In 2014 I had a run in with a female employee at a business I patronize.  It was nothing, just a flirty deke thing she tried but that I snapped to immediately.  She seemed a little impressed, whatever.  At this business I know a younger guy through friends who also works there.  Not long after this little run in with this woman, I said to this guy at a social function that his place of business was where I saw the most attractive young women on a regular basis.  I said emphatically, "I just go there for business, I swear."  He thought it kind of funny.

A couple of months later at this business, as I waited to complete my transaction, a young woman who worked there came up, and while looking into her smartphone, said something about, "This is my first time."  I thought about that, and snapped to the possibility that it was some purposefully dissociative, out of context reference to a smoking hot, young uberbabe type who was one of the prettiest girls that worked there.

I found the prospect that I would have to deal with this kind of stuff at this particular business pretty damn frightening.  As the days progressed and I went there several more times, I got the same kind of vibe in the same kind of way that this was really going down.  I wondered whatever could these people feel that I'd done wrong that would compel them to come after me this way.  Were they all against me, though?  Did they think they were helping me?  Did they think that this was the way someone like me preferred to get information?

What I figured had happened was that this one female employee that had tried to deke me had asked the guy that I knew socially about me, and that he had told her about my mental health deal.  I don't blame people like this guy when they kind of inadvertently light  the fuse that makes its way to the giant powder keg that I saw happening here.  They don't know what it's like to be me, and that they innocently can set things in motion when someone else takes the information that they give them and acts in an irresponsible manner with it.

In a highly confused, agitated, frightened state I called a friend who'd I met this employee through, and whom also patronized this business, and told him what I thought was going on at this business between myself and these people.  He handled it exactly the right way, in that he did not try to dispel anything that I told him and then go into why he thought he was right about what was really going on and how he thought I was wrong.  He just kept whatever opinions he had to himself and let me get this off my chest, because he could tell that I was feeling very isolated and frightened.  I told him that I thought that I might want to reach out to this young woman that this was all about, because I thought that maybe these same people might be working on her as well, and that she might be very frightened and confused as well.  He emphatically advised not to attempt that.  I felt better and let him go.

My course of action was to just slow things down, take my time, and be very circumspect about whatever courses of action I wanted to take.  It was quite an ordeal, but fortunately I'd had a very similar experience in my youth that I could draw on.  I talk about that experience in the post "I'm not bad," from January of this year.  It was a remarkably useful template for how to deal with this situation that guided me nearly every step of the way to a conclusion that meet with my complete satisfaction, because I busted that little girl but good.

I figure that she was playing both ends against the middle, in that she was not only trying to scam me, but also her fellow employees into being her unwitting accomplices.  If any one out there thinks that this kind of thing is cute or funny, I beg to differ.  That girl who looked into her phone and said something about her first time was under the impression that she was doing both her friend and me a favor with this remark.  If I had been someone with my diagnosis who didn't, for whatever reason, have the level of coping skills that I have, she could have been in some trouble.  And this virgin girl who was representing herself as this girl's friend didn't really care about the possible negative consequences for instigating this whole interaction between myself, her, and her fellow employees.  I had a friend like this, one who played by his own set of rules, and it's not a fun thing to find out that such a person doesn't view one's friendship with them as one that is based on mutual respect and trust.  I'm not talking about 1987 here, but rather the last couple of years, so I'm not one to judge this young woman on how she was taken in.

That was not the last female employee that I had a run in with at this business either.  Go back to about last Summer in my blog posts and see how another deal shook out with another girl who was buddies with this virgin girl, and whose big motivation for starting with me in the first place was, in all likelihood, to succeed where her friend failed.

So if any of you cuties out there want to try getting cute with me, you're going to have to realize the kind of adversaries that I've faced before.  If you see these words as just a gesture by me of throwing down the gauntlet, well, God bless you.

Not long ago I said to my psychiatrist that I predicted that there would come a day for me when this stuff was just never going to work anymore.  I recalled to her a time when I was in my early twenties when I constantly had to stand up to all kinds of guys in all kinds of settings who were trying to bully me and intimidate me, and yeah, their tactics worked at first, but when it kept happening over and over again, it just got to the point where none of that stuff ever scared me anymore.  Maybe the same kind of thing is taking place now.

