I watched a YouTube video from TheGamerFromMars channel titled,"How the Internet Made This Cartoonist End His Life."  The video contained the most comprehensive overview and summery of the Ed Piskor story that I've encountered.  Cartoonist Ed Piskor killed himself earlier this year after the internet blew up on him over a Twitter post from a young woman he propositioned in 2020 when she was seventeen years old.

I can't help but compare Ed's case to mine.  In Ed's case, I think he was administered a sudden lacerating wound that needed immediate attention and intervention.  Whereas for me, I feel as if I endured a more "death by a thousand cuts" level of punishment.  One could go on all day on which one of us was dealt the worse hand, but I'll say this, surviving a death by a thousand cuts is a hell of a thing.  Not easy.  I'll also say that the idea of actually harming myself over any of this was never an option I considered. By the time Schmaylor reared her head in 2016, I was an old hand at this bullshit, and I was ready.

I encourage anyone reading this post to check out the above YouTube video.  After my viewing of it, I honestly don't feel as if I owe any woman in my world romantic attention at this time.  That would go double for anyone I associate in any way with Schmaylor.  For whatever reason I decide to beg off of any situation that may or may not exist between myself and anyone in my world, I have the right to beg off.  I have the right to be all wrong about such a person.  That's it.  

The other day, as I waited around at the coffee shop, I came to realize something.  I didn't put years of hard work into coming to terms with my issues around loneliness and an endless, aching desire to connect with women in my world only to have all of that work unravel whenever I see desirable young women at clubs or the coffee shop or anywhere else.  I've even talked to some girls at some places, lately. I felt at ease talking to them, and I just wanted to talk, really.  It's time all of those years of hard work making changes to the whole of my being and how I think of and relate to women; it's time all of those changes really help me feel more comfortable in my own skin.

A few weeks ago, a woman I'm acquainted with in my world snapped at me over something minor.  I didn't think she had cause to snap at me.  My mind pricked up a little upon reflection on this exchange between us, and perhaps her mind pricked up too.  She's young and attractive, and I thought, "Did this way she snapped at me indicate some level interest from her in me?  Like, she can't help but display some emotion and frustration with the current state of affairs between us, because she wants something more involved with me?"  I kept my mind on thoughts such as these for a couple of weeks.

As time wore on and nothing of substance seemed to spring from this one minor incident when she snapped at me, I began to think, "You know, that's a really lame reason to make it about her at this point."  Soon after that one insight entered my head, I began to let the whole thing fall by the wayside.  To me, that kind of willingness to just let something like that go indicates that, yes, I do feel more comfortable in my own skin these days.

I plan on ranging this subject over several posts.  When I broke through last year at about this time and took down Schmaylor and her confederates, I vowed to not retaliate against her or anyone else I considered complicit in trying to fuck me over.  And so, here we are a year later, and I've kept my promise.  I consider retaliation to consist of "acting out" behaviors that implicitly or explicitly intend to embarrass, humiliate, harass, intimidate, threaten, or inflict emotional or bodily harm on one's perceived adversaries.  I don't believe I've visited those kinds of behaviors on Schmaylor or anyone else I connect to her and hers.

When I speak of Schmaylor explicitly, I don't think posting a song such as "Fuckface on Monday and Fuckface on Friday" on YouTube constitutes retaliation. I do think a work of art has the potential to inflict base harm on a person or group of people, but I think I take enough care in the art I create that my art doesn't do that to anyone.  I think songs such as "See What Fuckface Is Up To Today" make fun of me as much, if not more, than they make fun of Schmaylor.  I think that kind of song dances around a line, jumps from one side of the line to the other, and at other times walks right on the line that people have about all kinds of issues of acceptability vs. transgression, and that's part of what makes that kind of art good.

