My brother's funeral is tomorrow.  The death was accidental, but it had everything to do with the health problems he's had for a long time.  People who know me and have read enough of these things can know me as pretty bitter about the bad breaks I got from my problems, but I was handed the keys to the fucking kingdom compared to him. 

I had to get a medication change earlier in the month.  It's my antipsychotic.  So far so good.  I missed a lot of days of work before the change because the old medication sedated me so much that I would skip doses and not sleep.  I finally decided this month that the problem was not with me but with my medication, so I requested a change.  I understand that this new one can make people real restless after a while, so I have my fingers crossed.

Hellooo, is anyone out there?  I say this because my last couple of posts were about the women thing.  They help me, if nothing else.  I try to keep a civil tone, because this is, after all, the internet, and one does not know who will wind up reading this.  I don't want to post something hatey and find out that, yes indeed, the party in question is indeed reading my posts.  I'd just as soon not find out that way.  This is a perfect Richy Vegas situation, though.  I'll leave it at that.

So I was in a business I talk about from time to time.  I decided that a young lady employee was going to be my queen.  
This'll do for a while.  I do not like to find out the hard way that I've been barking up the wrong tree, so I'll just leave it at that and go on like I am about to go on.

I decided to favor this young woman with a little attention, because she is, after all, my queen.  She seemed….challenged by my overture.  If I were to guess, it would be that she doesn't like the idea of being judged harshly by me.  I know what it's like to be around a beautiful woman who would not be that much older that she is now, and feel like I stand before them naked.  I mean, I feel like smoking hot women in their late 20's or early 30's who are dressed to kill and all that may really be saying something about me if they found me coming up short.  I mean I've felt terrified and not able to interact with such women at all.

So I can imagine this young woman might feel the same way about me.  She has a heck of a lot to offer anyone whom she really does take an interest in,  I can see that a dynamic where I feel like, "She's just a kid, what does she know?" and where she feels like my judgement of her is more valid can get really old really fast.

I thought about holding back on these posts for a while and just seeing how it went between her and me.  But, this is a brave new world we're in, and she might have come to expect to be able to access what I'm doing now.

So here goes:  Young lady, the reason I cut you loose before was because I could not shake these unconquerable doubts that I had about you.  To this day I've hardly interacted with you at all in the real world, and at the time I didn't feel like it was worth trying to fight through all that doubt, so I let go.  This seemed to translate as some crazy sharp game that really gave you what for.  I was just trying to cut my losses and move on.

As a fifty-one year old man with a major mental illness who had something of an interest in you, I seemed to be assigned the role of loser to you.  In order for there to be a winner in your world, there has to be a loser, and that would be me.  My services for this role seem to be much in demand.  As much as they always were.  This has been hard for me.   It is not just something women your age engage in.  I've had to field this sort of attitude from women fifteen, twenty years older than yourself.  It is a very common attitude for me to deal with.  Our capitalist society seems to be predicated on the idea of winners and losers.  Women select mates on the premise of winners and losers.  

That's not very spiritual.  And, as women often find out in this sort of game.  Their winner is often not such a winner and their loser is often not such a loser.  A winner can't be a winner forever all the time, and what then? Are you supposed to treat them like a loser then?  What if you've been married to this guy a while?  What if you have a couple of kids?

I've found it best for me to exist outside of this system.  I've been doing this for a while.  In my twenties I would consider it very important to be spiritual with women who didn't seem to feel obliged to be the same way towards me.  Some quit extraordinary, transcendent moments occurred from this path I was on.  It was a hard path to unlearn.  One's relations with women should, to some extent, be about cashing in, and I just couldn't cash in on this particular line of inquiry.  As I descended further and further into madness, it became about the only thing that I could do right.

Like I said, I've existed outside of the winner/loser thing  pretty much all of my adult life.  I'm not saying go out and find the nearest homeless man and blow him behind the dumpster, but you get my drift, right?  For me it's not about winners and losers.  It's about taking care of yourself and knowing what's up.

Don't get me wrong, I have standards too.  One reason it's about you is that you have a fucking job and seem to have no problem with that reality of life.  Another reason it's about you is that you are very attractive, and I've just found it best to make accommodations for ones such as you from time to time.

Like I said, if it's true that you and the others read this blog, y'all seem to expect me to be a bit of an open book.  I figure that the reason it's about me for you, if that is the case, is that you feel I can tell you something or other about yourself, and you are at heart just a young person looking for answers.  A few years ago I used to look towards women your age for answers for myself.  Something to do with a midlife crisis.

 I've come to the understanding that there's no use crying about missed opportunities from my youth.  I read in Feeling Good that getting hung up on missed opportunities is a sign of low self-esteem.  That's because you're telling yourself that your opportunities to have something good happen in your life are in your past, and that you don't think enough of yourself in the here and now to get good things going for yourself in the present day.  Thousands of dollars saved not going to therapists with this issue.

