I have completed 32 of the 80 pages of the latest issue of my comic book.  I hope to finish by the 18th of February.  I completed three books last year, and I hope to complete two more this year.  After the second of the two, I will have to lay out the text for the next four or five issues.  I hope to complete that process in the five months that follow the completion of the second of the two books for this year.

I wanted to talk a little about the love addicted/ love avoidant dynamic that I saw in some videos online.  Yeah, I could go on at length about that, but it bores me, so I'll try to be brief.  I just have to say that every time I've been intimate with a woman, they were not playing the love avoidant role to my love addicted role.  One video I saw talks about how such a dynamic can really work on some fucked up level for some people for a period of time before it all goes to shit.  The therapist seems to only talk about the instance where the love addicted party is a woman and the love avoidant party is a man.  

Every time I've been caught up in that dynamic as the love addicted person pursuing the love avoidant person, there was never any intimacy or relationship or anything like that to it.  I've had quite a few breakdowns in that dynamic.  It never really worked for me on any level, unless one talks about the initial meeting of such a person and myself.  That initial spark could really hook me for a ride, for sure.

One time, Thanksgiving 1991, Jenna and my roommate Davey enjoyed a dinner that I had won at my housecleaning job.  I returned from my family dinner to see them finishing up the meal at Davey and I's house.   Jenna asked if I would be interested in riding a cheap bus to New York during Spring Break. 

I went to bed thinking things were getting good with me and Jenna.  I felt as if things were going along in the right direction and that  WE WERE GOING TO GET CLOSER VERY SOON.  The next Saturday my friends had a party at their house on Duval.  I went to the store to get some beer for myself, and returned to the party.  I walked into the kitchen and saw Jenna talking to some guy I didn't know.  My heart sank a little.  Sometime later I sat across from Jenna as she talked to this guy and exchanged phone numbers with him.  She looked and me and gave me a snarly grimace and said, "Rich," to herself.  I sat there, helpless, panicking, as it felt as if my heart sprang a leak that I tried to plug up with rapid beer consumption.  I then attempted to compete for Jenna's affections, and we were off to the races.

The above two paragraphs serve as a CLASSIC example of the love addicted/ love avoidant dynamic.  It's hard to come back from that kind of behavior from a love avoidant, with myself as the love addicted party, and have something I could really go with.  So, no, I haven't had much intimate relations with women, thank you.  I mean that is CLASSIC, and I have many examples in my personal history of just that kind of thing going on.  Last Fall I wrote in this space about a young woman at a business who was very rude to me in an out of the blue way.  A couple of weeks before she sprang that shit on me, she'd given me this million dollar smile one morning as I left her place of employment.  That time I wrote about in several posts, starting in late October, would represent the second to last time that has happened recently.  That is all.

A couple of days ago my thoughts turned to a particular young woman in my world.  I contemplated putting myself out there somehow for her sake...or for my sake...or for love's sake, whatever.  Back around 2009 to 2012, or thereabouts, I would just ask such women out in front of God and everyone.  These women all tended to work at businesses I patronized, the difference in our ages typically spanned a great number of years, and, oh yes, none of them went out with me.

The first couple of times I would make such an overture to such a young woman, I guess that took quite a bit of courage.  But, after getting shot down over and over again, what started out as a supreme act of courage may have come off as more of a farcical nuisance to these women and the various employees and management at these businesses.  When one of these girls brought this habit up when I ran into her at a sushi place, I had to agree with her tone of annoyance and just say that my social circle at the time didn't exactly have a wonderfully rich pool of women to choose from.

So, I thought about this young woman in my world.  Since those days of just asking these young women out in front of God and everyone, I decided to try going the other way with it.  I mean that, starting in September of 2012, I decided to revive the, "What if I turned my back on love?" experiment from my younger days of 1988.  I'm much more satisfied with the outcomes of these "deals" I find myself having to negotiate my way  through since I adopted that approach.  Since 2013 I've put in a few (3) Facebook friend requests for some women who worked at these businesses, but that's about all.

So, this woman I brought up at the beginning of this post: I couldn't find her on Facebook.  What to do?  Should I invite her to any upcoming music shows or open mikes?  Should I give her a comic book and encourage her to contact me through the URL posted on the cover?  Should I just ask her out in front of God and everyone?

I thought, "Would it really signify a great deal of courage if I asked her out at this point?  Given that I always came up empty before when I approached women at these businesses, what would make for a more courageous move?  Maybe just leaving her alone and not fucking with her would be a more courageous move at this point."  So the train of thought started going in that direction, and I decided to not fuck with this deal with this young woman.  A lot of the deals with the young women in the past I brought up a few paragraphs ago looked pretty righteous to me as well, only for me to come up empty.  So, I decided to not ask this young woman out or make any other moves in that direction to her, because I decided that just letting go of her at this point demonstrated more courage than asking her out.

