I've talked about these two situations I found myself in with young women in the past, but recent developments in my life compel me to bring both up again and compare the two.  On New Year's Eve 1984/85 I had a date with Katy.  I'd met her at a party a few nights before.  My friend at the party said he thought she was no good, but I found her attractive. On New Year's Eve, as Katy and I sat in theater seats at a party downtown, I confessed my virgin status and she said she loved me.  She said she'd broken up with her boyfriend, who came with her to that party of a few days earlier.  I turned down a supposed opportunity to have sex with her later on that New Year's Eve night because I didn't want to get her pregnant.  I had a few more dates with Katy and a near miss on the sex question again, to my way of seeing things.  A couple of weeks later Katy told me that she was no longer in an open relationship with her boyfriend, and asked if we could be friends.  I said no.

That whole next semester I saw my time with Katy as a missed opportunity to deal with my virginity dilemma.  I had my second psychotic episode at a restaurant job in March or April, and that all started when this kid who worked there made fun of me for being a virgin.  I did not have the self awareness to know until he said something that people could tell that about me rather easily.  I tripped on half a hit of acid after work, stayed up all night with two male friends, and went to work with no sleep the next night.  The psychotic episode centered around the idea that all the fellow employees knew I was a virgin and that the customers could tell as well.

The next Summer I called Katy again.  She agreed to go out with me.  I was all hot to get laid, and I pretty much tried to force a sexual encounter with her.  She fended me off, but I came off as hostile and surly to her as she drove my truck to her house.  I didn't even know how mad I'd made her until I called a day later.  I called the day after that and apologized.  I tripped on ecstasy the following Friday and talked to someone I knew from art school and my social circle, and later that Summer she became the first girl I ever dated.  In the Fall of 1986, I had an encounter at a nightclub with some of Katy's friends where I felt as if I had to show that I was willing to defend myself should they try to start something with me.

In 1996 I washed dishes at a restaurant where Snolly worked.  When Snolly first started working there, she would give me a really nice smile as we passed in the kitchen.  One day I stared at her in anticipation of this gesture of hers and she caught me, and it spooked her.  After that, she didn't typically come off as open with me.

After I'd quit the dishwashing job, I saw Snolly and some other restaurant employees at a party a few days before Halloween.  I walked up to her and another girl from the restaurant, and Snolly promptly walked off.  Later that night, at a house where about eight restaurant employees and I hung out, I brought up something to a guy named James.  James had accused me of raping the girl I'd met at the Cannibal Club in 1989.   Apparently, while in a blackout drunk over at James and Zac's house in September of 1996, I'd brought up the whole Legend of Richy Vegas story about the Cannibal Club, and Vernon Hoe, and I told Zac and James that I'd prevented Jenna from getting raped by Billy Billiams in 1992.  James apparently took a swig of gin, squirted it in my face as I sat on the floor in front of the couch wasted out of my mind, and accused me of raping that girl at the Cannibal Club whom I'd met in August of 1989.  He then made me arm wrestle him to prove that I hadn't raped that girl, and, though compromised by my ultra-drunken state, I beat him twice.  Wow.

Anyhoo, at that house where all of those employees and I hung out, I brought this blackout up to James and accused him of insulting my honor.  In the coming weeks I suspected a manager at that restaurant, Lane, of trying to build Snolly up as a bogus love interest through remarks that my crazy ass could take out of context and apply to Snolly.  I brought this up to my therapist, and brought up the idea of just asking Lane if he knew of any girls at that restaurant that liked me.  My therapist encouraged me to try that, so I did.  Lane said he didn't know of any girls at the restaurant that liked me when I called him about it soon after.  My therapist said the people in restaurant do play games, so this stuff might not all just exist in my head.

Around Halloween of 1997, I saw Snolly again at a party.  She smiled at me in a mischievous, knowing way as she walked by me.  I don't think she meant it at my expense, but rather appreciated how clever I'd been in dealing with that dilemma brought on by Lane and possibly herself.  A  little later, I talk to her some, then I walked to the all night grocery store to buy cigarettes.  When I returned to the party, Snolly had left.  The next day, at the video store, a manager at that restaurant named David seemed really happy to see me.  At a Scratch Acid show in 2006, David and another old manager of that restaurant, named Joel, both seemed really happy to talk to me.  I never ran into Snolly again after that party in 1997.  I figured she'd moved out of town sometime after that.

