When Van Halen's first album came out in 1978, my fourteen year old self instinctively hated them.  Seeing David Lee Roth preen around in his spandex and long blond hair later on only made me loath the band more, especially David Lee Roth.   I thought he epitomized the type of "strutting banty rooster rockstar" that I saw Robert Crumb grouse bitterly about in a Crumb comic in later years.  I imagined Roth as the guy who got all the girls I never could, and that has pretty much come to pass.

When I fronted Insect Sex Act in 2011, Max, the drummer, called Brett, the guitar player, and me over to his house for a band pow wow.  Max showed video of our last performance, and said he had a problem with how stiff I appeared as I did the vocals during our set.  I remember Brett specifically talking about what he DIDN'T want a front man to do when he asked me to audition for him in 2000.  He specifically said he didn't want a "dancer."  But here Max played the video and implored me to do SOMETHING during the performance that would reflect the energy the of the band as they played their instruments.  My solution became to dance around and goof like a trained monkey in our last several performances as a band before we dissolved the unit in late June 2012.  Everyone loved it.  The audience reacted positively to what I did on stage, and the other three guys in Insect Sex Act liked it too.

I bought two Van Halen CD's last Summer, something I was always way TOO COOL to buy until the age of... fifty-seven, I guess.  History has been very kind to the legacy of the Roth years.  Eddie Van Halen always had the massive recognition of changing the game in heavy metal/ hard rock guitar.  A lot of heavy metal guitarists took to practicing ten hours a day, like a classical or jazz guitarist, all because of Eddie.  Robert Christgau, critic for the Village Voice at the time of David Lee Roth's initial departure from the band, lambasted Roth's replacement as "one of the biggest assholes in rock and roll."  I saw an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street that featured a really cool usage of Van Halen's "Ice Cream Man," a cut from their first album, during a montage sequence that depicted a shipment of bad heroin hitting the streets in Baltimore.  The song sounded great in this context, and one really appreciates Roth's over the top vocalization of the lyrics.

Despite Roth's image as a decadent rock star, he still hasn't been "me too"ed, as far as I know.  He never did seem to have any personal problems or substance abuse issues that made the gossip pages, from what I remember.  I mean, I heard a story of an A and R guy from a major label scouting the band as they came up through the clubs, and he said that the band would be great, if only they got rid of the singer.  As an example of how the thinking on Roth changed over the years, I heard a clip on Howard Stern in the '90's that featured a Van Halen tribute band playing a club, and the singer went to great lengths to ape Roth's drawl and overall charisma as he bantered his way through the intro to "Hot For Teacher."  I could actually HEAR the guy swagger his way around the stage as he did his Roth imitation.   David Lee Roth had something, alright.

 

I've decided that blogging about my personal life, particularly blogging about my relationship with women, adds way too much drama and intrigue to my existence.  Especially intrigue.  I will instead try to write about music I listen to, books and comic books I've read or am reading, and also maybe some visual art as well.  If my audience that I believe may exist loses interest in these posts, so be it.  I count zero evidence of sales of comics or music from this supposedly appreciative audience.  "A lot of people out there seek fame.  I think as an artist it might be a good idea to instead seek....anonymity.  All one has to do is look at how the famous live their lives."  Brett DePalma, December 5th, 1990, during a drawing class I audited from him while I attended the School of Visual Arts as a graduate MFA candidate.  Brett just said this in a kind of off-the-cuff manner, but it has stuck with me over the years. 

I have an interest in joining a support group to help deal with my love addiction.  The one I looked into has a concept of "no contact." It's the interpersonal equivalent of total abstinence from things such as drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.  What no contact would mean for me personally would involve totally patronizing another business instead of a business I currently patronize.  All in the interest greatly reducing the chances that I will see someone whom I determined I have a fixation on.  It seemed like an extreme move on my part to actually take that kind of step, but my love addiction is extreme.  In 1992 I had to check into the psychiatric hospital twice due to my tendency to fixate on Jenna.  

