What is romantic love?  Romantic love has evolved into a system whereby women are allowed to choose their partners based on how they feel about them.  This contrasts to earlier times in the courts of the nobility in France and England where the ideal romantic love situation that  poets and troubadours went on about involved the beloved object of one's desire be a married individual.  So it was a bit of a mindf***k from day one, and it has been one ever since. Today, romantic love heavily favors attractive young and youngish women who have their sh*t half together over the old, the homely, or the weak of mind.  In my own background, marrying young and starting a family early in adulthood is generally frowned upon, because it can be so hard to get right.

Romantic love has also evolved into a de facto religion for perhaps tens of millions of misguided souls in developed and developing countries.  The main medium where romantic love as a religion is disseminated are in popular songs, (The Beatle's "Hey Jude", Bob Marley's "Could You Be Loved," and Johnny Cash's "Walk the Line" are but three popular examples of what must be hundred's of thousands of published songs over the years).  Romantic Comedies that present difficult, adversarial protagonists and situations in a redemptive story arc are also very popular.  As are romance novels and on and on.

This evolution into a religion, particularly among secular, middle-class, liberal or progressive types comes with a problematic set of dogmas and doctrines.  But one example is that proposed by famed 20th Century expert on world mythologies Joseph Campell; that when one is truly in love, one "just knows."  Bulls**t.  I only have to look no further that my own History of Cruel Example to debunk this absurd notion.  I mean, a avowed atheist proposing a faith-based belief that one will "just know" when it happens reveals that he is no atheist, sirs and madams, but that his true religion is romantic love.

My own History of Cruel Example to the Contrary is riddled with tales of how this one was "the one", of how I "just knew," only to come up empty handed time and time again.  Why, one need  to look no further than my own self-published Richy Vegas Comics, "The Villainess Veronica Ortega parts one and two," or the more recent Richy Vegas Comics, "The Consequences of Bringing LIght, parts one and two, (with four more on the way)," to witness this absurd will-to-believe in action. 


If I ever encounter a situation where a romantic love arrangement appears in the offing-which happens to some degree or other oh, three or four  times a year nowadays- I begin a rigorous regimen of Skeptical Inquiry.  Science, yes the scientific method, in answer to modern America's half-baked, de facto religion.


I read the following in the Skeptic column of Scientific American once:  The author did not mention romantic love specifically, just any phenomena in need of observation, measurement, and evaluation.  Skeptical Inquiry involves the investigation of a phenomenon, and through the elimination of all other possibilities, concludes that only one possibility remains.  To just know it's love for someone who has never experienced love is a faith-based assumption not unlike a male virgin declaring that he just knows what it feels like to be inside of a woman through the experience his fantasy life.


The last time a woman got a significant amount of my attention began in September of last year and concluded in mid-January of this year.  That is because she was a player who'd targeted me for conquest.  LIke i said, I can count on that kind of attention several times a year to a lesser or greater degree.  That time to a decidedly greater degree.  It's been a while since of of those has come along.  As I said in a post from earlier this year, I resolved that situation to my complete satisfaction.  I can't have those months of my life back, but hey, as far as romantic love goes, it was her world, and I was just living in it. 

I've been posting lately about attractive young women employees of businesses I patronize and fun and games and whatnot.  I think that my posts have come off as pretty magnanimous (look it up) for the most part.  The one headed, "She's adorable!," conveys that sentiment for sure.  

What often manages to shock me is how seriously my opponents take all this stuff.  It's a matter of life and death to them!  When I beat them, and I almost always beat them, they act like such sore losers.  Last week someone tipped the other side's hand with this  sour grapes attitude that she put out.  She thought that I had figured them out already, and she acted so sullen and surly, I thought I had said something wrong or something.  Nope, sour grapes.

In eighth and ninth grade, the school football teams I played on won only one game in each season.  I think I learned how to lose graciously and gracefully from such experiences.  I read something somewhere that women often do poorly in the business world because they come across as if they don't know how to accept losing.  They can be real competitive, but their sore loser vibe can really put off their more well-adjusted colleagues, as well as their win-at-all-costs vibe. 

