Buster had a seizure last Friday night.  He sprang right up after it was over and jumped in the cab when I took him to the 24 hour emergency vet.  It cost a fortune to keep him overnight and give him some blood tests.  I have insurance that will help defray some of the costs.  My dad has offered to pay for the rest.

The vet said that it was too late in his life to be epilepsy, and I have to face the possibility of a malignant brain tumor.  Poor little guy.  I'm holding off on the MRI stuff until I see when he has another seizure.

Buster's a bit too friendly around other people.  He jumps them and really gets on them, but he's fine around me.  I don't have many people over, so all of that is okay.  When he was a puppy, I remember that whenever I would yell, "Goddammit!" in frustration over something or other, and I do that a lot, I would make a point to say to Buster real lovingly, "Not you Buster!" and I would pet him.  It got to the point that whenever I would say, "Goddammit!" he would get real close and start wagging his tail, because he knew that it was time for me to pet him.  So I inadvertently trained an emotional support dog.

I started on the pencil work on issue twelve tonight.  I did work on five pages and a little work on a page further along.  This is the stage where I really have to get after the pencil work so that I can have something in front of me to work on further.  I will try to really get on it for the next two weeks and see where I am at the end of that period.

I decided to try to get after the guitar playing more than I have been as well.  I wrote a song last Friday.  It's called, "Hey There Titty Dancer."  So that's eight songs for "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band."  That's the album I'll do after some time after I record, "Self Portrait of Me."  

fA few weeks ago I went to a strip club by myself.  I'd never done that.  It was in the middle of the afternoon.  I usually don't like going to strip clubs at all.  It's always someone else's idea to go to one.   I just can't shake the feeling that walking through the door qualifies me as a mark.  Gentlemen's club my ass!

For once, I decided to go to get a table dance.  Normally, when I'm there with a couple of friends and I don't really want to be there, I have to shoo the dancers away like the persistent pests they usually are.  For once, I went there by myself to get a table dance.

I ordered a diet coke, and in the length of time that it took me to slowly drink it, not one dancer came to my table to offer me a table dance.  A couple of dancers walked back and forth in front of me from one side of the club to the other.  Another dancer paced back and forth a few feet from my table for a bit.  Another dancer came up and said hi and said she was looking for some guy to check into her shift.  A few minutes later I saw her sitting at the bar with a couple of other dancers.

I finished my diet coke and left.  The two twenty dollar bills I was prepared to spend sat safely in my wallet as I walked out.  What gives?  For once I go in there to get the service they advertise, and nothing.  That night I actually thought seriously about going in there the next afternoon I could, maybe even be willing to have the exact same thing happen again, and going in there quite a few times to prove to them I'm some kind of good guy and not someone that they have to worry about.  How many times I'd have to do that I had no idea.

That's it!  Exactly.  There were several other men in there by themselves who, for all I knew, might have bought into the same idea and were sitting there trying to prove the same thing.  There was one younger guy sitting behind me smoking an e-cigarette, and there was some old geezer whose facial expression made him look so forlorn and unloved.

Who knows how long these guys had been at it?  I figured that going there repeatedly by myself at the same time of day, having a diet coke, two diet cokes maybe, would just tell these women that I was the obsessive type who'd never found whatever it was he was looking for anywhere else and had now decided to try and find it with these women.  I figured that they would treat me accordingly as a result.

Maybe all that would amount to was little spoonfuls of attention with the expectation they could get tenfold back from me.  Anyway, it's nice to be self-aware enough about this kind of thing that the idea of being a regular patron of a strip club under those circumstances does not appeal to me at all.

There are already so many outlets for my energies that don't directly involve the participation of women, mainly music and art, where my obsessive energy and devotion actually pay off in some way, that I just don't go to women the way I used to for the things I used to go to them for.

Furthermore, the ability to snap to women who are actually attempting to exploit this tendency in some way is more important to me than getting laid, getting a girlfriend, having women think of me as some sort of good guy, whatever.  

When I had the Big One in the Summer of 1992 I started hallucinating in late June.  I'd just let go of Jenna, and I'd come to have the conviction that my kindness to her when I last saw her had made her realize that a guy our community of young people known to be a serial date rapist was more of a threat to her than I was.   The story is told in "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin part one."   One can find of video of this on my youtube link, or an audio version on my Myspace link. 

In the days that followed this gesture I'd made to her was when I started hallucinating.  The hallucinations consisted of "recovered memories" of an incident that supposedly happened in 1989 at the Cannibal Club.  In August of 1989 I was getting ready to move to NewYork/New Jersey to go to grad school.  Patrick said he and some others were going to the Cannibal Club on a Monday night.  I rode Bob's bike to the club, which was on Sixth Street.