I don't think I've wronged this person at this one business I will try to abstain from patronizing, but I think my move would probably serve both of our best interests, and I would, at the very least, let myself know that I'm committed to dealing with my issues in a tangible, material way.  I will try to take it one day at a time.  My ultimate goal in this endeavor involves a period of time spanning years.  Who knows if I can even last a week, but I've got a lot of success under my belt with cigarettes, drugs,  and alcohol.  With cigarettes I had to make quite a lot of tries at my ultimate goal, which now stands at nineteen years and counting since I've had a cigarette.

I mentioned in my last post that I try to take responsibility for my behavior in the midst of these crazy fixations I find myself in, and how I try to just bail when it seems time to bail.  Well, I made just such a decision a few weeks ago in regards to that young woman at that business I can go on and on about.  The question that inevitably arises when I'M the one making such a decision, as opposed to such a decision being made for me, centers around the notion that I bail way too early, and that I should just chill and see what happens.  I say this to that: One of the problems with one taking responsibility for one's action stems from the fact that one can make mistakes in what one does.  That comes with the territory.  I have the right to be wrong about this situation, especially if I think my heart is in the right place, and if I really think I'm acting in both our best interests by bailing at this time.

My last post seemed to resonate with some of her female coworkers, maybe.  I don't typically go into her place of employment when I know her to work there these days, but I see that I may have hit a nerve with some of what I said last week.  I wondered why.  I guessed this past evening that girls and women such as her throw out flirtatious looks and gestures to men in their world all the  time, but that the obsessive type of guy invariably becomes the one guy who takes that kind of stuff too seriously.  So, it they really have to be so responsible in regards to how they interact with an obsessive type, why do other types of men seem to have little or no problem with identical flirty behavior on their part?  Yeah, okay.

I think I did pretty good in my accounting of how I was towards her, both here on this blog and in the real world.  I said some heated things about a year and a half ago when I called her a bully and a coward.  I just felt that I was being subjected to some kind of entrapment oriented witch hunt at the hands of her and others.  So, yeah, that's a big reason why I'm so eager to bail at last from this deal.  She just didn't seem into the idea of interacting with me, even on a superficial level, the last time I had to chance to even say hi to her, so I just cut all of that shit loose at that instant.  I don't like the idea that women such as her, and other women observing the situations I find myself in with women such as her, see me as a guy who goes around bothering women. E-uh!

One of the main things I find most aggravating about these crazy fixations I get into with individual women has to do with the feeling that nothing ever changes in our deal.  I thought back on past bad fixation deals, and thought, "Did I do things that contributed to the feeling I had that nothing ever changed?"  Uh, yeah.  I remember calling Veronica Ortega almost every night trying to get a date with her after she kind of shut all of that down on me.  I've written about her before.  I've leveled the accusation on this blog that Veronica Ortega just wanted to collect me as an ardent admirer to help her get over a painful breakup with a live-in boyfriend in 1985.  On our first date at Kerbey Lane Cafe, I decided that I was in love with her based on some animated conversation with her at that moment.

Yeah, she may have just wanted to kind of use me for free male attention from an inexperienced guy she wouldn't have to take seriously, but the part where the wheels came off and I started the incessant phone calls, asking her out again over and over and over again counts as my contribution to the overall disfunction of that deal.  My lack of self-control made that whole situation about ninety percent my fault.  I mean, all she did was goose me some with a little flirtatious attention, go out on some dates with me, and then decide she'd had enough, but the part where I just went full tilt on her with the phone calls and the frustration that resulted from that was all on me.

Writing stuff on this blog to come off as some great guy, and then seeing if some woman in my world changes in the way she interacts with me KIND OF reminds me of those days, but only kind of.  There's not quite the white-hot intensity of flinging myself against the barricades that I felt in the midst of the deal I struck with Veronica Ortega.  Anyway, I've thought a lot about those days and how I do probably contribute to the overwhelming feeling that nothing ever changes between me and an individual woman to
a much, much greater extent than I sometimes care to admit.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd just backed off of Veronica in a timely manner?  I had sex with Chelsea almost FOUR YEARS LATER to the day after I met her.  I asked her in 2011 if I gave her the impression that I called her way too much, and she didn't even associate me with that type, and I'd known her since 2003.  Hooray.