I was watching "Zatoichi's Flashing Sword" when I came up with a song lyric.  The gist of this lyric says, if I ever get a girlfriend, "...and I don't want to watch my Zatoichis with no punk."  Zatoichi spends the whole time in his movies laying waste to every punk in sight, how would I feel about having some punk girlfriend to watch my Zatoichis with?  Ask yourself that.  Ask yourself that question, all of you who attempt to tie me up in some kind of knots in order to bring about some bogus, existential crisis.  Ask yourself, "Does my attempting to tie Rich up in knots automatically qualify me as some kind of minor league, punk-ass, no-account, bullshit artist?  Would I, if I were Rich, want to watch his Zatoichis with me?"

To answer that question, watch a Zatoichi, just one.  MIght I suggest "Zatoichi On the Road," my personal favorite so far. It has many of my favorite Zatoichi elements in it: a great beginning, a damsel in distress that Zatoichi in no way attempts to get with, Zatoichi pitting punk Yakuza against each other in order to kill them all, and as always, that sweet, humble, gentle, soulful killer of men, Zatoichi himself.

Now, what other qualities would I want in said hypothetical girlfriend?  Well, in the same vein, I do not want to have to learn how to sleep with one eye open.  I'm too old to learn that one.

One more.  How about, to start things off, I don't want to be the only one to show up.  That sounds reasonable.  Hear that sound?  That's the sound of me putting my foot down on that one.  In "Feeling Good" by Dr. David Burns, he mentions a young, shy man who insisted that he did not want to ask any women out until they gave him a clear signal of interest.  Dr. Burns advised him to not worry about that and just go for it.  I would advise any shy, young man on a similar course of action, if for no other reason than to get him out of his shell.

I've already done my fill of that sort of thing.  The women I would just go ahead and ask out in recent years were typically much younger women in food service jobs of places that I went regularly.  I feel that I have totally put my time in on that, and all that I really have to show for it is the satisfaction that I at least gave it a try.  I am willing to try other means of meeting other women in other contexts before I ever go back to doing that sort thing with ANY young or youngish woman that I am currently acquainted with, or will become acquainted with in the foreseeable future, in this way; food service, retail, medical, anyplace else, NO EXCEPTIONS.

So the lyrics, probably the chorus, would go something like, "I don't want to be the only one to show up/ I don't want to sleep with one eye open/ and I don't want to watch my Zatoichis with no punk."   End of message.

Buster had two seizures today.  I took him to the vet, and they gave me some more medicine for him.  I hope that this does the trick.

I've finished thirty-two pages of the latest issue of Richy Vegas Comics.  I still have three more nights to go in the month.  I will not finish more than six pages this month.  I want to keep an eye on quality.  I don't have much more to go, and I think that I will start on the next issue right away.  I will have the current issue finished in just over five months, but I will still set a six month deadline for the next issue.

I wanted to tell at least two more stories from the Legend of Richy Vegas, but there have been some wimmins in my purview that have not been right about the last stuff that I went into here.  Just because I tell some fantastical stuff about when I was a boy and my dog Toby, that doesn't mean it's open season on Rich!  You know who you are, and because a few of you decided to have a little fun, that means that no one will get any more Richy Vegas stories on this blog.  Maybe that will be permanent.

I hope to get some flyers out on Red River at least one more time before Labor Day.  That would make seven trips out to Red River between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  I know that doesn't sound like much, but really, how many trips have all of you in bands or have comics to sell have you all made out to Red River to hand out flyers between Memorial Day and Labor Day, hmm? 

Below is a link to an article I read earlier today, I hope.  https://medium.com/p-s-i-love-you/on-dating-men-with-potential-2a7a5fbf5b0b#.p07bbse27  I guess that you can't just click on it.  I guess that you have to highlight, copy, and paste it on your address bar of your browser.  The article has to do with how the author dated men who were drug addicts or alcoholics or bipolar because she thought that they had so much potential.  A couple of sentences down she warns younger women that she has come to realize that her telling herself that these men had potential was the same as saying that they were, 'gasp,' "losers."

Go ahead and read the article of you like.  I found it in medium.com if the link doesn't work.  I just want to talk about the times in my life that some women in my world saw me as having potential.  The first time came within the first year of my first psychotic break and, several months later, my first major psychotic episode.  The theme of my first psychotic episode centered around my virginity.  I was waiting tables at a restaurant the night it happened.  I first realized that all of the employees and some of the customers all  knew that I was a virgin because this black kid who worked in the kitchen or maybe bussed tables overtly gave me shit about it the night before.  I tripped on acid with Suckmeat and Carlos on Suckmeat's recommendation all night, and did not sleep, and went into work the next night.  That was when I had the episode.  I worked the whole shift and tried to get laid afterwards outside of a punk/metal show at Liberty Lunch by directly propositioning a girl that I was trying to date while within earshot of some punk kids who all seemed to know about the fact that I was a virgin as well.

