I'll give this person two weeks.  I'm talking about that former cashier, of course.  If something significant doesn't go down in two weeks, I'm concerning myself with point "A" and point "B" again.  Please don't think me foolish.  Last summer I talked some about how I thought she may feel about me, and someone in my world, a young woman I was attracted to, clearly labeled me as an asshole for even running stuff like that up the flag pole.  I could tell all of this by the look in this young woman's eyes and the expression on her face.  It made me think this former cashier was the wrong person after all.

I've been thought a fool many, many times.  "Jenna" comes to mind.  People thought I should have taken advantage of the "opportunities" she gave me to get with her.  Maybe Jenna, given the personal history I came to believe about her the sicker I got during the summer of 1992; maybe Jenna needed something other than yet another guy unwittingly tripping over that personal history in the act of "going for it."  But hey, maybe I'm the asshole.  Maybe I should've just concerned myself with getting laid.

So yeah, two weeks.  It might not even need to be all that much to buy her a little more time and consideration after the two weeks are up.  We'll see.  While I might not exactly approve of the methods this former cashier possibly employed to jockey for her old place at the table, I have a feeling "by any means necessary" was her and her buddies' credo on that score.  Okay, so here we go.  Two weeks it is.

I've decided that I don't want to knock on doors this fall to get gigs.  I'm fine where I reside with my music.  I'm working on an album, I practicing a set list on guitar, I'm taking banjo lessons, and I play at events such as Kent Finley's Songwriter's Circle in San Marcos.  I have no aspirations to go to any other place as far as playing out goes or greatly increasing my skill set on any instrument. 

My energy of this past however many years now goes more into comics than music.  I bought two more instructional books that I first checked out at the library and decided to add to my collection of books that I study on a regular basis.  I'm totally down with the idea of aspiring to be the Wally Wood or Jack Davis or Robert Crumb of my imaginings.  My latest book comes back from the printer in ten days.  I've lined up people to review it.  I have something of an audience, however small, with my comics that I've never had with my music.

"So, let me see if I've got this right.  You don't love me, you don't want me, but you need me."   -Spoken by Jeff Smith of the Hickoids while onstage and performing on Valentine's Day, 2025.

Have I, during these past several weeks, been experiencing an attempt at payback for the decisions I made about that former cashier?  I was so happy to disengage myself from everything about getting with her as of February of this year.  Did a third party try to teach me some kind of lesson about my chosen courses of action concerning her of these past two years?  Okay, maybe. Wow.  Can anyone out there suggest to these people a better way of going about getting the things they want in life?  Is the only viable course of action acts of retribution and harassment directed at someone who didn't do exactly whatever it is they wanted that person to do?   Has it really come to that?  Wow, okay.

In my last post I talked about the Japanese samurai movie "Sword of Doom."  In the last paragraph of the post I shifted to another subject and talked about "God giving me plenty of chances to get these women right."  I was being too opaque, perhaps, in what I was getting at.  I don't  mean to connect anyone in my day to day world to the villainous samurai in "Sword of Doom."  No, no!  I was talking about going into full-on Jesus mode and saying that my course of action (to get this type of person right) will somehow bring down the fascistic evils of our age.   Sorry about that!  I have a very grandiose way of  thinking about my place in the world.  That is all.  

"The Sword of Doom" was the first of what was supposed to be a trilogy of films based on a manga (comic book) that first appeared in Japan in the early 1960's.  The other two films never got made, and I'd like to hunt down the manga to see how the story shakes out.  That said, 'hoo-ee!,' what a movie!  The lead character is a samurai with no conscience or morals.  He just spends  the entire film creating mayhem and carnage wherever he goes and in whatever he does.

Toshiro Mifune makes an appearance as another master samurai who, after the bad guys send a bunch of assassin swordsmen after him, effortlessly, methodically cuts the band of assassins down, and then lectures the Sword of Doom, who stood by and watched the show; Mifune lectures the Sword of Doom that, "An evil mind wields an evil blade."  For some reason these two then take their leave of each other.  

It falls upon the up-and-coming disciple of the Mifune character to take on the Sword of Doom.  That's a scene we never see.  At the dojo, the old teacher and the disciple dope out that there is one basic sword move that will bring down the Sword of Doom.  We watch as he practices it at the dojo.  Like I said, I'd like to hunt down the manga to see how it all shakes out.

i looked over my last post about an hour ago, and found a typo that read "going" where "giving" was supposed to reside in a sentence.  Auto spell! The sentence was supposed to read that God was giving me plenty, but plenty, of chances to get these women right.  I'm glad I snapped to it.  By "it" I mean both the concept that God is giving me plenty of chances to get these women right, and the typo that auto spell substituted "going" for the intended word. 

One of the frequent things I said when I went through that years-long ordeal involving that former cashier had to do with the idea  that God was giving me plenty, but plenty, of chances to get women like her right.  Instead of feeling burdened and cursed by whatever it is I represent to women such as that former cashier, I saw that whole time involving her as yet another chance to get someone such as her right.

