In  the Fall of 1986 I took a class on Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales.  At the beginning of the semester I'd had a nervous breakdown at a friend's party that capped my romantic pursuit of an unavailable young woman.  Looking to rebound from that experience, I tried to make it about an Asian-American girl in the Chaucer class.

Over the course of the semester there was this and that as far as flirtations and so forth, and the teacher, who seemed to have a feminist axe to grind in her coverage of the stories, seemed to provide a running Greek chorus to whatever went on between myself and this young woman, which wasn't much of anything, really.

Nonetheless, I would play my roommate's Iggy Pop record with its version of "China Girl," a song later made famous by David Bowie, when I was at home in order to signify that I carried a torch for this young woman.  Really.

I eventually asked her out, she said she had a boyfriend, and not much else- at least not much else in regards to this post.  It wasn't some big traumatic crash and burn episode, but, as I thought about it further on into my undergraduate career, I wondered if I really needed to ask her out in the first place.  

I've concluded that it wasn't the worst thing to ask her out, but, based on the experience of it, I would just as soon not go there in the first place if I can help it.  Back around the beginning of this decade, I decided to try to overcome a fear of rejection by asking out whomever I felt like asking out.  This meant the young waitresses and baristas in my world, mostly.  I compiled quite an oh-fer on that expedition.  Since that time when I asked a bunch of young women out, I looked back at my time with Sara in my last days of UT, and how I played chicken with the notion that I would just blow off LOVE this one time to see what would really happen; I decided that was not such a bad approach in the end.  I've found myself much more satisfied with the outcomes of my interactions with these young women in my world when I factored in my approach to the dilemmas that Sara presented way back in 1988.

Anyhow, I've decided that maybe I lack an ability to filter out unimportant interactions with these young women in my world, and that that may be a big part of my problem.  This may be because of my love addiction (it's certainly a symptom of it, in my opinion).  I've even thought it might be something really freaky, such as a membrane that never formed in the space in the center of my brain where the lobes encounter the top of the spinal cord when I was in the womb because my mom might have had the flu or something.  They've found this lack of membrane thing to be an indicator of schizophrenia in later life.  I don't know if my deal with these young women is as elemental as that, but if it helps me to think along those lines in regards to somehow LEARNING  how to filter unimportant interactions with young women in my world, so be it.

These last several posts talked about a young woman in my world I have a fondness for.  The turnaround on her-from the first notion that she may present possibilities to the point where I decide against pursuing her romantically- the turnaround on her took a week and five days.  That's pretty good.  Readers of this blog know I can be tied up in knots about weird shit like the Invisible Woman for weeks or months at a time, so a week and five days to make such a decision is, I hope, a sign of progress.

I'll show my readers my math on her.  Okay, first there were issues about whether this young woman was even available and/or interested in the first place.  Second, she works at one of these businesses that I patronize on a regular basis, which is a deal that's never worked for me.  Thirdly, a couple of interactions I had with her did not seem to show a side of her that had any enthusiasm for me.  Fourthly, and this is the kicker, I entertained notions of bending over backwards to accommodate her in an effort to make everything work out between us and also be okay with everyone else, and what might she do in return?  I stopped myself there.  She might not have been shitty about me asking her out, but I guess we'll never know.

I guess that I would like to approach someone who has some of the qualities of youth and beauty this young woman has, but I couldn't help but feel just a little jerked around by her.  I don't like jerked around.  Since I've quit drinking I've had more overt offers for dating from a few women-LOTS more overt than anything this woman might or might not be putting out there- but I had reasons to turn them down.  So, some combination of things I like about her, but someone who does not do the "mixed signal" thing, thank you very much.  Oh, one more thing; I'm not up for a running debate in my head about whether or not this young woman deliberately, consciously puts out mixed signals, or whether that is all in my head.  Nope, I'm just deciding I don't want any part of that.

Issue number 4 of my comic book, "Anita, You're the Reason I'm Not In Prison," covers my last crash and burn episode involving the machinations of a failed love interest and her confederates.  That occurred twenty years ago this year.  The main lesson I took away from that episode was this: even though I was on psychiatric medication, even though I had a pretty good understanding of my diagnosis, even though I saw a therapist as well as a psychiatrist, and even though I had the support and understanding of friends and family, I could still have a crash and burn episode.  And so I did.

