in the day, a beautiful girl didn't even have to be mean to me for me to be miserable over them.  They just had to be unavailable somehow.  Unavailable logistically, like they had a boyfriend, and/or unavailable because they had no interest in dating me.  One of my earliest, meanest crushes came to me as a sophomore in high school over the dynamic between me and a freshman girl.  I KNEW there was NO WAY she could feel the same intensity of feeling for me that i felt for her, and that was enough to send me into a tailspin.

Over the years, I learned to accept greater and greater degrees of unavailability.  For example, a girl in my sophomore year of college committed the offense against me of being a really nice, beautiful girl in my art class who had a serious boyfriend.  At the time, THAT was enough to send me into a tailspin, but over time I learned to accept that kind of unavailability. 

Nowadays. they have to be really trying to be mean to me to tie me up in knots, but like I said, even those days, and those mean girls, might be on their way out.  Why? Because, hey, I've come to the realization that the happiest I've been in relation to ANY unavailable woman is when I discover I can be happy without her in my life.  What are these mean girls going to do about that one?  Can they keep playing cruel rejection games with me?  Can they keep tying me up in knots with such games?  We shall see. I doubt it, but we shall see.

I've talked often about the notion I've had concerning an internet presence that features me that I did not consent to.  A couple of months ago a woman I talked to said she heard that I was big on Reddit.  That was news to me.  Maybe that's the internet presence I did not consent to.  Tonight that notion I've had came to mind at a comic book reading event.  I got the vibe, a guilty vibe, that a woman there knew about this presence, possibly on Reddit.  Now, I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know for sure.

It turns out that I had shown up to the reading early, so I left to get some coffee and go for a drive.  On my drive I remembered the second of three reasons that makes base retaliation not such a good idea.  So, let's go over the reasons to not retaliate against people in one's day to day life.  1: One never gets the satisfaction from retaliation that one anticipates, 2, and this is the one I had trouble recalling the other day: Retaliation creates a lot more problems than it solves, and 3, from Dr. David Burns' "Feeling Good:" People never feel as if  they deserve to be retaliated against.

With these three reasons to refrain from giving anyone at that reading so much as a dirty look, I returned to the reading. I saw the first reader and then decided to leave.  Over the course of winding down my evening, I remembered something very important about forgiveness that I've discovered. One does not forgive someone in hopes of getting something material from the person in return.  That's not forgiveness in my book.  I call that "niceness."  

Some people, I don't really want to be buddies with when I forgive them.  Just refraining from retaliating against these people is the extent of my forgiveness of them.  But, hell, a lot of people I wind up feeling compelled to forgive happen to be women I'd like to date in some more perfect world than ours.  With that thought in mind, that expecting material "rewards" from women I forgive that I'd like to date is not real forgiveness, but rather, what I call "niceness," I would say that refraining from retaliating against such women, and leaving it at that, will have to suffice for forgiveness as well.

I can't get women to take an interest in me in this town.  I'm thinking about moving to a place where I can plug into a more vibrant comics scene than the one we have here.  All  these posts I've been writing about me trying to be more of a good guy to women are fine, but the women in question probably aren't going to take an interest in me even if they do detect whatever changes in me I want them to see.

I've just been reflecting on the past several years and how the most I ever talk to women are at comic and zine events and whatnot.  My job sucks for meeting women, because I don't really have anything in common with my female coworkers that would interest them.  I played another gig at a the Carousel Lounge yesterday, so there's music for me as well.  

The problem with that resides in my perception that making a mark in the local music scene seems for me too steep a hill to climb.  I mean, I can meet women at open mikes and whatnot, but I've already made something of a mark in my little corner of  the creative world-self-published indie comics-so why not work that nerve?  The pastures seem greener for me in that world than in the music world.  So, a move may be in the works for me.  I've already got a place scoped out that I'm thinking about moving to, so I"ve just got to start planning for that.

I think some women in my world seem just as intent on working my last nerve as much as some women in my past.  I think I've been doing pretty good at fielding those attempts to work my last nerve these days.  I think back on several occasions in my past where I lost it in response to women just going there, and although I understand why I lost it on those occasions, I still regret it.  I'm older, I'm on a good psych med, I don't drink, which would affect my mood, and I've come up with some good coping techniques to the adversarial stances so many women seemed intent on taking towards me over these last fourteen years or so.  Namely, I've learned to back off of women and regroup.  I've set limits on how often I'll approach a woman I'm interested in.  I can let things just go by the wayside if they aren't receptive to my approaches to them for social reasons.  All that coping stuff is as important as the good psych med and the abstinence from alcohol.  I guess I should just anticipate certain women in my world wanting to go there on me in the upcoming days and weeks and months, and that I can just see these occasions as opportunities to put right certain behaviors and responses from my past. 

In my post, "Beautiful Women." I went off on someone in my world.  I think I managed my response pretty well to some of the issues this person brought up.  The issues have to do with this person's availability and the availability of someone else.  I talked about how I first started teaching myself to exist in a happy place without someone such as this person I went off on giving me validation of my worth.  I first started teaching myself how to be happy without such women while I was still in my twenties.

In my early twenties, I had so many breakdown experiences that centered around this issue.  I could not make intelligent decisions about this or that young woman who presented me with this or that dilemma that centered around their actual availability.  One example was "Donna."  Donna merely flirted with me and the world in general one night early in the summer of 1986 over at a friend's house.  I decided to go on a spiritual quest for love over that one.  I carried a torch for her the whole summer, even though this mutual friend told me she had a boyfriend, and it all ended up in a breakdown mess at a party at that same house where she did her little act at the beginning of the summer.

I managed to smooth things over for a bit with a transcendent moment at another party at another location the following weekend.   I saw Donna and her boyfriend at this other party and I went up and talked to her as if it were all no big deal. This transcendent miracle attracted the attention of "Wanda."  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.  She presented me with issues of whether or not she was actually available as well, all while basically pretending to be my girlfriend. So yeah, my crude sexual proposition to her was not an intelligent decision, I admit.

I didn't start making intelligent decisions about unavailable women until Sara in the spring of 1988.  My only criticism of my "what if I turned my back on love?" approach I came up with at the time resides in the notion that I didn't not take that approach far enough.  So, in 2012, I once again embraced this "buddha" I follow to the utmost limits I'm able to follow it.

As the example of Donna leading to Wanda illustrates, an inability to deal with relatively minor dilemmas concerning the actual availability of an individual woman can lead to a much bigger problem with someone else down the road.  I think about this person in my world, the person I mentioned at the beginning of this post.  I don't think the dilemma she presented me with is that big a deal.  I think I can handle it in a sufficiently professional manner and come out okay.  I don't want to be vexed by whatever minor dilemma she's presented to me, because that would not bode well for my prospects for making intelligent decisions about some real turkeys out there who might come up for consideration further down the road 

In Dr. David Burns' book, "Feeling Good," He tells several stories of elusive boyfriends and wayward husbands who leave his female patients beside themselves as to how to handle it.  He counsels them again and again to learn how to be the providers of their own happiness and to stop chasing after these men.  He also encourages the patients to see things from their wayward partners point of view so these women can move on and not get stuck there.  In at least one instance, one woman turns the tables to such an extent that the man comes back wanting to deal.  

I typically don't have that level of success in the situations I find myself in. One reason may reside in the fact that I don't, at any given time, have any actual romantic love relationships with the women in question.  For me then, turning the tables doesn't matter.  The discovery by itself that I don't need to be vexed every single time someone presents me with a dilemma of whether or not they are actually available provides me with a great deal of satisfaction.