In the Winter and Spring of 1993 I convalesced from my major breakdown with my dad's family in Big Spring.  I'd stayed at the hospital to undergo treatment for severe depression. The hospitalization in December followed my initial hospitalization for psychosis in August of 1992.  After a few weeks at the state hospital in Big Spring, I was stable enough to stay with my dad at his house on the grounds of the hospital.

I still tried to put the pieces together as to what might have actually went on during that whole period that involved Jenna, Gil Wilson et al.  I tried to call people long distance and talk about this stuff in terms and a context that wouldn't alarm them.  One of these people was a guy I name "Suckmeat Muldoon" in those books that just sit there unloved and unbought at Austin Books (oh the glories of being an underground phenom).

Suckmeat recommended I check out a book by Thomas Pynchon titled "The Crying of Lot 49."  He said that even the library in Big Spring should have it.  The library had that one, and two other Pynchon books.  One I'd read, "V," and one titled "Gravity's Rainbow."  "Lot 49" was much shorter and more accessible than "Gravity's Rainbow," and for that reason I liked it much better of the two.  Pointy headed intellectual types will get all lathered up about "Gravity's Rainbow," but I found so dense, I didn't bother to see if I could recheck it out as its due date came near.  I finished well over half of it, maybe I'll finish it one day.

One of the two books had a quote, though.  It went something along the lines of, "Proverbs for paranoids: true paranoids don't have paranoid thoughts, they find themselves in paranoid situations."  This flew in the face of everything the medical community was trying to drive into my head about what I'd experienced the previous Summer, and this guy was a big time writer!

The idea that people in my day to day world might read this blog and don't ever directly allude to it when they interact with me is a very paranoid proposition indeed.  I'm not talking about friends and family, more like employees at places such as restaurants and coffee shops and the like.

My last post talked about going the other way in my deal with the women in my world.  I kind of think maybe two really attractive women saw things they liked in that one.  It that's not true, no big deal.  If it is, they know who they are.  I thought some about trying to somehow get with one or both of these two.  Later in the day though, I thought, "Nah, I'll just blow them off too."

The first several years of trying to improve my deal with women, starting in 2009, I would approach attractive young women, tentatively at first, then as I kept striking out, I would get so bold as to just ask them out on dates in front of God and everyone.  Every time they would reject me, I always felt the need to prove what a great guy I was, and what I great guy I was about being rejected.  Okay, we get it, I'm such a great guy about being rejected.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.

As time wore on and some of the defenses from these women took on a more and more vicious turn, I started to recall quite fondly a  time in my twenties where I remembered, "You know, there was one time in my adult life where I just refused to play any of this shit, I seemed to be so happy for that brief period."  It was, you guessed it, that whole time I've talked about with Sara in posts that start with, "I'm not bad," in January of this year.

Think of it, I don't have to go around proving what a great guy I really really am to any of these women in my world, because I just don't even get started with any of them.  If any one is tempted to try my approach, I suggest they try more orthodox means at first to improve things, because I can't say that my dance card is really full now, I just feel a lot better when I go about my day to day life.

I managed to put in twenty days on my book this month.  Twenty days was my original goal.  I've finished twenty-nine pages this month, including the cover.  I'm up to page 42 now.  Considering that I've been thinking about some really grandiose, important stuff all this month, I think its really good that my productivity is a lot better than it can be when I'm just hung up on some woman in my world.

God, did I just use that as a title?  I think I read an article in the New York Times that said that highly effective, analytical thinkers will actually,'gasp,' think negative thoughts a good deal of the time.  I guess what I mean by accentuating the positive is to dwell on the things that are going well for me, and those things tend to be things that I am able to do something about.  I've been talking about the grandiose, save-the-world type stuff that really can overwhelm me, but the stuff I'm actually able to do something about I'm very happy about the direction that I've taken and the decisions that I've made.