So no, in my best ability to assess my behavior towards Schmaylor and others this past year, as well as the many, many years previous that the situation I speak of has been in effect; I don't think I've ever retaliated in an acting out sort of way towards her or anyone else. I'm glad I have not.  I still have no desire to retaliate, and I came up with another reason that reinforces my path just the day before yesterday.  Here it is.  When I look back to the years 1986 and 1987, and all those people who, often with apparent glee and relish, inflicted pain on me, and how I finally retaliated against Wanda; after my retaliatory gesture against Wanda; Wanda and all those other people could just hide behind my act of retaliation, figuratively speaking, and make accusations and condemnations against me, and I seemingly destroyed any real chance I might have had to actually hold Wanda or anyone else accountable for the way they behaved towards me.

To this day, so many people from that era have never had to answer to me or anyone else about what they did.  Not on apology from anyone to me.  Base retaliation is a relatively "easy" act to commit.  It may be a bitch to live down, but the act itself is pretty easy to execute.  I think any effort I may make to bring about an actual reckoning to any of these people might be much harder to do than base retaliation.  What form would it take?  How long should it take?  How do I regard friends and possibly family I think may be complicit?   I'm just starting to wrestle with these issues.  

The best part about my struggle now is that, in forgiving these people and letting go of my pain, I have virtually zero unresolved issues of lingering hurt that need addressing.  If I do continue to pursue my efforts to hold these people accountable, I do so without the burden of a boatload of emotional pain to carry around.  That is all, for now. 

I've talked about those two young women at those two different food service businesses I patronize.  They both gave me contact information, such as their social media handle or their email address.  I contacted both of these very attractive young women about seeing them outside of the confines of their respective places of employment, and it was no go with both of them.

I'm trying to rein in my discretionary spending these days.  These two food service businesses are two very tempting places to put on the chopping block, so to speak, or at least limit severely the extent to which I patronize either of these places.  That's one reason to perhaps not see these two women at their places of employment so much as I'm used to.  I mean, not see them so much by a LOT, too.

Another reason I've seriously thought about cutting WAY BACK on the extent to which I patronize these two places has to do with how available I want to make myself to these two women.  Could making myself less available to these two women possibly coax the kind of attention I would like from either or both of them?  What if that doesn't work out?  I'll have saved some money, sure, but will all that effort to make myself more scarce to these women pay off in any other way? 

I kind of doubt it, but here's the thing: Making myself less available to both of these women may be something I can look at as a practice drill for a more consequential situation with a woman or women down the road.  That kind of thing has definitely happened before.  I was going to tell a story that totally illustrated that point, but that would take too much time.  

Okay, here goes: It involved that virgin girl at that grocery story I still patronize.  That whole situation was no drill, believe me on that.  The decisions I made in that situation regarding her and whether I really wanted to approach her for social reasons at all proved very critical and consequential as to which path I took.  

I decided to blow that virgin girl off completely, and I made her look like a total asshole in doing so.  The thing is, I'd had practice in blowing her off in a situation the previous year that involved a very attractive receptionist at my friend's printing company where I tried to temp for a while.

At that  time, in the spring of 2013, I'd decided to revive the "what if I turned my back on love" experiment of my youth.  The whole situation regarding  that receptionist at a that printing company vibed drill to me at the time.  All I did was stop calling the place to see if they had work for me.  I make the decision to stop calling after I couldn't get work for a couple or three weeks.  I just took my desire to do temp work to a temp agency, and that settled that.

I KNEW, that when I stopped calling my friend for temp work, and in so doing took the presence of that beautiful receptionist out of my world;  I just knew that kind of renunciation would not be a drill some day, and sure enough, one year later, that virgin girl at that grocery store fired a shot across my bow, thus signaling her desire to engage with me in what she considered some fun and games.  Asshole!

On December 8th of last year, I told myself I would take stock of my overall relationship with women in a year's time and try to evaluate whether or not I could see any signs of improvement.  So far, in the calendar year 2024, I've approached three women for social reasons, and I will look into a situation with a fourth well before the 8th of December, 2024, rolls around.  I'm really looking forward to seeing about this latest person.  Whether things shake out the way I would like or not, I think I've seen definite improvement in my relationship with women this past year.  Actually, this person I'm talking about now will be the FIFTH person I've looked into this year, if I include my enquiry into my deal with that former cashier that I used to go on and on about.