I thought about holding this stuff back for when we go out or what ever.  That day may never come.  This information and insight stuff seems to help you, and I thought that if I just go ahead and opened up on these things, that at least one of us could make and informed, intelligent decision about the other. 

There may be one or two women in my environment who may be somewhat interested in me.  By "environment" I mean the places I go on a regular basis.  They're both young, beautiful women, and bless their hearts if one or both of them are actually even a little interested in getting to know me better.  My stats wouldn't look good on an online dating profile or personal ad, so if there is really any interest on either of their ends, they deserve some kind of fucking medal.

When I was thirty-seven I decided to make finding a committed long term relationship less of a priority and try to concentrate on playing the field.  It hasn't exactly been a swinging singles sex party for me since then, but I also haven't  really been hurt since then either.  I would tell therapists that I did not want a relationship but instead a variety of dating experiences with a variety of women, and it was either met with this attitude that there was something wrong with me, or it would just go in one ear and out the other and I would continue to incessantly hear "relationship" out of them ad nauseam.  So I'm done with therapists.  They cost a fortune and they've never been all that helpful in my relationship with women.

Yeah, a variety of dating experiences with a variety of women.  There are quite a few reasons for this.  A big reason is so that I will find out what kind of women I actually like being around.  A lot of my drive was so fantasy driven, and things would not work out so often, that I really didn't know much about women who didn't fall into the narrow confines of my ideal choices.  I would be so sure that my ideal woman, whomever that was at the time, was "the one" that I missed out on actual experience.  It could be said that I really didn't like women that much, because I could not accept the idea of going on even one date with someone who didn't live up to my ideal.

Another is the issue of experience.  Women confer higher status on men who have more experience with women than men who have less.  I think that movie "The 40 Year Old Virgin" was bullshit,  The female lead would have cut that guy loose after taking his cherry instead of marrying him.  I don't think that a man needs to make a sexual conquest of a hundred women to know what's up with women.  I just try to go on dates and have a good time.  I think the ability to learn how to empathize with women and know what they want is not just for womanizer types, but can acquired by other types of men.

Another issue is history.  I've been able to acquire a history with women where I don't get hurt since I lowered the priority of finding love.  I haven't really crashed and burned since 1999, and I doesn't look like I will anytime soon.  Again, it's not been a history that's been chock full of dating women, but I have been able to consistently make intelligent decisions about women, especially since I committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol since December 2008.

Another reason for a variety of dating experiences with a variety of women is to compile a meaningful frame of reference.  When I invariably always made it about the best looking women in my environment, I would almost always come up empty in some way.  A lot of this kind of women, that is, the best looking women in my environment, would be such assholes in the same kinds of ways that I would wind of just comparing asshole women to other asshole women.  Going out with other types of women would give me an idea of what to look for in women that often would have a genuine interest in getting to know me better, and I could compare apples to bananas to oranges instead of always apples to other apples.

What do I look for for in a date?  Three things will usually do it: available, interested, acts like she gives a shit about taking care of herself.  Those three traits will usually get you at least one date.  Several women over the years couldn't manage that last one; that is, act like you give a shit about taking care of yourself.  A couple of them not bad looking women, either.  That's one reason why I decided to quit drinking and drugs, because it seemed like the only women who took an interest in me before I quit were not very presentable women who just wanted a drinking, drug buddy.  If I could have dated the cute girls and still used, I wouldn't have bothered quitting.  Substance abuse is a one way street.  No one who drinks heavily, for example, wants to date someone who drinks a lot more than even they do, but they'll consider someone who drinks a lot less or not at all.

So that's about it.  Until further notice, I just want a variety of dating experiences with a variety of women: a goal that I've found much more doable than finding true, everlasting love. 

 

In the Spring of 1988 I had just a handful of classes to go before I graduated.  I could graduate by the end of the second Summer session if all went well.  I took a class in Latin American Art History.  One day a beautiful Latina girl whom I had admired in a previous class sat in the row in front of me.  At one point during the lecture she seductively flipped her hair up revealing her bare, sensual neck.  I mouthed to a guy behind me that she wasn't very nice and he cleared his throat.

Wherever I sat she seemed to sit nearby.  One day I decided to just sit next to her to see how she took it. The next class I sat in the same chair to see if she would sit next to me.  She didn't.  I finally decided to take a chair in the very right hand corner in the very front.  She decided to take a seat in the next row up and just to my left.

It became obvious that she wasn't going to just leave me alone and let me take notes during the lectures and take the tests, etc.  I had been reading "Feeling Good," by Dr. David Burns.  Dr. Burns offered a cognitive therapy approach to treating depression.  I'd had a problem with depression since high school, and with the coming of my undiagnosed shizoaffective disorder symptoms starting at a the age of nineteen, my depression only became worse.