It's not been just my dumbass luck that I have not had similar to identical types of occurrences happen in these past twenty years.  I didn't have some magical medication change that solved this problem, and the world hasn't changed in this regard so much as I have.  I've encountered a lot of asshole women over the twenty years since June, 1999, along with their confederates, and my record in dealing with their shit is pretty good overall.  Over the years, bit by bit, I've gotten much better at taking care of myself.  First it was the smoking, then the drinking and drugs, and finally the issues with love addiction, which constituted the heart of the crash and burn problem in the first place.

I can't fully communicate here how much better my life has become since I taught myself how to thwart crash and burn episodes from visiting themselves on my being and my life.  Back before I received my diagnosis and treatment for mental illness, these kinds of episodes would go off in my face like Old Faithful in Yellowstone.  I could pretty much set a watch by counting on such an occurrence every six months, year, year and a half, or two years apart.  The interruptions to my life that these nervous breakdown episodes wrought....sucked.  That's about all I have to say.  I've been able to take on longterm creative projects such as my comic book series and the study of guitar and songwriting accompanied by the regular production of solo albums and solo performances, because my whole purpose in life is not wrenched apart by bouts of crippling self-doubt about whether I'm doing anything meaningful with my time and energy.

I think the impulse that motivated the antagonists in "Anita, You're the Reason I'm Not In Prison" stemmed from the idea that the results of their efforts would come off as really funny, because my reaction would come off as really funny, I guess.   In more recent times this one gal at one of these businesses would seem to get a kick out of what I would write about this or that situation I would find myself in, and she in turn, in my estimation, tried to yank my chain just a few weeks ago.  While it's true that I can come off as pretty funny at times when I write about some of these situations, I don't like people trying to orchestrate traumatic experiences just to see how I react.  That just comes off as really sadistic.

The decisions I make in the coming days, weeks, and months on whether or not to refrain from associating with individuals I find distasteful are not decisions I make lightly.  There have been several food service oriented businesses that I used to patronize regularly that I now patronize only occasionally-to-hardly-at-all because of such decisions I've made.  I don't regret these decisions at all, and I doubt that I will regret any decisions of that nature, should I decide to make them, in the foreseeable future.  That is all.

p.s. The decisions to refrain from patronizing these food service businesses where I encountered employees who behaved in a distasteful manner towards me; these decisions were made BY me and not FOR me.  Understand?  

Issue number 18 of my comic book starts into the "recovered memories" phase of my psychosis in 1992.  Recovered memories are a thoroughly debunked concept that fall into the same kind of category as facilitated communication as discarded avenues of inquiry.  Facilitated communication was supposed to supply a means for the nonverbal autistic or otherwise severely verbally and intellectually impaired to communicate with the world. A fully functioning person would "guide" an impaired person's finger or hand on a chart of the alphabet and, oh, the fun that ensued.  People started getting skeptical when things such as allegations of sexual abuse conducted by people who had airtight alibis, such as abuse by a deceased grandparent at the time the abuse supposedly occurred, started cropping up in these communications.  Recovered memories are now widely recognized a hallucinations in the more skeptically minded commentators of such phenomena.  Rosanne Barr, with the aid of a therapist, had a recovered memory of her parents sexually abusing her at the age of six months.

In this part of the story, I'm going for the idea that I want to bring across my total conviction that these memories had a basis in reality  when I first experienced them.  My literary role model for this part of the story is Mark Vonnegut and his book, The Eden Express.  Someone described the experience of reading The Eden Express as similar to reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  In Fear and Loathing..., Thompson describes massive drugs binges of all kinds.  The person describing Eden Express ​to me said that Vonnegut gives a similar visceral feeling of what it must be like to be psychotic to the reader of his ordeal, even if the reader has never been psychotic.  I just changed a passage at the end of issue number 18 to indicate that I initially greeted the first wave of hallucinations with no ability to think critically about what I was going through.  In effect, these "recovered memories" struck me as totally real, and I believed I was going through an evolution of consciousness rather than a psychosis.

People may find it hard to believe the hold these kinds of experiences can still have on me.  I had another vision of the Legend of Richy Vegas in the Summer of 2016; this time while on medication and decidedly not psychotic, and its power still holds me to the point where I won't talk about it in detail or specifics on a forum such as this blog.

