It took me less than a month to outline the illustrations of issue number 24 with ball point pen. It typically takes three/ three and a half weeks for me to do this stage. I think I will finish the book in the first week in August.

I see the number of visits to my site on a weekly basis is down.  I have no idea what a "unique visitor" means since they changed the way they tabulate all of that.  Oh well, none of the members of my audience seems to ever buy my books or music from this site, but others do at least buy books sometimes, so I guess my site really exists for people who engage with me on the level of buying something, at the very least.

Well, speaking of members of my audience, I guess they read this blog to see what I say about women in my world.  Okay.  I will start by talking about two girls I went on dates with in high school. I talked about one a couple of posts ago whom I gathered wanted to initiate me into the pleasures of the flesh. In 2005, a mutual friend of ours who also took art classes with us back then said that he had put in a good word for me to this girl back then, and that's how all of that started way back when.  Two posts ago I talked about how this girl gave me a half-assed opportunity to have sex with her one night at her house.  I really kicked myself for missing out on that chance, and only the fullness of my years and more experience with women since then let me know that this opportunity didn't amount to much. I'd never even made out with a girl before that night she propositioned me to spend the night with her, for one, and she never really adjusted and tried to bring things to that moment at a later date with some kind of make out session, for another.  One might surmise that she wanted to just pay lip service to this notion of giving me some kind of opportunity to placate our mutual male friend from our art class.

Well, I obsessed on this girl pretty hard after that.  While she attended college in another part of the state during my junior year in high school, and I still obsessed on her, another girl flirted with me pretty hard one time in a science class.  I asked this girl on a date.  The highlight of the date for me came with the heavy snog I put on her as I dropped her off at her house.  That really sent me over the top on my drive home.  Within a week of our date, I saw her walking the halls of our school arm in arm with her real boyfriend, whom I had no clue existed before then.  Well, I obsessed on that girl hard as well after that.  Her boyfriend graduated and joined the Army, but I never had as passionate a snog session with her on later dates.  It just wasn't the same.

I don't think either of those girls would have done me the way they did if they had known how hard I would have took it.  I really felt quite bitter and disillusioned with them in the years that followed.  Eventually losing my virginity and getting more experiences of all kinds with women made both of my deals with them seem like no big deal in hindsight.

In 2014 that virgin girl at that one business I patronize tried to start in on me with her shit. I beat her like a gong on that deal. I count seven or eight women at this one business, including that virgin girl, who all thought in their own dumbass ways that they would be the one to best me at their game, make me crazy, get my goat, call it what you will, they all got beat.  Mind, these games they play are games of their own choosing, playing by their own set of rules, with their own definition of what constitutes a win for them, but I beat them all.  Weird.  Why is that?  Could it have to do with the fact that I've had dozens of women play pretty much this same game with me since college?  Should I take the blame for making their collective losses smart so much?  Sure, blame me, assholes.

The fact that I could become so easily bummed out by and obsessed with those girls in high school meant that those girls I encountered first in college and ever thereafter had an extremely easy mark for whatever game they wanted to play. If they merely wanted to beat me at some kiss off game, okay they could.  If they wanted to go on some crusade and punish me for some offence I committed, by all means.  If they wanted to represent themselves as a girlfriend or love interest to play to some mutual friend's expectations of them, go ahead.  They all had in common, and still have in common, the belief that 1) I'm still vulnerable to this stuff, and 2) that they can get away with it.  Forget about their bullshit morality as the motivation for what drives this urge they all have to go there with me, the real motivators for their behavior towards me lie in only those two listed beliefs.  As time went on, and this same stuff kept occurring between myself and these women over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, it eventually became advantage Rich.  So much so that I now seem to encounter women who truly find themselves in over their heads in regards to me.  Tough titty, I say.     

Because I've refrained from mentioning that young woman I can go on and on about at length these past fifteen days plus, I get to order Rush's 2112 album.  I would never normally order a Rush CD, but this album is pretty cool and I've set up a token reward system where I get to order an easy to acquire, classic rock CD in exchange for refraining from mentioning that young woman until the 1st and/or 15th of the month.  I didn't want to undermine our deal by spewing out every little thought that comes to mind, because I thought it might inhibit any chance for us to interact in the real world.

The problem I have now concerns thoughts i have that I first posted in November of 2018.  The thoughts center around the idea that someone stalks me on the internet, and I that I might have a presence on the internet that I do not consent to.  Today I ate lunch somewhere, and a young woman I'd just met, who sat across from me, said something out of the blue.  She said, "You're in."  Then a little later she talked about a guy who lives in her apartment complex who uses her laundry room, and how he pulled his dick out and wanted her to blow him one time.  These two things made me believe that she knows stuff about me that I've never talked to her about.  I thought that when she said, "You're in," that she might have meant I was "in" with this young woman I go on about at length sometimes on this blog, and when this young woman I talked to at lunch today brought up this guy at her complex doing this crude sexual proposition to her, that she referred to the time I often write about in 1987 where I did something similar to Wanda.