The following Summer saw the arrival of not-yet-illegal ecstasy and I had a breakthrough when I talked to a couple of girls from the art school as I tripped on it on two different occasions.  The first girl was an uberbabe of the school whom I had mixed it up with some the previous year.  I heard from a sympathetic female friend that she'd said something like, "There's nothing wrong with Richard, except that he's crazy."  

The night I tried to talk to her was when I went to this dance club by myself while tripping balls on this ecstasy.  I took it while I was still at Suckmeat's house.  Suckmeat and his two gay roommates plus two gay guys from Houston were there,  I took the ecstasy and at some point one of the gay guys from Houston starts talking to the other gay guys about how he was talking about Georgia O'Keefe to some guy on some previous occasion.  He related how her name had come up, and this gay guy had said, "Oh you mean that woman who does the vaginal paintings?," and how this guy he talked to said that he didn't know what he was talking about.
This gay guy from Houston then pulls the Georgia O'Keefe book from the shelf and shows the other gay guys the paintings of close ups of flower petals and says that the guy that he was talking to about this must not have ever had any blah, fucking, blah, fucking, blah.  I left soon afterwards and found out a couple of days later that Suckmeat had unprotected sex with all the gay guys plus one other gay gay who came over after I'd left.  He didn't get HIV though.

The drive down I-35 while tripping balls on ecstasy was challenging, but I made it to the club.  I saw these three girls from the art school at the club, but I wasn't on very good terms with any of them.  One of them was the girl that I'd propositioned that night of my first full blown psychotic episode, but the real problem one was the uberbabe that I'd also had a run-in with the previous semester.  At one point I was really aware that the drug was making me really jump out of my skin and pace around frantically, so I decided that I just had to try to talk to the uberbabe and the other girl as they sat on a carpet covered bench that ran along a wall.

I was really polite to them and asked if I could sit with them and stuff.  The one girl got up and walked off and left me with the uberbabe.  I tried to be really nice and asked her to dance after a bit of strained small talk.  She said no, I said okay, and I walked off after I said, "Nice talking to you, Julie."

I let the club soon afterwards.  I didn't realize that I was no longer in the doghouse with the uberbabe, and thus, no longer in the doghouse with her friends either, until I fully realized it the night I tripped on ecstasy at another downtown dance club and talked to another girl from the art school.  That time was real fun and trippy-to-the-max with the way the crowd all seemed to be in on what was going on with myself and this girl as we talked on the deck at the entrance to the club.  The uberbabe was one of the other people there.

I dated that girl I talked to that night for like a month before the school year started.  She really didn't want to date me long term, but she wasn't very nice about calling it off.

That Fall I took a painting class with Julie.  She still seemed to like me.  At our first critique she talked about how her painting tried to depict how her recently ex-boyfriend used to grill her about her provocative little mannerisms and gestures that I had also found so unsettling.  I'm talking about the way she'd say hi when I passed her at school and such.  The quirky mannerisms and smiles seemed to convey a sense that she was in on some joke, and that the joke was on me. I figured that she thought that my being so nice to her that night must have told her that I was willing to take all of that in stride and let it go.  In recent times I recall that I was simply tripping balls on ecstasy and just dying for some interaction of same kind, and that she just didn't realize that.

So I totally worked that enlightenment-through-superniceness line of inquiry until I ran smack dab into a fucking impenetrable wall when I tried to date Wanda in 1987.  I tried the turn-my-back-on-love line of inquiry only one time to full effect in 1988.  That line of inquiry came a a result of reading through "Feeling Good" by Dr. David Burns and thinking maybe that my problems had a lot to do with Love Addiction.  I talk about this in the post, "I'm Not Bad," from January 2016.

How all of this relates to this article  this woman writes about guys with potential follows.  I think the girls at the art school saw me as a guy who had potential because 1) I seemed to be pretty talented artistically in school 2) and that I might have come across as some kind of genius as a result of these interactions with these girls while I tripped on ecstasy.

The girl I dated gave me shit about how I acted like she wasn't on my level and how that made me look like such an asshole.  I also talked about my psychotic episodes and she couldn't really relate to what I said.