Soon enough, Patrick introduced me to a coworker at his record store on the drag that I will call Michelle, and he walked off and left the two of us.  She seemed to lack interest and energy in anything, but nonetheless tried to be friendly and smile and whatnot.  We started talking about people at G/M Steakhouse, the place I worked down the street from her record store.  We started talking about employees at G/M Steakhouse, and the subject of "Billy Billiams" came up.  She said she knew Billy, and I said that I liked him.  She asked why, and I repeated what one of my martial arts instructors said and said that Billy was ,"Bold." 

She smiled a sarcastic kind of smile and said, "Oh, so you like Billy because he's bold, huh?"  After that, all I can say I remember is that I saw Patrick when I got downstairs and that he offered me a ride home.  I put Bob's bike in the trunk of his car and we went to Sam's Barbecue on East 12th.  I left the bike sticking out of the trunk and we went inside to eat.  When we went back outside the bike was still in the back, and Patrick said, "Whoa Rich, shout at the Devil."

In the factory job in 1992 I start hallucinating about Michelle and the Cannibal Club.  I took myself back to when I left her off and started to "remember" her saying stuff like, "I went out with Billy," and me saying something like, "What happened?" and her then saying , "I don't want to talk about it," and then I said, "How did Billy strike you?"  That's where this involved hallucination began that I touch on in ,"Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin, part two,"  "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin,part two," can be found on my Myspace link, all 25 minutes of it.  It might be a pain in the ass and not worth trying to access because Myspace may have pop-ups that want you to join.  If you can click past those, then give it a listen.  I think you have to click on a "Richard Alexander" tab in the lower left hand corner to get to my page.

One of the things about the hallucination is the part where I turn Michelle on to some of my favorite movies.  I bring up "The Seven Samurai," and "Yojimbo," and its sequel, "Sanjuro."  "Sanjuro" is not as good "Yojimbo," but that final scene...

In 1995 I added "Once Upon a Time in the West," when I was sick again and revisited this Cannibal Club scenario in my head.  Sergio Leone made "Once Upon a Tim In the West" with the money that he made from the Clint Eastwood trilogy.  He had more money for it. So he shot some in Monument valley in Arizona and hired big-time actors such as Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robarbs, and Claudia Cardinale.  Bronson plays The Man With No Name, the actor he originally wanted for this role, but had to settle for Clint Eastwood in the earlier films.  "Once Upon a Time In the West," will show you why he wanted Bronson in the first place. 

  

 From May 2000 to July 2001 I worked at Hobby Lobby.  I worked as a stocker and in the craft dept.  Part-time mostly.  Tried full-time, didn't work out, back to part-time.  On Friday the truck came in with the next week's stuff.  On Friday two women worked in back whose only job it was was to pull seasonal stuff from the boxes they came in into peach baskets that stayed in back until the season came to put them in the store. 

One of the women who worked there was higher up on the ladder, more compromised, deeper into the schizophrenia spectrum than I am.  My diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder.  While not exactly mild, it is more treatable and responsive to psych meds with a much better prognosis for a "normal" life than people as bad off as this woman.  This woman is said to have schizophrenia.  The first noteworthy thing she did on her first day was stop a black male employee as he walked by and ask him to please stop staring at her, which he was  not doing and had not done.

The other woman was what is now termed intellectually disabled; the preferred term for what used to be called mentally retarded.  Mentally retarded is no longer considered acceptable because of its denigration into retard.  Intellectually disabled it is then.

She had some cerebral palsy as well, I guess.  She walked with a limp and one arm crooked off her side.   The first Friday she said "hi' to me with a big smile, wide eyed, overbite. The whole nine yards, right?  She looked to be about forty-two, I don't know.

She never tried to talk to me or anyone else that I could see.  Just kept to herself mostly.  I could rely on her saying hi whenever she wasn't bent over a box or whatever pulling stuff out, once every Friday.

At Christmastime  we had a gift exchange deal where we wrote down what we wanted as long as it cost less than five or ten dollars or so.  Then everybody drew names and got the person they drew the gift they requested to give to them at the Christmas party.  I thought for a second about what I could possibly want for less than ten dollars and, smartass that I am, wrote down cigarettes.

The Christmas party came, we had it at a restaurant, the girl to whom I was supposed to give my gift to had quit already after working there only a few weeks, which was just as well because I had bought her a ten dollar gift certificate to the CD store across Airport from my apartment instead of the scented array of little soaps that she'd requested.

I'm sitting at one of the big tables when a gift bag appears before me,  I look inside this nice little paper gift bag, and there are two packs of Marlboro Reds under some nice pastel colored  tissue paper and plastic tinsel.  Not bad, I didn't specify my brand, but a good guess.  Not my brand, but not menthols or ultralights or anything like that either.