Does she?  I make no apologies about my attraction to her and desire to see her socially.  Maybe I might as well shoot pixie dust out of my asshole as speculate on her state of mind.  I'm no mind reader, dig.  Me, i'd love to have coffee with her and really get to know her on some social level.  Maybe she's just not interested in a likewise manner towards me.  If that's the case, then I guess she will never have to think, FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE, about what might have happened if she'd been a little bit forthcoming towards me about something that might weigh on her conscience.  After all, and seeing as how this line of reasoning I'm on may have ZERO basis in reality; and if it does have ZERO basis in reality, then I don't have to worry about what amounts to just another very attractive young woman who has ZERO interest in me as a potential friend or more; but yeah, what if she has some major shit to hide?

Well, I'll try and help her out, if that's the case.  Tell her what I'll do: I'll try to come off as obnoxiously as possible to the point where she will GLADLY hide whatever she's hiding from me, and she will GLEEFULLY continue to collaborate with any confederates on her end in whatever shit she's got herself mixed up in.  After all, could law enforcement, whether on the the local, state, or federal level potentially take an interest in what's going on on her end of things?  Again, this blog, I just run this crazy-ass shit up the flagpole and see who salutes.  "Oh pay him no mind.  It's just that crazy Richard Alexander."  And I hope it is just little old crazy me.  I hope she all she has to hide are like, boyfriends, or some such shit.  No big deal.

Me I'm totally down with seeing her socially.  But if she's got some big thing to hide, I can see where that would never happen, if she has any say in it whatsoever.  Which, of course, she does.  Yeah, I'd probably be a real asshole about whatever's eating her, if it's as wildly grandiose in scale as my imagination can make it.  It's only as if I've pretty much had to deal with shit like this all of my adult life, so she can bet I'd probably not take it too well.  But, what about my end of it?  I've gone over all kinds of shit I'm not proud of from my past, right here on this blog.  For all the world to see.  So, again, pixie dust out of my asshole, maybe, but that would explain why I'm down with seeing her, but she's not down with seeing me. 

So, myself, as a person with a major mental illness, I learn to play to two or more possibilities in situations like this.  So here goes.  There exists the more mundane possibility that she just has not interest in me at all.  No bizarre plots or conspiracies to speak of.  None.  That's one. Another possibility resides in the notion that yes, she's come to care for me, but she thinks I won't accept that she's orchestrated a rather ordinary, run-of-the-mill, years long cat-and-mouse game by me and that I couldn't move on from that and allow things to grow.  Then there's the possibility that this crazy shit I've alluded to in previous sentences actually has quite a bit of basis in fact; and I'm talking about the use of the internet to stalk me, the Invisible Woman, people from my past, younger guys wanting to beat me up at clubs etc., etc.

But here's the thing.  I have found that the best possible course of action to take in these kinds of situations is....to not do much of anything about any of that, really.  If she's just not interested in me, then I just need to leave her alone.  I'm okay with that.  If she cares for me some, but thinks that more involved interaction with me might not work because of some run-of-the-mill cat-and-mouse game she orchestrated, well, that's her prerogative to not get mixed up with me.  Now, the third possibility I've outlined, the crazy stuff, this gets interesting, but still, it might turn out for the best if she tries to work things out without my help.  Me, I have no substantive proof that the craziest scenarios have any basis in reality, just me thinking out loud again.  And she might well know that if she did come clean on something like that, that I'd probably hit the fucking ceiling over it and want to go right after whomever put her up to her role in this.  She wanted to take the point position in that deal, how's she liking it now?  That kind of thing.  So, not much for me to do but leave her alone, and not do much of anything else.

Ever since this young woman who works at this business whom I can go on and on about on this blog started in on me with her subtle yet effective flirtations, I've felt compelled to play to the notion that she really has no interest in me.  And so it goes that I still play to that notion to this day.  Oddly enough, that does not bum me out these days.  I still find her pretty inaccessible, and a HUGE reason I feel I can't just talk to her about anything under the sun when I do see her centers around this concern that she really doesn't want any part of that kind of dialogue with me.  But, that doesn't bum me out, either.