In 2012 I decided that my campaign to improve my relationship with women had played out as far as all the stuff I'd been trying up to that point.  I decided that I would try going the other way and see how that went.  In 1988, when I was really up against it in a class with a female classmate that I didn't want to know about, I decided to turn my back on love.  As I kept striking out in my pursuit of women in the modern era, that approach seemed to, in more and more ways, make a lot of sense.  These young women at these businesses that I would approach for dating and friendship possibilities seemed to throw up the same types of defenses that I saw so much of in my younger days.  I remember that when I tried the turn my back on love approach back in 1988, people in that class seemed to find me so much easier to relate to and sympathize with and that, disagreeable and surly though I might have been, it seemed like a far better way to go than to come across as if I was always on the make.

I wondered in 2012 whether this turn my back on love approach was a product of its time, or something that I could try again.  In 2013 I tried to do temp work for a printing company that a friend owned.  They had this SMOKIN' HOT Latina receptionist whose very presence in my world seemed to bring on a bit of a personal crisis.  After what seemed like all day and night and the next day of wondering what to do about this situation, I said to myself, "Okay, how would the turn your back on love approach manifest itself in March 2013 in regards to this woman?"  Then it came to me, loud and clear, "Who says, just because she is the best looking woman in my current environment, that it has to be ABOUT her?  I mean, did someone pass some sort of law saying that I, Richard Alexander, am obliged to make it all about her?"  I may think about her, even in an obsessive way, but the decision to make it all about her just because she hits that nerve is still a decision, and I could decide this one time to say no to all of that.

I decided that the decision to confer love interest status on someone based solely on how good they look was something that I just didn't want to do anymore.  If I ever want someone to be a love interest in my life ever again, there has to be more to it than just that.  I never did any more temp work for that company after I thought those oh-so-brilliant thoughts about that receptionist, but my decision to not call my friend any more after a couple of weeks of no luck in that department, and the decision to do temp work for another company instead, was definitely a direct result of putting myself in this place about her.  I still depended on him and his company to give me a real sweet deal on printing up my comic books, and I didn't want to jeopardize that relationship in some failed effort to get with that receptionist.

I have a number of female Facebook friends that I had a romantic interest in at one time or another.  From time to time I get the urge to unfriend them because I seem to still have issues with some of them.  I don't do that because it's an issue of, if I'm going to unfriend all of my female Facebook friends that I have those kinds of issues with, it would be like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of Facebook unfriending.  I would just have female relatives and the current-and-ex-wives and girlfriends of male friends as Facebook friends.

A few months ago I saw a couple of posts from one of these women I once had an interest in that bring home a good reason to not unfriend these kind of women in some fit of pique.  She posted something about how she was down because she didn't think there were any more good men in the world.  Her previous posts would show her with some real handsome guy, so that must have just run its course.  Okay, so she posts something that indicates that she's somewhat despondent about how there's no more good men, right?  So maybe three weeks after that post she posts pictures of her brand-spanking-new boyfriend!  He looks about as good as the last one, so no real difference between the two in that one particular department.

It just showed me how the other half lives.  It's not just good looking women I'm talking about; I know guys who get to trade old wives and girlfriends out for the supposed best friends of these wives and girlfriends when the new one stabs her best friend in the back and climbs over the corpse of her BFF to get with her new guy.

That kind of stuff really makes me think twice, or three or four times, before I decide to confer love interest status on any of these women in my world.  I guess that I used to think along the lines of, "Well, that must be how everyone does it," and that's just not true.  I see no point in carrying a torch for someone over any protracted length of time when, really, I could see being Facebook friends with any of them and see this three or four week turn around in boyfriends from any of them.

In the last post I talked about how I thought people in my world wanted to see Richy Vegas again.  I don't even bother trying to debunk such notions too much anymore.  Whatever happened or didn't happen back in the early-to-mid-nineties is such a part of me now, I just try to realize the aspects of those things that I can control, and the things that I can't.   It's the serenity prayer thing.  I am able to manage the symptoms that have led to so much trouble in the past pretty well.