Let's compare Katy and Snolly on the issue of forgiveness.  I tried to come off to Katy as if I'd forgiven her and wanted sex in return.  I came off to Snolly as if I'd forgiven her and just let her go.  I think forgiveness involves letting go of one's pain and moving on, rather than forgiving someone in hopes of getting something material in return.  I think Katy felt bad about how she'd treated me, and that motivated her to go out with me on that date.  For my part, I wanted to lose my virginity, so we occupied two totally different worlds as to what we wanted to happen that night.

Last Summer I accused that young woman who works at that business of encouraging her boyfriends to act as if they wanted to fight me.  I also brought up a couple of times at the Lost Well where I thought I had to let some guys know I would try my best to defend myself if it came to that.  I also brought up an artist named Mark Hogancamp, who survived a savage beating and tries to come to terms with that through his art.  I accused this young woman of being a bully and a coward.

I think that this young woman might feel bad about any type of adversarial role she may have adopted in relation to me, and perhaps wants to make it up to me somehow.  For my part, if it comes down to a choice of one of two options, with one of the options involving an effort on both our parts to work things out and see if we could get together as friends and whatnot, and the other option just involves me letting all of that stuff go by the wayside and getting on with my life, I think I would choose the latter. I don't feel as if this young woman owes me anything material, and I would just advise her to try to do better next time she finds herself in a similar situation.  Now, if it ever came to point where I found myself alone with this young woman in a social situation, what happened that night with Katy won't happen.  I just want to make that clear.  I do plan on patronizing her place of employment at times that I think she might work there- for the immediate future anyway.  She's really pretty, and I don't want to bother her, but I'd just as soon let all of that stuff go.

Things seem good between myself and this young woman who works at this business I patronize frequently.  I even thought about getting up the gumption to ask her for contact information such as her phone number or where I may find her on social media.  I thought about taking that kind of action, then...."What would represent a road less traveled?"  That thought crossed my mind.  I don't want to chase her around her place of employment or anywhere else.

I patronize a food service business that has several young, attractive female employees as well as this business where this young woman works.  I've given the women at this food service business my comic books and CD's without asking for personal information from them.  At most, I asked one of them to send me and email that she could glean from my URL on my CD, and she never did.  No big deal.  Yeah, my CD's and my books have my URL, but none of those women ever contacted me that way.  

I've decided to just let well enough alone in regards to those young women at that food service business and not try to be their boyfriend or see them or contact them outside of their place of employment or any of that shit.  They seem to want it that way, and I'm happy to oblige.  It's not everything I've ever wanted out of my relationship with women, but I can do it and not have any hassle with those women.

I think I'll just do the same with that young woman I go on so much about.  I'll just regard her in much the same way I regard the female employees at this food service business.  I'll just be a kind of friend to her that she, hopefully, likes to see at her work and no place else, if that's what she prefers.  This course of actions seems so achievable.  It might also represent the best way for me to actually connect with this woman on a social level, even if that social level never, ever involves even one date with her.

The only thing I will run up against will come in the form of doubts about my rather conservative course of action.  Does she expect me to try to get with her in some way?  Will I disappoint her and those around her if I just relegate myself and her to this very limited role?  Will I live an unfulfilled life if I just let the whole situation go to this extent?   I went through similar doubts already about some of those women at that food service business, and those women really seem to want me to just let all thoughts of initiating a course of action in order to get with them go by the wayside.  

My experience with female employees at businesses I patronize tells me that they all might have a "don't call us, we'll call you" policy about seeing male customers outside of their place of employment.  I went on one date and almost had a date with another employee type.  Both times the women broached the subject first.  The only reason I didn't go on that one date had to do with her disappointment that I don't drink, because that girl invited me to hang out with her at her favorite tavern.  

If this woman represents some sort of exception to that rule, and she wants me to break the ice, I tell you, "exception to the rule" would fit, because EVERY SINGLE TIME before, and I'm talking around twenty times now, EVERY SINGLE TIME, I got shot down when I tried to get something going with a woman of that type.  The reversal of male/female roles as to who initiates that sort of thing takes getting used to, but from my observations, it seems to ring true, for me at least.  Oh yeah, one more thing, I only gave CD's and comic books to those female employees who specifically asked me for them.