I approached seven women for social purposes last year.  They ranged in ages from the early twenties to close to my age.  I came up empty with all of them, but none of the approaches had the high tension quality of asking a waitress or barista or other retail employee out at their place of employment.  I remember seeing a news clip of an elderly woman who'd been married to the same man for an insane number of years, like over sixty years or something, and she emphatically emphasized that if she'd never met her husband, that she could have just as easily met someone else and had just as much success.  That really affected my decision to let this young woman at this business I patronize go.  Even though I didn't connect with any of the seven women last year, my decision to approach them sufficiently demonstrated that I was not so afraid of rejection that I couldn't approach anyone, and it also brought to mind that I could have probably been just as happy with a couple of those women as I fantasized about how happy I could be with this particular young woman.  

I talk quite a bit about the attractive young female employees at these businesses that I patronize on a day to day basis.  Several years ago I made it my goal with anyone whom I felt an attraction to, but that I only knew in such a context, that is, that I knew as an employee of a business that I patronize, I made it my goal to refrain from making such a person over into a love interest.  I essentially made it my goal because I did not want such a person to level the accusation at me to those around her that I was trying to make them into my girlfriend.

In my youth, the unspoken idea that I HAD to have a love interest in order to play a part in the love game seemed start a lot of trouble for me.  I can remember in high school that I would get so bummed out in any interactions with the girls around me that I wanted to get something going with.  It didn't seem to matter whom I fixated on, I always seemed to wind up feeling really crappy that things didn't seem to have any possibility of working out for me.  I figure that this tendency to get so easily depressed about such things made me extremely vulnerable to women in my college years that had a more predatory agenda.

In the years since I really decided to try to improve my deal with women, that is, since 2009 or thereabouts, I've traced this river of dysfunction back to the source spring of the notion that I deemed a love interest a necessary component of my dating life and of my overall relationship with women.  Since about 2012 I've attempted to short circuit this connection in my brain and do a workaround.  I think that I can say that, right now, no woman in my world, regardless of how I'm acquainted with them, feels that I am trying to make them over into a love interest.  If anyone does feel that way, they won't feel that way much longer, I reckon.

I reiterating this point because I don't know how many readers of this blog know that I've brought up this very subject many times in the past several years.  I believe that I used to have love interests in my untreated years so that I could bring order to a pretty chaotic situation.  The day would inevitably come where I had to let go of such women, and that day often marked another nervous breakdown period for me.  So, ladies, the bad man Richard Alexander is NOT trying to make you over into something that you don't want to be.  Understood?  

The other day at one of these food service businesses I patronize regularly, a very attractive young woman waited on me.  As she handed me my food, she gave me a little smile that made an impression on me.  I wondered about this little smile, and how it seemed borderline flirtatious.   Like I said, she's very attractive and doesn't have to do much of any of that to get someone such as myself's attention.

A few minutes ago I thought along the following lines.  Readers of this blog know that I guessed in November of last year that there just might exist an internet presence of me that I have not yet seen.  I ran that notion up the flagpole as a possible explanation for the behaviors of quite a few otherwise unrelated women toward me since maybe 2010.  It might not be true, but it made sense as I lay in bed one night adding things up.

So yeah, this very attractive young woman at this business would represent just the type that would have intimate knowledge of an alleged online presence of myself that I did not consent to.  So what?  Well, part of me thinks this notion of such a presence might actually ring true, and it that's the case, whatever flirtatious bone such a gal might throw my way wouldn't amount to much of anything.  If she really wanted to get with me, and if she really wanted to prove that she liked me, I think a better move for her would involve her saying to me, "Excuse me, sir.  May I talk to you for a minute?"  Then she could have taken me off to the side and told me that yes, this online presence actually exists, and perhaps she would offer to make a statement to the proper authorities.

So yeah, she can take her little flirtatious gestures and go jump in the lake, for all I care.   What if the notion of this online presence that I did not consent to has no actual basis in reality?  That would mean that all these women over these past nine years or so have just all been independently giving me their visceral reaction to what a total piece of shit I am, I guess.

Well, if it's the case that the online presence I suspect exists does not actually exist, what am going to do about this young woman's subtle flirtation?  Well, the whole notion of the online presence arose out of the beliefs that an individual from my distant past didn't like the way I treated her. Okay?  So, in regards to this young woman at this business, the best way I know how to treat such an individual, especially when such flirtations represent an adversarial stance, involves me slowing my actions down to a crawl and picking the right spot to make a decision to cut such a person loose.

I don't think any women that have gone adversarial on me over these past however many years- 2010? 21012? 2014?- have any reason to complain about how I treated them.  None of the women I've brought up who came at me adversarially ever had an agenda that had anything to do with love, girlfriends, or relationships.  So, my new improved methods of treating women in a way that might be more their liking was born out of all of this shit.  If this young woman is coming from a more sincere place with this ONE LOOK (whoop dee doo!) she gave me, and she finds my methods exasperating, I suggest that she try to get with a man who has more positive experiences with women like her than I have.