I have an effective antipsychotic medication and I abstain from drugs and alcohol.  Whatever else goes on with me that I have trouble with, in spite of these two measures, I consider life skills issues.  One example of a life skills issue that relates to Richy Vegas is the notion that the things that have gone on in my head, the grandiose themes and narratives that make up the Legend of Richy Vegas, will someday become manifest in the reality we all recognize.  For years, my de facto method of coping with this intrusive line of thought was to self-medicate with cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol.  That was the way I pretty much coped with everything, so that was the method I used for this stuff too.  Another tactic I used was to kind of implore people whom I thought could enlighten me to come clean.  I ALWAYS ran smack dab into a brick wall that way.  I chalk the idea that this uniform response somehow means something, in and of itself, as the "Where there's no smoke there's fire" argument.

The last blog post indicated that I am once again preoccupied about these issues.  A few weeks ago I found a method of coping with it.  I had parked my car downtown and was about to go out to Red River to hand out flyers.  I thought, "If you're going to be world famous soon, why bother with this small potatoes flyer thing?"  Then I thought, "Man, you're always thinking along these lines."  I hated the idea of becoming so paralyzed by these notions of impeding closure of the Richy Vegas story, so I committed to standing out there at least ten minutes.  It turned out to be just what I needed to do.  For that period of time, I got out of my head enough just by engaging the world on the level of handing out flyers, that it offered quite a bit of relief.  I didn't need to have something going on like an art show or a music gig, I just had to stand out there for a bit and solicit people, get turned down, have some take a flyer, and that was it.  I have found this to be the most constructive, sustainable way to deal with this particular symptom that I have ever found.

I'm moving right along on the production of issue number twelve.  I finished twenty-four pages plus the cover.  As far as what I could specifically do to save the world or whatever, well, I have some ideas, but that's not my department.  My department is symptom management.

In my twenty-five minute story song, "Richy Vegas the Blind Assassin, p2" (available for your listening pleasure on my myspace link),
I talk about the people who sent Gil Wilson my way.  That's who I think is turning the screws now.

Two years ago, this business I talk about became a great problem for me to patronize.  After about a four and a half month ordeal, I figured out where a young woman who caught my attention was really coming from.  In the following months I figured that she was playing her fellow employees for fools as well as attempting to do so with me.

The problems at this business continued with other young women attempting to take up the challenge of beating me.  They all went down.

By far the most vexing one didn't know when to quit.  She spent about a year, off and on, trying to make me over into a bad guy for the purpose of creating drama in her life.

I wound down a phase of that conflict to my satisfaction, when my family started in on me.  All of a sudden I was being accused of criminal behavior, and my heated protestations where met with pressure from all of my family to change medications, talk to my psychiatrist, get a therapist.  That is what it is like for someone like me.  Someone antagonizes me and turns the screws, the problem lies with me.

I resolved that to my satisfaction as well, when this particularly persistent young woman at this business starts in again.  I make the right call, she backs off.

The past couple of months have seen some strange goings on at this business, maybe.  Did she change her mind about me?  Maybe it has to do with the Legend of Richy Vegas?  Which brings me to the people who sent Gil Wilson my way in 1992.  Did they get to her?  Did they try to recruit her for a great cause?  If so, I think they make a poor choice.

So now it comes to these people.  My innermost circle of friends make up the ones I deal with.  I can't talk about these issues with these friends in a candid, direct, frank manner.  That is not done.

I sense the employment of familiar tactics, though.  They want to see Richy Vegas again.  These tactics?  In my downward slide in 1992, I came to believe that certain coworkers at my job were brought into the loop at some point.  As my mental state deteriorated in the aftermath of letting go of Jenna, the dissociative interactions with those in my world became all encompassing as my hospitalization neared.  Who was in on it, who was not, who knows?

Seven years ago I committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol.  I've had no alcohol and very little drug use since that time.  I remain committed, more so that when I began this process.

These friends, to a man, were not supportive of this decision.  The real glory days of Richy Vegas supposedly took place in the days before I went on psych meds.  The heavy drinking and drug use could sometimes beat the psych meds in ways I won't elaborate on.  If there was any more of Richy Vegas to be had, it was at these times.