Mary worked at a retail store I worked at around the year 2000.  Mary had an intellectual disability that caused her to have a low IQ, and she seemed to have cerebral palsy as well.  She always smiled and said hi to me when I walked by in back.  One day I made fun of her in a stupid way, and she instantly gave me a cold, knowing look.  Mary was middle-aged.  She'd probably had assholes treat her like that all her life.  I admired Mary for her show of self respect, and her ability to shoot it right back at me caught me by surprise.  If I'd wanted to become friends with Mary because of this, that would have been entirely Mary's prerogative.

I have more in common with Mary than I have with someone such as this young woman who works at this business whom I go on about so much.  I've had to deal with very ugly sides of human nature on a personal level all of my adult life.  I don't feel like I have to meet this young woman's expectations anymore.   I've written many  times that I care for her a great deal and that I am very fond of her, and I mean it.   But, I've also said that I can accept an outcome where myself and this young woman don't become girlfriend and boyfriend, and I mean that as well. 

My last post talked about Daria and compared her to that young woman at that business that I can go on about at length.  The thing about my decision about Daria, to just leave her alone and not email her anymore for the foreseeable future, that decision came about only after I had what I considered a significant interaction with her and could tell pretty well where I stood with her.  This girl at this business just started back there recently, and I've never even made small talk with her, ever.  I think I can at least check her out a little.

If she's really shitty to me and just wants to win at some silly game of her own devising, playing by her own set of rules, with her own definition of what constitutes victory, well all right then.  I'm pretty good at smelling a rat these days, so we'll see about that.  If she "wins" (whatever that means), well, that's just the hazards of the dating game for one Richard Alexander, born in Austin, TX, in the year of Our Lord, 1964.  I can draw a lot of heat from women who get some raging hard on to do a vicious takedown of me due to reasons such as something they've heard about me, like another person's version of something I've done, or the fact that having a major mental illness makes me a dumbass, or that having a major mental illness and being the romantically obsessive type automatically makes me the bad guy in a lot of people's eyes, so that must make them the good guy by default.  It's not fair, but you know what, life isn't fair, and that includes the dating game.

On March 1st of this year, I ran into "Daria" at Lone Star Zine Fest.  I know Daria from Austin Clubhouse.  She invited me to a performance she planned for the next night at Hotel Vegas.  At that event, she laughed because I came off as so reluctant to ask her for contact information, and she gave me her email address.  Daria is pretty young and really cute.  She's probably about the same age as  this young woman I go on and on and on about on this blog.  

Anyway, I wrote Daria the next week and told her about my show at the Posse East scheduled for St. Patrick's Day.  She wrote back saying she couldn't come because she was sick.  On St. Patrick's Day the county closed all of the bars and restaurants due to the onset of the pandemic, so there went my show.   As we all started hunkering down for the long haul, I started shooting music videos of my songs in my apartment.  I just stood in front of a banner that reads "Richy Vegas," performed my songs on my acoustic guitar, and put up eleven videos of the songs over the course of a couple of months.

On March 31st I once again wrote Daria asking her to check out my new videos and to subscribe to my YouTube channel.  Daria never wrote me back.  I didn't want to bother her anymore, so I haven't written her since.  I saw on her Facebook page that she posted something in May, so I guess she was all right as of that time.

I think of Daria and the decisions I've made to just leave her alone in relation to the decisions I've made in relation to this young woman at this business I patronize and still see to this day.  I admit, I think about this young woman who works at this business a whole lot more than I ever thought about Daria.  But, I thought about these two tonight, and decided that I wanted to come up with some new rules about how I relate to one versus how I relate to the other.

I've decided that just because I think about this young woman who works at this business a lot more than I ever thought about Daria, that fact alone does not mean that I need to favor this young woman at this business with more attention than I favor Daria.  At least Daria is someone I know from a more social setting, I have her contact information, I have actually talked to her, I do enjoy her company, and she is very pretty in her own right.  The girl at that business made quite a number of decisions over the course of these almost two years that didn't go my way, and displayed a desire to not favor me with any kind of attention or regard that I would want.  If anything, if I were to make it a contest between Daria and this young woman at this business as to whom I choose to favor with attention, I should maybe just be a little more persistent in regards to Daria and try to write her two or three more times to see if I could get her to write me back. 