I've looked at Youtube videos that go into Dissociative Identity Disorder and whether that is real or not.  The famous case of Sybil and her sixteen different personalities turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by an unscrupulous therapist and her willing patient.  So yeah, maybe Dissociative Identity Disorder now.  Y-y-yep.  



 

My last bad love interest that I'll count as a bad love interest was the Invisible Woman.  Now that was a bad love interest.  One of the main characteristics that made it that way lay in the unreal aspect of it.  Was it all in my head?  That is the main thing that made it so bad.

I KNEW, now I KNEW, that this load of horseshit of a love interest would work its way out eventually.  All it took was a little information and the passage of time, and work its way out it did.  Mark my words: bad love interests don't last.  It may take time, but they don't last.

The young woman I've been writing about this past week or so, I don't know.  She's so nice.  Maybe the worst thing she's ever been called is MAYBE a bad love interest by me, and I just put my foot in my mouth.  I'm trying to wrap my head around this one.  Okay?

Right now I'm doing the inks of my next issue of my comic book.  I'm working on scenes that depict the interior of the factory where I worked on 1992.  I'm pretty much using freehand and atmospheric perspective to define precise architectural spaces, and it's pretty much driving me nuts to do so.  It's intense.  I hope to have the book ready for the printer by the middle of June.  Here's hoping.

The last couple of posts brought up someone in my world I'm fond of.   I've concluded that my aborted attempt to level some incendiary accusation against this person represented a material manifestation of how I did not feel sufficiently loved by this individual. In effect, my paranoid thought processes about what I thought might be going on with her materialized in the form they materialized because I didn't feel loved by her.  

I guess a good explanation of why I didn't feel loved by her might be because she doesn't love me.  That doesn't mean I want to hurt her feelings with some wild, angry, paranoid accusation, though.

I guess my circumspect, thoughtful response earns me the freedom to blow that whole deal off for quite some time.  I managed to talk myself back from the ledge pretty good, alright.  Now there's a whole world from that ledge on back that I can wander around in that doesn't have anything at all do with her and hers if I so choose, and I do so choose.  

Yesterday's post could have gone bad if I had posted the first draft.  Shooting myself in the foot in regards to my relationship with women has been a real problem for me in the past.  I think that I made an intelligent decision in posting what I posted instead.  I also think it had more to do with good decision making rather than just my dumb-ass luck that I didn't click on the wrong button at the wrong time.

It may turn out that the only viable option I have with this person would have me just go piss up a rope anyway.  Well, then piss up a rope I shall, I guess.  But, mark my words; the good Lord willing and the creeks don't rise, these kinds of decisions I'm making will not just turn out to be a drill one day, but instead these kinds of decisions may prove critical to the eventual outcome of any deal I have going with any woman, no matter what context I know her in.

There's one thing I lied about in yesterday's post; I am not just "quite" fond of this person, I'm very fond of this person.  Like I said, maybe me and her are just not meant to be, but I'm so glad that I didn't do anything to assure that that kind of decision gets made for me instead of by me.

I was going to air a potentially explosive allegation aimed at someone I'm still quite fond of, but I just deleted it.  In the old days, people could write a letter with such accusations, fold it up, put it in their desk, sleep on it, and decide if they really wanted to mail such a letter the next day.  These days of Twitter, where people just post the first stupid thought that appears in their head, does not represent an improvement over one's ability to take stuff back that was said in haste, in my opinion.

In my airing of this allegation, I had the defense that I wasn't going to name names, and who really reads my blog anyway?  I saved my accusations to "drafts," and thought for just a few minutes, and the result of me thinking just a little bit about this issue results in the document you, the reader, sees before you now.  I decided to not play dumb about who does and does not read this blog, and to not play dumb about how I'm just a crazy guy who says crazy things, so who should take me seriously anyway?   Be well. people.  That is all.

When I think back on some of the really attractive women I've had occasion to hang out with and maybe go out on a date or two with in my life, I've often been struck with a particular thought.  I often look back on the times I've been seen in public in the company of an attractive woman on a date or whatever, and it strikes me how often all of that was not what it was cracked up to be.  

I have this line of thinking most often in regards to those women who wound up treating me pretty shabbily in the long run.  I mean, the shabby treatment I allowed so many of these women to visit on me stays with me a hell of a lot more than whatever momentary ego gratification I might have gotten by being seen in public with someone such as Jenna or Wanda.