That would be one possible explanation for the lack of support from these friends.  I would be out and out criticized that I'd made a bad move, be offered drugs as if my decision was of no importance to them, that kind of thing.  I committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol to improve my relationship with women.  That has been a very, very tough slog.

In my seven years of sobriety, I have not had any experiences that recall earlier times when the Legend of Richy Vegas was  supposedly in full effect.  I don't think anyone in my world should expect a return to any of that. I see what's going on in my world, I make as intelligent a decision about whatever I perceive as I can, and then something else comes along.  No miracles, no magic, no more Richy Vegas.  It's time to stand down.  I made a change seven years ago. It's time everyone else got up to speed.  It's over.

It's possible that this young woman I've mentioned from time to time has actually done a one-eighty turn and is now interested in me whereas before she was not.  I say this with a bit of trepidation, because when I've made statements like, "She might be interested in me," and posted them here, the next time I would see her at this business, she would look at me as if I was about to commence an out-of-control obsessive pursuit of her.

Nonetheless, I say this because this kind of thing has happened before; I've found myself in this position before.  So what happened?  A very noteworthy time this happened, and really, it's how I roll when confronted by these kinds of things nowadays, was the time it happened with Sara.  I've talked about her before, look on the blog post from January, "I'm not bad," for the lowdown on her.

The semester when Sara started in on me came to an end.  During the final, she turned her final in before I finished and walked out.   I took my time, and did not attempt to chase after her.  During the previous Winter break, I met a Mexican girl in Spain named "Monica."  The day before I flew home,  I made a clumsy pass at her in the train station.  We exchanged addresses, but she never wrote me back.

All during my time with Sara the next semester I kept thinking, "What if I just let this one go, instead of getting all panicky like I did with Monica and blowing it for sure?"  So I let go of Sara, and I had the Summer session to finish classes and graduate.  I had no real reason to think I'd see her again.

But, one day in June in the art building, I rode the freight elevator down.  On the second floor the door opened, and there she stood.  She faced the opposite wall looking at some papers posted there.  I pointed to her and smiled, she turned around, saw me, and started to wave.  Just then, the elevator door closed, and I laughed maniacally all the way down.

A week and a half, two weeks later, I hear this giggling in my painting class.  Sara comes up and says, "Hi-i!" mischievously as her girlfriends Eva and Cathy giggled behind her.  This was great!  They immediately go to the elevator and I follow.  Sara said something about, "Weren't you in my Latin American Art History class?"  Yes, I was, and she left.

The high from that lasted into the next Summer session.  In that session I took a painting class with a teacher I had a genuine rapport with, and knew popularity with him and some of the students that I had not known in quite some time.  I caught the attention of "Tarashula," top art babe in both of my classes that semester, and that was the beginning of the end.  She started talking to me and acting like she liked me.  Sara was nowhere to be found, I didn't even know her name at this point, remember.  It was coming up on two months since I'd seen her, and it really seemed as if Tarashula represented bigger and better things.

One night in early to mid-August, I went into the big studio to work on a painting.  Eva, one of Sara's friends, was there.  I'd not even seen her or Cathy since the previous Summer session.  Soon after I set up, and the girlfriend Eva was talking to left, Eva starts coughing.  She keeps coughing, as if she's trying to tell me something.  All she's telling me is that I really don't want to have anything to do with Sara.  After all that I'd done, they still just wanted me to jump through hoops.  Remember, Tarashula was someone I could actually see and talk to by this point, imagine that.  That was when I cut Sara loose.

Tarashula did not represent bigger and better things.  She just felt threatened by my attentions to her, and she did not let me down easy.  I was so mad at Sara, I didn't know what I'd do if I ever tried to actually get with her, so my mind was made up about her.  Even though Tarashula had a boyfriend, I willed it to be about her for this kind of reason.  That was the state of things in the coming Fall semester, when I'd still go into the art building to secure teacher recommendations for graduate school.