Another girl who took an interest in me at that time asked the art student girl roommate of that girl I dated about me.  This was like in November.  This girl told her something like, "He's one of the better students at the school, and people used to take him really seriously, but not so much anymore."  Jeannette asked me what that girl might have meant by that, and I didn't have a clue.

I've had a couple of other times in my life where the women around me seemed to see me as someone with potential.  The last really notable time came in 1998/1999.  I had been diagnosed and treated for the first time in 1992, and in 1995 I finally got some medicine that allowed me to enjoy a long period of relative mental and emotional stability for the first time in my adult life.

Some women I met through this dishwashing job in 1998/1999 took an interest in me.  A female manager talked about how I might be a genius.  There was this uberbabe girl who'd worked there when I first started, and who was still a fixture socially, in addition to working an occasional shift or two.  One day I concluded that I was really obsessed with her, and confessed this to the manager who talked about my being a genius and all that.

Issue four of Richy Vegas Comics, "Anita, You're the Reason I'm Not In Prison," tells a pretty good version of how things shook out with that deal.  One of the key factors that led to my downfall, I think, was the belief that my love interest might really like it if I did the enlightenment-through-superniceness approach one more time.

I had, essentially, the features of a psychotic episode in the social sense, without the psychosis,  I even had an appearance by what looked like a representative of Vernon Hoe and "The League" in the person of Anita.  A couple of days earlier, as the shit seemed to be going down once again, I wrote in a notebook about how now all that needed to happen was for Gil Wilson to show up for me to know that everything was totally in the crapper with my love interest.  I talk about Gil Wilson in the post, "Movies," and in the songs "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin, parts and two," which can be found in my Myspace music link at the top of  this page.  A video of part one appears in my Youtube link.

Nope, not Gil Wilson this time, but Anita.  I went to high school and art school with Anita, but have no idea when she was brought on board, if there is anything to this "League" stuff that is.

Anyway, I think that both times I had found myself in favor with those women from both those eras, I think that my downfall resulted from the perception that they had seen the the pathetic little man behind the curtain; the little man who projected the giant, booming image of the Great and Terrible Oz by manipulating little knobs and buttons and pulling an occasional lever, at least that was the contributing factor on their end of it.  So I kind of read that article about how that woman rued the time that she'd wasted on men with potential with that in mind.  My experience of being perceived as a genius both of these times is a definite double-edged sword, in that the perception that they'd discovered the pathetic little man behind the curtain led to that girl making that mean little dismissive comment about how people at the art school didn't take me very seriously anymore and the particularly vicious attempt to take me down that I depict in "Anita..." 

I feel like things are going pretty good for me now.  I don't really have what I consider a viable social circle now to meet women.  Sometimes I bring up who all might read this blog and not tell me they read it.  I talk about how I often play it as if women who work at some businesses that I patronize might read it.  I also talk about how I'm trying to work the turn-my-back-on-love line of inquiry to the fullest that I am able to make it, and what all this may lead to.  I'm pretty satisfied with all of that so far.  Mostly because I seem to be really good at being able to smell a rat as far as the predations on me from some of these women in my world.   It can take a bit of time, but shit, I've had this kind of problem since the onset of my symptoms, and it persists to this day, and true enough, the turn-my-back-on-love mindset is by far the best way to deal with it.

I've talked about how I've speculated that people from the League might have gone around to these various businesses and told some employees there to pay attention to this space.  I remember in 1992 that I had the perception that something like that might have occurred with some of the employees at my factory job as the climactic events of "Blind Assassin" unfolded, I bring this up in "Who's turning the screws now?" from July of this year.  Two of the cutest girls in the shop did not seem to be in on it, though.  The difference between then and now is that I think maybe Vernon feels like I'm a lot better at sizing up women that I am so very attracted to these days than I was back then.  Insert the usual skeptical disclaimer to the proceeding statements here.  

 



      

An hour or so ago, I finished a bit of snark that I wanted to dish on some gal in my world, but I had the wisdom to write it out on paper and think about it first.  The idea was to wait until like Saturday or Sunday before I wrote here again to see if I still wanted to post it.  It didn't even take that long.  The idea of writing something out before one sends it via any platform from snailmail on up is sort of a lost art in this age of Twitter and email and social media.  If any one thinks that I'm snubbing them or have major issues with them at any of these businesses I patronize, I'm pretty sure that's not the case.  Even I've been known to be somewhat forgiving of other people's excesses, I think.