This same article I read attributed this phenomenon to the fact that these women, as girls, never played team sports, or any sports, growing up.  This game that I have to deal with just to go about my daily and weekly routines, and how the women I beat react to losing, seems to bear this out.

I don't know, maybe these women could try their hand at some competitive sport?  Maybe they could all get together and form a softball team and play in some league.  They wouldn't be any good at it, but they might learn how hard it can be to win against people who've been doing for a long time whatever their competing in. 

Maybe they could try their hand at archery?  I hear people can actually get better at archery as they age, so a relatively late start wouldn't be such a handicap.

Maybe they could try chess?  I once heard some punk-rock-hero-to-women-everywhere type (all punk rock women are heroes to women everywhere) brag that women are so much smarter than men because of their ability to think several moves ahead.  Well, that might be part of the problem.  Maybe these men they try to outthink don't like being treated like extensions of these womens' egos.  If they're so good at thinking several moves ahead, then try chess.  Last I heard, all those Russian chess champions were men.

I mean, I learned my craft from sheer repitition and the fact that my ability to attend a school or keep a job was typically at stake.  If I lost, I just had to suck it up and try not to do anything that would get me in trouble.  I've never been kicked out of a school, or fired from a job, or, more recently, banned from a business because of my behavior towards a woman or women in these environments.

It looks like I will get some good productivity out of the rest of the month.  I have eight more days of July, and I'd like to finish like seven or eight pages.  If I can crank out these books at a six-months-per-book clip, I can get to the GOOD part, the grand mal meltdown that led to my diagnosis and treatment for schizoaffective disorder in 1992, in like two years or so.  I think that one will take at least seven volumes at about eighty pages a volume.  It may be like eight or nine volumes.  

Volume Nine, the volume that's at Austin Books and Comics right now, as well as for sale on this site, features myself making a crude sexual proposition to a love-interest from 1987.  It was the most painful of the books I've done so far.  Nothing much good happens in it.  I don't come off too well myself.

Volume Ten, the one I'm working on now, is another story.  Look, I suspected the girl that I feature in Volume Nine was representing herself as something she was not, and thus the crude sexual proposition.  If one has read my previous blog post, I have suspicions about the girl in Volume Ten as well.  I just handle it a lot differently.  That approach provided the template for how I relate to women I suspect of paying a kind of attention to me that I don't like to this day.  Spoiler alert: read my last blog post, and you'll get an overview of how that played out.

I mean, today it's about young women at businesses that I patronize having some fun and games, but then I'll get too old for even those girls to mess with.  Then what?  I figure that it will amount to organized criminal gangs that will throw some young or youngish woman at me in order to get ahold of assets such as property or money.  So, they're not going to stop, ever.  Good luck, ladies.

In 2011 I reached out to a young woman that I'd known over the years and that I'd dated for like, ten seconds.  It was her idea to date for only ten seconds, not mine.  Anyway, we renewed our friendship, because that was all it really ever was.  I had hopes of interesting her in dating me seriously.  I compared her to my one and only girlfriend in life and how we too had started out as just friends.   

A year or so goes by and she dates someone else, which I'm okay with, because unlike a lot of women I took an interest in over the  years, she was never really someone I fixated on in an unhealthy way.  I attributed it to the fact that I knew about her very serious flaws right off the bat and never really had a chance to idealize her and put her on a pedestal.

Anyway, Sept. 2012, she's single, I'm free as a bird as usual, so I thought that I'd ask her out on a dinner date and tell her of my feelings for her and try to "take it to the next level."  I call her and she goes like, "Oh hi," in a real bored voice when I she finds out it's me.

I reevaluated my plan to take it to the next level when I think about her over the next few days.  The girl that I counted as my girlfriend in life wanted to date a few short months after she initially rebuffed my advances.  This girl, on the other hand, I'd known for years, and she never really expressed an interest in dating me seriously  during that whole time.