In between the time I cut Sara loose in the Summer and I went to the school in the Fall, I read a true crime book titled, "Bad Karma."  It was about a male Indian student's intense obsession with a female townie in Berkeley in the '60s.  It did not end well.  I saw Sara the first day of the semester and walked by her and did not say hi or anything close to it.  I was determined that I was not going to go past the point of no return with her-however that would manifest itself.  It wasn't out of some tender sense of self-sacrifice, it was more like I'd really had enough of her.

In grad school in the Spring semester of my first year, I came to the conclusion that I'd made a big mistake by cutting Sara loose.  I tried to make up for it, and see if I could get some of that kind of thing back.  I first tried this with "Gwen." I'd made a really bad impression right off at SVA because the move to the tristate area and the culture shock made my usual affect to other people even worse.  This move towards Gwen only made things worse.  I was the mad villain of the school in some circles, quite a few circles it seemed, actually.  I tried to maintain this weird high-wire act, where I tried to apply the lessons I'd learned in my approach to Sara, but with an outcome of securing true, everlasting love.  The drama dragged out into the Fall semester.  I was really cut off from actually knowing anything about what was really going on with Gwen, and I was determined to carry this torch for her until I saw it through to the bitter end.

I remember the week before Thanksgiving, I rode the subway home.  The vibe I picked up from those around me at school gave me the sense that it was time to, once again, get on my white horse and set things right with Gwen.  I just had the notion that a lot of people had gotten the wrong idea about me, and that now it was time to set everyone straight.  I went to see my sister for Thanksgiving break, and the following Friday back in school, I saw what was maybe my chance.  I'd seen her in the wood-shop a few weeks earlier, waved playfully to her, and she just kind of looked at me.  I made a point to not go back in there at the same time and day that I saw her, because I wanted the times I saw her to be more incidental.  It was Friday night, so I thought, "Okay, she doesn't have a class there at this time, if she's there, fine, if not, I'll just get the waste materials I want for my art piece."

I walked in the shop, there she was, she looked as if she was about to cry.  She was very emotive that way, and I knew if I could touch her in the right way, that might do it.  She knew that I was not a threat to her, and I just kind of went about my business.  At some point, when I was about to leave, I sat on a couch.  An asshole ex-roommate from my dorm walked in.  He'd spent one semester at the school.  His dad was a famous rock star, but if one were to know by this punk, this asswipe acted as if he was the famous rock star.   Just an arrogant, asshole prick who was riding entirely on his daddy's name.  He acted like he was glad to see me.  I mocked him and said, "What the fuck are you doing here?"

For all I knew, he was there to meet up with John, one of our roommates from the dorm.  I sat there, Gwen seemed as if she was about to leave, she kind of grimaced as she put on her coat, hat, and scarf by me as I sat on the couch, a space open for her to sit.  She walked out of the wood-shop by herself.  A few seconds later this rock star's kid walked kind of rapidly out with John.  It maybe took me a day to figure out that Gwen thought enough of me to not let me see her walk out with that guy.

For me, I knew what came next. I really came to hate times like this, by this point.  It was one of those dreaded, beautiful, transcendent moments that ended up causing me nothing but further grief in the end.  I knew there was going to be a bit of a breakdown, and that people at the school, especially those who'd been so intent of ostracizing me because I was that bad a guy, would think I was this endless ever-flowing spring of niceness that some of them might want to take advantage of....

That's it, being taken advantage of.  That was the big problem I had with it-along with being treated like the villain of the piece up to this time.  I let people know in an undergrad drawing class that I audited, taught by Facebook friend Brett DePalma, that I was not happy about this series of developments.  I saw it as me clearing the air, and letting some of those in the class, one girl in particular, where she and the others really stood with me.  That was not how it was regarded.  I came off as really unhinged, I guess.  Over the years I've put myself back in that place, at that time, and tried to imagine things I could have said to come off better.  But you know what?  At that point, everyone else was in my world, and I was calling the shots, sorry.

One of the things I did that day in that class was assign the role of love interest to a girl named Anne Marie.  The next semester came, she dropped that class, and let me know in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome in her world.   Again, I had this weird high-wire act going, where I mimicked the way I was with Sara, but I was doing it in the name of true love.