I remember this girl in my neighborhood named Susan who just hated me starting around, I think, sixth grade for me, seventh grade for her.  By seventh grade the Richard hate from her was at a fever pitch.  In eight grade I don't remember her at all.  Moose and Stewart had moved by then, so I figured that there was no occasion to hang out with her.

In like ninth grade, she'd done a complete, I mean complete one-eighty on me.   She had blossomed into one of the hottest white girls at Austin High by then.  I would only see her at school.  She was on the gymnastics team.  Vernon Hoe said that the shop teacher used to stand in the doorway and watch her as she walked in the hall from the dressing room to the gym upstairs.

One time Vernon saw her give me one of her million dollar beaming smiles, which had become par for the course for me by then.  Vernon said, "Hey man, that's Susan G. smiling at you!"  I said something like, "Yeah, she lives over next to Jody, I've known her since third grade."  I might have said that I really didn't know why she smiled at me so much.  wimmen etc.

In college, when I had such a hard time with the wimmens, I thought about Susan.   I would think, "If I just be nice enough to Julie or whomever, she might come around as Susan did."  One time Susan hit me and Jody said, "Why don't you hit her back?"  Susan said mockingly, "You're not supposed to hit girls."  I didn't really argue with that.  In college, I thought that I could just kind of suck it up and they'd come around.  Tripping on ecstasy helped with that.  Man, that line of inquiry played out with the coming of Wanda.  I've mentioned Wanda in previous posts.  She's in issue eight, I think, most prominently in my comic books.

So of course, the reason Susan G seemed to love me forever only really make sense in the context of the Legend of Richy Vegas, of course.  Not long ago I called Vernon's younger brother and asked about this kid we grew up with named "Ben."  When I was sick in 1995 I had a hallucination centered around the time my dog, Toby, got out and ran into Ben's yard as his family walked to the car.  Ben saw my Toby run up, and said, "Sic 'im Toby, sic 'im!" to his Toby, and they fought.  My Toby won this time, something that I bragged about in Speech class later that year.  That was in the seventh grade.

Oh, but there's more, isn't there always?  In my sick state I "remembered" straightening that little bastard Ben's issues out as I held onto Toby and his Mom had just tried to blame the fight on the fact that my dog ran into their yard.  I told Vernon's brother that I only remembered Ben one other time that year, when he threw an egg at Moose's door.  I wanted Moose to really go off on that brat, but Moose said, "Shut up, Richard," and proceeded to try to teach Ben right from wrong.  I'm pretty sure that the family stayed in that house two lots down from me, but I don't remember Ben at all after that.

I said to Vernon's brother, "I figured that Ben would be the kid from our school most likely to get really drunk and kill a family with his car."  Vernon's brother said, "No, that never happened with him," and that was about all he said.  I also remembered how Vernon's brother had said sometime in the 2000's that Ben was down at the Tavern around Christmastime, and that it was this big old home week.  The kid I remembered had to change schools in his third or fourth grade because he was so unpopular.

Vernon's brother didn't have anything more to say about Ben, really, just that he knew him when he lived on a street before he lived on mine.  Anyway, Ben had an older sister who was in Susan's grade, I do think they were girlfriends.  Maybe I remember this girl saying hi to me once or twice in high school, I don't know.

Yeah, Toby!  The voices in my head told me that he was the shit!  We used to let him run around the neighborhood before the sixth grade, but he kept getting picked up by the pound, so my dad had to spring for a fence.   He used to say, "You wouldn't know it by looking at him, but that's a $900 dollar dog."  It really was a case of, you can take the boy out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the boy, and he became a master escape artist.

Those bastard voices didn't really give me any details about Toby, who, if the legends are to be believed, was a herald to me.  The cops couldn't take a statement from a dog, I guess, and so maybe Vernon's people told everyone to handle all later matters concerning me with suitable discretion.  In my pseudo science class in college they attribute these kinds of explanations to the "will to believe."  The stuff of conspiracy theories.