The only problem I have with that lies in my desire to no longer live my life that way in regards to how I relate to women in general.  So, if I can let go of any urge to contact Daria again to the extent that I have not even attempted to contact her in the past SIX MONTHS, I don't see why I can't show the same amount of consideration for this young woman at this business I patronize and just leave her alone to a similar degree that I leave Daria alone.

I wanted to write more on the previous post just now, but the glitches in the editing capabilities won't allow that right now, so here's another post.  Like I've said many, many times in regards to this young woman I go on about: God seems to want to give me plenty of chances to get ones such as her right.  This project has been going on for the last thirty-six years or so, and I finally think I'm beginning to make some headway on it.  Like I said in the last post, my main appeal to women such as her seems to reside in my demonstrated willingness to accept an outcome where we don't become girlfriend and boyfriend.  And, like I've said before, I don't just talk the talk on that point, but I prove that willingness to let go of the notion of getting with one such as her over, and over, and over again.  The last six to eight years or so have seen me prove this point to a whole string of young, very attractive women.

I guess I took martial arts in my younger days, in large part, to enhance my role as a protector of such women.  Nothing could get me going back then like the fear that myself and my prospective lady love would find ourselves beset by ruffians who intended to overpower me and spirit her away and do god knows what to her.  But, both the feminists and the cops will tell you that intimate partner violence typically represents a far, far more prevalent threat to women than any Willie Horton (look him up) types that might lurk out there.  My willingness to accept an outcome where I don't get with such a one as her, from the very beginning of the whole deal through all of the adversarial drama ones such as her try to lay out for me finally seems to register with them at some point.  At least I hope so, anyway.  I think driving that point home in all its iterations over the course of time demonstrates that I really care about ones such as her more than any "I will love you totally, forever and ever, and I will follow you to hell and back to prove it" overtures could ever possibly demonstrate.

That young woman seems to have returned to working at that business I patronize on a regular basis.  That strikes me as kind of funny, because in this past couple of weeks or so, I found my mind going other places that didn't have anything to do with her, and now she's back, I guess.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, though.  I've always been very fond of her, and I still care for her a great deal.  Like Cheyenne (played by Jason Robards) said to Jill (played by Claudia Cardinale) in Once Upon a Time In The West, "You don't know how happy it makes a man to see a woman like you.  Just to look at her." One does not end a paragraph with a quotation, so I will just say to an amen to Jason Robards on that sentiment.

I think that my appeal to Sara all those years ago comes down to a couple of points:  1) That I demonstrated an ability to look out for both of our interests, way above and beyond anything she could do, or even had any desire to do initially. 2) That I stumbled on this ability to look out for the both of us through my expressed willingness to accept an outcome where we did not become boyfriend and girlfriend.  Furthermore, I think those four main transcendent moments that capped my fixations on Donna, Linda, Gwen, and Jenna in the eighties and early nineties came as a result of my demonstrated willingness to accept an outcome where we didn't become girlfriend and boyfriend as well.

The way I imparted that sentiment on Sara just represents the relatively painless way to go about it.  The four transcendent moments with those other women involved psychotic episodes at some point in the timeline.  Usually the episodes came immediately before or after the transcendent moments.  In the case of Linda, however, the psychotic episode followed the time months later when I waved the axe on my mother's property in the direction of her house, and a neighbor saw me and told her about it, I guess.  

The reason the way I took with Sara proved relatively painless by comparison has to do with the experiment I tried in relation to her.  That experiment just involved a willingness to let any perceived opportunity to get with her just slip through my fingers.  In other words, "What would happen if I turned my back on love?"  In contrast, with the women I experienced the psychotic episodes over, I  tried to hang on for dear life to the notion of getting with them over a period of quite a few months.

This young woman at this business is a real goddess type who can't be a day over twenty-two, by my reckoning.  So yeah, therein lies one of about eight or nine reasons why I'm so very willing to accept an outcome where we don't become girlfriend and boyfriend.  The other reasons are: She might not be available.  She might not be interested.  She doesn't seem accessible or approachable because of where she works, and all of the above reasons in some combination.