Am I picking up a stranger in some bar every Saturday night and getting laid?  No, but I've been reading up and looking at YouTube videos that proclaim the lack of willingness a lot of men have when it comes to approaching women for social reasons.  I'm not exactly burning up the charts with my level of activity of that nature, but for a sixty year old guy that likes a certain level of peace in his social life, I've been pretty actively approaching women for social reasons this past year. One of the more promising ones I approached this past year had to be no younger than, say, fifty-three years old, too, so anyone who accuses me of only approaching much younger women can go piss up a rope.  Okay?

Does anyone remember Sister Wendy?  She was the nun who had a show that looked at art mainly from Western Civilization.  She had a heavy emphasis on Renaissance art. One painting I remember her talking about had a lot of phantasmagoric, strange, grotesque imagery that reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." Sister Wendy's very unique interpretation of this Northern Renaissance painting proclaimed that the painting tried to depict the state of a world where men and women did not get along.  I would say that such an interpretation speaks to our current times, and a big reason why that guy got elected President again.

I would very much like to have some material success in my relationship with women, so I could possibly help show a lot of men the way.  The advantage I have over a lot of other people in that line of work has to do with how self-conscious I am.  I can lay out, step by step, how a man who feels lost out there in the dating world can find a way to negotiate his way through it.  Then again, maybe my techniques, and approaches, and, this is big, mindsets I've taught myself and learned through others such as Dr, David Burns in his books will ONLY work for me.  I'm curious about that.

I shot a video that documented my 2017 song, "Fuck-face on Monday and Fuck-face on Friday," last Sunday.  It's the sequel song to "See What Fuck-face Is Up To Today."  It's about only looking up fuck-face on the internet on Monday and Friday.  "...Every day other is no fuck-face my day," is how it goes.  Anyhoo, I think Schmaylor got pissed off about me posting that on my YouTube 2 channel.  What a punk!

For the past couple of weeks I had some ideas about writing blog posts about women in my world who gave me some kind of contact information only to not reciprocate when I messaged them via the email address they gave me or the social media account info they gave me.  I thought about purposefully avoiding them until enough time had passed for them to get the message that they really didn't count much with me.

I never went through with any post like that, because none of these interactions rose to the level of a big enough deal for me to hold a mad on about these women for more than a day or two or, at the most, two and a half days.  These women I talk about work at food service businesses I patronize, and that's how I became acquainted with them in the first place.  

I decided to patronize these women's places of employment as much or as little as I cared to on any given day or week, because the changes I've made to my game allow me to think of my interactions with them as part of some greater purpose.  It doesn't matter what exactly shakes out with either of  these women, because the changes I've made to my game typically give me food for thought and a viable, positive frame of reference for me to draw on for possible future situations with possible future women.

Back when I was eighteen years old, I got a girl's phone number one night at Antone's when I went to see a friend's band play.  I called her the next day or day after that.  She answered, said she was busy, but that she'd call me back, but she never did.  I flushed the napkin with her phone number down the toilet, and in so doing cut myself off from any chance that I would wind up obsessively calling her over and over and over again.

When I was nineteen, in 1984, I developed a devastating fixation on a classmate named Cathy in my UT art class.  I think, looking back, that I'd believed myself to have outgrown that tendency I had to obsess on girls and women.  The fact that I became so obsessed with Cathy, who had a serious boyfriend, really knocked me into a major depression and devastating feelings of despair and hopelessness.  

It took my situation with Sara in 1988 to really get a handle on how to deal with someone I found myself obsessed with.  The "what if I turned my back on love" experiment opened up a whole set of new options for me to pursue in how I related to someone like Sara.  What wound up happening came about as a result of me holding Sara to minimum standards of engagement with me.  

Like the girl I met at Antone's, I let Sara go when she failed to meet minimum standards of engagement with me.  The trick of it was, though, that Sara was someone I was really fixated on.  So the inquiry into possibly turning my back on love in letting Sara go allowed me to hold her to the same set of standards as that girl I met at Antone's.