I think I got that waitress at the Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin right, for sure.  It wasn't about trying to win her over to the point  where she'd have an attraction to me and actually wanted to date me.  It was more about coming to terms with a hot-button situation for me that resonated as the type of situation where, in years prior, I could find trouble rather easily.  I could find trouble easily when I decided that retaliation against such a person was the way to go, and I did think that way on a number of occasions in my twenties and once in my thirties. 

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I think everyone knows where the visual part of this sequence is going.  If I post it without thinking on the next blog entry, I apologize in a advance.

I'm in the process of deciding whether or not to put more effort into my musical avocation.  That means more practice, more open mikes to work on songs, particularly covers, and actually getting out there and knocking on doors to get actual gigs.  I'll start looking for gigs in the fall, with the increase in guitar practice and open mike activity for the rest of this sumer.

I decided it would be okay to do more of that kind of thing if I concern myself more with the process than actual, conventional measures of success.  I figure that success, to me, depends too much on the acceptance of me by other people.  There can be all kinds of reasons I won't find that kind of success in music, ever.  But if I can just get into the process of trying to bring that kind of  thing about, and not concern myself with actual, conventional measures of success, I might be okay with that.

In my last post I talked about a specific kind of cruel rejection game I felt a waitress at Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin Blvd. tried to visit on me in 2016.  I said she tried to make me over into a loser in her game by trying to get me to vie for her affections when she was already hooked up with her new boyfriend.  She had her new boyfriend as the winner in her game, but she couldn't leave it at that.  She had to pick some guy to be the loser.  I was just a regular customer in her restaurant.  I would eat breakfast there after I would drop my dad off at work.  I figured out what was going on and decided to stop going there for breakfast.  I saw her a year and a half later when I ate breakfast again there for the first time after all that time.  She acted as if she was glad to see me.

If someone in my world tried to play the same game with me these days, and I could not opt out of seeing them on a regular basis, my forgiveness towards them would just take a different form, a form  that would line up with the circumstances I found myself in with them.  I would forgive them in the sense that I would not try to retaliate against them.  I consider retaliation any acting out behaviors.  These include harassment, intimidation, threats, and I would break those things down into just trying to refrain from coming off as glowering or menacing around them in the way I looked at them or talked to them.  I don't know if I would ever want to be best buddies with such a person, but I could forgive them in the manner I just laid out.  I  tend to feel better just thinking about behaving in such a manner towards such a person.

I've been looking for a post that I thought was from late 2016, but I can't find it there.  Here goes.  I patronized the Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin in 2016.  There was this queen bee waitress on the breakfast shift.  I'd eat there after dropping my dad off at work.  Sometime during the summer of 2016, she started being rude to me.  I figured that she didn't like stuff I'd written on this blog.   Oh well.

One day in the fall of 2016, I sat there while she talked to some guy who waited tables there.  She kept talking to him about stuff such as how she'd recently broken up with her boyfriend, the year she moved to Austin, and how old she was at the time.  She would have been twenty-five in the fall of 2016.  

I snapped to the idea that the guy she kept saying this stuff to was already her new boyfriend, and that this dog and pony show was for my benefit.  I figured that the way she kept talking about how she'd recently broken up with her boyfriend, and about how young she was, that she wanted me to try and approach her for a date or something.  I figured that she needed to settle in her mind that this new boyfriend was her winning guy, and that for every guy she designates as a winner, there has to be a loser.  That's where I come in.  Mind you, I was just a customer who came into her restaurant to eat on a regular basis.  That's all.  

I stopped patronizing that restaurant, and I wrote a song titled, "My Girlfriend Is a Hatesong." and posted it to my blog in late December of 2016.  Several years later, I wrote, "Go to the Loser Store," about this same person.  In that song I sing about how women like her should hire some man to play the loser in these games they play.  "If you want to find a loser/ then go to  the loser store/ hire some man to play that part/ he'll be your loser whore/ it's me you want to shit on/ I'm not here for that chore/ If you want to find a loser/ then go  to  the loser store."  I figure if there was some form of male prostitution that catered to such women's specific need for such a guy, and they could just pay that guy money, then no on would get hurt.  I find  this kind of behavior directed at me extremely hurtful.

I finally went back to this place to eat at that breakfast shift about a year and a half later, in 2018.  I thought she'd stopped working there, but, instead of the waiter who took my order, she brought out my breakfast.  She acted really glad to see me.  She'd gained about fifty pounds. I don't know why.  Anyway, I'm not sure why she was being so friendly to me, either.  I think the post I was looking for might be from June, 2017.

I just had an exchange of information with that coworker I've been going on and on about lately.  The only thing I want to say about how that went is that I care for her a great deal.  I'm going to upload my latest comic book to the on-demand printer as soon as I have enough free time.  People may wonder why I'm so willing to give away the store on my books by posting so much, or all, of its contents for free on the web.  Because I only print up one hundred copies, I will find enough people who want to buy them at cons and fests to sell out the first-print run, whether I post the contents of the books on the web or not.

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