So I would see Anne Marie in the building, but if she didn't want to come up and say hi or talk to me, I just didn't push it.  Like it was with Sara, my real priority was to graduate.  I found myself on kind of thin ice one time, but I think the head of the department knew enough to just tell the aggrieved party to leave me alone, and I wasn't called into the office and threatened with expulsion, much less actually expelled.

As usual, a lot of people at the school heard about this, including, it seemed, Anne Marie.  Anyway, just like with Gwen, I became determined to carry a torch for Anne Marie and see it through to the bitter end.  All in the name of making it up to Sara, right?  Funny thing was, about mid-semester, Gwen let me know she was available and interested, but I couldn't just jump the train to another track at this point, right?  Live by the single-minded romantic obsession, die by the single-minded romantic obsession, I guess.

The second to last day of classes came, and I was on the first floor about to go up to the graduate studios.   I remember having a running diatribe in my head where I was bitterly criticizing Anne Marie for not giving me the love I felt I so deserved.  As I stood there waiting for the elevator, Anne Marie walked by wide-eyed, looking scared.  I remember interrupting my diatribe to say to myself in my mind, "Now let's not push anything on her," as I looked at her.  She quietly said, "Excuse me," and walked by.

Some of the girls who seemed to not understand my behavior after my encounter with Gwen the previous semester really seemed to approve of my handling of this incident.  Particularly this pretty French girl who was in Brett's class on that day I really went off.  Brett, whom she was talking to at this occasion when she beamed at me, and who also didn't seem to understand me either on that day I went off like I did, and, who maybe the day before this particular occasion looked in my direction during his class and forcefully proclaimed that he was tired of artists he knew committing suicide, seemed to be all smiles when I greeted him.  There was this really beautiful undergrad girl who "tsk"ed when I passed her by, though.  I guess she still thought me some kind of miracle worker.

Cut to the chase:  a week or two after school ends, I'm walking  through midtown Manhattan.  Those shots that one sees of throngs of pedestrians on the sidewalks and bumper to bumper traffic are typically shot in midtown at anytime during the business day.  It was just like what one sees in those shots as I crossed the street.  For some reason I look over to my right, and there's Anne Marie!  I smile as if to say, "You see, I told you so!"  Maybe I looked over because her eyes were on me.  She walked by in shock.

Again!  I did it again! In the streets of New-York-fucking-City, baby!  In the days that followed, my thesis advisor Tommy seemed real pleased when he said hi as we passed outside the art building.  I figured that maybe Anne Marie worked at his gallery.  I saw her just outside of the building in midtown where Tommy's gallery resided.

Some time passed.  I graduated along with everyone else.  I remember when they called my name, I walked to the podium as if I had an enormous weight on my shoulders.  Half the auditorium seemed to chuckle at that.  David, the head of the department, seemed really happy to hand me my rolled up degree. 

Still, no sign of Anne Marie. A couple of women in the grad school class below me seemed to hint in an out-of-context way that I should go to Tommy's gallery and get her. Oh boy, okay, sure.  I go to Holly Solomon Gallery and check it out.  I ask the young guy behind the counter if Lance, a guy who'd graduated a year before me, was there.  He said Lance was on vacation.  I look at the press release for the current exhibition, and I hear a young woman's voice from the next room back.  She talks on the phone to someone in a very confident sounding, professional manner.  She hangs up.  I read a little more of the exhibit brochure, the guy at the front clears his throat, and I walk out.

That whole time I'd beat myself up for blowing Sara off and remembering how I'd passed her multiple times in the hall and ignored her and if I just had another chance and, oh yeah, jump through hoops.  Apparently my gesture of letting Anne Marie go and seeing her on the streets of New York afterwards was not good enough in and of itself, and I still had to jump through hoops.  I tried to be super nice about it, and I came back the next week or two later and asked the same guy about Lance, but it seemed like what was done was done.  So much for Anne Marie.