"Feeling Good" talked about distortions in reasoning that led people to think thoughts that would lead to and perpetuate their depressions.  I believe he called these "automatic thoughts."  Automatic thoughts would be thoughts that people would have that weren't necessarily put into words.  Dr. Burns encouraged people to write down their automatic thoughts and then see what category of distorted thinking they fell under.

So this Latina in my class, what about her?  What should I do?  Should I just pursue her and see if I could make things work out?  That would have been my typical course of action up to then.  Since I broke up with Jeannette in January 1986, I simply could not get anything going with anyone.  I had some pretty bad experiences in my pursuit of love.

Now, for once, finding love was not my number one priority.  Graduating from UT was now my priority.  I became intrigued by Dr. Burn's chapter on Love Addiction.  Dr. Burns cited Love Addiction as an underlying cause of people's depression, along with Approval Addiction, and I forget what all else.

Okay, so what if this girl offered a chance at love?  I felt that way about someone that I had a very bad experience with in 1987.  I've come to the conclusion that the young woman from 1987 represented herself as something she was not.  Date after date of heavy make out sessions led to nothing.  In frustration, I made a crude sexual proposition to her one night during a particularly involved session in her car outside of my house.  I quickly came to regret that move in the days and weeks to come, and had doubts about the suspicions that led to the crude sexual proposition.  That whole deal went totally in the crapper by the Summer of 1987, and only in the years since have I been able to reconcile my actions with what little I really did know at the time.

So what if this Latina in my art history class offered a chance at love?  What if, on the other hand and by all appearances, she represented herself as something she was not?  What to do?  I pursued the girl in 1987 to the ends of the Earth and came up totally empty handed, and I knew nothing more about the deal than when we'd started.

So what about this Latina?  Maybe my problem was Love Addiction.  What if turned my back on love?  What if I just let this "opportunity" slip through my fingers?  What automatic thoughts came to mind?  Would that make me a bad person?  Would that make me a weak, inadequate man?  Would that make me cold, unloving man?  Would I be doomed to live an unfulfilled existence?  Really, even if I did it just once?

I sat there in my seat in class and made no effort to talk to her or anything.  So far so good,  I started to think that things could really work out with her and then, one day she came in as I sat there and exclaimed, "What a weirdo, god!  God, what a weirdo!" as the guy who'd sit next to her described some guy who'd pursued a girl from Houston to Austin.   The class ended and I whirled around and excitedly burst out to her a question about the papers.  I turned to the girl next to me and the girl next to me answered my question.  The Latina grabbed her stuff, rushed out of class, and slammed the door behind her.

For about half a day I thought that I'd really blown it.  Then I thought, "Come on!"  Sure enough, next class she tried to play the guilt card.  The difference between her and the girl from 1987, was that we were not alone with each other, and she couldn't pit her word against mine.  I've never been in any kind of compromised situation with any woman ever since.  I had my side too,

The Latina let me know she was sorry, and I gave her another chance,  The deal didn't work out.  It turned out she was gay.  She may have been a virgin at the time, and she may have wanted to have things work out with me, but I cut her loose when it became apparent that, after all we'd been through, she still just wanted me to jump through hoops.

In 2012 I decided to revive the "turn my back on love" experiment in earnest.  There was no elusive Latina in sight.  Well, there was one, but it was someone I'd dated for like ten seconds.  It was easy to cut her loose, and we stayed friends until she moved on and started with a guy and eventually had a baby.  The "turn my back on love" experiment really represented a road less travelled for me.  I knew by about the Summer of 2013 that what still seemed like just a drill would one day not be a drill at all.  And so it has come to pass, several times,

When I turned my back on love in the Summer of 1988, I went on to graduate, apply and get accepted into graduate school in New York, graduate from there, and come back and get a job before I succumbed to my demons for real in the summer of 1992 and receive my diagnosis.

In the Spring of 1990, while in grad school in New York, I came to the conclusion that the Latina in my art history class really did love me and that I'd made a terrible mistake, one I tried to make up for in my subsequent pursuits of woman.  One could turn over an hour glass a finite number of times and know that I would one day go completely nuts on this path.  I was quite the bad guy in grad school, until I wasn't.  When I got back to Austin in the Summer of 1991, I met "Jenna."  I tried to romantically pursue her and that course of action led to my grand mal meltdown in 1992.

I ran into the mysterious Latina from my art history class just days after I let go of Jenna.  Her name was Sara.  I had a date with Alice, and Sara came over with a gay male friend of Alice's.  Sara looked at Alice with gay lust, and that's how i found out.   That was in late June, and I finally had to go to the hospital at the beginning of August.

So turning my back on love did not make me bad, and I did not have an empty unfulfilled life because of it.  Love is just not that important to me any more.  If I ever felt the need to once again ask myself, "What if I turned my back on love?" as I have several times these past few years, I would do it again in a heartbeat,