A big difference in my game from when I flushed that girl's number down the toilet involves my ability to keep contact information and know that if I don't want to contact a woman anymore, I won't.  What my experience with Sara taught me, and what I've been able to build upon in the following years, is self control.  These two women at these two food service places have each received just one message from me since they gave me their contact information.  I don't need to resort to discarding the means of contacting either of them in order to practice sufficient self control.

With that level of self control I can patronize their places of employment as much or a little as I care to.  Either of them could date ten guys each over the next three months and engage in gaudy displays of affection with dudes right there where I can see them, and it might not make a damn bit of difference to me.  I just might have to bring a sick bag with me if such displays get too over the top.

I posted a few weeks ago about barking up the wrong tree.  I said I wanted to make it my goal for the rest of the year to refrain from casting about for a love interest.  I consider that a worthy goal.  Such a goal might not seem like much of anything to a lot of people, but it actually proves challenging to someone such as myself who would normally try find some woman to connect with at all times.  This kind of impulse made going out on the town for fun and relaxation a bit of a drag, because the never-ending hunt for a love interest, sex partner, whatever, took all the fun out of just gong to see some bands or going to a party or whatnot.  Back in my twenties I would concentrate on drinking when I couldn't find someone to glom onto.  I would concentrate on drinking when I could find someone to glom onto.

How does one go about "connecting" with a woman out in public?  My go-to move, to connect with a woman in my mind, was to look at her.  Then looking would become staring, and oh, there goes the love connection!  So, first, I try not to stare, then I try to not judge an event such as a music show at a club or a party on whether there are attractive women to "connect with" (stare at).  Yeah, staring at attractive young women has been a lifelong habit of mine that I'm still working on.

So, yeah, refraining from staring at women and refraining from casting about for a love interest from amongst the women in my world occupies me these days, mentally at least.  Anyhoo, I must be doing something right, because I've completed some demanding creative projects such as shooting videos, the latest examples one can find on my You Tube 2 channel (link in menu bar on this page), and completing the illustrations of my latest  Richy Vegas Psychoverse book.  I posted the cover art below.

I've only got the four pages of cover art to finish to complete the illustrations on this issue.  I plan on going out to breakfast to celebrate tomorrow morning.  

I went to the Austin Corn Lovers Fiesta last night.  At one point in the evening, I thought I saw the other party.  I call the person I attribute an alleged internet presence I supposedly have that I did not consent to "the other party."  Anyhoo, I think I had a sighting of this other party last night at the Corn Lovers Fiesta.

I have absolutely zero desire to reach out to this person and try to make things right with them in that particular manner.  Instead, I will simply reiterate my previously stated position on this whole affair and say that I will forgive this person to the extent that I will not attempt to retaliate against them for the wrongs they may or may not have done unto me.

I see actually reaching out to them as an attempt to prove what a great guy I am, and by extension, I see reaching out in such a manner as an attempt to gain some material thing from this person.  Material things I might hope to gain from reaching out to them might include access to art gallery shows or gigs for my musical act.

The one thing I can definitely gain from unilaterally forgiving them their trespasses against me and having that forgiveness take the form of promising myself I will not attempt to retaliate against them; the one thing I can gain from that course of action I already possess.  That one thing I already possess comes on the form of a sense of inner peace and quiet about this horrible, evil deed I accuse the person of perpetrating against me.  The inner peace and quiet I experience, daily, stems from the path I take of no attempts to retaliate against this person or any person I associate with her.  In essence, I've already gained all I can realistically hope  to gain from any act of forgiveness from me towards this person, and I don't have any need to reach out to them.

Let me make this one point clear.  I consider a concerted effort on my part to refrain from even shooting this person a dirty look or making a cutting remark around them a huge component of my overall position of forgiveness towards them.  That's because attempting to refrain from retaliation on even that level helps me gain a greater sense of inner peace and overall well-being about the particulars of this whole atrocious affair.  The whole idea that I can stop this back and forth between myself and this person, even if it's just me on my end stopping my part in it; that really helps me a lot.

Which brings me to my concluding point.  What if this person continues on their path of attempting to get back at me? Well, there's just no pleasing some people, is there.  All the more reason to not even attempt to reach out to them in some sort of great-guy way.