 

These past six years or so have seen me deal with sketchy young woman with suspect motives.  I figure that God wants to give me plenty of chances to hammer away at this particular weakness of mine.  I think I've done a pretty good job of it these last six years or so.  I mean, it seemed as if one came right after the other, and then another, and then another.  I had the idea that they must line up outside my door with this particular fucked up agenda.  Don't get me wrong, though, prior to six years ago I found myself in a position to deal with sketchy women with sketchy motives aplenty, and to cite the last time I didn't meet my own standards of smarts and behavior, I have to go back to 1999.  But, the sketchy women really seemed to come around with a vengeance after I committed to abstinence from alcohol and drugs in 2009, and then, starting in 2012, they really started piling on when I revived the "what if I turned my back on love" experiment from 1988 (see post from January,  2016 titled "I'm not bad").

So I propose a trade.  I propose this trade with my own mind.  I can let go of all the Legend of Richy Vegas stuff; the catching serial killers, the thwarting rapists, the finding Raoul Wallenberg and Josef Mengele, the fucking over the Khmer Rouge and the IRA; I can exchange all of that stuff for the hard earned ability to make intelligent decisions about the kind of women that led me to psychotic states in the first place.  Is that a deal?

The story I'm working on in my comic books now, "The Legend of Richy Vegas," deals with my gran mal meltdown of 1992.  One of the central themes of that episode centered around the idea that I prevented Jenna from getting raped by Billy Billiams.  I thought for a little bit tonight that I didn't want to trade that one along with the others, because that whole theme appeared to represent a real "where the rubber meets the road" scenario.  But, seeing as how Jenna came out of that whole experience unscathed, and I still don't know whether she even knew Billy Billiams, I can just let that one go as well, I suppose.

In the Spring of 1984, when I attended UT-Austin as a freshman,  I got really hung up on a girl in my art class named Cathy.  She had a serious boyfriend, and that really bummed me out.  I really went into a tailspin over Cathy.  I've often thought about her over the years for several reasons.  She seemed pretty nice, but later that year I encountered "Katy."  Katy was not nice at all.  She had a boyfriend too, but she told me that she'd broken up with him and that she loved me when I confessed my virgin status to her on our first date on New Year's Eve.  Katy seemed to represent a harbinger of things to come, too.  I really didn't get hung up on nice girls who just had boyfriends like Cathy anymore, and the women I did get hung up on just got meaner and meaner and meaner.

I've concluded that because I got so hung up on Cathy and became so bummed out over what now seems to me to be a really minor thing-that she had a boyfriend- that tendency to get so easily bummed out over such a thing made me extremely vulnerable to the Katies, the Wandas, and the Lindas of the world.  I would see  women such as them as heaven sent, and the shit would happen.  

Last night I got a little bummed out in regards to that young woman I still go on about.  I thought about Cathy and all of the girls after her.  I concluded that getting bummed out over this person would just leave me vulnerable to getting fucked over by someone else later on down the line.  I'm not bummed out about this person now, and I doubt that I will get bummed out about her within the foreseeable future.  

I promised I would not get ugly about anyone who may read these posts, and I will try to keep my promise.  In my dealings with women such as the one I go on about so much, as well as my dealings with friends, both male and female, whom I've had in the past that remind me of this young woman, I've found a thing about them.  I had this one female friend in the nineties who would talk about how cool she was and how she would be shitty to people around her and go on and on in that vein, at length.  Whenever I would attempt to call her out for this stuff, she would act really surprised and sometimes hurt that I would object to her whole line.  Seriously.  So, it was not as if she just didn't care what others thought of her.  It was not as if she could take or leave someone like me, and therefore she could say whatever she wanted to say about how she fucked this person over or what an uncool person that girl was who once was her friend, she really didn't like me or anyone else calling her out for this shit.

This girl I'm talking about, and a former male friend with whom I ended our deal after many years of friendship, really expected people such as myself to just love them no matter how they behaved towards me and others around us, or what their general attitude displayed about themselves.  I can only conclude that people like this want, expect, and feel as if they are entitled to unconditional love.  Unconditional love only exists, in my mind, in the relationship from a parent to their child, typically.

I think this young woman whom I go on about might expect that kind of thing from me.  Now, she might not be the total freak about this kind of love that these former friends I describe were, but from me at least, yeah maybe.  She might be more realistic about the kinds of love she can receive from people such as her real boyfriends, though.  She might realize that she has to meet certain expectations in her relationships with people like that, but she might really, really expect total, unconditional love and acceptance from someone like me.  I'm not prepared to give such a person that kind of love anymore.