I find myself in the same kind of place with this woman at this business that I did with both Anne Marie and Sara.  I'm afraid that now, once again, is the time where I just have to sit back helplessly and watch yet another one of these women proceed to shoot herself in the fucking foot.  But, what good is previous life experiences I can't relate some of them in the hopes that I can head that kind of thing off?

Last September, I talked to "Vernon Hoe" and said, "This girl's in my world now, and at this point in my world, girls like her get cut loose."  I did do that, only to now find myself in this same kind of place that I have been before with other women.  All those female employees at that business she works at who seem to hint in an out-of-context way about a "first time for everything," or, "I changed my mind, wait," etc.  All those people who don't even work there, but who may or may not read this blog, including a fair amount of young woman who seem to be for her, hell I'm for her too, all those women who are not going to step on her deal even if they would otherwise be inclined to do so, have to know that I've kind of been in this same place before.

I don't want to criticize her too much.  I come from a family of total asshole types who criticize and judge those around them to no fucking end and then wonder why they don't have any friends.  I don't think that there is a "Billy Billiams" type in her life that is putting pressure on her like I suspected with "Jenna."  (see blog post from April, I think, titled "Movies")  She seems to be going through quite a bit of stress, though.  She seems to have cut back to part-time hours on this job I see her at, and I think maybe she's having a hard time in a more financially rewarding but more stressful job. I wish her luck.

Hell, maybe all this stuff I'm going on about how I compare her to Sara and Anne Marie just means that I'm barking up the wrong tree and I'm just wrong in all of my guesses that I've talked about.  Still, I have to make a decision about her.  What is most definitely true about her, as it has been with so many others before her, is the presence of her absence in my actual life.

At these times with previous women, it's been on these occasions that I ask myself, "Do I really need this person in my life, and what am I willing to do see that come about."  Make no mistake, I at least strongly suspect that this woman is now more in my world than I am in hers.  Sara and Anne Marie didn't seem to appreciate that fact and tried to pass it off like it was about me having to kiss their respective asses on those occasions when I begged to differ.  I genuinely feel as if now, it is not on me to do anything more on my end.  Even if this young woman has never read these posts, I sure as hell put in a Facebook friend request for her, so I've definitely done my part to reach out to her.  It may not be the miracle romantic gesture I bestowed on Anne Marie, but seeing as how it seemed as if, if that was Anne Marie back there in that gallery in the first place, right, it seemed as if she was telling me that that was not good enough, and it was on me again to prove something I felt like I'd already proven.  How am I supposed to take any implied suggestion from anyone, I'm looking at this woman's coworkers in particular for the possibility of this kind of an attitude, that somehow it's on me, once again, to show up?

I've had to fight mightily with family members to even have the right, in their eyes, to write words such as these on a platform such as this.  Apparently, I'm not someone who can be entrusted to do something like this without raising the specter that I'm really doing an awful, terrible thing that a family member can thoughtlessly accuse me of with no consequence to them for leveling that kind of accusation at me.  Apparently, I'm not someone who can patronize a business where a young woman is employed, because admitting to thinking obsessive thoughts about her on past occasions is the equivalent of a criminal act, and another family member is free to attempt to forbid me from going to this business ever again-how am I supposed to feel about fuck anyone implying that I'm not doing my part for the cause?

If I decide to cut this woman loose in the coming weeks, trust me, it's probably because it's the right thing to do.  Sara turned out to be gay, and anything that could have started up with Anne Marie probably would have just gotten in the way of "Jenna Cruz," "Gil Wilson," "Billy Biliams," and .....destiny.

The only difference between now and earlier times, is that at no point since this woman fired a shot across my bow in May of 2015, and at no time in the foreseeable future, have I even attempted to or will even attempt to caste about towards the other women in my world for another love interest.  It is definitely not the case that I have been keeping some kind of eternal flame going for her this whole time.  Believe me, she has been off my table for months at a time, several times.  I am really trying to not do the love interest thing anymore.  I think that is where all of my trouble starts, and if I accomplish nothing more with her or any attractive young or youngish woman in my foreseeable future, it is that the era of the near constant presence of a love interest in my head or anywhere else is over.