Early this morning, I found out that what bummed me out these days centers around an imagined scenario where I would feel compelled to say no to any chance of going out with her.  Then I realized this; I cast my vote for seeing her socially two months ago when I invited her to my comic book sale.  I haven't changed my mind ONE LITTLE BIT on that score.  I'd totally love to see her socially if given the chance.   The apparent reality that she really doesn't want that doesn't bother me so much, because that's just something I can't control.

I want her and everyone else concerned to understand this: My behavior towards her and willingness, or lack of willingness, to interact with her comes from a palpable feeling on my part that she doesn't want me bothering her.  I want NO ONE, including her, to think that my lack of willingness to engage with her comes from a place where I don't want anything to do with her.  I just don't want to bother her.  I repeat, if it were up to me, I'd go out with her in a heartbeat.  No question about it.

If some of these much, much younger women in my day to day world wanted to go out with me, yes.  Unequivocally, yes.  Absolutely I'd love to go out with quite a number of the early to mid twenty-something years old women I see at coffee shops, restaurants, the grocery store.  Yep.

In a perfect world going out with such women would present no problems for me.  When I tried to get with the young women at this one coffee shop I patronize during the years 2009-2011, I came up empty and then some.   A lot of them tried to retaliate with mean rejection games, because, I guess, they viewed my overtures towards them as a type of harassment.  It's not as if I've gotten ten years YOUNGER since then, either.  In 2016, a young woman, I'll say early thirties, who managed a shift at a pizza place invited me to drink with her at her favorite tavern.  I told her I didn't drink, and we never went out.  But, she broached the subject, which I have ZERO problem with.

When I invited that young woman who works at that one business I patronize to my comic book sale late last October, I really counted that as an exception.  Understand, I had (probably still have, but maybe I'm coming out of it) an almost morbid fixation on her dating back to, I suppose, the Summer of 2019.  So, finally taking matters into my own hands and approaching her for social reasons almost THREE YEARS after she initiated her (pretty minor, but she's VERY attractive) flirtations represented a real raising of the bar for what it would take for me to approach a much younger employee of a business I patronize.

So, on the one hand, I really, really do have an attraction to MUCH younger women, but I think I'm willing to let just about anyone I can think of off-hand go out with the tide.  The whole notion of just letting opportunities with women in general just slip through my fingers really appeals to me, especially as that notion governed my behavior towards that young woman I wound up approaching last October.  I texted a friend of mine last week that I don't wreck myself on women anymore, and I think the way I'm just willing to let all of that go just because I say so, dammit, accounts for a big reason why I don't wreck myself on women anymore. 

I had someone tell me once that a mutual friend of ours said that I was compulsively self-revealing.  Okay, I guess this post will prove that.  I do this for a reason, though.  I've spent this overnight period in bed thinking about someone and where they might have been coming from with some of the kinds of attentions they did pay to me over these almost three years.  I thought the subject of where they might be coming from in general in regards to me so delicate and so personal that I figure it a good idea if I put the primary focus of this post on myself instead of them.

I first must extend my apologies to my sister, whom I will call Judy, because I will now tell a dramatic story from my childhood that involves her.  This story, whether one chooses to believe ALL of its narrative elements or not, at least reveals something about the nature of a youngest of five children who first grasps very, very serious matters with his gut years before he can intellectually process them with his mind.

One night in the Fall (?) of 1971, when I was seven years old, I lay in bed on a school night trying to get to sleep.  The problem arose  when my sister (17 at the time) and her boyfriend in the bedroom next to me started "fighting."  The fighting consisted of Rusty hitting my sister and telling her that she was going to "sleep" with him that night, and my sister crying and protesting that she did not want to "sleep" with "Rusty" that night.  I lay in bed in the next room wondering, I guess, why my sister didn't want to go to sleep with Rusty.  I mean, weren't they already in bed together?  Why was he hitting her over this issue?  Why was he so mad at her?  She might just take longer to go to sleep than he would.  He could go ahead and doze off etc. etc.

