I hope to finish with "The Legend of Richy Vegas" by 2025 or 2026. I don't know if I'll be able to maintain this production schedule; life is what happens when one is making plans and all that. I think it will be a eleven or twelve volume series, and I'm on the second volume now.
The gig was another unique experience in performing. I had three twelve/ thirteen years old girls as my audience sitting right up at the front of the stage, along with their three parents. One of the mothers insisted that I could do my full set of potty-mouth songs, but I just couldn't. I excised "Blo-hole Acres," "Lot Lizard Lolita," "See What Fuckface Is Up to Today," and others, from the set. The remaining songs that had the f-bomb and whatnot I did an edit on.
I sold some books and a CD at the show, though. That was the main reason for me to do these shows in the first place. I have such a huge inventory of unsold books, that I have to have some way of getting them out there. Conventions are expensive, and often they are not much fun, either.
I was thinking the other day about something a young woman told me about ten years ago. I told her about a teacher in an informal class that I had an interest in. I didn't know whether this teacher was single or what. The young woman said something about, "Those crushes can be pretty mean," or brutal, or something like that.
That made me think, "Did I have a crush on this teacher?" A "crush." Wow! No I did not. I was about forty-three at the time, and I think I was pretty much past all of that. I did have a bit of a crush on a barista a couple of years later. I remember thinking she was ideal and perfect and I had some intense fantasies that revolved around how great we'd be together. I based most of my belief in her perfection on how good she looked. She was a bit of an asshole, as it turned out. If I was at all inclined to have a crush on her, I don't think I've had a crush on a woman since then.
For me, at this stage in my life, having a crush on a woman is like putting money into a defective soda machine. I might put in money at first, maybe one or two more times, but when no soda pop comes out when I push the button, and I can't get my money back, and I contact the vending company and they don't refund my money, and I do this enough times until I'm convinced that I will never get my soda pop by putting money into the machine, I will eventually stop putting money into that machine. Other people might get their soda pop just fine from the same machine, and I might stand by the machine, dumbfounded, and see it work for them, but for me, I'll just give up eventually on getting a soda from that machine, I guess.
I hope that when everyone gets to be my age, that when it comes to the romantic love game, they only concern themselves with what works versus what doesn't work, period. I think that is the appropriate frame of mind to have when one reaches my age. i haven't had anything remotely resembling the longings of unrequited love in- maybe almost twenty years. I've had quite enough spiritual growth experiences from unrequited love, thank you.
I find what helps most with that is to resist the urge to idealize someone based almost solely on how good they look. I go into hypercritical mode and try to come up with anything to pick someone apart based on what little I know about them as a person. An example: I saw some college-age woman at an open mic a few months ago. She looked really good. After I got home, I wondered why she didn't do more for me than she did, I concluded, that just by looking at her, that unavailability just oozed from her pores. I haven't seen her at that open mic since, nor did I try to talk to her when I saw her that one time.
I guess I have to distinguish the experiences I've written about in this blog and how they are different from a crush. A crush is more of a voluntary thing than what I experienced with the Invisible Woman and the two that came before her. I had the intense, involved fantasy life with these three women that generally centered around myself being accepted by them and theirs in their world- not really sexual fantasies at all, mind you. I guess when I get right down to it, those pathways in my brain that went to those places in my adolescence are still there, but all three of those women represented more of a bad juju curse that I had to overcome than anything that I wanted to be a part of . Furthermore, I knew that these curses wouldn't last forever, and I welcomed their passing.