The only thing the voices ever really told me about Toby was about his last hurrah with Robin.  In 1985 my brother and I moved like three times during my Fall semester at UT.  It was from one parental rental property to another.  The third property had a gap in the fence that he got through.  He went missing for two or three weeks before I found him at the pound.  He was found miles from home with an old belt and a straightened out wire coathanger for a leash and collar.  The voices in my head said that those two items had to do with Robin, they were things she had handy at time when they, 'ahem,' met each other.  I remember telling my brother about the wire coathanger and  the belt they found on him years after my diagnosis and recovery, and he seemed rather quick on the draw with his,  "That was a dragworm.  A dragworm must have adopted Toby and used him for protection," explanation.  Yeah, the will to believe.  

When I was, I think, seven years old something was going on in the next room as I tried to go to sleep one night.  I remember now that I was very confused about the nature of the conflict unfolding.  In recent days I thought, "Did I ask God what I should do, and what happened next was whatever happened next?"  This sounded like more of an effort to burnish the Legend of Richy Vegas than anything else.  But, then I definitely remembered back at that moment when I heard what was being said and done and not understanding, so it would follow that I would not know what to do about it myself.  I confronted the family member about that night in like, the year 2000, and she didn't even remember it.  I became aware in 1986 or 1987 of feeling as if I might have done nothing about what was going on on that night, but if that was true, I doubt that this family member wouldn't have remembered that night at all.

The only time we would go to church was when my Mom's relatives would visit.  At that age the neighborhood kids would ask each other if they believed in God, and I probably said yes.  I remember when I was eight and we found a dead squirrel in the street and we tried to bury to see if it would come back to life.  An older kid said that the squirrel would just stay dead.  It was in hard, rocky caliche dirt at a house under construction, so we didn't bury the shoe box it was in very deep.  I checked a few days later, and the squirrel was still there, still dead. 

In June of 1992 some friends and I went to Emo's on Red River when that club just opened.  I walked through the inside and spotted Patrick.  I've mentioned Patrick in an earlier post titled "Movies" from April of this year.  At this time when I saw him at Emo's things had totally gone in the crapper with Jenna.  Earlier that Spring, Jenna had taken a job with this magazine writer where he was not only her employer, he was her boyfriend.  Jenna had met this guy through Patrick.

I walked through the inside of Emo's, spotted Patrick, he was talking to a group of young men that I didn't recognize.  Maybe they all worked at Sound Exchange, where Patrick had become a manager.  I remember wanting to go up to Patrick and maybe give him a piece of my mind about introducing Jenna to this guy, who was now not her boyfriend anymore.  I said, "Hi Patrick," I guess.  He looks at me, and delicately, slowly holds one hand out at hip level and quietly says, "Rich."  I wave him off and walk off thinking, "I don't know what's going on."

Moments later, Jenna walks up to me in the patio area.  She tries to introduce me to an art student girlfriend, I ask her for a light for my cigarette in a manner that lets her know that I am mad at her, and storm off.  The days, and weeks, and months...and years that followed I do a pretty good job of going over in, "Richy Vegas, the Blind Assassin, part one."

I do remember that moment when I walked away from Patrick thinking, "I don't know what's going on."  I know no more about that time, and whatever followed, or whatever had happened before now than I did at that moment, really.  When I was seven in that dark room, I didn't know what lay in store when I may have been searching for some way to deal with what was going on in the next room.  I still feel that way.  I have no idea what lay in store.  I have no idea what's going on.

I've written recently about rather grandiose thoughts that have proven quite intrusive lately.  I've said that I don't even bother to try to debunk every irrational notion that crosses my brain.  The things that have so preoccupied me come too fast and in too great a quantity to try to dispel entirely each time.

My dad, who is a psychiatrist, said that what happens with people like me when they become so preoccupied with these kinds of thoughts, is that continued compliance with medication and routine kind of push all of that to the back burner.  After a while, he'd ask a patient, "What about those satanic murders the FBI hired you to investigate, Ed?"  Ed would reply,"Oh, what are you bothering about that stuff for, man?  I 'ain't got time for that."  Ed would somehow have more ordinary, everyday things that would be more important than what was so at the forefront for a time.  I've experienced this same kind of thing myself, so I know it's true.

The book is coming along pretty good.  It looks as if I can put at least twenty, maybe twenty-one or more days in on it this month.  I'll be able to lay up the other books and have them all ready for the printer if need be.  I sold one book at Austin Books and Comics recently.  I think it might have been some DIY punk rock type I handed a flyer to on Red River.  I don't have any idea who specifically, it just seems as if those are the types that would go to the trouble to hike all the way up to ABC and buy a book.  I want to go out to Red River at least one more time before Labor Day and hand out some more flyers.