Moving forward, what should I make of this?  Well, if saying "no" to this or that woman's bullshit means that I won't be seen in public on a date with said woman, well, I'm okay with that.  If teaching myself how to say no whenever I perceive women attempting to take advantage of me means I am relegated to the fringes of the dating world- a dateless wonder- then so be it.

I think I've done a pretty good job on this blog of laying out the various ways a lot women tend to be shitty to me, and the steps I take to counter these tactics.  One of the things I remember reading about love addiction online relates how a love addicted person can have a crash and burn drama from hell visited upon them through their pursuit of the wrong person, and how this person will swear off of ever finding themselves in that position again, only for this same person have the same kind of drama come down on them again  and again and again.  I think I've done a pretty good job of breaking up that cycle, if I do say so myself.  

A few weeks ago I talked about some young gal in my world who seemed to want to play the role of yet another failed love interest for the old Rich-ster.  I've gotten pretty good at smelling a rat since the bad old days of the eighties and early nineties, and she didn't get very far with any of that.

One main thing I try to keep in mind nowadays regards the impulse to try to rebound from failed romantic love experiences by finding someone else to love.  I really try to refrain from acting on that kind of impulse these days.  I tell myself, "Think about it; whenever I try to rebound from failed romantic love experiences, I start trying to look for someone to TAKE THE PLACE of the failed love interest.  What's wrong with this picture?"

I see young women in my world who certainly have the good looks and youth to take the place of a typical failed love interest, but there are some key differences from the old days when I would try to rebound from such experiences as a matter of course.  The biggest difference I can see regards the notion that I don't fall in love quite so readily with this or that attractive young woman in my world the way I used to.  Therefore, I don't have the same tragic crash and burn experiences that defined much of my younger days, and, therefore, I have little "need" or desire to try to rebound in the first place.

I can think of quite of number of times in my youth when I decided this or that love interest represented THE ONE, and that all I had to do was play my cards right to win her.  I could make such a decision based on the most minor of flirtations from the other party.  Sometime along the way, I became conscious that these decisions did constitute a choice, and that meant that I keep making fucked up choices, and what should I do about it.  

One can reread my many posts on this topic, but I'll try to summarize how I manage to not fall in love as easily as I used to; I basically make it okay to have an outcome where I don't wind up with the gal in the end.  I will let supposed opportunities slip through my fingers pretty much on a self dare.  I've seen so much of the other side of the coin through this process, particularly in instances where the young woman who vied for love interest status had an agenda that had nothing to do with being my girlfriend.  

In the past twenty years, I can only think of ONE woman that I would want a do over on in regards to a missed opportunity.  Also, I remember a couple of other instances where I attended gatherings and a couple of women seemed to want to talk to me, but I became too intimidated by the beauty of these woman, and I just bailed.  So, that's three instances in the last twenty years I can count where I just didn't have what it took to go for it.  On the other hand, I can count a huge number of times where I went for it alright, and came up empty, or more recently, just let it all go, and found out that no opportunity existed in the first place.

I still have attractive young women in my world whom I would love to get to know better, but that probably won't happen.  In my teenage years, I became fixated on a couple of females, one in high school, one in college, who didn't have any kind of fucked up predatory agenda, but I just got hung up on their overall unavailability.   The girl in high school didn't have a boyfriend when I got hung up on her, but my shyness and insecurity got in the way of me trying to act on my feelings of intense attraction to her.  The girl in college had a serious boyfriend, and I just couldn't reconcile my intense attraction to her with the reality of her circumstances.  Neither of the two gals had any kind of fucked up agenda where they had any desire to hurt me, but I believe that the fact that I became so fixated on these two exposed a true vulnerability of mine to other woman who had totally fucked up agendas later on during college.

So, with these attractive young women in my world, I sometimes worry that I might become hung up on one of them, because I don't perceive any fucked up agenda on their part.  They just seem unavailable due to various things such as age difference, the fact that I only know them at all because they work at businesses I patronize, and therefore we probably don't have much of anything in common even if they were single, which I don't know that they are.  But, here's the thing.  I've become pretty good at sniffing out the motives behind women who do have really fucked up agendas, and this might mean that I just don't fall in love as readily as I used to, under any circumstances, whether the unavailable woman comes from some fucked up place or not.    This thought makes me happy.  Life can be like an experiment with no discernible boundaries for what constitutes success or failure, so I guess that I just have to see if I get hung up on anyone in the end.  I'm pretty confident that I won't.