These thoughts I had today about these two remarks this young woman made whom I ate lunch with today disturb me a great deal.  I think maybe that post in 2018 might actually contain truth.  This is not good for me in my prospects of interacting with this young woman who works at this business whom I write about a lot on this blog.  I care for this person a great deal, still, but the idea that she is in on something like that, along with a lot of other women in my world, turns off whatever affection I have for this young woman right now.  I don't think it's always possible to care for anyone in a warm, affectionate way all the time, even under better circumstances than the ones I've outlined above, so I don't feel bad about feeling turned off towards her right now.  I don't know how to move forward from this kind of an impasse, and I'm prepared to walk away from the whole deal at this point.

I slept pretty late today. Last night I had to get a hotel room near Austin rather than try to brave the storm and drive back. I didn't have my medicine and I had no other things such as a change of clothes or toiletries to prepare me to spend the night in a hotel room. When I returned home this morning I caught up on my sleep.

So I found myself at loose ends tonight on my book. I worked a little on the lettering and then took a break from all of that and took the rest of the night off. I remembered back when I was sixteen and how the girls of the day had me vexed, and I never seemed to know what to do with myself in general. There was this girl from my art class in tenth grade who seemed to want to help me with the virgin dilemma, but she wasn't much help. On one date we sat and watched TV in her family's living room after a night at a club. I sat in a big puffy chair while she sat on the floor beside me. At one point, it was at about three in the morning, she offered to take me to the bedroom and spend the night. I didn't go for it and went home.

I thought the rest of the Summer about that opportunity, and got pretty obsessed with her. When she went away to college in the Fall, I obsessed on her more. I saw her invitation as some great, missed opportunity that I felt bad about. I'd never even made out with a girl when she made the offer to spend the night with her, but I've only thought about that point these past several years. She had two other real boyfriends that Summer, and she showed up at my house for a short visit with a new girlfriend sometime later that year. She never again gave me that kind of opportunity that she gave me that night at her house, but I tell you, I really found myself beside myself with regret over the not scoring with her for a long time afterwards, and I could not just let it go. I didn't really try to find more constructive things to do with myself but turn over my whole deal with her in my head in the year or so after she left for college.

Nowadays, of course, all that stuff I found myself so vexed with about my deal with her at the time seems like no big deal at all. Beginning in the Fall of 2001, I made a concerted effort to find more constructive things to do with my time alone than drink beer, smoke dope, and smoke cigarettes. I became so confident in my ability to spend time in my little efficiency apartment by myself and not get loaded that I made a serious effort in December to quit smoking. I haven't had a cigarette in nineteen years as of this year. I committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol in late 2008, a commitment that continues to this day.

I made the commitment to abstain from drugs and alcohol, specifically, to improve my relationship with women. How am I doing on that front? Well, tonight I realized that, in some ways, I find myself in the same position I found myself with girls like the one I mentioned in the above paragraphs. Sometimes I just don't know how to spend time by myself constructively, and I can get caught up in things I don't need to get caught up in. But, when I think about it, I often times find myself in situations with women that I might very well look back on one day and say, "You know, that really was no big deal," in much the same way I now say the about that girl I went on dates with in high school that one Summer.

Now, I've been in plenty of situations where it seems as if my love interest has some interest in deliberately putting me in bad position. I've talked often about Wanda. I've talked about how she basically pretended to be my girlfriend as she vied for the attention of a guy who had at least one other girlfriend. Wanda really pulled me around by an erect penis with all of her machinations, and I honestly don't know if I'd do much better than I did with her if I found myself in the same position again. After several weeks of heavy makeout sessions that would go nowhere, I gave her a sexual ultimatum in the form of a crude sexual proposition. That created way more problems than it solved.

Between the times when I find myself confronted with my own loneliness, sense of isolation, feelings of no direction to go in, and those times when it seems as if some woman seeks to really prey upon all of those feelings somehow and represent herself as the solution to all of that when she is not, I've done pretty well since the days of Wanda. Right now I feel as if I'm more confronted with my own insecurities than anything else, which I can definitely deal with better than I could when I was fifteen or sixteen years old.

I'm over halfway finished with inking the text of my new book, and I hope to finish the whole "Legend of Richy Vegas" series by this coming December. I've also got my record way more than halfway finished, and I've started playing out a little, and I hope to scare up at least one gig before the year is over.