Then I remembered what this girl had said about a painting of mine.  The painting is a portrait of my mother as Medusa. The snakes that come out of my mother's head are all portraits of girls and women that I had problems with in my life.  Some of the girls I represented had presented quite serious, painful problems for me in their day.  So, on two separate occasions, many years apart, this girl had told me she would like to be added to this pantheon of women coming out of my mother's head.

That did it.  No way was I going to open up my heart to someone who just came out and said that they wanted to be that to me.  I never had an interest in dating her again.

The whole reason I'd kept her around for so long and put up with so much of her excesses is that I hoped to date her seriously and make her into the first girlfriend I'd had since a long time ago.  The self-destruct button, put into words for the first time in my life: "I wasn't a loving enough man to woman A from my past, so I will try to make up for it in my romantic pursuit of woman B in my present."  Oh my god, the problems that "silent assumption," a thought that I'd never put into words, caused me over the years.

In many instances, woman A from my past just did her best to make me crazy, and at any rate, it was never 100% my fault that the deal didn't work out, and therefore it was not in my power to take 100% responsibility for seeing that it worked out.  Compound this with an attempt to project a ghost of someone from my past into someone in my present, and try to play to that, and well, need I say more?

This last time I tried to do this in 2012, I caught myself, and in the process managed to get both woman A and woman B off my back for good.  I still couldn't get any play from women at that time, but nevertheless, that was a red letter day when I dismantled that self-destruct button.

I've posted on this blog previously about a business that I patronize that has quite a few young, attractive female employees.  I talked about how I kind of got into it with one of them and how I busted her game.  For those of you who haven't read the post it's from like January.  I've been wondering lately whether another employee, who seems to be a friend of the girl that I busted, has taken a romantic interest in me or not.

Last year a friend who is about my age was in a quandary about a very young woman that he'd hung out with a couple of times.  She was very attractive and confident and, because she didn't put out for him right away like his girlfriends usually did, he was distressed that she would never put out for him and was indeed attempting to play him.  Even though I am much less experienced with women, he wanted my input, because, more often than I'd like to admit, it's been about much younger women for me this last ten or fifteen years or so.

I thought about it for a bit and came back with this: for me it has gotten to a point where the age difference between myself and these young women is so vast that I just can't tell at all where they are really coming from.  They could flirt with me from here to the moon and back and it would just go, 'ptshew', over my head.

And you know what, it was always that way when it came to woman that age, even when I was their age.  They were just at a stage in life where the very attractive, confident ones just wanted to collect as many admirers as they could.  A lot of them really didn't seem to care whether their ability to inspire strong feelings of attraction in someone like me towards them was really in my best interest or not.

In regards to this young woman at this business I patronize, all I have to say is this:  I've done a pretty good job of learning to live a good life without chasing after girlfriends, love, or relationships.  If it is indeed true that I am able to live without those things, than it should be of no great concern to me whether this young woman is coming from a "real" place or not.  I mean, if distancing myself from her fills me with a terror that I could be mistaken in assuming that she has no interest in me, than what's all that rhetoric about how I am able to live without love really amount to?

In my post regarding the young woman that I busted in January, I said that I was running about 0 for 12 in getting dates with women in her category.  That is, much younger female employees of businesses that I patronize on a regular basis.

In issue # 10 of Richy Vegas Comics, I go into my deal with a young woman from 1988.  She was the first woman that was a major big deal to me that I simply refused to chase to the ends of the Earth, as I'd always done before with women that I'd considered "important."  A couple of years after I'd definitively cut her loose and moved on, I came to the conclusion that I'd made a terrible mistake.  One could pretty much turn over an hourglass and count on the fact that after a finite number of rotations, I would go completely nuts as a result of this belief.  And so I did.  A few years ago I felt a similar kind of regret for the fact that I broke up with the one woman I count as a girlfriend in my life after we'd dated for only a month.  Funny how the two times I really said "no" during that time in my life later made me feel really guilty and remorseful that I'd missed out on really good things.