Now, in the years that would follow my remembrance of this episode, I would feel really bad about how I must have just lay there in my bed in the next room doing nothing while all of this went on.  It was only in my later twenties that I also recalled my dad being down there at some point and gently suggesting that Rusty might just want to go to his house that night, and Rusty being really super-nice about dad being down there and protesting that everything was fine to the point where he convinced Dad to go back upstairs.

I then remember Rusty being really gentle with Judy and how all of us went to bed and that was that.  A day or two later I told my friend and neighbor, Moose, about how Rusty and Judy had had a fight, and when Moose (8 years old at the time) asked Judy about it in the kitchen during the next day or day after, she told us to, "Fuck off!"

I confronted Judy about this night during a long period of psychosis in 1995, and she couldn't recall this particular night or the next day or so when Moose confronted her with what I had told him.  Judy told me she broke up with Rusty after a night at HIS apartment when he "wouldn't let (her) leave."  She had no problem remembering that night.

Now, the Legend of Richy Vegas, as I pieced it together over the years, takes us back to those moments as I lay in bed frightened about what was going on in the room next to mine.  My bed lay on the opposite side of the same wall next to Judy's bed.  So, as Rusty proceeded to hit Judy- this went on for a while- as Rusty hit Judy and demanded that she sleep with him, I started to recall something Moose said one day as we played in a pile of landscaping dirt for a new house in our West Austin neighborhood.  In the telling of the Legend, I recall Moose saying that if we ever found ourselves in a bad situation we didn't know how to deal with, I guess he supposedly said, that we should ask God for help, and that God would help us.

When we look into the mind of the seven year old Richy Vegas, God comes to him with an idea.  So, Richy Vegas stands up in his bed, pounds the wall with his fist several times somewhere above his head, Rusty exclaims, "What the fuck is that?," Richy Vegas stealthily runs upstairs and tells his mom and dad in a drowsy manner that Rusty and Judy were having a fight, whereon Dad goes downstairs, but not before Richy Vegas goes downstairs ahead of him and gets into bed.  That might explain why Rusty was so loudly, exceedingly polite and cooperative when Dad came downstairs and confronted the situation.

After Dad goes upstairs, and after Rusty promises my sister that he won't give her any more trouble, he calls to me as I lay in bed.  He asks me about the pounding, I profess ignorance and say it must have been my older brother (13) whose bedroom resided in another part of the downstairs.  According to the Legend, I said that my older brother must have been in my room looking for something, but that I was trying to get to sleep, like I was when Rusty woke me up to ask about the pounding.  

The Legend has Rusty ask my older brother sometime later about that night, my brother professes ignorance, and Rusty is, not only the first person to guess that it was indeed me who pounded on the wall, but the first person to disseminate the origin story of the Legend of Richy Vegas to people as he turns his life around in later years.

So, the next day, I had no recall of the pounding on the wall.  God had apparently struck a rather devious Faustian bargain with me, whereon in subsequent years, these acts of divine intervention I practiced left me with no memory of them in the wake of said acts.  It was only in the aftermath of my conversation with Gil Wilson at that party in 1992, where I had recovered memories of that night at the Cannibal Club in 1989, that I started to have a clue about the supposed existence of my alter ego, Richy Vegas.  

The Legend really kicked into high gear during that months long period of psychosis in 1995, when I really needed a medication change but didn't get one until, like I said, months after my first symptoms of voices and "recovered memories"; it wasn't until that long period of psychosis that I had the conviction that the Legend of Richy Vegas extended well beyond that night at the Cannibal Club and all the way from the age of seven until that period in 1992, which marked the beginning of the end of Richy Vegas.  Or did it?

Let's get back to some facts, shall we?  In 1985 and into 1986, I dated Lisa and Jeannette.  I didn't date either of them for over a month, but I never laid a hand on either of them.  In the 2000's, I sort of dated "Chelsea," but we were more platonic friends that people who dated.  Never laid a hand on her.  I had some loose sex with two other women, paid for three more.  Never laid a hand on any of them.  I've gone on at great lengths about the misconduct I did engage in with "Wanda," "Linda," and "Katy,"  I don't want to dredge that up.  Regular readers of this blog know enough about those stories.