I turn around to see my secret Santa is, and it's this intellectually disabled woman, and she walks off as I say "thank you" and I guess she's pretty shy, okay?

The next notable interaction with her is one that  I will never, ever, ever forget for the rest of my fucking days, ever.  It's Friday, she's in back doing her job.  I walk by and as she looks at me I affect a real stupid, goofy grin, wide-eyed, wave at her like a small child, you know, I'm making fun of her, right?

Instantaneously, her smile disappears.  I look into her eyes, which I'd never noticed were a blue-gray color like the color of gun metal, steel, whatever.  Not just her eye color, but her eyes into the very core of her being, telepathically, instantaneously, reflexively telling me, "Fuck you in the heart, asshole!" with every inch of her being and I'm past her and it's over.

I get it.  I fucking get it right away.  Most of us only experience intellectually disabled people like her in middle school or whatnot, when they're still kids and they get mobbed by boys who bully them, tease them, and fuck with them nonstop and they'll cry or maybe lash out and it's like that for them at that age.

But intellectually disabled, or more accurately retarded, means slow.  It does not mean that they are incapable of learning, or growing, or developing.  They just take a longer time.

By the time someone like this woman has reached her age, she has seen it all.  She has been subjected to this treatment and attitude all the time, all of her life, over and over and over again.  She can smell it, she can feel it, she can see it coming from a mile away.  There's probably been nothing new under the sun of this kind of  shit by this time in her life for quite some time.

It just comes with the territory.  She can't even work a menial job one day a week, keep to herself, not bother anybody, nothing.  Just appear vulnerable to being hurt by some assclown such as myself who seems to think he's the first person in her life clever enough to try and bust this kind of move on her.  She knows it is her job to be the adult in these situations and let people like me know that it's not as simple as that.

The next week I walk by her by her and she has her chest a little puffed our and she stands a little straighter, and she smiles the same goofy overbite smile, and and the same wide eyes and, as usual, says "hi" to me really friendly and, for my part, however I am to her, there is no way any thought about trying that again.  Zen master efficiency.

As far as my deal with women goes, I am more like her than like normal people.  In most other ways I am more like her than like normal people.  An intellectually disabled advocate for his people wrote a short column for a newspaper or online publication, I don't remember.  He said the biggest problem he and others like him face is the loneliness and lack of human interaction and contact the rest of the world relegates them to.   The rest of the world regards his people as having nothing to offer them in the way of friendship.  Where have I heard that before?  These women at this business I talk about vie for love interest status with me so they can just turn around and drive home the point that I have nothing to offer them that they could possibly want.  By the time this started going on at this place, unlike previous businesses,  I had shut down my end and can't be credibly made to believe that I somehow brought this treatment by them on myself as had been the kind of thing I could maybe be made to believe at least to some degree in my earlier days.

For quite some time, since the age of twenty, really, these kind of women have tried to impress upon me that whatever the nature of my offense, transgression, what mistake I'd made, big or little, whatever the affront, whatever level of threat they perceived me to be towards them, that the punishment was to always try to break my fucking heart.  Major or minor, they always want to go there, always.  By the time it got around to the employees at this particular business, I had shut down my end of it the best of my ability, and still, they wanted to go there.  So it was what it really was all about all along.  It wasn't that I had really ever done anything to deserve to be treated this way, it was that all these women from the time I was in college to what, oh it's April, so last month, really wanted to break my heart because they perceived me to be vulnerable to being hurt this way, and that they could get away with it.  All of them, that is all that it was ever really all about, ever.

By the first time a shot was fired across my bow at this business, that I won't mention the name of, it was as if to announce, "Here, it's on here now.  A place you'd never expect, because never once in all the years you've come here did you ever even consider trying to get with a female employee here.  It's here now, deal with it."  And so I have.  Over and over and over and over.  Again and again and again and again.

I have a role model.  A role model who really impressed upon me that the second I tried to bust that kind of move on her, I was in her world from then on, forever.

She kept to herself and didn't try to talk to anyone or make friends?  Maybe she's doing that on purpose.  What's the use of her trying to make friends if no one thinks she has anything to offer?  She has to wait for her moment to do her thing, before someone like me or anyone else will even think that she has anything to bring to the table.

Some people will never get it, maybe enough do that it is actually worth it.  Seeing as how she was offered absolutely no other choice to be any other way that those around her would consider more acceptable, I'd say she probably does alright.  It's her world after I tried that shit on her, all of a sudden it's more about if someone like her feels that someone like me has something to offer her that she may actually value, than the other way around.