I'm a big guy with a mental illness who has acted out at times in his life.  I can understand how someone might, if they heard about that stuff from third parties, might feel torn with indecision about me.  I would caution such a person to watch out for ANYONE who seems a little TOO understanding and TOO patient and TOO nice and TOO smooth about any woman they supposedly care for taking up what must seem like a permanent residence astride a fence about them. 

In 1989, I worked at G/M Steakhouse.  "Dickbag McNuttsack" blabbed to our fellow employees that I had been cleared of an attempted rape charge only after submitting to a photo lineup, whereupon the victim emphatically said I was not her attacker AFTER she picked a photo of a guy that did more closely resemble her stated description.  After my run-in with "Linda," during the Winter months of 1989, but before I waved an axe in the direction of Linda's house from my mom's property during the Summer of 1989, I had a run-in with "Myrna," a fellow employee at G/M.  

From what I pieced together years later, during and after my psychosis in 1995, I guessed that certain employees at G/M took this rape lineup story that DB McNuttsack related a little too seriously, and that would explain how things shook out.  For my part, looking back, I did not see MYSELF as a rapist, because I had never raped anyone.  So when my fellow employees alluded to this or that around that subject, such as one story a punk girl told about being raped outside of Liberty Lunch, any idea that those allusions had anything to do with me, in their minds at least, just went right over my head and didn't register at all.  Anyhoo, just yet another time when I arrived, youngest child that I am, very, very late to the the ball everyone's been attending this whole time.

If any women out there have such misgivings about me that they hesitate to approach me for social reasons despite their attraction to me, I might advise them to just not bother with me.  I don't like being jerked around any more that anyone else does.  Furthermore, I have met attractive women in my life who seem to not feel at all threatened by me from the get go, and sometimes we hit it off.  They exist.  I don't need to rely on anyone who has such major misgivings about me to enjoy some of the finer things life. 

My invitation to that young woman at that business had two purposes.  The primary purpose for me reaching out to her came from a desire to see her on a social basis, and since she seemed to have no desire to initiate those kinds of interactions, I went ahead and took charge of that.  The secondary purpose to my invitation to my comic book sale at my friends' business came from a desire to issue an ultimatum.  The ultimatum aspect meant that if my primary desire did not get addressed in a meaningful way by her, that I would just go ahead and get on with my life.  

Don't get me wrong, I make no apologies about how much I really do care for her, but I care for her so much that I found the ultimatum necessary.  I said in my last post that whatever I give that expresses my feelings for her, I don't even think I can take such expressions back if I wanted to.  The most I could do would involve some crude sabotage that would negate whatever more positive things I wanted to express, and I have no desire to engage in such reprehensible behavior now, and, in saying what I will say shortly, such acts of sabotage would prove as unnecessary as they prove reprehensible.

I said a couple of posts ago that she might find my paranoid speculations of where she came from all this time in regards to me upsetting, but I then followed with the observation that my almost total lack of meaningful access to her in the form of communication meant that, mental illness or not, anyone's imagination might run wild as to what really went on on her end this whole time.

And so it stands, and I will just say this: the reason I can't communicate with her in a meaningful way probably comes from the notion I have that she does not want me to have any meaningful access to her.  I don't think at this point the reason I can't call her, write her, etc., comes from a reluctance on my part to do enough to make that happen.  I think she does not want that at all.

I rolled out the red carpet for her when I told her about my comic book sale, and I saw her at her place of employment yesterday.  I walked up to her and asked her a question related to her job, which she and a coworker with her promptly answered.  But, she made no attempt to tell me why she couldn't take me up on my invitation to my show that I made in late October.  I think I can pretty safely assume that she just didn't want to come, and therefore, she doesn't have any desire for me to have any meaningful access to her.

I don't want to go into the possible reasons for her lack of interest in engaging with me. I've said enough on the subject in many, many previous posts, and I don't really have any desire to attempt to embarrass her now.  Right now I'm very comfortable with the idea of staying in my lane as far as the ways I go about patronizing her place of employment.  I saw my approach to her yesterday as more of a reflection of my desire to stay in my lane than any desire to obsessively favor her with attention.